“How’s she look?” Mercer called to Ira, who stood atop the conning tower surveying their progress.
“That engineer knew what the hell he was doing.” He laughed. “I’ve seen new cars fresh off the assembly line in worse condition than this old girl.”
“You think this is going to work?”
“I honestly think it will. I was worried about the rubber gaskets and hoses, but they’ve been treated with something. While they’re stiff as hell, they should hold okay once they warm up. Just in case, I’m only going to run one engine and have the hoses from the other ready as spares.”
“What about the batteries? We’ll need to charge them if we’re going to get out of here.”
“He drained the hydrochloric acid from them and stored it in big glass bottles, so none of the batteries have been eaten away. I’ve just started refilling the sixty-three cells in the aft battery room. That should be enough juice to clear the tunnel and reach the surface.”
“Our priority is to make sure we can submerge her once Rath shows up. We’ll worry about getting out of here later.”
“In that case, we’ll start loading the diesel into her main tanks as soon as I check them for water seepage. This way we can use her Junkers compressor to fill the air tanks for when we want to surface again.”
Mercer checked his watch. He was stunned to see it was past midnight. Without the sun to guide his circadian cycle, he hadn’t realized that they’d been on the move for twenty straight hours. “We’ll start that after we grab a few hours’ sleep.”
Hilda sagged when she recognized the English word sleep. “Danke.”
“Where the hell are Anika and Erwin?” Marty asked, dropping to the stone floor and propping his back against a barrel.
“Obviously they found something of interest.” Ira climbed down the conning tower and crossed the gangway to the dock.
Hilda took over cooking duties from Mercer when he started gathering provisions from the packs, freeing him to find Anika. He found her slumped over the desk in the administration building’s largest office. Erwin Puhl was asleep on a threadbare couch. Mercer touched Anika’s shoulder and she came awake with a guilty start.
“Oh, God. I am so sorry.” She saw that Erwin had also succumbed to exhaustion. “We were reading and took a quick break” — she looked at her watch — “three hours ago.”
“That’s okay.” Mercer smiled. “We’ve just knocked off outside. Have you found anything?”
“Everything,” Anika replied, fire replacing the sleep in her eyes. “Names, dates, orders, procedures, the works. If we get out of here, Kohl AG is finished.”
“What about the two men who survived the accident that killed everyone else. Did they leave any kind of a journal?”
“That’s what Erwin was reading.”
The scientist came awake when he heard his name. He slipped on his glasses. “You were right about a great many of your conjectures, Mercer. One of them was a Jewish slave laborer named Isidore Schild. The other was the submarine’s chief engineer, Wolfgang Rossler. They were on the glacier when one of the Pandora boxes dropped from a crane and spilled its contents. The radiation blast killed everyone in the chamber an hour after they got the fragments safely into another box. Schild and Rossler remained outside for two weeks, freezing and starving until they felt it was safe to enter again. The protective suits the Germans brought couldn’t take a direct blast of radiation, but it did shield them when they moved the contaminated bodies into the excavation and backfilled it by blowing up what they called the hanging wall.”
“That’s a mining term for the ceiling of a tunnel,” Mercer explained. “They must be talking about the shaft leading to where the meteorite fragments came to a rest after melting down to bedrock.”
“Yes, that’s right. They couldn’t operate the submarine with only the two of them, so they were marooned. Necessity ended any animosity between the two men. They lived off the food supplies and killed the few seals that came into the cavern. For the first few years they tried to signal Allied aircraft that ventured nearby on their flights to and from England, but it was rare any planes came this far north. They assumed after several years that when no more planes approached the war had ended.”
“Jesus.” Mercer shuddered at the idea of being isolated for so long.
“Schild’s journal is filled with anecdotes about their time here. He was a remarkably generous man toward Rossler, considering the circumstances. I’ll tell you the details later if you’d like. They decided that the only way to attract attention was if they could shoot down one of the passing planes. Since they had only small arms from the submarine, the only weapon capable of crashing an aircraft was the radiation from one of the boxes. They dragged the smallest one to the surface and took turns every day waiting for a plane to fly low enough and close enough for a direct dose of Pandora radiation to kill its crew. For eight long years they waited until the C-97 flew over. Rossler was at the entrance, so Schild doesn’t know the exact details. He guessed that maybe the plane had engine trouble. Anyway, Rossler opened the box, sacrificing his own life for Schild’s, and downed the plane.
“As soon as the radiation dissipated enough for his suit to protect him, Schild went in search of the plane but couldn’t find it. After two weeks he returned to the cavern. Despondent, he finally gave up a short while later and left, packing up enough provisions to sustain him for a week. The seals had long stopped coming, so he was dying of scurvy anyway. He wrote a beautiful suicide note at the end of his journal, which leads me to believe he knew nothing of Camp Decade.”
“Want to know the sickest part of this?” Mercer said when Erwin fell silent. “Had he stayed in the vicinity of the cave entrance after the plane crash, he probably would have seen Stefansson Rosmunder as he searched for the wrecked Stratofreighter. He passed near enough to this place to give himself a fatal dose of radiation from Rossler’s body.”
The tales of Japanese soldiers surviving on remote islands long after the war were tame compared to the hardships Rossler and Schild endured only to die so close to rescue.
“There are other parts of Schild’s journal,” Anika said, “that are much, much worse.” She held out her hand to Erwin for the journal. She thumbed through to the passage she wanted, pausing to build the strength to reread it. “This takes place at the height of the mining operation.” Her translation came fluidly, as though she’d already memorized the passage.
August 11, 1944
Can the Nazis leave any beauty uncorrupted? We learned again today that they cannot. We fooled ourselves into thinking the guards didn’t know about Sara’s pregnancy. Yes, her belly was hidden under loose clothing, but there were more obvious signs of the life within her. She was happy. An unknown aberration from this living hell. That she’d been raped by guards who planted this seed no longer vexed her as her time approached. She’d been beautiful and the guards’ favorite. We didn’t understand why they had left her alone these past months. Now we realize they were under orders not to touch her. She gave birth this morning, straining as much to free the child as to maintain her silence. Many of the older women who knew midwifery helped her. And as if they knew the due date, Herman Kohl, nephew of the industrialist Volker Kohl and here on an inspection tour, appeared moments later with Sturmbannfuhrer Kress. They took the child to the dock. The wailing infant was forever silenced by the still waters. I write now to the sounds of the old women crying and the snuffling of the guards once again raping Sara. I pray for the strength to hide from the suicidal thoughts plaguing me since my first day here so that mother and child will never be forgotten.
The heavy silence in the room served to amplify Anika’s sobs. Mercer too felt the salty sting of tears in his eyes. A handful of the abstract six million had names and faces for him now. He made a silent vow to stop at nothing until Kohl paid for what they had done. For him there was no ambiguity about responsibility. “Kohl AG is going down.” He was unaware he spoke aloud.