Pandora's Curse

by Du Brul, Jack

  He didn’t tell the others what he had done, nor did he reveal the counter as they worked now. He’d seen people panic at just the presence of one of these little machines. To the uninformed, the slow clicks of ambient radiation sounded as dangerous as the tail shake of a rattlesnake. He kept the counter in a pack hanging from the side of the sled and wore the earphones that Thorsteinn had given him. Since he was the only person who knew how to operate the radar unit, no one questioned the extra equipment. If he’d found something, he would have told them immediately, but after completing half of this slower sweep, he felt that the military had told the truth about the site. There was no hazardous radiation anywhere near Camp Decade.

  At noon, Mercer downloaded the raw data they had accumulated onto a laptop computer that would create a digital version of the base. Because of the thick ice, the resolution was poor and the images were grainy and blurred, but there was still enough detail for him to pick out individual features. The radar had penetrated through the roof of Camp Decade, so the pictures resembled an X ray. Inside the facility, he could see wall partitions and even furniture. It was eerie because he was the first person to see inside the camp in fifty years.

  He was also very relieved. While the facility was anchored to bedrock and protected from glacial pressure by a peak of rock on its upflow side, he had harbored the fear that the entire place had been ground to debris by the shifting ice. The radar scans showed it had had little problem weathering the past five decades.

  “All right, let’s wrap this up for now,” Mercer said, shutting off the radar and checking the computer and GPS system that was part of the sledge. “We’ll compare this data with the original drawings done by the engineers who built this place.”

  Even without the additional Geo-Research scientists, the mess hall was crowded for lunch, and they had to wait until afterward to clear enough room on one of the tables to spread out their findings. The original drawings had been scanned into the computer, so Mercer brought up the shadowy images recorded this morning and overlaid them with the neat architectural sketches. Instantly, they had the orientation of the base locked down and saw they had only mapped a third of the sprawling complex. Still, it was enough for them to extrapolate the location of the main entrance and determine its GPS coordinates.

  Mercer pointed to the spot on the computer screen. “X marks the spot.”

  “You sure?”

  “Do you think I want to dig two holes out there? With your permission, Marty, we can start tunneling through the snow to reach the base.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Bishop replied. “Why don’t you go out and mark the area over the entrance? Ira, you go get the Sno-Cat with the crane and plow attachments and haul over the plastic sleeves and hotrocks. I’ll tell Werner that we need one of his people for a while.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Mercer agreed.

  “How goes your search?” Igor Bulgarin had appeared with Erwin Puhl at his side. Both men had just entered the mess hall and were covered in snow.

  “Oh, God!” Ira made his face into a frightened mask. “It’s the Yeti!”

  Roaring with laughter, the Russian placed a huge arm on the much shorter Puhl. “And this is my Yetette.”

  “We’ve already located the entrance, Igor. We’re going to start digging right now.”

  “So quickly?” Bulgarin sobered. “You Americans, I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I take it you’re not having any luck finding meteorites?”

  He laughed again. “Is success if I find one or two this trip.”

  “How’s Koenig’s group coming?” Mercer asked.

  “All morning they work to mount the drill tower on one of the trailers to make it potable.”

  “Portable,” Erwin corrected. “Beverages are potable.”

  “This coffee isn’t.”

  “Da, portable. Is not going well, I think.” He frowned. “Germans are supposed to be good engineers. These people, bah! Like children with Legos.”

  “How about you, Erwin?” Mercer asked. “What’s the weather forecast?”

  “That I can’t tell you.” Puhl removed his coat. “But don’t expect the satellite phones or radios to have the best range for a while.”

  “Atmospheric interference?”

  The scientist nodded. “And it’s just beginning. In another four or five days we can forget about contacting the Njoerd except for a few periods of calm when the solar wind dies down.”

  “Erwin thinks some communications satellites in orbit are going to be kaput because of radiation,” Igor added.

  Marty stood. “Then let’s bust a hump. I want to be able to call my father and tell him we’ve reached the base before this gets worse.”

