Pandora's Curse

by Du Brul, Jack

  “What about the landing gear?” Winger’s hand was poised over the switches.

  “I’d rather flop her in on her belly. We can’t risk a landing strut hitting one of those ice ridges.”

  Had they lost their instruments, there would have been no way to tell their proximity to the ground. It was one of the bewildering aspects of flying in Arctic conditions: the absolute sameness wherever you looked. It was mostly the trees Delaney missed. He could determine altitude by gauging their height. His only visual reference here was the barren mountains looming out the starboard windows. Experience said they were about three thousand feet high, but they could easily be just three hundred. His hands tightened even further on the yoke. The cold was affecting him now. His eyes felt dried out though tears streamed down his cheeks. He could barely feel the rudder pedals. The altimeter spun through five hundred feet.

  The Stratofreighter droned in, her two working engines maintaining a steady descent. Details of the ice field became crisper the closer they got and what Delaney and Winger saw was not good. This would be a rough landing even if the ice were smooth. But it wasn’t. The veil of snow blowing off the ice swirled and eddied against countless concrete-hard ridges.

  Delaney bumped the throttles, feeling he needed a bit more altitude before flaring the crippled plane. She came in level despite the wind’s desire to slew her around. The closest mountain was only a quarter mile off the right wing, yet it offered little protection from deadly wind shears. He sensed a gust coming up and reacted accordingly, fighting the spongy controls to keep the wings of the artificial horizon indicator balanced. “Call the altitude.”

  “One hundred feet,” Winger replied at once. “Tom, you strapped in tight?”

  Sanders’s answer was a pained moan. Delaney had the plane, so Winger twisted around to check on the radioman. He gasped. Tom Sanders’s face was coated with blood that ran from his nose in twin jets and steamed in the flight deck’s freezing air. Most of the blood had solidified into a crusty sheet covering the lower half of his face. He cradled his head in his mittened hands, pressing against his skull with so much force his upper body trembled. His eyes bulged as though they were on stalks, and more blood leaked from around them.

  “Tom, what happened?” Winger assumed their radioman had hit his face against the navigation table.

  Sanders moaned again, louder, and began clawing at his chest, smearing blood on his leather jacket like paint strokes.

  “Jerry, I need you,” Jack Delaney called. They were fifty feet above the ice.

  Winger turned back to the controls. “Something’s wrong with Tom. He’s hurt.”

  A gust took the C-97, pushing it to the left. Winger and Delaney responded in concert, easing the plane back on course. They brought the nose up ever so slightly. Air beneath the wings was forced against the ice, providing a cushion called ground effect that the plane gently sank through.

  “Speed’s one hundred knots.”

  Delaney’s concentration was total. This was nothing like the countless flights he’d done for the Berlin Air-lift, where planes were stacked up four and five high waiting for landing instructions. This was a one-time thing: land her safely or crash. There was no third option.

  In the clear air, the ground came up deceptively fast. He held her aloft for a moment longer, then felt pressure against the yoke as though a weight had been forced against Winger’s column. He turned and saw his copilot slumped forward in his seat, his stiffened arms pushing on his wheel. Winger spasmed, throwing himself back again. Droplets of blood from his nose and eyes splattered the inside of the cockpit. A scream came out as a gurgling cry. More blood fountained from his lips. Delaney guessed that it was the effects of the smoke inhalation. Fortunately he hadn’t gotten it as strongly as his two crewmen.

  There was no time to help. Delaney focused his vision on the landing just as the fully loaded plane hit the ice. With a rending scrape, her belly smashed into the ground. Delaney was instantly blinded by a fury of ice particles and snow. He felt the props on the two working engines tear into the surface and then shatter, the huge blades breaking off, one sounding like it had scythed through the aluminum skin of the payload area.

  The engine drone was replaced by the sound of the plane being ripped apart by the ice. Every jarring crash into a ridge slammed Delaney against his seat restraints until his shoulders felt broken. It went on and on. The airspeed indicator had barely dipped below one hundred knots. It wasn’t possible, Delaney thought. They should have been slowing.

