Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“How far do you estimate we are from the cave?” Erwin asked anxiously.

“About thirty kilometers,” Mercer said and just then realized something he’d overlooked earlier. The distances on the map he’d discovered in Camp Decade were written in the metric system. An American pilot would have used standard or nautical miles. He shook his head in self-reproach. He should have noticed such a discrepancy immediately. He’d already calculated the deflection in compass headings, so the navigation had been done. His earlier foray told him that they were in for a grueling march.

“Can you lead us there?” Hilda asked through Puhl.

“No.” Mercer wasn’t going to risk their lives by pretending he had all the answers. “But Anika has experience in these conditions. I trust her to get us to safety.”

“We’ve got a problem.” Anika looked up from Otto Schroeder’s journal, her eyes pinched from the strain of reading in such low light. “I haven’t finished the whole thing yet but I have something that makes your plan unfeasible.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Otto Schroeder was a combat engineer in the German Army. Before that he had trained as a mining engineer. He was sent to Greenland in 1943 as part of the Pandora Project to help expand a network of caverns discovered under a glacier. The orders had been cut by Hitler himself. He never knew what became of his work, because two months into the project he was caught in a rockslide and had to be evacuated. He says in his journal that a thousand Jewish and Gypsy slaves were being used in the excavation and that the scope of the mining was increasing. He also said that they were dying off at an average of ten a day.”

The figure was sobering. With his intimate knowledge of mining practices, Mercer had a better grasp at the unspeakably brutal conditions those poor souls had faced.

Anika continued. “Schroeder’s principal task before tunneling commenced was to mine an air shaft to the surface through an estimated thousand feet of ice.”

“Hold on.” Her statement didn’t make sense. Mercer thought she’d read it wrong. “Are you sure he had to mine an air shaft first? That would mean they started underground and worked their way up.”

“That’s the problem.” Anika paused. “The cavern is buried under a mountain at the end of a fjord and was accessible only by submarine. After completing the air shaft, Schroeder was to create a dock for the supply submarines and hack out more space in the cave for dormitories and other work spaces.”

Mercer cursed. “The air shaft is what Rath is looking for.”

Anika nodded. “Which means there aren’t any other caves for us to hide in.”

“And we haven’t addressed one issue that we need to.” Ira shot Mercer a significant look. Mercer knew what he was about to say and nodded. “We didn’t tell you that the body we found in Camp Decade is radioactive. He may have picked up the contamination from the C-97 when he took Delaney’s flight jacket but Mercer and I already discounted the idea that the U.S. military would leave atomic materials lying around.”

“I checked the plane,” Mercer interrupted. “Readings were the same there as in Camp Decade. It’s not the source.”

“That means the radiation came from the cavern we’re going to be humping our way toward,” Ira concluded. “Since he still gave a reading on the Geiger counter after fifty years, whatever’s down there has gotta be hotter than hell.”

Mercer looked to where Erwin Puhl huddled silently in his sleeping bag, the lantern glow reflecting off his glasses like tiny sunbursts. “How about it, Erwin? Are you ready to drop your cover story and tell us what you know?”

It was such an unexpected question that they all turned to the German meteorologist. For his part, Erwin tried to look shocked, but he’d experienced too much trauma in the past few days to sustain the facade. “How did you know?” he asked simply.

“Your friendship with Igor Bulgarin,” Mercer said. Erwin knew what he meant but the rest waited for an explanation. “When Igor and I first met, he told me he was coming to Greenland to search for meteor fragments. The only problem with his story is that finding meteorites on Greenland is next to impossible. They do it in Antarctica all the time because there’s so little precipitation that much of it is considered a desert. Chunks of space rock can lie around for years waiting to be picked up. Here, they’re usually buried in minutes.”

He looked around the cabin. “I read about an expedition in 1998 that spent six weeks on Greenland’s west coast looking for microscopic bits of the Kangilia meteor. That one weighed an estimated one hundred tons and there was a video and satellite information telling them where to look. They didn’t find a trace. There’s no way that one man walking around the ice could ever hope to find extraterrestrial debris.” Mercer returned his gaze to Erwin. “I figured that, since you were friends for years, you already knew that Igor’s cover was bullshit and knew what he was really doing here.”

Puhl didn’t deny the accusation.

Mercer took his deductions to their obvious conclusion. “He must have known about the Nazi cache and gone into Camp Decade because he suspected the body might have come from the cavern. Someone in Geo-Research knew what he was doing and murdered him to keep it a secret.”

Erwin’s lack of reaction told Mercer that the meteorologist had already figured out Igor’s “accident” was premeditated murder. His near-catatonia in the past few days was likely due to the fear that his friendship with Bulgarin meant he was next.

“Do you know who killed him?” Ira asked Mercer.

“Since Igor was struck on the back of the head, the murderer had to be someone he didn’t suspect and would turn his back to. The killer also had to be strong enough to bludgeon a man who was the largest in the camp. And finally the killer dragged the corpse out of officers’ area and abandoned it when he reached the first major obstacle. This means he wasn’t strong enough to actually carry the body.”

“Makes sense. So who was it?”

“The only person who fits all three criteria is Greta Schmidt,” Mercer answered and received a number of dubious looks.

“I think he’s right,” Erwin said after a moment. “Although Igor and I didn’t think Geo-Research knew who we really were and why we were on Greenland, we did discuss people we should be careful about. Neither of us considered that Greta could be part of this.”

“Erwin, do you know if Geo-Research is affiliated with a company called Kohl?” Anika asked. “Schroeder mentioned the name in his journal as the company given the actual contract to dig the cavern. He was among a handful of military experts sent to help.”

“Kohl bought Geo-Research last year so they could hide behind their scientific credentials and execute their true aim.”

“Which is the recovery of the gold?” Marty asked.

Erwin echoed Schroeder’s words. “The gold is only a small part of what’s going on.”

“What were the Germans hiding?”

“They weren’t hiding anything. They were trying to recover something, something that was never meant to be on this planet.”

Mercer put it together quicker than the others. “A radioactive meteorite that landed here in 1943?”

“Not quite,” Erwin said. “Most of it slammed into Russia in 1908.”

The sudden insight came to Mercer in a rush, and despite the horror surrounding this search and the loss they had already felt, he couldn’t help but be excited. They were talking about one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the twentieth century. There was a hushed awe in his voice. “Tunguska.”