Pandora's curse

of larger hull slits.

It came taut just as he got the line secured to the sub. He looked up to see the rotor-stat come up short against its leash. Straining, the huge dirigible pivoted around its bow, losing altitude until her deadly cargo dipped into the ocean for a moment. Her engines screamed. “Got you, you son of a bitch,” Marty shouted.

“Let’s finish this.” Mercer stood. Above them the Schmeisser rippled again, and Hilda Brandt motioned them to hurry, the black gun smoking in her beefy hands.

Like a fish struggling for its life, the airship whipped back and forth on the end of its tether, straining to break free from the U-boat. Rath must have radioed the pilots and told them that if they released the Pandora boxes their survival would be short-lived.

Mercer’s hands were frozen claws as he climbed the ladder to the bridge under Hilda’s covering fire. Anika’s shoulder was under his backside as she headed to the top of the conning tower. Once they were safely on the bridge, Hilda directed them to get below. She would keep up a steady barrage to prevent anyone from the Njoerd launching a boat and cutting the line.

As he reached the control room, Mercer saw Erwin Puhl propped against the chart table. His shirt was off, and seeping bandages covered his shoulder and wrapped under his arm. The meteorologist was ashen, his lips pressed tight in pain.

“Are you okay?” Mercer asked through chattering teeth.

“Anika said I am. The first bullet went in and out under my arm. The other was a ricochet buried in my shoulder. It hurts but…”

“Ira,” Mercer gasped as he started stripping off his wet clothes. “Are you ready?”

“Say the word.”

“Close the hatch, Marty, and get down here.”

Anika helped Mercer remove the remainder of his clothes. He stood naked and dripping watery blood, his skin blue and puckered. “Don’t judge me in this condition,” he said when she glanced at his groin. She threw blankets over him as Hilda and Marty descended into the sub.

“Dive!” The ballast tanks gurgled as they filled with water, and the boat slowly began to sink.

Above them, the rotor-stat pilot saw the swirl of air bubbles around the antique sub and knew what was going to happen next. His loyalty to Rath ended at that instant, and he nodded to his copilot. “Don’t do it,” he heard Rath screaming over the headset. “The Njoerd is sending out a boat to cut the mooring line. You can hold on.”

“Dump it,” the pilot said. The copilot hit a switch that severed the cables securing the cargo nets to the airship. Thirty tons of gold plundered by the Nazis and a ton of the deadliest element on the planet fell away from the dirigible. It splashed into the sea and vanished.

The rotor-stat rose like a child’s balloon until it once again came up against the rope. Nose down and engines straining, she fought a tug-of-war against the sinking U-boat trying to pull her into the ocean. They would be free if they could hold out long enough for men from the Njoerd to cut the rope. The entire craft shuddered with the power of her four engines and massive rotors.

The pilot jettisoned fuel in an attempt to lighten his ship further, but it made no difference as the altimeter unwound slowly. He didn’t need to look out the cockpit window to know it wouldn’t even be close.

“What are we going to do?” his copilot asked.

Finally glancing out and seeing the smooth bay rising to meet them, the pilot’s answer was just one word. “Die.”

The bow of the airship struck in a colossal explosion of spray, and her remorseless downward plunge was checked. She continued to hang there, her nose like a dimple in the sea.

On the U-boat, they all felt the hull lurch when the rotor-stat hit the surface. Even with the ballast tanks full, the sub couldn’t overcome the buoyancy of 1.2 million cubic feet of helium. The tug-of-war had come to a standstill.

“What’s our depth?” Mercer gasped as he drew a mouthful of brandy to warm his insides.

“Forty meters and holding. We can’t pull her under.”

“We don’t need to.” Mercer’s expression was savage. “Blow the tanks and surface.”

Not fully understanding Mercer’s plan, Ira blew compressed air back into the ballast tanks and watched the fathometer as the sub ascended once again.

Because of the airship’s near-vertical position, the rotors were no longer adding lift, so when the sub rose and tension was released off the bow line, her tail dropped before the pilots could compensate. The massive underfin sliced into the water like a knife blade as she belly flopped and then she began a roll onto her side. Powered by jet turbines, the rotors sliced air in a blur, but when they came in contact with the water, the Teflon blades came apart like scythes. Hundred-foot slashes appeared in her skin and helium burst from the envelope in a screaming torrent. It was her death cry.

Half deflated and waterlogged, the airship settled into the water and began to sink, internal pressure pooling her lifting gas into pockets within her envelope that ruptured like boils. Part of her envelope fell across the stern of the Njoerd, Kevlar fabric tangling and snaring on her deck cranes. Men scrambled to cut away the entanglements before the huge weight capsized the ship. The airship’s other engine pods struck the ocean, and more pieces of blade ravaged the gas bag and the Njoerd.

A hundred feet from the dirigible’s limp bows, the U-boat appeared once again as plucky as a bathtub toy.

Gunther Rath had watched the destruction from a safe distance and when he saw the sub, he went berserk. “Get closer,” he shouted at the pilot, loading a fresh magazine into his Glock.

He could see movement in the conning tower as two people came out on the deck. One held an ax while the other had a Schmeisser.

“There’s nothing we can do,” the pilot said.

“Get me down there!” Rath screwed the gun’s muzzle into the pilot’s ear.

The chopper came at the sub like a hawk in a stoop and raced into a burst of 9mm rounds from the MP-40. Rath got off only one shot of his own before the charge carried him out of range. In the moments it took the pilot to swing around for another pass, one of the men had leapt to the deck and was hacking at the rope with the ax. It parted at the third swing.

“I’ll kill you!” Gunther Rath raged.

“I doubt it.” Klaus Raeder laughed over the wind swirling through the helicopter’s cabin. “You’ll get one more shot off while they pump a dozen rounds into us. And then they’ll close the hatch and there won’t be a thing you can do.”

“Darling, he’s right,” Greta said. “The boxes are gone, but we still have this one.” She nudged the golden chest at her feet. “We can land on the Njoerd and be far away by the time they reach civilization.”

For a second she thought he was going to shoot her for suggesting it. Instead, Rath reholstered his pistol and turned his gaze out to the ruined airship draped across the stern of the Njoerd. Greta wasn’t going to risk asking him to close the door, so she hunkered deeper into her parka. Rath looked across to Klaus Raeder, sizing him up as if he were a commodity. He said nothing, but Raeder recognized the feral look of a cornered animal.

Rath was about to lash out. The emotion was there, just at the surface and ready to explode. Gunther reached into his coat again and withdrew the Glock. With a casual flick he tossed it out the door.

“I would have killed you if I hadn’t,” he explained. “By the time they get Njoerd’s deck cleared enough to get under way, Mercer will be halfway to Kulusuk. We’ll never be able to catch him, so we’re altering our plans. We’re going someplace where I’m going to need you.”

It took twenty frustrating minutes for the helipad on the Njoerd to be cleared of debris from the destroyed airship. Once they were down, Rath learned that there wasn’t enough aviation fuel on the ship to use the chopper for the next leg of their journey. They un-lashed one of the powerful boats stored on the research vessel. By then the U-boat was long gone. An hour later, Gunther Rath, Greta Schmidt, and four of Rath’s best security men were aboard the sleek, oceangoing boat. Klaus Raeder was trussed in the hold with the last box of meteorite fragments.

At thirty knots, the boat had a range of three hundred miles. They would make their destination shortly