  His view was completely whited out. He had no references, nothing to judge their position or progress. But it seemed that the plane was turning to the right, toward the mountains. The shaking vibrations continued unabated, the airframe shuddering. Delaney’s head pounded with the strain of trying to see what was happening. He kept his hands away from the control yoke, but his feet remained on the rudder pedals. Now he was sure the plane was turning to the right, so he applied left rudder, hoping to straighten them out to avoid the rocky projections that fronted the mountains. When he felt he had corrected the skid, he released the rudder and prayed he was right.

  Blinded by the maelstrom of snow blowing around the hurtling aircraft, Delaney couldn’t have known how wrong his perception had been. The plane had been following a straight line until he hit the rudder pedal. The pilot’s actions turned the Stratofreighter, and now she was traveling toward a gentle hill that rose out of the ice. The plane hit it and climbed up to its crest. The low friction between aircraft and ice had not reduced her speed enough and for a moment they became airborne again.

  Lifting off the surface, the plane flew out of the snow it had kicked up. Delaney screamed, seeing they were headed for the rocks. The C-97 hit the ground a second time, more violently than the first. The ice here wasn’t level. It sloped down toward the mountains, riding up and over hills that aeons of glaciation had worn down. Incredibly, the plane picked up speed like a toboggan. Delaney’s vision was obscured once again, and for this, he was thankful. There was nothing he could do.

  The aircraft hit an outcrop of rock. The crash twisted it on its axis so that the port wing led its headlong rush. Momentum tilted the plane until the wing hit the ice and gouged a furrow into it, throwing off tons of material like a snowplow. This was the drag the plane needed to slow, and when the wing finally snapped near its tip, it was moving at no more than thirty knots. Another impact with a rock scrubbed off more speed and Delaney felt that they would make it.

  Several windows had shattered and snow blew into the cockpit on a shrieking wind. Delaney’s face was scoured as though hit by a sandblaster. Even numbed, he knew he was bleeding. The C-97 stopped suddenly when her nose dug into a snowbank on the leeward edge of a foothill. Avalanches of snow poured through the broken windows, piling into the cockpit until Delaney’s legs were buried. But he was alive.

  At first everything felt silent and still. He sat there, his labored breathing producing billows of condensation like cigarette smoke. But he could not hear it or feel it. Everything just felt calm as his terror subsided into immeasurable relief. And with relief came pride. Not one in twenty pilots could have pulled that off. Not one in fifty.

  Only then did he become aware of the wind howling outside and the volleys of ice that raked the fuselage like machine gun fire. He wiped his cheeks, and his hands came away covered with blood. He felt no pain—he was too numb for that—but it reminded him of Winger. In his seat, the copilot was dead, his eyes wide and sightless. The blood on his face had turned into a frozen mask.

  “Tom?” Delaney called to the navigator behind him. “Tom, are you okay?”

  There was no response. His crew was dead. The veteran pilot couldn’t allow himself grief just yet. He knew that if he didn’t act soon, he’d be joining his men. First, he had to dig himself out of the cockpit. So much snow had blown through the windows that he couldn’t move his legs more than a fraction of an inch, and even that took all his strength. He felt weak, wea
ker than he should have. Delaney wanted to close his eyes and rest for just a minute.

  A particularly loud fusillade of ice pummeling the aircraft roused him even as his eyelids drooped. Once he was free of the flight deck, Delaney was sure he’d be all right. Loaded onto the Stratofreighter were thirty tons of supplies destined for Thule, including fuel, food, survival clothing, and other Arctic gear—everything he would need to survive on the ice until rescue came.

  Of that he was supremely confident. They would be searching for him within hours of his overdue arrival at the base. He could use the plane as a base until then, warm and with his belly full. It was only a matter of time, a few days, maybe a week at the most. But they would find him.

  If only his head didn’t ache so much. If only he could stop the nosebleed that continued to pour coppery fluid into his mouth . . .