  It took a few minutes to sort out their coats and boots, zip up properly, and secure the Velcro straps around their gloves. It wasn’t cold enough to need face guards, but each man leaving or entering the mess hall had all but a bit of his eyes exposed from under hoods and neck gaiters. Mercer put on his glacier glasses and threw open the door, then leaned into the wind that lifted a dense fog of snow.

  Waist-high guide ropes had been strung between the buildings, he noted, to help people during whiteouts. It was not unheard of for someone to become lost during a storm and die just a few yards from camp.

  After staking where he wanted to drive the shaft, Mercer studied the snowfield while he waited for the others. Judging the angle of the hill and testing snow in his hands, he realized they could use the ’Cat’s plow to drag away much of the accumulation.

  On the wind, he could hear his long-dead grandfather, a quarry foreman from Barre, Vermont. “Never do work yourself that a machine can do for you.” Mercer smiled at the memory. Scraping away much of the surface snow would save them days of backbreaking labor to reach the firn line, where they could employ the hotrocks.

  When Ira and Marty arrived with Bernhardt Hoffmann, a young Geo-Research worker, Mercer told them what he wanted to do. By taking thin bites out of the snow, they began digging a trench over the entrance, removing about half a foot of grainy ice with each pass. To keep the slopes gentle, the trench grew to over two hundred yards long. Like a tractor plowing the same part of a field, the ’Cat dug deeper and deeper until the walls of ice flanking the excavation were taller than the vehicle’s roof.

  Mercer stopped the work and used a shovel to dig into the walls, testing their strength. While he was more familiar with soils and rock, he was confident that the trench was stable enough to continue for another few vertical feet. He would use some of their stiff sheeting to line the trench for added support before boring with the chemicals.

  At one point that afternoon an old Douglas DC-3 cargo plane fitted with skis lumbered over the camp low enough to make Mercer duck unconsciously as he stood on the lip of the trench. The aircraft banked away, sunlight sparking off its windows, before returning upwind. It lined up with the makeshift landing strip Werner Koenig’s people had packed down with the other Sno-Cats. The plane was at least sixty years old and yet roared flawlessly, flaps down, nose pitched high, and dragon’s breaths of snow billowing up in the wake of her radial engines. Her skids hissed against the snow and the pilot had to fight to keep the plane centered as she slowed. It was like a scene in an old movie, Mercer thought, as he watched her pivot for her taxi run back to the camp.

  The engines remained at idle as the rear door was thrown open and people began jumping to the ground. They wore the matching Geo-Research snowsuits. They unloaded supplies from the plane with an economy of movement more befitting a well-trained army than a group of scientists. A mound of crates and boxes was stacked on the ice before the door was closed and the plane raced back to the runway. Even as she lifted into the air, two Sno-Cats trundled to the waiting people and the cargo was loaded into the trailers. In all, the plane was on the ground for less than ten minutes.

  “They may not be able to fix their drill rig, but they sure can unload an airplane,” Ira said,
standing at Mercer’s shoulder.

  “I guess,” he replied. “Looks like we get fresh vegetables for dinner and maybe our first mail call.”

  “Expecting good news from home?”

  Mercer didn’t answer. Something bothered him about what he had just watched, something he couldn’t name. Before he could pull together the thought, another roar shook the site. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned. The mountains that separated the camp from the coast were fifteen or twenty miles away, and yet the air was so clear he could see an avalanche on the flank of one peak begin to build in momentum, a white wave of ice and snow tearing through a narrow valley like a solid wind.

  “Look at that!” Marty had a telephoto lens on his video camera.

  The avalanche continued to accelerate in undeniable violence as it careened through the valley, its bulk slaloming with each twist in the topography. In seconds, it reached the bottom of the mountain and fanned out onto the snowfield, slowing finally as it expended its gravitational force. A cloud of powder remained suspended above the area.

  “Is that normal?” Bishop asked.

