turn his back to. The killer also had to be strong enough to bludgeon a man who was the largest in the camp. And finally the killer dragged the corpse out of officers’ area and abandoned it when he reached the first major obstacle. This means he wasn’t strong enough to actually carry the body.”
“Makes sense. So who was it?”
“The only person who fits all three criteria is Greta Schmidt,” Mercer answered and received a number of dubious looks.
“I think he’s right,” Erwin said after a moment. “Although Igor and I didn’t think Geo-Research knew who we really were and why we were on Greenland, we did discuss people we should be careful about. Neither of us considered that Greta could be part of this.”
“Erwin, do you know if Geo-Research is affiliated with a company called Kohl?” Anika asked. “Schroeder mentioned the name in his journal as the company given the actual contract to dig the cavern. He was among a handful of military experts sent to help.”
“Kohl bought Geo-Research last year so they could hide behind their scientific credentials and execute their true aim.”
“Which is the recovery of the gold?” Marty asked.
Erwin echoed Schroeder’s words. “The gold is only a small part of what’s going on.”
“What were the Germans hiding?”
“They weren’t hiding anything. They were trying to recover something, something that was never meant to be on this planet.”
Mercer put it together quicker than the others. “A radioactive meteorite that landed here in 1943?”
“Not quite,” Erwin said. “Most of it slammed into Russia in 1908.”
The sudden insight came to Mercer in a rush, and despite the horror surrounding this search and the loss they had already felt, he couldn’t help but be excited. They were talking about one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the twentieth century. There was a hushed awe in his voice. “Tunguska.”
“Yes, Dr. Mercer. The Nazis were looking for a piece of the Tunguska meteor that exploded over Siberia on June 30, 1908.”
“How? Why?”
Puhl looked at the blank faces of the others. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Tunguska explosion has remained an enigma since it occurred. Some theorized it was an asteroid, others a comet or black hole. Some even believe it was the detonation of a UFO’s nuclear power plant. What everyone does agree on is that it leveled a thousand square miles of forest, although trees at the very epicenter were left standing like certain buildings in Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Seismographs as distant as Washington, D.C., registered the shock wave, and an unearthly glow was seen as far away as Copenhagen. Furthermore, eyewitness accounts say that a portion of the object was observed continuing in a northwesterly direction and was actually gaining altitude
“To answer Mercer’s questions as to how and why the Germans were searching for the wayward fragment those witnesses saw, I have to give a bit more history.” Erwin accepted the brandy bottle when Ira passed it to him. “The first scientific expedition to search for the site wasn’t conducted until 1927 by a man named Leonid Kulik. He is important to remember because he was captured by the Germans and died at a prison camp in 1942. During weeks of brutal interrogation he revealed everything he knew about the mysterious impact.
“After they learned the truth about the blast, the Germans spared nothing to secure his research notes. In fact they sacrificed thousands of troops in what became one of the most desperate battles of the entire war just to find a couple of notebooks.” He paused again, more contemplative than dramatic. “When the war broke out, Kulik had sent his more secret findings to an associate in Stalingrad.”
“Are you saying the Battle of Stalingrad was all about a couple of notebooks?” Marty scoffed. “Give me a break.”
“No, but hundreds of commando teams were sent behind Russian lines during the fighting to find them. Thousands of men died in the search. When it came to Hitler’s obsessions, fact is a lot stranger than fiction. Let me tell you another story to illustrate this.” Erwin lectured as if to a child. “In April of 1942, he sent a team of scientists equipped with state-of-the-art radar gear to Rugen Island in the Baltic Sea to test a new theory that he had. Hitler had become convinced that while the Earth was indeed round, we didn’t live on its outer surface but on the inner curve of a hollow sphere, like insects in a salad bowl. The scientists spent weeks beaming radar waves into the sky hoping for a rebounded signal from the British naval base at Scapa Flow.
“You must realize at the time Germany lagged far behind the Allies when it came to radar equipment and yet
“What’s this have to do with Tunguska?”
“Not all of the ludicrous scientific avenues the Nazis pursued during the war were such dismal mistakes. The Pandora Project was much more successful. As I said, the first official investigation into the Tunguska blast didn’t occur until 1927. However, there had been a great deal of local interest. The first unofficial search was sent out a year after the celestial impact, although they were turned back because of weather and the site’s inaccessibility. It wasn’t until two years after that, in 1911, that anyone saw the devastation first hand.
“While Tunguska is one of the most remote tracts in the Siberian taiga, news of this success reached the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1912 because so many of the explorers died in the forest or shortly after their return from the site. Their deaths were horrifying, a mysterious disease that dissolved the flesh from their bodies. They ended up as nothing more than skeletal figures.”
Mercer’s mind flashed to the photograph of Stefansson Rosmunder lying in a hospital bed in Reykjavik, knowing now what had killed him.
“The peasants believed,” Puhl continued, “that the devil had punched the forest, leveling the trees, and it was his residual evil that killed their men. Some returned from the impact zone with pieces of a strange rock that was warm to the touch, claiming it was pieces of Satan’s skin. Entire settlements where this unknown rock was stored died of the same wasting disease, usually just days after the explorers’ home-coming. Priests called in said they knew what dark forces were at work and had all the samples encased in golden icons, confident that they would contain the evil that had killed an estimated one thousand people. Their idea worked.”
His statement was met with skepticism until Mercer spoke. “That was a hell of an idea even if they didn’t understand why. If the rocks they collected were radioactive fragments from the meteor, gold would act as an effective shield because of its density. Not as good as lead, but efficient nonetheless.”
Erwin nodded his head. “Kulik’s research later proved that gold dampened the radiation much more effectively than lead. He was never able to explain why this radioactivity behaved so differently, and in his defense, little was known about radiation at this time. It was a mysterious force only a few were even aware of.”
Mercer’s scientific background allowed him to see the hole in Puhl’s story. “How is it such a potent radiation source didn’t kill
“Kulik knew that all radioactive material decayed in what is termed ‘half-lives.’ His theory was that the meteor pieces decayed unevenly, from the outside in, and as the surface becomes inert in a few months, it shields itself from more decay. He believed this phenomenon was caused by a reaction with our atmosphere or perhaps an effect of solar radiation breaking down something within the fragments. Neither he nor anyone else is really certain. He guessed that only those chunks the peasants handled roughly and broke away the nonreactive coating were the ones that caused the deaths.”
Noting a number of flaws with this theory, Mercer held his tongue. He wasn’t a planetary geologist. They were talking about an element that had never been seen on earth before and had never been examined by modern science. He didn’t know what fantastic substances could be swirling around the universe on the backs of interstellar comets. Every few years, scientists working with particle accelerators added new elements to the end of the periodic table. It was possible that the meteor was composed of some stable element we hadn’t yet discovered.
“Okay, back to my story,” Erwin said, and the group became attentive again. Few of them understood or cared about the physics. They just wanted to hear the rest of his enthralling tale. “In 1912, Czarina Alexandra sent her most trusted emissary to Vanavara, the city closest to the blast, to discover what was killing her people. The man had a religious background and quickly adopted the idea of sealing the fragments in golden icons. He had teams sent into the forest to scour for more bits of ‘Satan’s Fist,’ as he called it.”
