Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

“Get through this and you’ll be fine,” he told himself. He liked how that sounded so he repeated it, adding, “I didn’t kill those people. He did. It was his choice, not my order. No matter what, I am not a murderer. We’ll pay the commission, destroy all the Pandora boxes, and I’ll fire Rath. He’ll remain silent because to reveal what he knows would be an admission of guilt. He’s trapped himself.”

He drank a palmful of water and went back to his desk, hitting the intercom. “Kara, is Reinhardt still out there?”

“Yes, Herr Raeder. Would you like me to send him back in?”

“No. Tell him to pay whatever the commission is currently asking for. I think it’s two hundred and twenty-five million marks. Then page our pilots and have the company jet ready for an immediate flight to Iceland. Have my car brought around to the front of the building.”

“Yes, sir.”

Raeder dialed his summer house in Bavaria, hoping to reach his wife. His eleven-year-old son, Jaegar, answered the phone. “Papa!” the boy cried before restraining his emotions as his father had taught him. “How are you, sir?”

Squeezing his eyes at hearing how he’d turned his son into an automaton, Raeder needed a moment to answer. When this was over, a lot of things in his life were going to change . Oh, God, please let me see them one more time. “I miss you. I miss all of you. Is your mama home?”

“No. She went shopping with Frau Kreiger from next door. Fatima is watching Willi and me.” Willi was Jaegar’s six-year-old brother; Fatima, their Turkish housekeeper.

“I need you to take a message for me. Tell Mama that I had to go away this weekend on a trip.”

“You aren’t coming to Bavaria?” The boy’s en-grained reserve could not contain his fierce disappointment.

“I’m sorry, son. I just can’t.”

“When will you be coming?”

Reader considered his reply, knowing a lie would only add to his family’s disillusion. “Not for a long time, I’m afraid. I love you, Jaegar. I’m sorry. Tell your brother that I love him too. And your mother” — God, this hurt — “give her a big hug for me.”

Raeder knew his uncommon burst of concern would confuse the boy. But if things didn’t go as planned in Greenland, he’d be glad he’d made the call. It could be the last his family heard from him. On his way out of the office, he opened his safe to retrieve his licensed pistol, a holdover from the kidnapping threats he’d received before coming to Kohl.

The flashlight beam pushed back the gloom for only a few dozen yards before being swallowed by impenetrable darkness. With Mercer in the lead, the group chased the retreating ring of light, marching downward at a steady pace, protected by a thin bubble of illumination in an otherwise cold black realm. Otto Schroeder had engineered the sloping tunnel so those walking through it would never lose traction on the icy floor, and every hundred feet the entire shaft leveled out for a yard or two in case someone did fall.

Without the wind, the air was a constant thirty-two degrees, and after so long in below-freezing conditions, many of them had unzipped their parkas. None of them were yet comfortable enough to speak. The walk through the passage was punctuated only by the rustle of equipment and the slap of their boots. Even the Geiger counter in Mercer’s free hand had remained silent since they’d slipped past the corpse at the tunnel’s entrance. They continued ever downward, wending through living rock and glacial ice.

After thirty minutes, Mercer estimated they had walked nearly two miles into the mountain and had descended a thousand feet. He knew they had to be approaching sea level. Suddenly the light that had cocooned them no longer brushed the walls. It had vanished into an enormous gallery. Mercer stopped, checking the floor to see that it had leveled out. The ground was bare rock, mined smooth during World War Two.

“I think we’ve reached the bottom.”

Training the light upward, he could just barely see the underside of the cavern, an ugly mixture of ice and rock hanging fifty feet above them. Others snapped on their own lights and more details emerged. The cavern was roughly circular, at least five hundred feet in diameter, and domed. All around them, huge tongues of glacial ice were being forced into the cave through fissures in the stone. In a few centuries, the ice would eventually reclaim the space that the Nazis had carved for themselves. Ahead, the floor dropped off to still black water. Mercer imagined that somewhere across the water was another entrance to the cavern, a submerged grotto accessible only by submarine. He strode across the cavern to the water’s edge. By the high-tide lines staining the edge of the quay he knew that the path to the open ocean had remained clear after all this time.

“Must be the tides that keep it open,” Ira said as he approached. “If you look closely you can see currents in the water.”

Mercer dropped to his belly so he could reach over the side of the pier that Otto Schroeder had built and dipped his hand in the frigid water. He tasted it and spat back into the pool. “Typical salinity. It hasn’t been diluted by ice melt.”

“I bet if we had a submarine we could get out of here without Rath ever knowing it.”

Mercer’s attention was fixed on a large gray shape in the water at the far side of the pier. “I’ll be goddamned. Wishing it makes it true.”

Ira Lasko had to jog to catch up. Mercer called to the others with lights and they converged at the water’s edge, close to one side of the chamber. “I can’t believe it.”

Low in the water sat a German U-boat that looked like she’d just slipped down the ways. The paint on her upper works seemed freshly applied and there were only a few streaks of surface rust along the side of her outer hull. Her conning tower stood about twelve feet above her flat deck, ringed halfway up by a tubular steel railing. Her designation, U-1062, was stenciled on her tower, and she looked as sleek and deadly now as she had generations ago.

“No deck gun,” Ira said after a moment’s examination.

“What?”

“This is a type VII, the most widely constructed version. Over seven hundred, if I remember correctly. She should have an 88mm cannon just forward of the conning tower.” He rubbed the sprouting beard on his chin. “I think this is one of the special torpedo resupply subs the Germans built. She wouldn’t need armament if they were using her to transport cargo in and out of this cave. Notice the rubber membrane on the conning tower. That’s Tarnmatte, an antiradar coating. She was built for stealth.”

“I’m glad I never took up your trivia challenge about submarines,” Mercer said, impressed by the breadth of Lasko’s knowledge.

“When you spend your life in one of these monsters, it’s good to know their history.” The gangway spanning the narrow gulf between sub and shore was a short distance away. Ira shot Mercer a look.

“Let’s explore the rest of this place before we board her.”

“You have a plan?”

Mercer grinned. “Always.”

“A good one?”

“Rarely.”

For the next hour, they split into teams and scoured the chamber. There were four separate caverns carved off the main cave as well as a long tunnel bored parallel to the air vent. This shaft did not rise up into the glacier but ran level for eighty yards until ending abruptly in a pile of loose boulders and chunks of ice, obviously the result of a cave-in. One of the side chambers had been a machine shop for repairing mining equipment, such as generators, pneumatic drills, lights, and small utility loaders. Ira Lasko remained in the workshop while the others continued their exploration.