Pandora's curse

“Considering what he’d been through, I’m not surprised.”

Anika said nothing and took a tape measure from her bag. Delaney was just five feet six inches tall in his boots. Awfully short, Mercer thought, but since he didn’t know what kind of height restrictions the military maintained for its pilots, he didn’t say anything. Next, Anika pulled up Delaney’s sleeves.

“You shouldn’t move him until the Air Force arrives,” Mercer admonished but not very sternly. He was just as curious as she was.

He checked his watch. They’d been here for ten minutes. He would give her five more before leaving. He was conscious of the body’s mild radioactivity. He realized that could have explained the tooth loss and the fact that under his woolen hat, Delaney was completely bald — another symptom of acute radiation poisoning.

“What do you think?” Anika pointed to a rectangular scar on his left forearm.

“Looks like a burn.”

“More like a brand mark,” she countered. “But there’s nothing to it except scar tissue, no symbols or words.”

When she tugged his sleeves down again, a piece of paper that had been clutched in Delaney’s hands came loose, a small corner showing from under one long finger.

“What’s that?” Mercer asked.

“Good eyes. I would have missed it.” She used a pair of surgical forceps to slide out the folded piece of paper, careful not to dislodge the original position of Delaney’s hands.

The smoke hit them as she handed it to Mercer. It came in a solid black wave sweeping through the underground base, dense and impenetrable. In moments the beams from their Maglites were nothing more than feeble spots of light unable to cut more than a foot into the roiling haze.

“What the…?” Anika started coughing before she could finish the question.

Mercer pushed her to the floor, where the air was marginally cleaner. Anika’s eyes were red rimmed and weeping. Her lungs convulsed for a few more seconds until she could purge the worst of the smoke.

“What happened?” she gasped, fighting not to throw up.

“Fire. I don’t know. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“How?”

Mercer crawled to the door. Even through the pall of smoke he could see the dancing glow of a fire at the exit of the officers’ quarters. The fire appeared to grow in ferocity in the few seconds he stared transfixed. On the other side of the advancing wall of flames was the only way out of Camp Decade.

Anika joined him at the door. “We’re trapped!”

Mercer didn’t need to voice his agreement.

Everything was happening too fast for panic to be a problem. His mind was sharp and ready to figure a way out, but as he watched the growing flames, inspiration remained beyond his grasp.

You’re trapped underground by fire. There’s one way out and it’s blocked. The flames have plenty of fuel considering this whole place is made of wood and it won’t starve for oxygen before you’re cooked. Like a natural chimney, smoke would be billowing up the access shaft at the same time the fire sucked down more air to keep itself going.

“Mercer!”

You’ve been here before, he reminded himself. At different times and at different places. How did you get out?

He knew the answer to that was an unlikely solution. The underground fires he’d faced before had been in coal mines where teams of trained experts battled the inferno to save him.

You know how to get out of this. You’ve done it before. How?

It came to him. “Air shaft,” he shouted over the noise of Camp Decade being consumed from within.

“It’s in the middle of the fire.” Anika choked. “We won’t make it.”

“Not the main shaft we came down. With this much smoke, we’ll never find it. We have to go all the way through the fire to reach the garage on the other side.”

“How?”

“Run like hell.”

“Why not try to find the exit doors?”

“Anika, there’s nothing down here that could have started this fire. It was intentionally set by whoever killed Igor to stop us from proving his murder.” A paroxysm of coughing racked her when she gasped. “We can’t risk stopping in the middle of the blaze to search for the doors because they are most likely blocked. We have to reach the far side. There will be air shafts in the garage used to vent engine exhaust when the military stored Sno-Cats there. It’s our only chance.”

Mercer shuffled to the bed holding Delaney’s body and unceremoniously shoved the corpse aside to strip away the blankets he’d been lying on. The encroaching fire had melted a tremendous amount of ice and snow, so water rippled down the hallway and past the bedroom door. Mercer dumped the blankets in the stream, soaking them through. The water was near freezing and burned his exposed hands like acid. “Take off your snowsuit,” he ordered.

“Are you nuts?”

He turned to face her. “Yes. Take off your snowsuit.”

As she did what he asked, Mercer took off his own parka, sloshing it in the torrent of meltwater. Before he put it back on, he dropped onto his back, gasping when he came in contact with the icy river. Even as he splashed more water on his legs, he could feel crusts of ice forming and breaking with each movement.

“We’ll freeze to death.”

He splashed handfuls of water on his face and hair. “I’d rather freeze than burn.” He took Anika’s red suit and soaked it, motioning her to douse herself in the water as he worked.

Her lips were blue by the time she was done, her jaws chattering uncontrollably. Mercer imagined he looked as bad. If they made it through the fire, they would have only a few minutes before hypothermia overcame them. He handed her the one-piece and worked his arms back into his dripping parka. The garment weighed at least ten pounds more than it had. He could only hope it retained enough water to insulate him.

The fire roared only fifteen yards away by the time they were dressed again, their delay caused by numb fingers that refused to work properly. Assuming that it spread evenly, they would need to run through a sixty-yard gauntlet before reaching open air again.

He pulled his hood around his face, covering his eyes with his goggles and making sure that Anika was similarly protected. “Be careful when we reach the middle of the fire. I don’t know if all that snow has melted completely, so there could still be piles of it.”

“What happens if the fire’s bigger than you think?”

Mercer’s gallows humor didn’t fail him. “Then all those people who’ve told me to go to hell will get their wish. Are you ready?”

“No.”

Mercer gave her a reassuring smile and draped a few wet blankets over her. “We’ll make it.”

“Okay, AK, let’s do it,” Anika said softly and watched Mercer launch himself down the hallway like a javelin. She waited for a heartbeat and went after him.

Mercer kept his eyes open for as long as he dared. When the heat hit him full blast, he pulled his own blanket over his head, hunched his shoulders, and ran as fast as he’d ever run in his life. Behind his closed lids and through the now-steaming blankets, light still danced against his vision, ragged swirls of flame that licked upward from the floor. Over the raging inferno, he could hear the blankets sizzling as the water boiled away. Ten yards into the blaze the heat intensified. He hadn’t considered that parts of the roof would be collapsing at any moment, creating obstacles that could trap them in the middle of the fire.

Twenty yards and he knew he was approaching the avalanche that had buried Igor Bulgarin. His boots sloshed through a thick slurry of snow and water that pulled at each step. It was like wading through liquid mud. Yet he started to drag his feet, pushing aside the slush to clear a path for Anika. Somewhere behind him he heard a rumbling crash. A portion of ceiling had succumbed to the flames and given way. If Anika was on the other side of the blockage, he would never be able to reach her. He continued to run. The blanket felt like it was starting to smolder.

Mercer’s foot hit a snow pile at full stride, pitching him forward. Had he not been prepared for it, he would