  “Last night I asked Erwin about avalanches,” Ira said. “He said he’d be surprised if we saw any. Global warming has altered the environment up here. He said there’s less snowfall than ever and fewer and smaller icebergs. Aerial surveys of the mountains north of us show patches of rock that haven’t been exposed for hundreds, even thousands of years.”

  At six, Marty called a halt for the day. The trench was fifteen feet deep, and the pressure of snow had compacted the material at the bottom enough for Mercer to begin melting operations the next morning.

  With the addition of the Geo-Research scientists there wasn’t enough room in the mess for everyone, so dinner was served in two shifts. Halfway through the meal, Greta Schmidt approached the table, a bundle of papers in her hand. Mercer had seen very little of her since the Njoerd, and when they did bump into each other, he found her demeanor hadn’t improved since that first confrontation at the Hotel Borg. He’d also noted that many of the Geo-Research people deferred to her more than Werner. Her relationship with whoever had bought the research company from Koenig had given her a great deal of power.

  “The plane carried mail. This is what came for you.” She dropped the letters and envelopes on the table, keeping one in her hand. “Also a letter with an American postmark came, but I do not recognize the name on the envelope.”

  Mercer’s guts slid. He knew it was for him and who sent it. “What’s the name?”

  She checked the address. “Max E. Padd.”

  Ducking his head as the others laughed, Mercer held up his hand for the thick envelope sent to him by Harry White. Schmidt sensed she had been made fun of and strode away quickly.

  “Who’s it from?” Ira asked.

  “A friend of mine is forwarding my mail.” Mercer noted his name was written in tiny script under the boldfaced Max E. Padd. “For years I’ve tried to convince him he’s not funny.”

  When he tipped the large envelope onto the table, a cascade of junk mail fell like confetti. There were credit card solicitations, sweepstakes entries, catalogs from companies Mercer had never even heard of, and five parking tickets issued since he’d left Washington. In the packet, Harry had also included his own bills, as well as a strongly worded PAST DUE notice for the rent on his apartment a few blocks form Mercer’s house. At the bottom of the pile was a handwritten note. Chuckling as he read it, Mercer tried to decide what, if anything, was teasing and hoped to God it was the postscript.

  Dear Mercer,

  Sorry, I didn’t know what was important so I sent along everything you’ve gotten so far. I was rushed when I did this so some of my bills might have gotten mixed up with your stuff. If you don’t mind, go ahead and pay them and I’ll pay you back. Trust me.

  Also, you ran out of Jack Daniel’s again, so I forged a check at the liquor store. You do have four hundred dollars in your account, don’t you? By the way, I wouldn’t have gotten those tickets if you had a handicap sticker for your Jag. Something to consider.

  Don’t let your balls freeze off, Harry

  P.S. Tiny said he’d pay to have the scratch buffed out of your car.

  It was late the next afternoon when they reached the entrance to Camp Decade. The hotrocks had worked flawlessly, and the single pump they’d brought to the ice was more than capable of drying out the five-foot-diameter shaft as it filled with meltwater. The most time-consuming part of the dig was sleeving the hole with plastic to prevent cave-ins. Mercer and Bern Hoffmann spent most of the time at the bottom of the shaft wearing rubber boots that allowed the cold to leach into their legs, but protected them from the water. Ira and Marty kept up the supply of hotrocks and made sure the pump was fueled.

  Mercer had worked it so the shaft dropped about a foot in front of the entrance to Camp Decade. That way the ice wall would act as a barrier to keep meltwater from flooding the facility. Through the distortion of twelve inches of ice, he could see the corrugated metal siding of the entrance and make out that there was a crude sign nailed to the door.

  “We’re just about set,” he shouted up the vertical tube. “I want to lay one more load of hotrocks down her to give us a sump below the level of the base. Our body heat is going to melt some of the ice, and we could have a flooding problem.”

  “Okay,” Marty replied. “I’ve got another drum in the sling. It’s on its way down.”

