Pandora's Curse - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  “With the exchange rate, that’s about half a cent,” he said darkly. “Sounds like you’re overpaying.” His words stung her. “Sorry. I’d like to be alone right now.”

  “So you can brood?” she challenged.

  “So I can think.”

  “For you, I believe it is the same thing. Why do you continue to blame yourself? Without you, we’d all have been dead on the plane from Camp Decade. Because I interviewed Otto Schroeder, if anyone is to blame it is me.”

  “No. It’s Gunther Rath.”

  Mercer had fallen for her trap. Anika smiled, a kaleidoscope of color from the aurora shimmering off her jet hair. “See, you know the truth and yet you beat yourself up as if everything is your fault. That is foolish.”

  “For me, it’s inevitable.”

  “Because you let it.”

  Mercer couldn’t respond and they lapsed into silence again.

  Anika fidgeted as if she had something she wanted to say and didn’t know how. When she finally spoke, her voice faltered. “Back in the fjord, I should have stayed below to tend to Erwin. I am a doctor and my duty was to my patient. Instead I went up to the conning tower. I thought I just wanted to help. Now I realize what I really wanted was to take the gun from Hilda and shoot those men on the Njoerd. I’ve trained my entire life to ease suffering and all I could think about was killing them for being part of the same evil that murdered all those people in the cavern sixty years ago. I have never wanted to kill before.” The admission cost her.

  “But you didn’t. Wanting to do something isn’t a crime, Anika. I want to cheat on my taxes every year. That doesn’t make me a criminal.”

  “Yes, but you haven’t taken an oath to pay your taxes the way I have to heal people. My place was with Erwin, not indulging in my desire for revenge.” She paused. “You’ve… you’ve killed people before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. The crew on the blimp being the most recent.”

  “How do you, you know, handle it?”

  I don’t. I justify it by telling myself that they would have killed me if I hadn’t acted first. Then I bury the guilt as deep as I can, praying that one day the nightmares go away. But Mercer didn’t say it, afraid that voicing the truth would somehow crack the barricade he’d built around those emotions. “The same way you deal with the trauma patients you lose. You concentrate on those you did help.”

  Anika searched his eyes and saw the lie. She let it pass because the joyrider who’d died in the ER before she came to Greenland was the fifty-seventh patient she’d lost and she had no idea how many she’d saved. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. How’s your leg?”

  “It hurts a bit but the stitches you laid feel fine, thanks.” Mercer recognized that she’d let him off the hook. “I should make you my full-time doctor.”

  “After the helicopter and the DC-3, I’m never getting on a plane again. Don’t expect me to come to the States for a house call.”

  Mercer smiled. “I’ll only get hurt in Europe.”

  They talked easily for the next couple of hours, not about anything in particular, just enjoying the sound of each other’s voice. The cold finally forced Anika below again. She paused at the hatch, unable to resist returning to the subject they had left behind. “If you ever want to compare nightmares,” she said, “I’ll be there for you.”

  She ducked out of sight before Mercer could respond.

  Ira Lasko came up the hatch a moment later and found Mercer laughing to himself. “What’s the joke?”

  “Me. I’m learning that I’m a lot more transparent than I thought. How you doing down there?”

  “My head’s about ready to explode from fumes, but I’m hanging in. We should be about an hour from the Sea Empress. I think the engine’s going to make it. I’ve even managed to cobble together enough good batteries to give us some electrical power to maneuver once the diesel kicks out.”

  “Great job.”

  “You think we’ll find the cruise ship?”

  “She’ll be lit up like a carnival, and the weather’s cooperating for once. I think we’ll spot her.” Mercer moved to the hatch. “I might as well let a couple of the others stand watch. I’m freezing my ass off.”

  Marty took over on the conning tower while Mercer spent a few minutes in the engine room, soaking up heat from the big diesel. He was back in the control room when, with a grinding crash, the port engine seized. The thrashing propeller stopped so suddenly that the entire boat torqued over. The eerie silence seemed unnatural after so many hours of clanking noise.

