Rath’s men sprinted down to the cavern, the ball would beat them by ten minutes, giving Mercer and his group enough time to submerge the boat. The whole setup looked innocuous enough to evade suspicion once Rath found it.
They put in eighteen hours of work that day and slept, if possible, harder that night. Before Mercer would let them into their sleeping bags, he made certain that all evidence of their presence had been erased and that everything was packed for the dash to the U-boat if necessary. They’d considered sleeping on the boat but didn’t have enough people to move one of the heavy Pandora boxes into it to provide heat.
The following morning, the exertion and cold made them lethargic and ill-tempered. They loaded fuel all morning, a filthy job that left them reeling from the fumes. By lunch, Ira had tested all the sub’s valves and he was confident that, when the time came, she would dive. With her air tanks charged off her compressor, she would resurface too. He’d also managed to coax a few minutes of running time off the port engine and knew what needed to be done to get it running at full power. He announced that they were ready with the exception of her batteries.
He’d filled a few with acid so they would hold a charge for lighting the boat but the rest remained empty. That job would have to wait until they were ready to leave. Most of the batteries had cracked in the past decades and were unusable. Those that Ira salvaged still tended to seep acid. Because it was impossible to completely dry the bilge spaces, the leaking hydrochloric acid would mix with the seawater contamination. The resulting clouds of poisonous chlorine gas would quickly fill the U-boat’s pressure hull. To limit their exposure, Mercer decided they would fill the batteries just before leaving the cavern.
After his meager meal, Mercer gave his team a few hours’ rest before tackling the batteries. As they gratefully fell into their sleeping bags he made the long trek up the tunnel to check his warning device. He’d thought of a better system to release it and wanted to make the modification. Climbing a thousand feet in a two-mile-long shaft wouldn’t normally bother him, but he was more tired than he could remember. The lack of food and cold so sapped his energy that two-thirds the way to the surface he decided to turn back. He couldn’t afford to waste his dwindling reserves on building what amounted to a better mouse trap.
With a fraction of a second’s warning, a bounding shadow flitted through the beam of his flashlight. Mercer tried to dodge out of the way as his ten-pound lead ball came bouncing out of the darkness toward him. It smashed his thigh like a baseball bat at full swing, crumpling him to the ground like he’d been shot. The ball continued its plunge to the cavern a mile and a half away.
He bit his lip to keep from crying out and tasted blood. Lying on the floor of the tunnel, he strained to see anything farther up the pipe, cursing his stupidity for coming up here. Even if he couldn’t see Rath’s men, he knew they were coming. As he lurched to his feet, his right leg would barely take his weight. It was dead all the way to his toes.
“Son of a bitch,” he grunted and began loping down the tunnel, a shuffling gait that hammered pain to the top of his skull with every step.
Mercer knew the leg wasn’t broken and tried to convince himself that he could run through the agony. With a half-mile advantage he could only hope that Rath would need time to assemble his men at the entrance before descending into the earth. At his pace, Mercer’s lead would vanish fast. There were no tricks he could think of to lessen the pain, nothing he could do to increase his speed except push himself harder.
Ira and the others must have heard the ball slamming into the metal plate at the bottom of the tunnel. He wondered if they would wait for him and prayed they wouldn’t. To be captured now because of his mistake was something he couldn’t take. He knew, though, that they would wait right up until it was too late.
The thought that their lives hung in the balance carried him the next half mile. He was two-thirds home, but knew he was tapped out. His breathing raged painfully. His thigh throbbed even stronger, an agony that made him cry with each footfall.
He reached the cavern floor before he knew it, his determination able to push him far beyond what he knew where his limits. The cave was completely dark, and he could hear nothing over his own pained gasps. Up the shaft he could just discern a faint ghost’s glow of light, a distant flicker that warned him he had only a few minutes. He left his own light off, relying on years of subterranean experience to guide him across the cavern to where the sub should be. When he thought he was close, he splayed his fingers across the Maglite to diffuse its beam and flicked it on.
His sense of direction was perfect. He stood a couple yards from the gangway. He looked up to see Anika Klein standing atop the conning tower. She saw him and her face lit up with undisguised relief. “Come on.”
Beyond the sub, the lagoon was littered with a hundred empty fuel drums that would disguise the one Ira had bolted to the top of the U-boat’s snorkel and the gas can he’d mounted to hide the attack periscope.
“Tell Ira to dive,” Mercer wheezed.
“We heard the ball fifteen minutes ago. We’re ready.”
He swept his light across the dock. Nothing remained of their equipment. Rath would never know they were here. Using his arms and one leg, he climbed the ladder welded to the conning tower, grateful that Anika was there to drag him up the last few rungs.
Mercer didn’t waste seconds he didn’t have by climbing into the sub. He launched himself through the open hatch and fell to the floor of the fire-control space located above the main control room. Anika followed him through, stopping to dog the hatch above them. The sub was watertight.
“Ira, now!” she shouted down to the control room.
A steady hiss echoed throughout the U-boat as Ira opened valves to the sea, flooding them with enough water to put the sub on the bottom of the lagoon, sixty feet below the keel. He knew to trim the flooding to compensate for the sub’s tendency to sink stern first because of her engines. She went under with barely a ripple.
Mercer gingerly lowered himself into the control room. As cramped as the room was, it was the largest space on the U-boat, but the low ceiling, clutter of pipes, wires, and conduits as well as the myriad duty stations made it claustrophobic. Around the large tube for the boat’s second periscope, Ira stood in front of the dive controls, adjusting the dizzying array of flow valves and knobs. Marty was seated at the planesmen’s station, his hands kept well away from the twin wheels. The others were in the forward torpedo room to distribute weight.
Gently, the sub settled on the bottom. Ira forced a little air into the saddle tanks to prevent suction forming against the silty seabed. For fifteen minutes he continued to trim the U-boat, set the depths for the snorkel and periscope, and generally made certain they were secure. He scampered around with the agility of a man half his age. It was clear that retirement hadn’t deadened his training. Because no one had his specialized knowledge, the others wisely stayed out of his way.
“By the end of the week,” he said at one point, “all of you are going to know how to run this tin can in your sleep.”
“If sleep is a prerequisite, after I do a little spying through the periscope, I’m heading for a bunk to get a jump on everyone else,” Mercer joked but pain clipped each word.
“No, you’re not,” Anika snapped with clinical professionalism. “You’re getting to bed right now. You can barely stand.”
Mercer made to argue and thought better of it. Anika had to support his shoulder as she led him to the captain’s cabin, the only private spot on the two-hundred-fifty-foot relic.
“You or Hilda should have this cabin,” Mercer said when Anika stripped off his parka.
“Sweet gesture.” She smiled. “But we took a vote yesterday. By unanimous decision, this one’s yours.”
She gave him several painkillers, which he washed down with a mouthful of brandy. “No operating heavy machinery for twelve hours,” she admonished.
“I promise I won’t even lift my eyelids.”
Her more-than-concerned kiss lingered on his lips long after she’d closed the curtain on the wood-paneled cabin.
GEO-RESEARCH NORTHERN CAMP, GREENLAND
“Say again?” Gunther Rath snarled into the static filled radio. “Your last transmission not understood.”
