Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“Ah, no.” Mercer’s voice caught in his throat, and he had to swallow heavily to clear it. “I don’t know the first thing about bombs. Ira, any suggestions?”

“Land.”

“Marty, go tell the pilot we have a bomb on board and we’ll never make it to Reykjavik. Have him turn back to Greenland.”

“What happens when we return to the Geo-Research camp?” Anika asked. “Rath’s trying to kill us now. What’s to stop him from just doing it later?”

Mercer made sure that Ira had a firm grip on the box before he stood, bracing himself as the DC-3 went through a steep banking turn. “Because we’re not going back to the base. Give Ira a hand packing stuff around the bomb so it doesn’t shift and pull the trip wire. We’re not out of this fight yet.”

The plan was a desperate one, but as Mercer reached his seat he felt there was a slim chance of hope. Because the DC-3 was equipped with skis, he wasn’t worried about landing. What concerned him was the amount of time they might be stranded on the ice. Once the bomb went off, he doubted there would be enough of the plane to protect eleven people from the elements. He had to find them shelter. Mercer had a location in mind, but finding it depended on a man who’d been dead for fifty years.

He unfolded the map he’d recovered from Major Delaney and studied the figures the airman had penciled in. Mercer’s immediate urge was to tell the pilots the heading Delaney had used to reach Camp Decade from the crash site. Finding the wreck would have been a simple geometry equation.

And it would have been wrong.

A fact largely ignored by modern navigators because of global positioning satellites and other artificial aids is that the magnetic North Pole is not a stationary point. It can migrate up to fifty miles in a single day and averages a northwestern drift of approximately nine miles every year. Earth’s iron core, which generates the magnetic field, is slightly out of phase with the rotation of the crust, creating this observable movement. To find the plane, Mercer had to factor fifty years’ worth of drift to Delaney’s heading, a difference of about four hundred and fifty miles.

With a calculator and a pen, he did the math as quickly as he could, aware of the bomb’s remorseless countdown. He could do nothing about Delaney’s estimate that he’d walked three hundred kilometers to reach the abandoned Air Force facility. Once they established themselves above his route and began backtracking, Mercer could only hope they would spot his plane. Erwin had said a few days ago that the region around where Mercer believed the C-97 had crashed had less snow cover now than at any time in decades. That was just one of the many lucky breaks they would need.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up. It was Erwin Puhl. “Anything I can do?”

“Get Marty’s sat-phone.”

Erwin shook his head. “Marty already tried it. He can’t get a lock on any satellites. It’s the solar max.”

“In that case, are you a praying man?”

“I am now.”

“Me too.”

The pilots didn’t question Mercer’s orders when he told them the new course to fly because he was the only person who had an idea how to save them. He returned to the rear of the plane, where Ira, Marty, and Anika had buried the bomb under as much cargo as they could pack around it. It was a makeshift redoubt, but any bit would help. “How much time?”

Ira checked the timer on his digital watch. “Forty-five and a half minutes.”

“We’ll be feet dry over Greenland again in fifteen and over our target area a couple minutes after that.”

“Doesn’t give us much time,” Marty pointed out.

“If we don’t find Delaney’s plane, we’ll still be able to put down and hope there’s enough of this one left to sustain us.”

“We pulled some of the better food stores, camping supplies, and cooking fuel away from the bomb,” Ira explained. “We can each grab an armload when we make a run for it.”

“Good idea. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Don’t thank me. It was Dr. Klein’s idea.”

Mercer smiled at Anika. “Intelligent, brave, and quick thinking. Do you have any faults?”

“I get drunk on a single glass of wine.”

“You call that a fault?” Mercer chuckled, trying to reduce the gloom that had permeated the cabin. “I call that a reason for a weekend together in the Napa Valley.”

Anika made a face of mock horror. “Ugh. You Americans sicken me. The Loire Valley or nothing.”

The banter didn’t last. The enormity of their situation overshadowed everything. Once they cleared the ramparts of the Greenland coast, Mercer had everyone at a window watching the snow and ice and rock below. Even though they had a few more minutes before reaching Delaney’s reported path, he wanted them accustomed to the rough topography so they were better prepared to spot anything anomalous.

To intercept Delaney’s route, they had to fly thirty miles into the hinterland before swinging north-northeast, back toward the coast at a shallow angle, their altitude reduced to a thousand feet above the ground. Hunched between the pilots’ seats with the Geiger counter in his hands, Mercer estimated they were about forty miles south of where the plane went down.

Watching the terrain scroll under the DC-3, everyone kept a lookout for a flash of sunlight striking a metallic surface or any unnatural straight edges, like a wing. As Erwin had predicted, there wasn’t anywhere near the amount of new snow here as had been around the Geo-Research camp. Large patches of bare rock appeared at irregular intervals, jagged peaks that showed above the ice. There were still enough snow-covered sections to land the plane, which also meant there was an increased possibility that the C-97 had been buried as deeply as Camp Decade. They’d know soon.

Far ahead he could see a fjord carved deep into the ice sheet, protected on all sides by sheer mountains. A quick guess put the plane wreck just south of where the narrow bay terminated. Mercer checked his watch. They had ten minutes before he would call off the search and order the pilots to land. He’d cut the margin as close as he could, balancing the need to locate the wreck with the time it took to find a safe landing site.

“Mercer!” It was one of Erwin’s teammates, Wilhelm Treitschke, seated immediately behind the lavatory. “Ahead about four kilometers, just before that rock that looks like a shark fin.”

Looking out the windshield, Mercer spotted the feature Will described and concentrated on the shadow staining the clear ice in front of it. For an instant he thought they’d found it. The size was right and it had an airplane’s cruciform shape, but as he looked closer, he could tell it was just a rocky projection that hadn’t quite broken through the surface. His mouth turned bitter.

“Good eyes, but that’s not it. Keep looking.”

A minute later, the copilot hit Mercer on the shoulder with the back of his hand and pointed. “There!”

Near where a wall of mountains rose before falling off into the fjord was a piece of debris sticking up from the ice like a tombstone. Battered and bent by decades of glacial movement, it was still recognizable as a section of an aircraft’s wing. There was another piece of wreckage sitting on top of a low ridge of stone maybe a hundred yards from it.

The shape of the mountain looming over the wreck indicated that the plane had had the added misfortune of coming down in an avalanche channel. He imagined that when the C-97 crashed in the 1950s, its impact must have triggered an avalanche that buried it, hiding the wreckage from both air and ground searches. But now, with temperatures on the rise and record low snowfall, the aircraft had melted out of its frozen tomb. Since this part of Greenland went largely unexplored, it was possible the plane had lain exposed for years.