Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

There were certain fears Mercer couldn’t purge from his brain, and radiation was one of them. He hated it. It reminded him of firedamp gas in coal mines, invisible in its touch and insidious in its death. There was no defense except avoidance.

He walked slowly. The snow near the base of the mountain had become ankle-deep slush. He wondered how close Stefansson Rosmunder had been to this very spot fifty years ago during his search for the C- 97. Close, he estimated, considering the dose needed to kill him so swiftly. Not knowing the half-life or dissipation rate of an extraterrestrial element, Mercer proceeded with deliberation, like he was walking through a minefield.

Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick. Tickticktick.

Mercer’s eyes dropped to the Geiger counter. Twenty-five RADs, about a quarter of the dose needed to cause radiation sickness or about eight times the average yearly exposure people received from background radiation. They would be safe for a while, but each moment brought an increased possibility of cancer later in life.

Nothing around him looked like a likely radiation source. There was no meteor impact evidence on the side of the mountain nor were there signs of Otto Schroeder’s air shaft, no tailings of waste rock from their mining. He looked up and saw he was still ten yards to the left of the face. Moving laterally and trying to ignore the clicking counter, Mercer knew he was close. The ice had become even more watery, as if heated from below. Erwin had told them that pieces of the meteor kept in the Russian villages melted snow even in winter.

Without warning, the ground opened up and swallowed Mercer in a wet rush. He fell about ten feet and landed heavily on his backside in a small ice cave. It was an antechamber at the head of the Nazi air shaft. Ahead of him was the long tube descending into the glacier. A wall of icy slurry surged down the eight-foot-diameter tunnel. Had this cave not had a level floor, it would have carried him headlong into the earth as though he’d been flushed down an enormous drain. The moment of terror that had tripped his heart gave way to awe as he surveyed his surroundings. He wasn’t even aware of the pain from the fall.

Then he saw the body.

It was badly decomposed, merely a skeleton dressed in gray rags adorned with brass buttons and piping and medals. He recognized the rotted insignia on the corpse’s uniform. He had been a sailor in the German Kreigsmarine, specifically the U-boat service. If Mercer needed any more proof that Erwin Puhl’s story was true, here it was. But that wasn’t what filled him with wonder. It was what lay next to the seated body: the two-foot-square box of pure gold stamped with the swastika-clutching eagle of the Third Reich.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he breathed, superstitious ripples charging his skin like static. The Nazis had called their operation the Pandora Project, meaning he was looking at a true Pandora’s box, its contents as deadly as the evils the mythological one once contained.

“Mercer? Are you all right?” Anika yelled from above, her voice strained by concern.

“Yes,” he replied. “Stay back.”

The Geiger counter had been turned off by the fall and he flipped it back on. The meter thankfully registered the same dosage as he’d found before his sudden plunge. He held the probe first to the box and then the corpse, finding that it was the sailor’s body emitting radiation and not the container of Satan’s Fist. The reading was significantly higher than from the survivor he’d found at Camp Decade, meaning this man had received a much more powerful dose, fatal in minutes rather than weeks.

But what about Stefansson Rosmunder and the crew of the C-97? Mercer wondered. How strongly had they been hit? Was it exposure to the corpse or the meteor itself that killed them? Rosmunder had lasted six months after returning from this area, so Mercer guessed it was an acute dose of residual radiation from the body. Considering how they had all bled out, he presumed the airmen were killed by a radioactive blast from the fragment sealed in the box. The sailor must have opened it, killing the flight crew and himself.

Why, after surviving for ten years, did he commit suicide and murder? Madness? Desperation?

Mercer put his hand on the gilded crate, noting that its surface was warm to the touch. Then he realized why the shaft hadn’t been buried any deeper. The environment and the box had come to a kind of balance, melting away much of the snow that fell here but leaving enough to cover the tunnel’s entrance. That was why there weren’t hundreds of feet of ice blocking the shaft. It wasn’t until he came along that his added weight overcame the equilibrium between Arctic cold and radioactive warmth and exposed the air vent. Eventually, as the meteor fragments decayed, the heat would diminish and the glacier would forever seal the tunnel.

He gave the box a shove and realized that, while it was heavy, it wasn’t solid. Straining to gain traction on the slick floor, he pushed it against the corpse, pressing the disintegrated pile of bones into the wall of the excavation, partially shielding the space from its deadly rays. The Geiger counter dropped noticeably. Next he unfolded the thermal blanket from his pack and draped it over the box to reduce the amount of heat it radiated. He would use the other blankets each person carried to further dampen the warmth, so when they blocked the entrance, the container wouldn’t melt away their effort.

“Hey down there, what’d you find?” It was Ira.

“What’s left of a German sailor and part of his set of golden luggage. Mind tossing me a rope?”

“Have you out in a second.”

Back on the surface, Mercer changed his wet parka and snow pants for the spare ones they’d brought for an emergency, and he told the others what he’d found. The idea of walking past the radioactive body had a chilling effect on them even after he explained that their exposure wouldn’t be too dangerous. Like him, they were all terrified by radiation.

It took a half hour to pile enough snow near the opening to seal the hole and erase their presence. With the Pandora box, as Mercer already thought of it, covered by the “space blankets,” the slush would freeze to concrete hardness in a few hours. Rath would need weeks and a lucky break to find them. Both of which, Mercer mused grimly, he would no doubt have.

They lowered each other one by one into the antechamber until only Mercer remained on the surface. He mounded snow around the hole, shrinking the aperture until it was barely large enough to admit him. He took one last look at the setting sun and allowed himself to fall into the ice, his landing cushioned by waiting arms below. Flashlights had already been snapped on, their beams vanishing into the bowels of the glacier.

“We ready?” he asked brightly, hoping to dispel their apprehension.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Marty said as he looked down the stygian air shaft.

“It drives me nuts when they use that line in the movies.” Mercer stopped and turned, his eyebrows raised in a mocking expression. “Marty, do you think any of us have a good feeling about walking through an oversize Nazi sewer pipe that leads to a radioactive chamber filled with God knows what?”

Together, they started the long descent into the unknown.

Klaus Raeder waited a moment before answering Reinhardt Wurmbach’s question. He carefully unlaced his fingers and placed his hands palms down on the tabletop, fixing his stare as if pondering his response. “No,” he said at last.

“No, you won’t agree to pay the reconciliation commission two hundred and twenty-five-million-mark settlement, or no, you won’t counter with two hundred million like you promised before?”