by Roger Weston
“It’s gonna get bad,” Rivera said.
“How do you know?”
“You live here twenty years you can smell a storm. I smell one now. It won’t be long.”
As the zodiac rounded the point, Jake’s eyes widened. At the base of a steep mountain beyond the beach, a huge shelf of lowland spread out and surrounded a large cedar plank cabin that had the appearance of an Antarctic haunted house. The poor condition was no surprise given that it had been abandoned for many years and weathered by constant Arctic storms.
Jake couldn’t believe he was seeing a cabin on South Georgia Island, one of the most remote cabins in the world.
Mission Cove reeked of danger with freezing gray waters, rolling whitecaps, and a razor sharp reef of shallow rocks that slashed the waves into churning foam. Thick patches of seaweed rose to the surface around reef, which drew a curved band across the water. A shipwrecked old freighter was a warning on the shoal ring, and seabirds lined her rusted rails. While penguins lined the beach, other sea birds with hooked beaks and yellow heads filled the sky with their eerie cries.
Jake’s gaze drifted to the shore. It was a gray inlet inside a bay. Because it curved back into the land and behind hills, the cabin could not be seen by the rare boat that passed the bay. The inlet was walled on the backside by a glacier and mountains. The glacier rose from the far shore and crawled up the wide valley. Ice that had shed off the glacier lined the beaches, and large chunks floated in the water like iced tea. The cabin was almost touching the foothills. A hundred yards from the cabin, a cross rose from the roof of a small white church that was no bigger than the one at the whaling station. The ruins of a pier reached out into the cove.
Jake studied the shipwreck. The name was still visible on the bow, and it was the Cushaven.
Jake saw what looked like an opening in the reef and steered for it. He studied the dark, menacing clouds. Things could get nasty in a hurry around there, and he didn’t want to stay long.
He gunned the outboard engine. As he approached the beach, he took in the sights from close up. Hundreds of cormorants covered the rocky promontories along the shore, and an albatross soared above the church.
Jake pulled the zodiac beyond the reach of the surf. As he walked on the icy pebbles and frozen snow, he inhaled the smell of rotting fish and kelp that drifted across the beach. Yellow lichen covered the rocks.
Lichen hung down from the cabin’s rafters like the shredded sails of tall ship after a hurricane.
“What do you expect to find?” Rivera said. “I told you Köhler’s money was in the bank.”
“I don’t know. Maybe a clue.”
Jake could not believe that in this location Köhler had built this home, which endured like a rotting whale carcass.
A veranda ran all along the front of the cabin, which was over forty yards long. Every ten feet, drunken columns held up the overhanging roof with its sheet-metal roofing that had mostly defied the Arctic winds’ attempts to strip it away, although a several metal sheets were peeled back. Several windows had imploded under the force of the Antarctic hurricanes. Against these gales, Köhler had built small windows and used thick glass, but some window frames were outlined in glass daggers.
Tucked out of sight in a treacherous cove, this was a staggering place to build a cabin. Long, dark winters in the Antarctic had a smell to them—the smell of danger. Blizzards, freezing hurricanes, treacherous waters, total isolation—it was a good place to die, but a risky place to live.
Jake crossed the front porch slowly against the chance of falling through the squeaking wood. As he pushed the door open, the hinges were as silent as the grave.
“I’ll wait out here,” Rivera said. “I never liked going in there.”
Jake sighed. He could understand why Rivera was resistant to enter. The place had a grim history, but Jake’s concerns went beyond that. He was concerned that Horace might be hiding inside. The chances of that were probably slim, but he had to expect anything. “But you said it’s dangerous. You have to show me where it’s safe to step.”
“I said I’m not going in there. You get it? Just be careful.”
CHAPTER 17
False Cape Cabin
Freezing, stale air met Jake inside the main room. A 7x7 painting of the famous German freighter, Greifswalder dominated the back wall. The floor was made of cedar panels and had a checkerboard look.
Walking down the hallway, Jake noticed a photo of a blond woman in a wedding gown. She was beautiful but had sad eyes. Holding a bouquet of flowers, she stood alone in front of a lush garden. Jake saw no other family photos, which struck him as unusual.
Rivera joined him and said, “He talked about her whenever I saw him.”
Jake wandered through the drawing room, which even now remained well furnished with haunted-house furniture—rotting couches, frayed curtains, decaying Indian rugs, and a cracked mirror with a huge, gaudy frame. A desolate and depressed feeling came over him, and he wanted to leave, but he moved on. A few of the floorboards felt unstable. A back hallway beneath cracked windows was covered with patches of ice.
Rivera followed at a distance.
Jake wandered into a bedroom with Victorian décor—a king size canopy bed with shredded mosquito netting draping down in streaks. A leather wing chair looked dry and almost usable; however, the leather was cracked all over. A ten-foot wide painting of a blond ballet girl still hung on a wall where the wall paper was peeling off at the corners.
“What are you doing?” Rivera said, stepping into the room.
“Looking for something. I told you that.”
“There’s not much here of value. He offered most of it to me, but I didn’t want it. You have to remember where it came from.”