  “You goddamned whore!” Ira was heard shouting. “You filthy piece of shit! You can do better than this.”

  “Chief, you’re supposed to whisper sweet nothings to machinery,” Mercer yelled back.

  “This is a German engine. They like the rough stuff.” He came forward. “Sorry, folks. The bus stops here. We’ve got about twenty minutes of juice in the batteries if we just creep along.”

  Mercer double-checked the chart and his position estimates. “We should be right in front of the Sea Empress when she comes through. With any luck we won’t need that much from the batteries.”

  “Have you thought of how we’re going to board her? With antiradar coating on the conning tower, she’ll never see us and if we do appear on her scopes we’re going to look like a tiny iceberg that she can plow right over.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping for,” Mercer answered. “You’ve never seen a picture of the Sea Empress, have you? She’s a huge catamaran capable of launching boats from between her hulls. We just line up in the gap and let her come right over us. Once abeam of her integrated marina, we jump aboard.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Ira nodded in admiration. “Teachers must have hated you in school.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you have an answer for everything.”

  After half an hour of waiting on the still waters, Marty shouted to the control room, “Mercer, I see her. She looks like she’ll pass to our starboard.”

  Mercer joined him on the icy bridge to judge for himself. He took a pair of binoculars from Bishop. As he’d predicted, the Sea Empress blazed like a small city under the wavering curtains of the northern lights. She looked beautiful. And she looked like she would indeed pass them to starboard. “Okay, get below and prepare to move the sub.”

  As the cruise ship drew nearer, Mercer could better judge her speed and direction and ordered the U-boat positioned accordingly. The sub crept forward at a fraction of her normal power and barely made a ripple as she came about. Ira had been generous saying they had twenty minutes of juice remaining. They’d be lucky to maneuver into the path of the fast-approaching hundred-and-fifty-thousand-ton monster.

  They got the stern of the sub pointed directly at the Sea Empress. “All right. Hold us here. Anika, you and Hilda get Erwin up to the front deck.”

  Through the binoculars Mercer could clearly see her twin hulls and the yawning channel between them. He continued to order small bearing corrections, making sure the U-boat was properly aligned with the Sea Empress. She was now close enough for him to see individual windows along the front of her wide superstructure. If he stood perfectly still he could feel the power of her whirling props through the water.

  “Jesus, she’s huge,” he said to himself as the ship continued to widen as she closed, eating further and further into his range of view. They had to pass between her hulls at the exact center to avoid being slammed against one side or the other. Even a glancing blow would capsize the U-boat. “Ira,” he yelled down, “when I give the order, give her everything she’s got. Marty, you’ll need to move the boat a little to port or starboard to get close to the dock. I won’t know which way until we’re between the hulls.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  He watched as it came at them, the sub in position. Bow waves peeling off the hulls reached the U-boat before she entered the gap, rocking her violently before she could find her center. The wide span of the superst
ructure didn’t begin until fifty feet back from the prow of each hull, so for a moment it felt like they were motoring between two stationary ships. The water pulsed.

  Then they were under the main part of the vessel and their perception of motion changed. Instantly, they could all see just how fast the Sea Empress was cutting through the water around them. The underside of the superstructure towered thirty feet above the surface of the ocean, creating an echoing tunnel between the hulls. There was enough light from the inside portholes to see a mural painted on the ceiling scroll past in a murky blur.

  Mercer was as awed as the rest but snapped himself out of it quickly. “Ira, full ahead and flood the tanks.” He studied the sides of the twin hulls, and spotted an alcovelike pier on the left side near the stern. Beyond the marina were tall garage-type doors for launching larger boats. “Marty, give me ten degrees to port and get up here.”