  VIENNA, AUSTRIA THE PRESENT

  When the weather was nice, the old man and his little dachshund were a fixture along Karntnerstrasse. The trendy shopping street that passed next to the inner city’s celebrated Opera House was regularly jammed with gaping tourists and hustling locals, yet many of the shop owners recognized the shuffling man and his sausage-shaped dog. He had walked this route for years. Many called him Herr Doktor, though no one knew he truly deserved such a title. It did fit him, however. His eyes were bright despite his years and his voice was captivating and learned.

  It was late July, and the air was warm and filled with the smells of pastry and traffic. The Doktor was affected by the pains of age, so he wore a thin jacket over his buttoned shirt and cardigan and a homburg on his head. In winter, Handel, his dachshund, sported a tartan sweater that made her look like a small piece of luggage, but today her sleek black fur glistened like anthracite.

  He strode with a special purpose this morning and many who recognized him were surprised to see him walking so early. Usually he wouldn’t pass the wedding cake-like Baroque Staatsoper until ten or ten thirty. Handel seemed to sense his urgency and she trotted at his side obediently. Beyond the looming Finance Ministry building, the 444-foot spire of Stephansdom Cathedral shot into the air. The massive Gothic church with its mosaic-tiled roof was the symbol for Vienna the way Paris was defined by the Eiffel Tower.

  Before reaching Johannesgasse, the old man guided his dog to the right, waiting at the curb for several red trams and a string of cars and trucks to thunder past. The exhaust of so many vehicles had darkened the lower floors of many of the buildings so that architectural details were lost under countless years of grime. In the warren of small streets near St. Anne’s Church, Handel began to get excited. She knew they were approaching their destination.

  The house, like all the others on the narrow lane, was two stories tall and fronted with white stucco. There was a tiny courtyard garden behind it and decorative wrought ironwork over the windows and at the eave of the steep roof. Affixed next to the heavy door was a discreet bronze plaque that read INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED RESEARCH.

  The men who ran the Institute allowed their care-taker, Frau Goetz, to live in the two-room apartment tucked into the back corner of the house. Though it was only nine, she already had the front door unlocked, and when the Doktor stepped into the entry, he could smell coffee and a freshly made torte. He reached down to unclip Handel’s leash, and she ran off to her favorite spot in the back of the house, where the morning sun had warmed her blankets.

  “Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor,” Frau Goetz said, coming out of the kitchen to help the elderly history professor off with his jacket.

  “Guten Morgen, Frau Goetz,” replied Doktor Jacob Eisenstadt.

  The two had known each other for forty years, and yet they had never uttered the other’s given name. Only a few years junior to her employer, Frau Goetz shared his deep respect for the more formal traditions from before the war. He was no more likely to call her Ingrid than she was to wear slacks. This in no way diminished the care she showed Eisenstadt and his partner in the Institute, Professor Theodor Weitzmann. Both men had been widowers for so long that without her influence they would have reverted to a bachelor’s slovenliness. She made sure the clothes they wore had the proper number of buttons and the lunch she prepared for them would be at least one wholesome meal they ate each day.

  “Professor Weitzmann is already upstairs,” Frau Goetz informed him. “He beat you here by an hour.”

  “We agreed not to come in before ten. The old fool couldn’t wait, eh?”

  “Apparently not, Herr Doktor.” The housekeeper knew what these men did and believed strongly in their cause, but she just couldn’t get caught up in one more batch of musty papers the way they did. At times they were like young boys. “I will bring aspirin for his eyestrain when I bring up your lunch.”

  “Danke,” Eisenstadt said absently. He had already turned toward the stairs.

  The Institute was cluttered beyond reason, and no amount of straightening by Frau Goetz could help. She dusted regularly but so many old books and papers arrived at the quiet house that she could never seem to keep up. Bookcases lined every wall in the front rooms, stacked floor to ceiling and interrupted only by the small windows that overlooked the street. There were even shelves above the doors for little-used manuscripts and documents. There were books in the bathroom, piles of loose papers atop the toilet tank, and since Frau Goetz had her own shower in the apartment, the claw-footed tub was also mounded with binders of material. The stairs to the second floor were narrow and made more so by piles of books on one side of each tread.