Jake was starting to wonder why he even came here. He’d seen a picture of the Greifswalder, but the ship and cargo were still missing. Rivera had said the cargo was never here, but Jake wondered if the crafty miner had found the goods and hidden them away for himself.
Jake moved on. An arched ceiling hovered over the main room and dining room. Four chairs surrounded a six-foot long decrepit dining room table. Each chair was a carefully crafted antique although the wood was seriously damaged by the moisture that came in through broken windows.
“He was two different people,” Rivera said. “There were two Köhlers. There was the coward in Germany, but there was also the man I knew for twenty years. He spent his life here trying to make amends for his sins. I have never known a more tragic figure. Towards the end, I sat at his bedside while he wept like a baby and confessed the most horrible things. These were crimes he had done forty years earlier, but he acted as if it was only yesterday.”
Jake nodded moved down a cold hallway. He wondered where a sad, tragic person like Köhler would stash his loot. Then he felt a jolt of anxiety. He thought of the Atlas’s passengers, of Talia and Len Jackson and some of the crew. He worried…but put them out of his mind.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rivera said.
“What’s down there?” Jake pointed down a dim hall of the main room. He took a couple of steps that way, stopped then kept going.
He came to a door that had been kicked in. The hinges were barely hanging on, most of the screws having been torn loose.
“When I came through here last year,” Rivera said, “this was locked.”
“It was probably locked last week. Someone entered the house in the last twenty-four hours.”
Rivera laughed. “No, man. There were no tracks in the snow out front.”
“You didn’t look out the back window. A helicopter landed there.” Jake started through the door, but Rivera grabbed his sleeve.
“I’m not going in there.”
“Why not?”
“Bad memories.”
The library was a striking room with its broken Victorian antique stained glass windows and life-size, hand-carved marble roaring lions standing on bases that looked like coffins. Fearsome, roaring beasts.
Jake was inspired by their majesty. Both of the lions were in excellent condition, but green lichen streaked down their faces and bodies. Jake was impressed by the library. He saw water-damaged books on history, theatre, the arts, and religion. He saw no maps, no diaries, nothing related to the Greifswalder.
He continued the search in other rooms. He found nothing of interest. If Hitler sent his cousin to South America as the Reich crumbled, it wasn’t to hide out in a remote cabin. There must be something else, Jake thought, something of great importance or value.
Then he heard something that made his hair bristle. He heard a groaning sound, which he followed to a store room across the hall. A body was sprawled out on the floor, where it had lost blood. The face was covered with blood from a broken nose. The damage was much worse than that however. The man lay there in the twisted pose of a broken doll. The legs, below the knees, were bent forward in a grotesque manner. The face sported a magnificent red beard that matched the hair and mustache. The head was turned at a disturbing angle, suggesting a serious spinal injury. Jake saw little eyes peering up out of the dim cavern as the man lay on his back.
“Who are you?” Jake said.
“Falco.” The voice was weak and strained.
“Then you speak English?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I—I came with Alamar. I want kill him, but I will die first.”
“Who is Alamar?”
“The Gitano.”
“The man who hid the cruise ship?”
“Yes, the bastard.”
Jake took the rope from around his neck and expanded the fold-out grappling hooks. “I’ll get you out of there.”
“No, it’s too late.” The man’s teeth suddenly chattered, the body shook with convulsions. When that had passed, the man said, “The Gitano left me to die.”
“Why?”
“I—I told him I … wanted out—” He grit his teeth for a moment. “—that I was leaving.”
“What is he doing with the ship?”
“Tell the authorities he… threw fifty people overboard, the old and the weak. Watched them drown. Soon he will kill the rest.” He whimpered in pain. “I never wanted to be part of that.”
“When?”
“H—He will be back here. He says this place is for a g—great man to hide.” He groaned in pain as spasms worked their way through his nervous system.
“The ship? Why?”
“You die tomorrow,” the man said.
“How?”
“The Moroccans here now. Twenty killers.” He grunted as if he’d been punched, and then he endured another bout of chattering teeth and spasms.
“Can they be stopped?” Jake said.
“The Gitano is piece of donkey shit.” He coughed like a rattle. Followed by choking sounds, the man suddenly seemed to relax. Jake saw the life go out of him. The eyes were still open, but now the red-haired gypsy stared at him through lifeless windows.
“ Let’s get out of here,” Jake said. There was still the chapel to check out. At least there he could say a prayer and get rid of the dark emotions.
***
The church was small and simple, about the size of a one-car garage with vaulted ceilings. The interior walls were all painted white. It almost had the feel of a kids’ playhouse, except it had four pews, which was a lot for a congregation of one man. Rivera stood by the door, sweat beading on his forehead. Jake sat in the back row and looked around. Up front, a figure of Christ nailed to the cross gazed down on him. Beneath the cross was a platform as in most churches, but Jake had no idea if anyone had ever preached from it. Light shined in through stained glass windows, and they weren’t even broken. A wooden tabernacle box in good condition rested on the table.
