by Jack Du Brul
What have I done? Raeder finally saw that he didn’t control Gunther Rath, never had. Thinking he was using Rath’s special propensities in the business world, Raeder had allowed the neo-Nazi into corridors of power he’d never known existed, showing him the real meaning of strength. Now Rath was turning the tables, unveiling to Raeder what depravity actually lurked in his heart. And Raeder had handed Rath the tools he needed to execute the plans of his fascist masters.
“We are proceeding with the rest of the operation,” Rath continued, misunderstanding Raeder’s silence as tacit approval for his actions. “From corporate records we have the general area of the air vent, but a weather front has delayed our establishment of the northern base. Using the rotor-stat and Sno-Cats we’ll find the tunnel in a day or two.”
What is the man talking about? He’s killed a dozen people and thought that everything was going according to plan. How could I have possibly thought that I could civilize a man like Rath? He’s an animal who worships a cult of evil and death. Raeder knew he had to put a stop to this. He couldn’t let Rath continue. Not like this. He made his decision quickly. It was an effort to keep revulsion from his voice when he spoke. “I’m leaving for Greenland immediately, Gunther.”
“Why? We haven’t found the cavern yet.”
“Watch what you say! This is an open channel.” Like facing a rabid dog, Raeder had only one choice: put the animal down. He would send Rath back to Germany and take over the recovery of the Pandora boxes. Once that was done, he would decide what to do with his special-projects director.
“I will be there sometime tomorrow,” Raeder snapped. “I don’t want you to take any more actions until I arrive. Is that clear?”
“Klaus, I’m close. You don’t need to be here.”
He had another agenda, Raeder realized. The only thing that made sense was that Rath wanted the boxes for his Nazi bosses. He’d told them what was in that cavern and was under orders to recover them so they could either be used or sold. Either option was too horrifying to consider
Raeder softened his voice. He had no idea what the neo-Nazi hierarchy had in store for him if he interfered. “I know I don’t need to be there, my friend. It’s just that I want to be. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He killed the connection before losing control of his emotions. He raced for the private bathroom next to his office because he thought he was going to vomit. He heaved and heaved but nothing came out. Responsibility and remorse couldn’t be so easily purged. He studied himself in the mirror above the gold-and-marble vanity. He looked the same. His hair was in place, his complexion smooth, his teeth brilliantly white. It was in his eyes that he saw the corruption.
“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 PANDORA CAVERN
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.
Another cavern, about half the size of the central one, had been a dormitory and was filled with rows of bunk beds stacked four high. Mercer confirmed the slave laborers had used it when he found a Star of David painstakingly carved into the underside of one of the beds. There were enough bunks for five hundred people, double or even triple that if the workers were forced to sleep in shifts. Most were neatly made, the single blanket stretched taut. A few were rumpled and he could see the outline of the last person to sleep there. That was all that remained of the man or woman. An impression.
It was all that remained of any of them.
Fists clenched, he backed out of the dormitory, refusing to turn away until he returned to the main cavern.
Buildings for administration, planning, and housing of the Nazi overseers had been erected in the central chamber. Walking through them was like stepping into a museum. Uniforms hung neatly in closets, dishes were stacked in cupboards, and a deck of cards had been left on a table as if the players had just stepped away for a moment.
“Where are the bodies?” Marty Bishop asked when they left the Germans’ dorm.
“I’m not sure.” Mercer had been scanning everything with the Geiger counter and had yet to find any trace of the Pandora radiation.
“Hey, Mercer.” Erwin Puhl was at the water’s edge, standing between a storage dump of forty-four-gallon fuel drums and crates of other cargo.
As he approached, Mercer could see that Erwin had stripped a tarpaulin from a pile of boxes. When his light fell on the topmost, a golden reflection flashed back at him. Pandora boxes. He estimated there were at least thirty of them, and all were larger than the one they had found at the surface. These measured about five feet square and were three feet tall. He waved the counter over the neat stack, detecting nothing. The Germans had obviously learned how to properly seal the meteorite fragments.
There was a palpable amount of heat washing off the gilded crates. Meltwater dripped from the ceiling high above them, running off the pier and into the sea.
“Look at this.” Erwin indicated the top box, and Mercer climbed the pile.
This one did not have a lid and he could see that the interior was baffled with diminishing sized boxes like a Russian nesting doll, though all were made of sheets of pure gold.
“Any idea why they made them like this?” Erwin asked.
“Heat dissipation,” Mercer replied, jumping back to the ground. He felt along the edge of another box, where its internal structure would be attached to the outer shell, and found it was warmer there than on the flat sides. “They couldn’t make the boxes solid for cost and weight reasons, so they used as little gold as possible, designing them this way so the whole thing didn’t become too hot to handle.”
