Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“Go get him and tell him we need to rig wiring into the base for lights. Then come down here and give me a hand wrestling the generator back topside.”

Marty didn’t argue. Bringing the Honda generator into the tunnel had been his idea. Listening to the Geo-Researcher’s racking coughs, he knew what a deadly mistake that had been.

Mercer turned to reenter the facility, clamping a hand on Bern’s shoulder. “Just stay here and keep taking deep breaths to clear your lungs. In a few minutes Marty’ll give you a hand getting back to your dormitory.”

The floor of the hallway was covered in water melted from the snow that had broken into the base. He didn’t know how many BTUs the little generator pumped out, but it was more than enough to cause a pretty good flood. Once they had the sump in the main shaft drained he wanted a hose snaked in here to get rid of this water too. It would refreeze soon and make working conditions dangerous.

He moved slowly as he neared the cave-in, stepping over the silenced generator and the shovels and other tools brought down to clear the passage. In the sharp beam from the light, he could see the gaps in the roof, where the relentless pressure of snow had broken through the structure. It was logical that this would be the area that let go — part of the ceiling had already collapsed in the years since the camp had been abandoned. And yet he couldn’t think why it had failed at the very instant Igor Bulgarin walked underneath it. The odds were too long. He studied the twisted metal and jagged teeth of torn plywood, wondering if Igor had done something to the roof to precipitate the failure.

That made no sense either. And what was Bulgarin doing down here in the first place?

He trained the flashlight on the body. Igor lay facedown on the floor, wearing his blue parka with the hood pulled down. The lower half of his body was still buried under the ceiling-high snow. Although Marty and Bern had removed much of the snow around him, Mercer could see where blood had stained the ice near the back of his head. He knelt to examine the spot. It looked like a large slab of ice had hit him at the base of his skull. He could see a thin but deep depression in the bone under his matted hair. Depending on the force, it could have easily been a killing stroke.

Mercer had seen enough head wounds to know how much they bled, and there wasn’t enough blood to make him believe that Igor had survived the blow. The first impact had most likely killed him instantly. He hadn’t suffered. For that Mercer was thankful. He could easily imagine Igor’s agony if he’d slowly frozen to death in the dark.

“Hey, are you all right?” Ira Lasko had approached silently, only announcing his presence after Mercer stood and brushed off his gloves.

“Yeah,” he answered. “How are Marty and Bern?”

“Marty’s lungs cleared when he went to get you, but Bern’s back in his room, sicker than a dog. He’ll be fine in a few hours.” Ira’s expression soured. “It’s my fault. I never should have let them come down here alone. Marty doesn’t have the common sense of a Boy Scout.”

“He said you were fixing one of the Sno-Cats.”

“Greta grabbed me at breakfast. Said they needed help with a clogged fuel injector. Dieter and a guy named Fritz are still working on it. What happened here?”

“Hanging wall let go.” Mercer used a mining term for the roof. Then he swept the flashlight to show where the ceiling had collapsed. “Igor was right underneath it. When the snow came pouring in, it looks like a chunk of ice caught him in the head. He didn’t have a chance.”

“This place has been pretty secure for fifty years. What could have caused it?”

“We did,” Mercer answered.

“Come again?”

“We caused it. The climate down here had been stable until we entered the base. By us moving around and the heat we gave off by working and breathing yesterday, it’s likely that the ice above this area shifted just enough to rip through the roof.”

“So Igor was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Yes.”

“What was he doing down here in the middle of the night?”

“I heard him leave his room, and I think it was more like early morning than late night,” Mercer corrected. “But I didn’t know he was coming down here, nor do I know why.”

“He could have come down anytime he wanted with one of us,” Ira remarked. Like Mercer, he’d seen too much death to be rattled.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Mercer agreed absently, noticing that Igor Bulgarin’s arms were stretched out in front of him as though he’d been walking with his hands touching the ceiling. He wondered if that was an important detail and decided it probably wasn’t.

“The body?”

Mercer looked at Ira, understanding what he was asking. “It’s possible he wanted to check it out, but why would Igor be interested in a dead pilot? And why come down here secretly?”

“Booze?”

“That was my first thought,” Mercer said sadly. He didn’t like to think the worst of Bulgarin. “Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know he’d fallen off the wagon, so he came here to get drunk.” He bent to pat down the body, but couldn’t feel the distinctive shape of a bottle. “Could be he stashed it someplace when he decided to leave.”

“Lot of ground to cover to prove it.”

Mercer flashed the light down the tunnel to make certain Marty hadn’t returned yet. He felt that Ira, with his experience on submarines, could handle what he was about to say, but he wasn’t sure about Marty. He spoke in a low voice. “We’ve got another problem too. It’s not important why, but I brought a Geiger counter with me from Iceland.” He paused, waiting for a reaction.

Ira made a gesture with his hand for Mercer to continue. Mercer was correct about the former Navy man. Nothing got to him. “When we were using the radar sled, I also made a radioactivity map of the facility. None of the radiation I detected was dangerous. It was mostly ambient background noise, but there was an area that spiked a bit. I assumed it was where the old reactor had sat. On another hunch, this morning I compared the radar sled readings to those from the Geiger counter and found that the spike occurred over the room with the pilot’s body, nowhere near the old reactor site.”

That got a reaction. “The body’s hot?”

“Call it warm, yeah.” Mercer nodded. “Just enough to tickle the counter now, but back when he died he would have been glowing like a neon sign.”

Ira knew that radioactive contamination didn’t cause a person to physically glow but he understood what he was saying. He looked at Mercer skeptically. “You’ve got some pretty accurate hunches.”

Mercer shrugged and told him about Elisebet Rosmunder and her son’s search for the downed C-97 and his subsequent death from cancer. “I guess you could call it more of a warning than a hunch,” he concluded.

“If there was something that radioactive on the plane, the government wouldn’t have stopped until it was found,” Ira said after giving the problem a moment of thought. “There was quite a flap when the Air Force lost a couple of nukes from a bomber off the coast of Spain in 1966 and again when an armed B-52 crashed over in Thule in 1968. I remember for that one they hauled off nearly a million cubic feet of ice, snow, and debris. No, the Air Force would have moved heaven and earth to locate that plane and clean up any spill.”

Mercer regarded Lasko for a minute. “You could be right. I don’t know. But the evidence suggests that the C-97 was carrying radioactive material that leaked when the plane crashed, poisoning Jack Delaney and later killing Stefansson Rosmunder.”

“So what do we do?” Ira asked.