Rivera broke the silence. “That’s Köhler for you. The man literally spent decades in prayer, and keep in mind—because of his immense weight of sin—he was utterly humbled. The man had no pride whatsoever because he had no illusions about his righteousness. He trusted for forgiveness—although he was convinced he would pay a terrible price for his actions even though he was forgiven. Don’t ask me to explain that. I couldn’t if I wanted to.”
To Jake’s surprise, he felt the phone in his waterproof bag vibrate. He stepped outside and answered it.
“Jake, it’s Ashley. What’s going on down there?”
Jake looked out at the shipwreck in the bay and the birds lined on her rusted rail. “I can’t talk right now, Ash. What did you find out about the Gitano?”
Over the next five minutes, she told him what she had learned, and Jake was stunned.
“Something’s going on down there, Jake. If you’re in trouble, I need to know.”
“I can’t go into detail now, Ash. I need you to contact the Royal Navy and the Argentinean Coastal Patrol and tell them to send help to Grytviken. Tell them we’re shipwrecked, but they also need to send an anti-piracy detail to Stromness. They can expect to run into a fully armed crew there.”
“Are you kidding me, Jake?”
“Tell them to hurry. Something is going to happen very soon.”
“Nothing happens fast when you have to work with government agencies.”
“Tell them it’s a rescue operation, Ash. Tell them that they’ll find the missing cruise ship they’ve been looking for.”
“What? You mean the Arctic Trekker? They’re searching for survivors south of the Falkland Islands.”
“It’s back on. Gotta go.” Jake hung up.
CHAPTER 18
Since the latest killing, Talia had cried. Another scientist was lost. Nobody even talked of another funeral. Talia stayed busy to keep her mind off of it. She had spent all night and all day caring for Gary Mayo. He lay in his sleeping bag in the sand of the old repair shop, smoke whisking up from a campfire. Talia knew basic first aid, but nothing about stab wounds. She cleaned the wound, but that seemed almost pointless since she wasn’t cleaning beneath the surface of the skin. She changed the bandages and dug up some antibiotics from supplies that Jake had salvaged. The good news was that Gary Mayo was stable. When she heard a scream, her heart almost froze with fear, but the she heard another. She realized that the scream was Ava.
“Boats,” Ava screamed. “We’re rescued!”
“What boats would come here during the winter?” Talia said.
Gary Mayo tried to roll over onto his side, but he grimaced with pain and abandoned the effort. “Fishing boats. Mostly they don’t come ashore, but sometimes they do. Go see what’s happening and come tell me.”
Talia walked out of the building. Outside she walked over the snow and stood at the head of the beach.
“They’re finally here!” Ava screamed. “It’s about time. What the hell took them so long?”
Several more of the castaways had gathered along the beach—Len Jackson, a few sailors and a lone scientist. They cheered and waved their arms.
A deck hand came out and waved back, spurring on still more cheering. One of the boats blasted something like a fog horn. The cheering went on for a couple of minutes.
As the boat went past King Edward’s Point research station, Talia saw two men with rifles come out of one of the buildings.
“The gunmen,” Ava shrieked. “What are they doing? Hurry. Hurry up!”
They got down on their knees and aimed their rifles out at the boats—but then Talia had a horrible realization: Those weren’t rifles; they were missile launchers.
The others noticed the same thing, and they all began pointing and shouting.
Two loud detonations triggered two missiles which Talia could actually see as they burst out of the launchers and streaked across the sky, tongues of fire burning out the back ends like blow torches. The missiles both hit their targets. Both of the fishing boats erupted into balls of fire that curled under their own heat and rose into mushroom clouds. The clouds were quickly dispersed in the winds, and Talia was shocked to see that the boats were no longer there. They
literally been blown to bits, and she saw little pieces of wood splashing down into the waves.
For a moment, dead silence and horror filled the air. The castaways all stared out over the water in shock. The boats were really gone.
Ava screamed. However, this scream was frayed on the edges by the tones of terror. Ava broke into a run for cover. Talia realized then how vulnerable she was. If the killers could target the boats, then she too could be targeted. When she saw the others flee for cover, she did the same.
CHAPTER 19
As Jake steered the zodiac northwest along the coast, an albatross soared so low that Jake could almost reach out and touch it. The magnificent creature banked away. As the zodiac crested, Jake watched the coast, which was somewhat visible behind the speeding snow. Strong snowy winds caused the boat to skid. The six-foot waves were dark and frigid, and they spit whitecaps all over the place. Still, they rolled between long troughs that made them navigable. Jake beached the zodiac a couple of miles south of the whaling station to drop Rivera off.
Rivera had just started inland on cross-country skis when Jake heard the sound of a high-power gunboat racing along the coast.
Jake saw Rivera speed up rapidly, so he dragged the zodiac behind a pile of snow-covered driftwood logs and lay down in it for cover. His white clothes blended with the snow enough to avoid detection, and he pulled down the face mask of his white stocking cap before he raised his head. He saw two men on the back deck and one man at the mounted machine gun. They were all watching the shore, evidently looking for a target of opportunity, which they’d almost found. Just after passing Jake’s position, the boat slowed to a crawl. Jake stayed low behind the driftwood pile.
“Why did I look?” Jake said. “Bad move.”