“Be thankful the weather has been so rotten,” he said when the airship vanished around a promontory. “It’s delayed them as much as it has us.”
“How much time do you think we have?” Anika asked, brushing snow off his back.
“I don’t know,” Mercer replied absently, watching the spot where the rotor-stat had disappeared. “Not as much as I’d like.”
“Figure they’ll bring three Sno-Cats up here and at least one building,” Ira said. “Four round-trips, six hours flight time, an hour loading. That’s a little over twenty-four hours if they fly around the clock.”
“Or half that if they’d already moved stuff before the pitaraq,” Mercer added.
With a renewed urgency, they continued walking. Mercer had the point and pushed at a brutal pace. His legs burned from the strain of clearing a path for his people, and yet he maintained a gait not much slower than a trot. He kept watch for the rotor-stat and studied the rock formations as he moved. The mountains were like a string of beads impeding the glacier from reaching the sea, and as they rounded one more in the long line, a wicked smile split Mercer’s chapped lips.
“Anika, you still have that map?”
“Yes.”
“Take a look at it and tell me what you see above the X.”
“Looks like the profile of a face. A face with a big nose.”
“Kind of like the one on the side of that mountain up there?” Mercer pointed at a natural design cut into the stone by aeons of erosion. It looked remarkably like a human face in profile. The lips were out of proportion, but the nose was unmistakable, as were the deep-set eyes. The formation loomed like a sentinel high above the ice.
“My God,” she breathed.
“The last piece of the puzzle.” Mercer grinned. “I wondered about that drawing when I first saw it. Now I get it. It was the laborer’s way of telling us exactly where to look.”
“With a little imagination you can even think the face up there is Jewish.”
“If you’re referring to the nose, that’s an ugly stereotype.”
“I’m Jewish. It’s okay. You ought to see the beak on my grandfather.” She smiled up at him. “You think the air shaft is beneath the face?”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Before Mercer let them proceed, he spent a few minutes with the Geiger counter checking for radiation. As they followed far behind him, he kept his eyes on the monitor, fearful that the counter would peg over at any second. So far it was giving just faint chirps of background radiation.
A hundred yards from the near-vertical mountain, the Geiger began to tick a little more rapidly. Mercer held up his hand to halt the others and paused to see how far the readings would go. The level was slightly higher than he’d encountered in the C-97 but a few weeks’ worth of exposure would be below the danger level provided no one got X-rayed for a while.
There were certain fears Mercer couldn’t purge from his brain, and radiation was one of them. He hated it. It reminded him of firedamp gas in coal mines, invisible in its touch and insidious in its death. There was no defense except avoidance.
He walked slowly. The snow near the base of the mountain had become ankle-deep slush. He wondered how close Stefansson Rosmunder had been to this very spot fifty years ago during his search for the C- 97. Close, he estimated, considering the dose needed to kill him so swiftly. Not knowing the half-life or dissipation rate of an extraterrestrial element, Mercer proceeded with deliberation, like he was walking through a minefield.
Tick. Tick. Tick, tick, tick. Tickticktick.
Mercer’s eyes dropped to the Geiger counter. Twenty-five RADs, about a quarter of the dose needed to cause radiation sickness or about eight times the average yearly exposure people received from background radiation. They would be safe for a while, but each moment brought an increased possibility of cancer later in life.
Nothing around him looked like a likely radiation source. There was no meteor impact evidence on the side of the mountain nor were there signs of Otto Schroeder’s air shaft, no tailings of waste rock from their mining. He looked up and saw he was still ten yards to the left of the face. Moving laterally and trying to ignore the clicking counter, Mercer knew he was close. The ice had become even more watery, as if heated from below. Erwin had told them that pieces of the meteor kept in the Russian villages melted snow even in winter.
Without warning, the ground opened up and swallowed Mercer in a wet rush. He fell about ten feet and landed heavily on his backside in a small ice cave. It was an antechamber at the head of the Nazi air shaft. Ahead of him was the long tube descending into the glacier. A wall of icy slurry surged down the eight-foot-diameter tunnel. Had this cave not had a level floor, it would have carried him headlong into the earth as though he’d been flushed down an enormous drain. The moment of terror that had tripped his heart gave way to awe as he surveyed his surroundings. He wasn’t even aware of the pain from the fall.
Then he saw the body.
It was badly decomposed, merely a skeleton dressed in gray rags adorned with brass buttons and piping and medals. He recognized the rotted insignia on the corpse’s uniform. He had been a sailor in the German Kreigsmarine, specifically the U-boat service. If Mercer needed any more proof that Erwin Puhl’s story was true, here it was. But that wasn’t what filled him with wonder. It was what lay next to the seated body: the two-foot-square box of pure gold stamped with the swastika-clutching eagle of the Third Reich.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he breathed, superstitious ripples charging his skin like static. The Nazis had called their operation the Pandora Project, meaning he was looking at a true Pandora’s box, its contents as deadly as the evils the mythological one once contained.
“Mercer? Are you all right?” Anika yelled from above, her voice strained by concern.
“Yes,” he replied. “Stay back.”
The Geiger counter had been turned off by the fall and he flipped it back on. The meter thankfully registered the same dosage as he’d found before his sudden plunge. He held the probe first to the box and then the corpse, finding that it was the sailor’s body emitting radiation and not the container of Satan’s Fist. The reading was significantly higher than from the survivor he’d found at Camp Decade, meaning this man had received a much more powerful dose, fatal in minutes rather than weeks.
But what about Stefansson Rosmunder and the crew of the C-97? Mercer wondered. How strongly had they been hit? Was it exposure to the corpse or the meteor itself that killed them? Rosmunder had lasted six months after returning from this area, so Mercer guessed it was an acute dose of residual radiation from the body. Considering how they had all bled out, he presumed the airmen were killed by a radioactive blast from the fragment sealed in the box. The sailor must have opened it, killing the flight crew and himself.
Why, after surviving for ten years, did he commit suicide and murder? Madness? Desperation?
Mercer put his hand on the gilded crate, noting that its surface was warm to the touch. Then he realized why the shaft hadn’t been buried any deeper. The environment and the box had come to a kind of balance, melting away much of the snow that fell here but leaving enough to cover the tunnel’s entrance. That was why there weren’t hundreds of feet of ice blocking the shaft. It wasn’t until he came along that his added weight overcame the equilibrium between Arctic cold and radioactive warmth and exposed the air vent. Eventually, as the meteor fragments decayed, the heat would diminish and the glacier would forever seal the tunnel.
He gave the box a shove and realized that, while it was heavy, it wasn’t solid. Straining to gain traction on the slick floor, he pushed it against the corpse, pressing the disintegrated pile of bones into the wall of the excavation, partially shielding the space from its deadly rays. The Geiger counter dropped noticeably. Next he unfolded the thermal blanket from his pack and draped it over the box to reduce the amount of heat it radiated. He would use the other blankets each person carried to further dampen the warmth, so when they blocked the entrance, the container wouldn’t melt away their effort.