Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“I’ve not heard of that either,” Eisenstadt confessed. “But I bet it’s the code name for a specific Nazi looting program. Remember that Schroeder was an engineer, not a soldier so it could even be the name given to an attempt to build a secure stash for art and precious metals like they did at the salt mines in Austria.”

The idea was an alluring one. “So what do we do now?” Anika had asked, the scent of treasure added to her desire for justice.

“We,” Jacob thundered, “do nothing. I will continue working and you get out of Germany. You aren’t safe there. You said yourself that the men who killed Schroeder have seen your face and could at this very moment be learning who you are. You should go on your trip to Greenland. You will be safe there, and by the time you get back in a few weeks, I will know enough to go to the police and get you proper protection.”

The following argument lasted nearly an hour with Opa ’s partner, Theodor Weitzmann, and Frau Goetz, the housekeeper, joining in on the other phones at the Institute. They were unified in their appeal, which was a first as far as Anika knew. That day Anika had called Geo-Research’s main office and told them that she would not be able to make the rendezvous in Reykjavik due to an accident. She didn’t add that she would spend the days letting the bullet graze in her thigh heal.

After the plane ride to Kulusuk and a chopper to the Njoerd, here she was on another helicopter that was minutes away from crashing. Yet her thoughts weren’t on her situation. She thought only of the guilt Opa Jacob would feel when he learned she died following his recommendation. It very well might kill him.

“There’s a rescue effort under way right now,” the pilot shouted into the headphones. “They want you to fire a flare when we get close to the ground. They’re in an emergency pack under your seat.”

Anika was in the copilot’s seat and had to loosen her shoulder restraints to reach under her chair. She waited until the gyrating craft stabilized for a moment before attempting the maneuver. As her fingers brushed against a plastic case, the chopper bucked suddenly, dropping farther into the raging clouds of snow blowing by them like random tracer fire. Her head hit the control stick, deepening their dive, which forced the pilot to jerk back hard, hitting her once again.

“Schiesse!” she cried, rubbing the knot already forming under her hair. She checked her glove to make sure she wasn’t bleeding.

On her second attempt she brought out the orange box and retightened the straps before she could be thrown bodily out of the seat. The flares were in individual firing tubes that could be activated by pulling a short lanyard at their base. She gripped one firmly, getting ready to open the small window next to her. “Tell me when.”

“No. Not up here. You have to go in the back,” the pilot told her, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the cargo compartment. “The flare will destroy my night vision.”

From her vantage she could see there was an operable window in the hold’s side door.

“Okay.” She pulled off the headphones since the cord wouldn’t reach; then she unbuckled all her safety belts.

There was no pattern to the helicopter’s erratic flight, so there was nothing she could do as gravity either tossed her toward the roof or crushed her to her seat. As if she was mountain climbing, Anika maintained three contact points at all times, only moving a limb when she was certain the other three had a secure purchase. In this fashion, she crawled over her chair and slid into the only open space in the chopper’s hold, bracing herself by pressing her back to the floor and jamming her feet against a built-in shelf on the forward bulkhead.

“Can you hear me?” Anika screamed, testing whether she would be able to hear the pilot when he gave his order to fire the flare.

“Yes!” His reply sounded as if it came from outside the aircraft. “About five more minutes, tops.”

Okay, AK, this is it .

As long as the engine held together, they had a chance to find a break in the storm and land safely. She kept that hope alive by praying to God, Who had kept her safe in situations like this. She thought of the time when a climbing rope had parted two-thirds up Eiger. She recalled when a white-water raft she’d been paddling had been split open in the middle of Class- 4 rapids, dumping her and three companions into a liquid maelstrom. Then there was the case of food poisoning that had forced an end to a hiking expedition in Peru. Anika had eaten the same native stew as the four others with her, and while they had to be choppered back to Iquitos for medical treatment, she hadn’t felt the slightest ill effect.

She liked to brag about her outdoor skills, but she knew so much of what she had survived was due to luck, an ally she sometimes disdained. Not now. She was terrified and would need whatever last shreds of good fortune she’d managed to preserve.

Reaching up, she slid open the small Plexiglas window. She gasped at the raw blast of air that sucked her breath away as if the chopper had just gone through explosive decompression. Intellectually, she knew if they survived the crash, they wouldn’t last more than a few hours on the ice, but that didn’t impair her desire to see the chopper down safely. She would worry about rescue afterward.

The wind rattled the tub of mail left near the door. In the worst bit of irony about this whole ill-fated trip, she’d noted when the crate was put aboard that the topmost envelope was from New York City and had been posted to none other than Philip Mercer. The odds that the man mentioned by Otto Schroeder was on the same trip as her were too long to be coincidental. The anger that had begun at the isolated farmhouse nearly exploded. Though she immediately knew she’d been set up, she didn’t know if it was by Schroeder, his killers, or the snipers. Or maybe even by Philip Mercer himself.

Until the storm struck the helicopter, she had been quietly brooding about this development, determined to find the truth.

“Get ready!” the pilot yelled from the cockpit.

Anika stuck the end of the flare out the window, stripping off one glove so she could get a better grip on the lanyard. From her position she couldn’t see outside and this was better. Let the crash come as a surprise, she thought. If she didn’t know it was coming, her body wouldn’t tense involuntarily.

“Now!”

She jerked the string and the glowing ball of fire arced into space, its red corona flying away like the spectral trail of a meteor. Ten seconds later the chopper’s skids slammed into the ground. The collision was like a full swing of a sledgehammer against Anika’s spine. Momentum made the craft’s nose pitch forward. Its blades sliced through the granular snow until they hit solid ice and came apart. The engine’s torque continued to spin the unbalanced rotor head with enough power to slam the helicopter over on its side. Anika was thrown into the door, her body pinned by boxes forced loose by the first impact.

The ragged bits of blade left on the main shaft chewed into the ground. Teflon-coated shrapnel exploded off with each contact with the ice. The smaller tail rotor hit the snow, digging in before it too disintegrated in a deadly swarm of fragments. Most flew away harmlessly, but several cut through the chopper’s thin skin, one slicing by close enough for Anika to feel its passage. She screamed.

The engine finally died when it became starved for fuel. The sound of the chopper’s frenzied destruction was replaced by the noise of the storm’s full force. It assaulted Anika’s ears like a hurricane, with hail-size chunks of ice rattling against the fuselage. Battered but unhurt, she began to shift bundles of clothes and boxes of food off of her. It seemed that the more she moved, the more the gear shifted and wedged around her. It was like trying to dig in quicksand. The agony radiating from her back wasn’t helping. Then she remembered she hadn’t heard anything from the pilot.