  Marty and Ira scrambled up the ladder as the U-boat accelerated and heeled over to the left. Their increased speed was far slower than that of the cruise ship, but it would give them a margin of safety when they leapt for the built-in landing. They assembled on the forward deck. Marty carried a knapsack full of documents from the cavern as well as the sub’s log book. Mercer had the Schmeisser and the broom-handle Mauser. Ira had swiped the Enigma decoding machine from the U-boat’s radio room as a souvenir.

  “Nice touch,” Mercer said.

  “Almost as good as you writing ‘Kilroy was here’ on the side of the bridge.”

  “Just messing with a future marine archaeologist.”

  Air bubbled around the U-boat as her tanks filled with seawater and she continued to angle toward the marina. The dock was nothing more than a long fiberglass ledge cut into the hull. It was accessible from the interior of the ship through a standard hatchway placed next to two garage doors for launching personal watercraft. Farther aft were the bigger doors that shielded the storage area for the Empress’s larger excursion boats.

  Although the portholes along the hull were small, they got an occasional glimpse of people in their cabins and once a face appeared at eye level across just a few feet of frothing water. Everyone waved cheerily. The startled person, an elderly priest, blinked hard, and when he looked again they had passed out of his view.

  “That’ll make him lay off the sacramental wine.”

  The force of water hissing along the Sea Empress’s hull created a cushion between her and the U-boat, a gap of about two feet that widened as the sub slowed due to the weight of her filling tanks.

  Frigid water began to wash along the deck plates. “Shit, I opened ’em too wide,” Ira cursed.

  “Get to the stern of the sub.” Mercer prodded Anika and Hilda, then helped Erwin. He began to run, kicking up spray as the ocean reached his ankles. “It’ll reach the landing first.”

  With every step the water rose higher. It was at Mercer’s calves by the time they reached the back of the U-boat. The dock was still twenty feet too far. Slowed by the added drag, the sub continued to sheer away from the towering side of the Sea Empress. As the cruise liner overtook the U-boat, the landing drew abreast of the floundering submarine. Mercer took two sloshing steps and launched himself across the four-foot gulf, calling back as soon as he landed, “Do it!”

  They had five seconds at most before the U-boat was no longer alongside the dock. Erwin’s struggling leap would have dumped him in the sea had Mercer not grabbed his good arm. He cried out and slumped to the deck. Anika came across like a bounding gazelle. Marty and Ira leapt with less grace but equal results.

  “Hilda, you can make it,” Anika cried. Water surged past the cook’s thighs. Hilda rushed like a charging hippopotamus but couldn’t make herself leap the widening gap. The water flooding across the sub’s deck was too deep.

  Frantic, Mercer spied a life ring mounted on the wall. He coiled the end of the rope around his wrist and tossed it to the stricken woman just as she floated free from the sinking U-boat. He wasn’t sure she’d caught the life ring until the drag of her body against the cruise ship’s fifteen-knot headway yanked him off his feet. It would have hauled him into the water if he hadn’t braced his legs against a bollard.

  The effect of water pulling against her body meant Mercer had a five-hundred-pound weight at the other end of the line. His wrist was about to snap. “Help!” he cried. It came out as a strangled croak.

  The others grabbed the line, taking up the strain, and like dragging an anchor up a raging stream, hauled Hilda Brandt back to the marina.

  “Anika,” Mercer gasped when Hilda clawed her way onto the dock. “Tell her she’s the most beautiful mermaid I’ve ever caught.”

  Panting from the exertion, Ira helped Mercer to his feet. “Now that we’re here, O great cruise director, and finished with our north Atlantic tug-of-war, what’s the next shipboard activity?”

  “Foraging for a cabin, food, and booze — in whatever order you’d like. Shuffleboard’s at ten. Me, I’m going for the bar first.” The next joke died on Mercer’s lips. In the rush to save them, he’d forgotten that the ship’s being here might not be as coincidental as they’d thought.

  Anika was the first to notice the change in him. “What’s wrong?”

