Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

When he was calm again, he levered himself upright and flashed the light at the body that he assumed had been the radioman/navigator. The ruby effect that had so startled him was the result of frozen blood around the man’s mouth and splashed over his flight jacket. It looked like he’d also bled from the nose and… Mercer leaned closer. Jesus, his eyes. He had bled from his eyes.

There was more blood in the snow on the cabin floor, pools and strings of it like some obscene abstract painting. He flicked the beam toward the cockpit. Nearly all the windscreens had been smashed in by the crash fifty years ago. The snow forced into the cockpit had solidified into a misshapen block of ice. The copilot was strapped in his seat, his head turned away as if the light could still bother him. The snow piled up to his chest was stained crimson. He too had mysteriously bled out.

Mercer had been right. With the navigator in his seat and the copilot focused in the beam of light, the body he’d found in Camp Decade was the pilot, Jack Delaney. He flicked the light to the pilot’s seat to make sure. What he saw made him stumble back again.

Major Delaney sat there as if still flying the plane, his cap still in place although he no longer wore his leather coat. Much of his face had turned gray and shriveled over the years, so his dazzling teeth looked particularly gruesome. A death’s head smile with aviator glasses.

Anika didn’t know how many times she had checked her watch or cleared the condensed breath from the window. The routine had become automatic, although with the setting of the sun her pace had increased. Her lower lip felt raw from constant chewing.

Mercer hadn’t said anything about staying at the other wreck until the next morning, nor had he taken enough supplies to sustain him. The thick ground fog that had settled in the past hour only served to increase her anxiety. Since they could be stranded for weeks, they couldn’t waste anything for a signal fire, and if Mercer lost sight of his footprints coming back, he’d never find the DC-3.

Initially, she’d told herself her concern had come solely from the fact that Philip Mercer was the undisputed leader of the group. His actions had saved them all, and his absence, even for a few hours, had left the others sullen and pessimistic. Their dinner had been eaten with a minimum of conversation, and everyone had retreated to separate areas of the fuselage to sleep. Anika had stayed awake to check on Magnus, the thirty-five-year-old Icelandic copilot. Marty had been by her side until he too had succumbed to exhaustion. Ira Lasko had remained awake the longest, falling asleep only an hour ago and telling her she should do the same. He’d also assured her that Mercer knew what he was doing.

She wasn’t so sure. While she’d never been to Greenland, she’d spent more time in harsh conditions than any of the other survivors. She knew the dangers of hypothermia, had seen the effects of deep frostbite, and knew how fragile a lone man was outside with the temperature down well below freezing.

Now that she was in the second hour of her lonely vigil, Anika allowed her mind to wander to the other reason for her concern, a more personal reason. She didn’t know Mercer well enough to think beyond the physical, but on that level she was attracted to him. His was a natural masculinity that other men strove to attain through bravado and swagger. Yet there was a self-deprecation in him, as if he tried to hide his talents. He was a year or two older than her but he was like a buoyant teen who hadn’t yet gotten used to becoming an adult. It was charming.

Anika remembered the look he’d given her after they had run the gauntlet of fire. It had been a reflection of her own desire. Experience told her to temper her feelings because of the drama surrounding their first meeting and everything since. She’d taken lovers whom she’d shared dangers with, mostly fellow rock climbers, and every relationship had crumbled under the weight of the subsequent normalcy. While it was unfair to compare Mercer to these other men, she suspected the results would be the same.

Still, it was fun to think otherwise.

She didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until a noise startled her awake. The survivors had built a snow wall to screen the gaping hole at the rear of the aircraft, fashioning a crude door at the bottom with a section of bent metal. They used tarps found in the remaining cargo to cover the other holes in the fuselage. As a result the plane, though chilly, was warm enough to keep them alive. It was the door being pushed aside that woke her.

The apparition who entered in the faint glow emitted by their single gas lantern looked like some mythical creature. It was covered from head to foot in snow, with icicles dangling from the scarf covering its mouth. The fur trim around its head was a solid halo of ice. As it moved, knots of snow fell away like it was shedding its skin. It was Mercer.

Without a word, he lumbered down the aisle and doused the lantern, plunging the cabin into total darkness.

“Mercer, what is it?” Anika asked, confused and still half asleep.

“Quiet!” His labored breath sounded as though he’d run a marathon.

Then she heard it — a steady and deep thumping that seemed to come from every direction at once. She didn’t recognize the strange sound, but the others who’d been roused by Mercer’s entrance did.

“It’s the rotor-stat,” Ira said at last.

“I heard it about half an hour ago.” Mercer unwound his scarf and pulled down his hood. “I was afraid you might have a signal fire going, so I ran back as fast as I could. Even with the fog, I could see the lantern through the window a good way off.”

“What is it doing here?” Erwin could be heard fumbling for his glasses. “Looking for us?”

“They don’t know we’re here.” Mercer’s parka was so ice crusted it remained erect when he dropped it on the floor. “And I think the airship is miles away. We’re just hearing its echo ricocheting off the mountains.”

“Then why is it in the area?” Marty asked.

Chills racked Mercer before he could answer, his body quaking so strongly that he had to clamp his jaw. “I assume it’s moving Geo-Research’s base northward like they wanted all along.”

“Are they looking for Delaney’s downed Stratofreighter?” Ira had a towel to hand to Mercer, whose hair was a mass of frozen sweat.

“I think they’re searching for something else, considering Jack Delaney and the rest of his crew are still sitting in the plane.”

Mercer’s bombshell was met with a collective gasp. In the following silence, the sound of the dirigible began to fade. It was Ira who finally asked the question on all their minds. “If Delaney’s in his plane, whose body did we find at Camp Decade?”

He let the question hang for a moment before turning to Anika. “You want to answer that one?”

Anika’s stomach gave a sickening slide, and she had to grab on to a seat to steady herself. Earlier, she’d thought that hearing Gunther Rath at the base camp had brought everything full circle. That hadn’t been quite true then, but it was now. This had started with her grandfather’s search for hidden Nazi treasure and an interview with a man who had been an engineer. The two together meant a secret cache someplace, obviously in Greenland since Rath, Mercer, and she were here. Until this instant she’d never considered whom the Nazis had forced to dig their repository and never imagined that any of them could have survived on this bleak wasteland long enough to reach Camp Decade. Ten years had passed from the end of the war until the base was abandoned and yet there was no other explanation.

Her voice was barely above a whisper. “He was the last victim of the Holocaust.”