  Mercer looked up. Water dripping from above fell like rain. The heavy-gauge plastic that lined the shaft held back the ice, but the joints weren’t watertight. Drops pinged methodically off his hard hat, making him feel like he was at the bottom of a wishing well. Above the shaft’s lip, the Sno-Cat with the crane was backed right up to the hole, and a forty-four-gallon drum hung from its unspooling cable.

  Reaching upward with a gloved hand, he grasped the bottom edge of the drum as it came into range, guiding it down those last few feet. “Okay, Marty. We’ve got it.”

  They had done this so many times now their actions were almost habitual. While Bern cracked open the lid, Mercer positioned the pump hose into an intentionally deeper part of the shaft meant to collect the last of the water. The young German was a quick study at spreading the blue granular chemicals. They had to work quickly, for no sooner did the first handfuls land on the ice than they began to melt their way into the floor. In moments the entire sump was covered in blue water percolating upward and draining down into the hole. The chemicals smelled like fertilizer as they mixed with water. The pump was at full power and quickly drew the melt to the surface. Mercer expected that the mixture had produced a foul blue stain at the pump’s discharge outlet.

  Only fifteen minutes passed before the pump began sucking drafts of air. Another six inches of ice had vanished up the hose.

  “Well, I guess we’re ready.” Mercer took a drink of Gatorade from a large thermos. Because there was virtually no humidity on the ice sheet, dehydration was one more constant threat. He cupped his hands to his mouth to shout up at Marty. They’d already decided to have some walkie-talkies brought in on the chopper flight carrying Anika Klein. “Send down the chain saw. We’re set to open her up.”

  “Why don’t you come up and let me open the base?” Marty’s voice echoed back. “I need Bern to hold my video camera, though, for my father’s tape.”

  “Lower the bucket.” Mercer would have loved the honor to be the first one in Camp Decade, but it was right that Marty had the privilege. His father had been stationed here and he was paying the bills.

  Snow blew in a constant sheet in the narrow ribbon of sky above the trench, howling just above the Sno-Cat. Yet when Mercer got out of the empty barrel they used as an elevator, the cut protected him from the shrieking fury. Ira handed him a silver flask, still warm from where it had rested against his body. Mercer took a pull of the Scotch, gasping at its smooth burn.

  “Good job down there,” Ira said.

  “Th
anks.” Mercer took one more snort before returning the liquor to Ira. “Marty should be able to use the chain saw to cut through the ice in ten, fifteen minutes.”

  The whine of the saw was amplified as it reverberated up the shaft, sending shivers down Mercer’s spine as its blade chewed into the ice. It was worse than a dentist’s drill. When the chain saw finally cut off, Ira hollered down, “Can you open the door?”

  “Yeah, just a second. I’m recording the sign on it.”

  “What’s it say?” Mercer asked.

  “ ‘Camp Decade, United States Air Force.’ Below it some joker hand-painted ‘Give up hope all ye who enter here.’ Once we get the outer door open, you guys can come on down.”

  “Just say the word.”

  Mercer could hear Marty talking below him and guessed he was saying something he had prepared for the video, some words for his father. A minute later, he heard a screech of protest, a sound of metal tearing against metal.

  “We’re in!” Marty whooped. “It’s a vestibule of some kind. There’s another set of doors about ten feet in front of us. The walls all look good. Just a little buckling.”

  “How about the floors?”

  “They’re a little uneven and there’s ice in places, but they look good. None of the wood has rotted.”

  “Can we come down?” Ira demanded.

  “Yeah, Bern’s on his way back up. Don’t forget the flashlights.”

  Once Bern Hoffmann reached the surface, Mercer used the crane’s remote controls to lower himself and Ira back down the pipe. Light spilling down the shaft barely reached the vestibule’s far doors, so they each turned on the four-cell Maglites.

  Coat pegs lined both walls of the passage and below them grates had been placed to help melted snow drain off boots. This had been a staging area for the crew before venturing onto the glacier. A sign on the wall warned the men to make sure their socks were dry before stepping outside. Beyond the far door would be the camp proper.