  Mercer didn’t reply. Behind them was the watertight door leading into the ship. It opened into the Jet Ski garage. In the glow of a couple of night-lights, dozens of the personal watercraft sat on AstroTurf pads next to racks of scuba gear and other aquatic toys. Also in the garage were two mahogany-decked thirty-foot Aquariva speedboats. A sophisticated track crane mounted to the ceiling could launch any of the small vessels.

  There was a glass-sided office at the far side of the garage for the boat attendants to handle the paperwork of their job. Mercer crossed to it and found the door locked. He used the machine pistol to smash the pane of glass in the door and let himself in. Switching on a desk lamp, he spotted what he was looking for: an invoice pad for passengers to charge a Jet Ski rental to their cabin. The ship’s letterhead was on the top of the pages in bold script. At the bottom he found the name of the vessel’s owners.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “What is it?” The group had gathered behind him after helping themselves to handfuls of fluffy towels.

  “This ship’s owned by a company called Rhine-marine.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a division of Kohl AG.”

  ABOARD THE SEA EMPRESS

  “I guess this ship being here wasn’t such a coincidence, after all.” Erwin Puhl’s voice quavered. He’d never considered that the forces the Brotherhood were fighting could be so prepared.

  “This is either Rath’s fallback position,” Mercer agreed, “or he planned to transfer the Pandora boxes here all along. Considering the ship’s distinguished passenger list, I doubt customs is going to pay much attention to what’s in her holds.”

  “You’re not surprised, are you?” Marty snapped, more accusation than question.

  Mercer matched his anger. “After what we’ve been through, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gunther Rath is already on this tub. He can’t risk sticking by the Njoerd in case we made it to Kulusuk and contacted the authorities.”

  “Doesn’t matter who’s surprised,” Ira soothed. “We need to figure out our next move. Erwin, do you know what cabin your friend is in?”

  “I don’t know. It was assigned when he boarded.”

  “Then we have to go look for him.”

  “How do you propose to do that?” Marty’s fury had not abated. “We look like a bunch of refugees.”

  “There must be some cabins close by,” Mercer said, grateful for Ira’s role as peacemaker. “We’ll help ourselves to some new clothes.”

  After knocking to make sure the cabin nearest the marina was empty, Mercer splintered the lock with one kick. He motioned to his people, and they raced across the corridor and into the small room. It was barely big enough for the three beds, closet, and tiny bathroom. There was no porthole. Mercer went stra
ight to the telephone hanging on the wall near one bed. Next to it was a list of numbers. He dialed the one for a ship-to-shore connection. After a single ring, a recording answered, “Due to the solar-max effect, all ship-to-shore telephone calls have been suspended. If this is an emergency, please come to either of the pursers’ offices located on the entrance deck of each hull. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

  Mercer fingered the disconnect button. “Outside communications are out. They claim it’s the solar max, but I bet Rath’s already here and has isolated the ship.”

  “I would if I were him,” Ira said. “Who were you going to call?”

  “I wanted to reach Dick Henna, the head of the FBI. We’ve been friends for years.”

  “No kidding?”

  “It’s a long story.” Next, Mercer phoned the purser’s office and asked to be connected to Father Anatoly Vatutin’s room. A moment later, a shipboard operator said that no one was answering. “Could you give me his room number? It’s important that I find him.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the tired operator said. “We aren’t allowed to give out cabin numbers. It’s company policy.”

  Mercer hung up the phone. “Damn it. They won’t give me Vatutin’s room number either.” He crossed to the closet and opened the door. Hanging inside were three saffron robes of Buddhist monks and rattan sandals. The idea that flashed in Mercer’s head was a desperate one. He called to Anika, who was in the bathroom. “Are there any razors in there?”

  “A couple of them.”

  Mercer snapped open the longest blade on his pocket knife.

  “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  “You know any monks with hair, Ira? Besides, what do you care? You’re already bald.”

  “What are you doing?” Marty asked.

  “We can’t stay here because the monks will eventually return, and as you pointed out we can’t walk around the ship dressed as refugees. So a couple of us are converting to Buddhism. One of the men will have to remain hidden in the boat garage with the women.”