Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“He’s with team two. What are you going to do?”

Thinking furiously, Mercer’s brain shifted back to the pilot’s strident call. “…titude down to one thousand feet. Dr. Klein says… smoke… air vents.”

That did it. His moment of hesitancy evaporated. There was a passenger on board. The pilot had made the choice to fly through a storm, but Anika Klein was different. She was simply along for the ride. Deep down he knew he would have gone even if the pilot had been alone. “Ira, get on the other radio and keep me updated. I’ll be in the Land Cruiser.”

Mercer was at the door before anyone realized he’d moved. He didn’t bother with the moon boots. His sneakers would have to do. He thrust his arms into a lightweight outer jacket that was the topmost coat on the rack near the exit.

“Dr. Mercer!” Greta Schmidt shouted, running toward him. “I forbid you to go. We will organize a proper search.”

“And when you’re done you can follow me,” he snapped, jerking the zipper to his throat. “Ira, you with me?”

The wiry mechanic had already muscled his way to the short-range set they used to coordinate communications with the Sno-Cats. “Move your ass.”

“No! You will wait.” Greta grabbed Mercer’s sleeve in a fierce grip that felt like it went all the way to the bone. “This is a wasted gesture. Wait until we know where they land. Going alone is suicide.”

Mercer had just a second before two more Geo-Research workers joined her. Though he had never struck a woman, he was sorely tempted to break that rule. Why couldn’t she see that the only chance the pilot and Anika Klein had was if someone left now?

He yanked free and reached the door. The pressure of wind slammed it open when he turned the handle. The wind was a solid force that made him stagger back until he got better traction, hunched his shoulders and bulled his way forward. The blowing snow and gathering dusk swallowed him.

Despite her fury, Greta made no move to follow. She slammed the door closed again, her body shivering with just that brief contact with the frigid gusts. She stepped over to Ira, her expression one of ill-disguised contempt. “That was the most stupid thing I have ever seen.”

“No need to tell me,” Ira said with a smirk. “But at least he’s doing something. Get your damned search party ready and follow him.”

A few minutes later, Mercer came over the radio. “Ira, you there?”

“Nice and snug,” he drawled. “How about you?”

“I’m going to need the Jaws of Life just to get my testicles to drop. According to the thermometer in the cab it’s fifteen degrees below zero out here. Any word from the chopper?”

“They’re still in the air and still heading this way. Pilot said the GPS puts him twenty-one miles due east. How’s your speed?”

“I’m pushing it now. Doing twenty.”

“Take it easy out there. I don’t think Greta’s gonna stop for you if you get stuck.”

“She’ll never see me,” Mercer replied with a grave-yard chuckle. “Visibility’s pure shit. I can’t see more than fifty feet in front of me.”

“How do you expect to find a crashed helicopter?” Ira asked, alarmed.

“Tell the pilot to have Dr. Klein fire a flare just before they crash.” He didn’t need to add that neither would likely be in any condition to do it afterward.

“Roger, good idea,” Ira was shouting into the microphone because Mercer’s transmission kept fading. His radio had much less power than the chopper’s. “I’m telling the comm officer to relay your message now.”

It took two minutes for the pilot to acknowledge the request. But even if they were able to do it, Ira had doubts that Mercer would see the flare. The helicopter was down to three hundred feet and Mercer was still between five and ten miles away.

Ira kept his misgivings to himself. “Mercer, the pilot will comply. He estimates he can hold her aloft for another five minutes.” He heard nothing but static. “Mercer, do you copy? Over.”

There was a small window above the radio sets. It was dark, but with the floodlights on, he could see how the wind raced first in one direction and then another. The captured snow and ice looked like it was caught in a tornado. Ira estimated the gusts at forty miles per hour. He prayed Mercer brought back the pilot so he could kill the stupid son of a bitch for daring to fly in this kind of weather. No resupply mission was worth it.

“Mercer, do you copy? Over.”

The comm officer was listening hard to his own earphones, talking with the pilot in easy tones despite the fear they all heard from the speaker.

“…ifty feet… iring flare now.” It was a cruel twist of atmospherics that the last seconds of broadcast from the helicopter came in so crisply that it sounded like the pilot was in the room with them. His scream was piercing enough to shatter crystal.

“Mercer, chopper’s down! Chopper’s down! They fired the flare. Did you see it?” Ira mashed the earphones to his head. “Mercer, are you receiving? Over.”

Nothing.

He tried again every thirty seconds for the next half hour. And the results were always the same. Mercer was gone.

Amid the rusting tankers, bulk carriers, and container ships, the Sea Empress gleamed like a new Rolls Royce parked in a junkyard. Her upperworks were snowy white, trimmed with black and gold, with twin raked funnels topped by aerodynamic wings not much smaller than those on a private jet. She was longer than most of the ships around her, and her eight-story superstructure towered above every vessel in the busy port. Designed as a catamaran, her two hulls were nearly a thousand feet in length and each had a ninety-foot beam. The cavernous gap between them was used to lower any number of watercraft, from two-hundred-passenger lighters to glass-bottomed excursion boats to Jet Skis.

She could comfortably accommodate four thousand passengers as well as her full-time staff of three thousand. Her list of world records for a cruise liner included everything from number of restaurants — thirty-nine — to casino square footage to having a four-hole pitch-and-putt golf course. Her cost too was a world record likely to hold for years — $1.7 billion.

Despite the ascetic beliefs of many of those who would be sailing on her, few could help but be awed by the sight of her snugged against a concrete pier. The Sea Empress was a high expression of the beauty mankind was capable of creating.

Because of the tight security surrounding the Universal Convocation, the quay was quiet except for the guards posted all along the length of the ship. Harbor patrol boats buzzed along her starboard side, and overhead military helicopters kept the roving media choppers at a safe distance. So far there hadn’t been a single credible threat against the ship or her passengers, but with so much world attention focused on the greatest religious meeting in history, the authorities were taking no chances. After lengthy interrogations, her crew had been sequestered aboard for the past week, and she was searched daily with bomb-sniffing dogs.

Getting the ship ready and secure had been a massive operation, and now that the passengers were embarking, those in charge of security had redoubled their vigilance. Each passenger, from the pope down to the lowliest secretary, was escorted through unobtrusive metal detectors calibrated to allow nothing bulkier than religious medals to pass through. The latest generation of chemical-sniffing devices was also used to detect the most minute amount of gunpowder. Even if someone sneaked a ceramic pistol past the metal detectors, traces of gunpowder from the bullets would be picked up on these machines.