“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.
“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.
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.
Anika looked at him and was a bit frightened by what she saw. His rage was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. It shimmered off him like heat waves. For the first time she realized Mercer’s capacity for revenge.
Since they didn’t know how long they would remain isolated, their meal was a light one. Their rations would be proportioned to sustain them for a week to ten days. Too exhausted to let rumbling bellies distract them, they slept like the dead until Ira Lasko’s watch alarm roused them six hours later.
Because of the physical strength needed to move the three-hundred-fifty-pound fuel drums, Erwin and Anika were given the job of degreasing the machinery in the U-boat with rags under Ira’s guidance. He spent the morning cleaning the sub’s port diesel engine and checking that her electric motor would operate by jumping it with the portable generator. Ira had to scavenge wiring from the starboard power plant to get it running smoothly but was satisfied with his efforts. Mercer spent part of the morning rigging a trip wire device near the surface entrance. He formed a sheet of lead into a tight ball that would roll down the tunnel once a lanyard was brushed by passing feet. He placed a metal plate at the bottom of the tunnel that would reverberate like a bell when the ball struck it. Even if