  Every book and binder and loose file of documents ran to a single theme and Doktor Eisenstadt had read all of it. This had been his life for forty years: accumulating information, sifting through it carefully to find the one thread he could pull to get answers and retribution.

  On the wall at the top of the stairs was a narrow space between two more bookcases. In a simple frame was a picture of Eisenstadt’s inspiration, Simon Weisenthal, and below it was a epitaph etched in a piece of wood and signed by the great man himself: NEVER AGAIN. Eisenstadt didn’t need to see the engraving as a reminder. His own memories and the numbers tattooed on his forearm would never let him forget.

  Like Weisenthal, Eisenstadt and Weitzmann were Camp survivors turned Nazi hunters. More accurately, these two were hunters for the gold and other precious commodities stolen from the Jews by the Nazi regime.

  At the head of the stairs, Eisenstadt turned to his left and stepped into the office. “Theodor, we promised not to come in early today,” he said, though he wasn’t really upset.

  “You are here an hour before your normal arrival too.” Theodor Weitzmann was shorter than his partner and not as round in the middle. His hair was a wild mane of white, and his eyebrows were huge bushes above his dark eyes.

  The office overlooked the garden and smelled of pipe tobacco, for both men indulged despite doctor’s warnings. Two desks butted against each other in the center of the room, their scarred tops littered with papers and pipe ash. Each man had several framed photographs on his desk, the two largest being their long-dead wives.

  “Have you started going through the new material?” Eisenstadt eased himself into his antique chair, the wood creaking as loudly as his joints.

  “Of course. Why do you think I got here two hours before I promised I would?”

  “And what have you learned?”

  “Jacob, I won’t draw your conclusions for you.” The two had the abrasive relationship of friends who knew they could never hurt the other.

  Jacob took the mild rebuke in silence and lit his first bowl of the day. Finally he had to say some sort of rejoinder. “Stop overfeeding Handel. I think she is constipated.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  Frau Goetz came up with a silver tray laden with coffee and two slices of Sacher torte. As was a Viennese tradition dating back centuries, she also brought two small glasses of water. Theo had told her countless times to dispense with the water since neither man drank it, but she continued the custo
m.

  “So tell me, what has you two so excited this morning?” She placed the coffee service on the only open area of the joined desks. “I assume it has to do with the courier delivery just before you left yesterday.”

  “You know we have been cultivating a source in Stalingrad,” Weitzmann said. Like Jacob, he used the wartime names for many of the cities in the former USSR.

  “Yes, he started sending you recently declassified archive material.”

  “Rather mysteriously too. We don’t know who this man is or how he’s getting the documents, but we are more than grateful for them. Aren’t we, Jacob?”

  “Highly irregular,” Eisenstadt said from around a mouthful of cake. “But it is first-rate material, mostly originals of German documents captured by the Soviet Army when they took Berlin in 1945. The Soviets have held on to this information for decades.”

  “And now someone is sending it to you?” Frau Goetz asked with a trace of mockery.

  “The Institute has a good reputation,” Theo defended automatically but he knew what the housekeeper meant. They were not as well known or as well funded as other organizations involved in the same work. “Two months ago it started, just a trickle if you recall: two small envelopes in a week and then nothing for another ten days and then that large parcel that the deliveryman had to help us drag up here. For the past three weeks we’ve been receiving more small envelopes through the regular mail. They tell an amazing story, one we hope will conclude with the special delivery we received yesterday.”

  “I see.” Frau Goetz knew enough not to ask the men to divulge their tale until they were ready. “Then I shall leave you to your work. Lunch will be promptly at twelve. Herr Doktor, I will walk Handel for you at eleven if you wish.”

  “Thank you, Frau Goetz.” Eisenstadt was already absorbed in a loose collection of papers emblazoned with the Wehrmacht eagle that Theo had passed across to him.

  At noon, Frau Goetz brought their lunch but the two hardly noticed. They were lost in another world, one of evil and corruption where the existence of men and women had been reduced to numbers on bills of lading: six thousand to Dachau on November 10, two hundred for labor use at Peenemunde. Such was their preoccupation, Theo Weitzmann didn’t bother with the aspirin she had brought, though his weak eyes watered painfully.