everything since. She’d taken lovers whom she’d shared dangers with, mostly fellow rock climbers, and every relationship had crumbled under the weight of the subsequent normalcy. While it was unfair to compare Mercer to these other men, she suspected the results would be the same.
Still, it was fun to think otherwise.
She didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until a noise startled her awake. The survivors had built a snow wall to screen the gaping hole at the rear of the aircraft, fashioning a crude door at the bottom with a section of bent metal. They used tarps found in the remaining cargo to cover the other holes in the fuselage. As a result the plane, though chilly, was warm enough to keep them alive. It was the door being pushed aside that woke her.
The apparition who entered in the faint glow emitted by their single gas lantern looked like some mythical creature. It was covered from head to foot in snow, with icicles dangling from the scarf covering its mouth. The fur trim around its head was a solid halo of ice. As it moved, knots of snow fell away like it was shedding its skin. It was Mercer.
Without a word, he lumbered down the aisle and doused the lantern, plunging the cabin into total darkness.
“Mercer, what is it?” Anika asked, confused and still half asleep.
“Quiet!” His labored breath sounded as though he’d run a marathon.
Then she heard it — a steady and deep thumping that seemed to come from every direction at once. She didn’t recognize the strange sound, but the others who’d been roused by Mercer’s entrance did.
“It’s the rotor-stat,” Ira said at last.
“I heard it about half an hour ago.” Mercer unwound his scarf and pulled down his hood. “I was afraid you might have a signal fire going, so I ran back as fast as I could. Even with the fog, I could see the lantern through the window a good way off.”
“What is it doing here?” Erwin could be heard fumbling for his glasses. “Looking for us?”
“They don’t know we’re here.” Mercer’s parka was so ice crusted it remained erect when he dropped it on the floor. “And I think the airship is miles away. We’re just hearing its echo ricocheting off the mountains.”
“Then why is it in the area?” Marty asked.
Chills racked Mercer before he could answer, his body quaking so strongly that he had to clamp his jaw. “I assume it’s moving Geo-Research’s base northward like they wanted all along.”
“Are they looking for Delaney’s downed Stratofreighter?” Ira had a towel to hand to Mercer, whose hair was a mass of frozen sweat.
“I think they’re searching for something else, considering Jack Delaney and the rest of his crew are still sitting in the plane.”
Mercer’s bombshell was met with a collective gasp. In the following silence, the sound of the dirigible began to fade. It was Ira who finally asked the question on all their minds. “If Delaney’s in his plane, whose body did we find at Camp Decade?”
He let the question hang for a moment before turning to Anika. “You want to answer that one?”
Anika’s stomach gave a sickening slide, and she had to grab on to a seat to steady herself. Earlier, she’d thought that hearing Gunther Rath at the base camp had brought everything full circle. That hadn’t been quite true then, but it was now. This had started with her grandfather’s search for hidden Nazi treasure and an interview with a man who had been an engineer. The two together meant a secret cache someplace, obviously in Greenland since Rath, Mercer, and she were here. Until this instant she’d never considered whom the Nazis had forced to dig their repository and never imagined that any of them could have survived on this bleak wasteland long enough to reach Camp Decade. Ten years had passed from the end of the war until the base was abandoned and yet there was no other explanation.
Her voice was barely above a whisper. “He was the last victim of the Holocaust.”
Mercer relit the lantern, setting it to a weak flicker, and crawled into his sleeping bag. “Tell us what you know.”
“My grandfather has spent his life trying to recover property looted from the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Recently he received some information from an unknown source in Russia about a shipment of gold taken from Stalingrad and sent to Hamburg. The documents also revealed that an engineer named Otto Schroeder had played a role in this transfer, an operation I learned was called the Pandora Project.” As she got further into the story, Anika’s voice firmed and her outrage returned stronger than ever.
“Up until ten days ago, Schroeder was living outside of Munich. I went to interview him about the gold. When I arrived at his house, he was being tortured by a group of men led by Gunther Rath, the man who planted the bomb on this plane. With his dying breath, Schroeder said that the gold — and I’m talking about tons of it — was only part of the operation and that Philip Mercer was someone who could help me.” She looked to him, searching for an answer in his eyes as to why.
“Around this time,” Mercer said, “I received an e-mail from a lawyer in Munich telling me that an unnamed client was sending me a package of documents.” He dug them out of his sample bag and held them close to the lamp for the others to see. “Until this journal arrived, I’d never heard of Otto Schroeder. Nor do I know why he would send it to me. And since it’s written in German, I have no idea what’s in it.”
Anika picked up the tale again. “Just before I left the
Ira looked at Mercer. “Our stowaway wasn’t a stowaway after all.”
“She told me just before we discovered the bomb.” Mercer shifted in his sleeping bag. “Because of a practical joke played on me by my friend Harry, she never got the letter she was looking for. I suspect the envelope Anika took was from Charlie Bryce.” He indicated that she should continue.
“Because Schroeder was an engineer, my grandfather and I believe that he was involved with creating a secret storehouse for Nazi plunder far from where the Allies would find it. An enormous hoard of treasure was recovered in old salt mines at the close of the war, but there are still billions of dollars’ worth of art, antiques, jewelry, and gold bullion that was never found. Schroeder’s statement that the gold we sought was only part of the project made us think we had stumbled onto another of their hidden depositories.”
“Here on Greenland?” Marty Bishop asked. “Seems a bit excessive even for the Nazis.”
“I would agree if Mercer and I weren’t here with Rath.”
“How did Schroeder know the two of you were coming here?”
“I don’t know,” Anika admitted.
“It was part of the setup.” Mercer took a sip from his brandy bottle, which had survived the crash. “The Russians who sent the information leading Anika’s grandfather to Otto Schroeder chose him rather than better- known Nazi hunters because they already knew the gold is on Greenland and that Anika was coming here. I’m willing to bet that they were the ones who told Schroeder that Anika could trust me.”
“You’re right,” she cried. “He said that he received a mysterious call about you a few weeks before his murder.”
“That doesn’t explain how they knew Mercer would be here,” Ira pointed out.
“Either they got that information from the Surveyor’s Society Web site and just chose to include me,” Mercer said. A dark implication came clear and he hesitated. “Or because Charlie Bryce engineered it so that I was here at the same time as Anika.”
“That would mean Charlie’s part of this too,” Marty said doubtfully. “I’ve known him for years. He’s not a Nazi hunter or anything like that.”
“I’ve known him a long time too,” Mercer agreed. “As unlikely as it sounds, that’s the only explanation that works.”
“So what did you mean that the body at Camp Decade was the last victim of the Holocaust?” Hilda asked. Because she didn’t speak English, Erwin Puhl had been translating the conversation for her.
“I think he was a Jewish slave laborer used to excavate some sort of cave for the Germans to hide their plunder.” Tears welled in Anika’s eyes. “Somehow he was left behind and managed to survive for ten years until he discovered Camp Decade. I can’t imagine the horror and isolation he endured only to find his one chance at rescue