“Clever bastards,” Marty remarked sardonically.
A shrill scream pierced the air. Mercer led the two men as they raced across the chamber to where Hilda stood with Anika Klein. The chef’s face was pale and tears were running down her rounded cheeks. Anika stroked Hilda’s hair, trying to calm her.
“What happened?”
“In there.” Anika gestured to a small aperture in the towering rock wall that Mercer hadn’t noticed before.
Tensed as he ducked into the hole, Mercer held the Geiger counter at the ready. He moved through the cramped space, twisting his body as he scraped along the rough stone, the beam of his light showing nothing. The passage ended at a ledge overlooking another cave, the bottom of which was littered with tens of thousands of cans and a heavy scattering of bleached white bones.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep, calming breath, Mercer braced himself for a more careful examination. He studied the bones for a moment and fell back against the wall, a wave of relief momentarily robbing him of energy. He backed out of the passage to rejoin the others.
“It’s a garbage dump. Hilda saw bones in there and thought they were human. They’re not. They’re seal bones.”
“Seal?”
“To supplement the food the Germans brought here, the two survivors hunted seals that ventured into the cavern through the submarine tunnel.”
“That’s how they survived for ten years down here,” Ira said, wiping grease from his hands. “The provisions couldn’t have lasted from the war until 1953.”
“I bet they could,” Mercer countered. “With a thousand people working in here, they needed tons of stores. If the accident that killed everyone occurred right after a supply run there would have been more than enough canned goods to support two men for ten years. Especially if they killed an occasional seal.”
“That explains why the man at Camp Decade had such rotten teeth,” Anika said as Hilda composed herself once again. “Even with fresh meat, ten years without fruits and vegetables would cause scurvy.”
“But where is everybody?” Marty asked for the second time.
“Since I haven’t found any radiation,” Mercer answered, “I think the corpses have been moved to another chamber and sealed inside to protect the two men who survived the accident.”
“You think it was a radiation leak that killed them?”
“What else could it have been?” Mercer said. “They all died at the same time. Otherwise, they would have escaped on the sub. The man we found at Camp Decade and the one at the entrance must have been on the surface when the cave was dosed with radiation. They could have waited up there for the radiation to dissipate to a safe level before returning underground. Then they could have moved the bodies to a side chamber and buried them.”
“How is it they didn’t get killed by the residual radioactivity still in the bodies?” Anika asked. “The ones we found are still radioactive after sixty years.”
“I don’t know.”
“The German
s must have had protective clothing for themselves,” Erwin offered.
“Why didn’t the Navy officer use it when he opened the box when the C-97 flew over?”
No one had an answer to Ira’s question.
“Let’s get closer to the Pandora boxes, where it’s warmer, and discuss our options,” Mercer suggested. “I have a surprise and an idea.”
“I’ll meet you there in a second,” Ira said and went back to the repair shop.
Once they were settled, Mercer pulled a nearly full brandy bottle from his pack. “Surprise.”
“I couldn’t take my father’s videotapes and you brought booze?” Marty said angrily. “That’s not very fair.”
“I said essentials only.” Mercer took a pull. “I consider alcohol an essential. If you don’t want any, feel free to give up your share.”
“I didn’t say that,” Marty backpedaled. “So what’s your idea?”
A low rumbling sound prevented Mercer from replying, and from the side of the chamber, a bright glow appeared in the machine shop before being suddenly doused. “Damn!” Ira cursed. A moment later the light returned and stayed on.
“What did you do?” Mercer shouted as Ira appeared from the shop. Lasko’s grin went from ear to ear.
“Played a hunch,” Ira said. “I noticed the uniform shoulder tabs on the body up the tunnel were the brass cog wheels of the Kreigsmarine engineer corps. The guy had been the sub’s chief engineer. As a mechanic myself, I guessed that he spent the last ten years of his life making sure everything in this place was in perfect running condition. It’s what I would have done.”
“But in the fifty years since he died, wouldn’t everything rust? And wouldn’t the fuel go bad?” Erwin asked.
“In normal conditions this place would resemble a scrap heap but the low temperature means there’s virtually no humidity. Nothing rusts. Hell, the brass buttons on the uniforms are barely tarnished. As to the fuel, the Germans used diesel with a low cloud point for Arctic conditions. All I had to do was drain the water at the bottom of a can as a result of phase separation, strain out the sediment, and preheat it over a can of Sterno to put the paraffin back in the solution. I had to crank the generator like a bastard to flush the kerosene our German friend used as a rust inhibitor, but it should smooth out in a minute or two as it lubricates itself.”