“I’ll be damned,” Mercer exclaimed. “That explains why nothing of the original meteorite has ever been found at Tunguska. Someone cleaned the site before Kulik or any subsequent expedition ever reached it.”
“Precisely,” Erwin agreed. “Even with protective boxes to seal the meteorites as soon as they were discovered, hundreds more perished in the task. This priest had a golden suit made for himself so he could work with the samples, making sure that they would never again harm another soul.”
“Who was the priest?” Ira asked.
“His given name was Grigori Efymovich Novykh.”
Anika Klein was so wrapped in the story it took her a second to realize she knew that name. Or at least the more famous one the man was known by. “Rasputin!”
“Yes, Rasputin was the Czarina’s emissary and he spent two years at Tunguska recovering the meteorites. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, he refused to tell anyone about what he had found. World War One had just begun and he feared that his discovery would be used as a weapon. Even when the Germans first used poison gas at Bolimov in January 1915, he would not divulge the presence of this extraordinary killer. As the war dragged on, rumors surrounding what he’d found grew and he knew it was only a matter of time before he was tortured to reveal what had killed the villagers in Tunguska. With pressure against him mounting, Rasputin formed the Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist, enlisting a few trusted priests so they would continue to protect the secret after he was gone. Rasputin was murdered in December of 1916, not because of his influence over the royal family as the history books record, but because he wouldn’t tell certain military men what he knew.”
“So he wasn’t the psychotic demon people think he was?”
Erwin chuckled with dark humor. “Oh, he was that too. Tales of his debauchery are, if anything, milder than the truth. But those in the Brotherhood saw him as a man who might have saved humanity from its own destructive impulses.”
“So how does this involve the Nazis?”
“The first Russian revolution swept through St. Petersburg a few weeks after Rasputin’s murder, and those who knew the rumors about Satan’s Fist were exiled or executed. Interest in the Tunguska blast waned. The Brotherhood hid the fifty icons containing the meteorite fragments in various churches and monasteries around the country, moving them often as communist forces either confiscated or razed the buildings. And as members grew older, new people were brought in. Leonid Kulik was one of them, the first who wasn’t a priest. He was asked to join so he would not reveal some of the anomalous findings he had made at the impact site, like the fact that he knew others had been there before him.”
“How many members were there at any given time?” Mercer asked. Like the others, he’d already deduced that Erwin Puhl and Igor Bulgarin were part of the Brotherhood.
“Usually never more than six or eight. Our small size helped ensure our anonymity. It was Kulik who determined the true nature of what the Brotherhood safeguarded, and it was his recommendation shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union that the icons be destroyed. He would not allow this horror to be unleashed on the world. Much more was known about radiation by then and he feared that physicists could build an atomic bomb from the fragments.
“All but one icon were encased in cement and transported far out to sea, where they were dumped. Because gold won’t corrode in seawater, they will remain dormant forever. At the same time this was going on, Kulik calculated the trajectory of the piece of meteor that eyewitnesses said skimmed off the atmosphere and vanished. His next goal was to track down this other piece to ensure it didn’t get discovered by anyone else. That is when the Nazis launched their lightning strike into the Soviet Union. Kulik was captured before the last icon could be shipped from the isolated abbey where it had been hidden and before he could organize an expedition to find the other fragments.”
“Which landed here?”
“Yes.” Erwin soothed his throat with another sip of brandy. “The Nazis eventually learned of the missing icon from Kulik, sent a commando team deep into Russia to steal it, and secured his notebooks from Stalingrad, which gave the coordinates to where the last piece of Satan’s Fist had landed.”
Anika’s dark eyes shimmered with the same passion that so infected her grandfather. “Then they launched the Pandora Project using looted gold to build their own storage boxes for any radioactive material they discovered. Once they found the meteorites, they sent Otto Schroeder to dig them out of the ice.”
Nodding, Erwin polished his glasses. “By this time the allies were regularly flying over Greenland in aerial convoys ferrying aircraft to England.”
“The ‘Lost Squadron’ we were talking about earlier was just such a flight,” Mercer added.
“Yes. The radioactive heat generated within the stones had melted the fragments down to bedrock. Because of these flights, the Germans couldn’t risk tunneling to them from the surface, so they approached from the sea in submarines, eventually finding a cavern under a glacier that was within five miles of where the meteor landed. They planned to use the cave as a staging area before driving a long tunnel through ice and rock to reach the fragments.” Erwin looked over to Anika, who still had the journal open on her lap. “You don’t need to finish Schroeder’s journal. I’ve already read it. They had completed the air shaft and pier for the sub and had just commenced the tunnel to the cache when Schroeder was injured. He didn’t know what happened here after he was injured.”
“Do you?” Marty asked.
“No one knows except the poor slave Mercer found in Camp Decade.”
Something Puhl had said struck Anika. Her brow furled and her thin eyebrows arched. Her tone was accusatory. “When did you read Schroeder’s journal?”
Erwin looked away, pained. “Shortly after you went to interview him,” he said evasively.
“How shortly?” Her anger rose because she was pretty sure of the answer.
“We found it in his house after driving off Rath and his neo-Nazi thugs.”
Anika exploded. “Those snipers were your people? You son of a bitch! You were there the whole time and you let Schroeder die. You let me get shot.” And then everything else came clear. “It was you who set this whole thing up — my
She lunged from her seat and would have reached Puhl had she not gotten tangled in her sleeping bag and fallen. Mercer dove to pin her to the deck, holding her arms over her head so she couldn’t squirm free. She was a foot shorter than he, eighty pounds lighter, but for a few desperate seconds he was afraid she’d beat him. Fury augmented her strength, so she was like an enraged animal.
“Anika, stop it,” Mercer pleaded, his teeth gritting against the pain as she bit his shoulder.
She got a hand free and went for his eyes, her fingers cocked like talons. Mercer ducked his head and felt her try to tear a piece of skin from his cheek. And then it was over. Anika went completely limp. Mercer opened his eyes, confused, wondering what had calmed her. Chef Hilda stood over them massaging one fist. She said something over her shoulder for Erwin to translate.
“She knew you would never strike a woman, so she did it for you.”
Hilda gave Mercer a proud smile and a wink.
“In this fight, no one is innocent. The Brotherhood of Satan’s Fist has spent nearly a century protecting the world from what we know. I think for that kind of dedication we should be allowed to involve others if we need them.”
“But why involve Anika and her grandfather? Or me?”
“I will answer your second question first,” Erwin said calmly. “We did not get you involved. You were already scheduled to come to Greenland with Geo-Research. It was just luck on our part. We mentioned your name to Schroeder as a possible ally in case something went wrong with our plans. You have a reputation for being a very capable man.”
Mercer remained unconvinced, but if Erwin was revealing the truth about the cavern and Anika’s grandfather, why would he lie about him?
“I don’t know this Charles Bryce you mentioned earlier,” Puhl continued, “so I think his invitation for you to join the expedition to Camp Decade was legitimate.”
“And Anika?”
