Pandora's curse

“With the exchange rate, that’s about half a cent,” he said darkly. “Sounds like you’re overpaying.” His words stung her. “Sorry. I’d like to be alone right now.”

“So you can brood?” she challenged.

“So I can think.”

“For you, I believe it is the same thing. Why do you continue to blame yourself? Without you, we’d all have been dead on the plane from Camp Decade. Because I interviewed Otto Schroeder, if anyone is to blame it is me.”

“No. It’s Gunther Rath.”

Mercer had fallen for her trap. Anika smiled, a kaleidoscope of color from the aurora shimmering off her jet hair. “See, you know the truth and yet you beat yourself up as if everything is your fault. That is foolish.”

“For me, it’s inevitable.”

“Because you let it.”

Mercer couldn’t respond and they lapsed into silence again.

Anika fidgeted as if she had something she wanted to say and didn’t know how. When she finally spoke, her voice faltered. “Back in the fjord, I should have stayed below to tend to Erwin. I am a doctor and my duty was to my patient. Instead I went up to the conning tower. I thought I just wanted to help. Now I realize what I really wanted was to take the gun from Hilda and shoot those men on the Njoerd. I’ve trained my entire life to ease suffering and all I could think about was killing them for being part of the same evil that murdered all those people in the cavern sixty years ago. I have never wanted to kill before.” The admission cost her.

“But you didn’t. Wanting to do something isn’t a crime, Anika. I want to cheat on my taxes every year. That doesn’t make me a criminal.”

“Yes, but you haven’t taken an oath to pay your taxes the way I have to heal people. My place was with Erwin, not indulging in my desire for revenge.” She paused. “You’ve… you’ve killed people before, haven’t you?”

“Yes. The crew on the blimp being the most recent.”

“How do you, you know, handle it?”

I don’t. I justify it by telling myself that they would have killed me if I hadn’t acted first. Then I bury the guilt as deep as I can, praying that one day the nightmares go away. But Mercer didn’t say it, afraid that voicing the truth would somehow crack the barricade he’d built around those emotions. “The same way you deal with the trauma patients you lose. You concentrate on those you did help.”

Anika searched his eyes and saw the lie. She let it pass because the joyrider who’d died in the ER before she came to Greenland was the fifty-seventh patient she’d lost and she had no idea how many she’d saved. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. How’s your leg?”

“It hurts a bit but the stitches you laid feel fine, thanks.” Mercer recognized that she’d let him off the hook. “I should make you my full-time doctor.”

“After the helicopter and the DC-3, I’m never getting on a plane again. Don’t expect me to come to the States for a house call.”

Mercer smiled. “I’ll only get hurt in Europe.”

They talked easily for the next couple of hours, not about anything in particular, just enjoying the sound of each other’s voice. The cold finally forced Anika below again. She paused at the hatch, unable to resist returning to the subject they had left behind. “If you ever want to compare nightmares,” she said, “I’ll be there for you.”

She ducked out of sight before Mercer could respond.

Ira Lasko came up the hatch a moment later and found Mercer laughing to himself. “What’s the joke?”

“Me. I’m learning that I’m a lot more transparent than I thought. How you doing down there?”

“My head’s about ready to explode from fumes, but I’m hanging in. We should be about an hour from the Sea Empress. I think the engine’s going to make it. I’ve even managed to cobble together enough good batteries to give us some electrical power to maneuver once the diesel kicks out.”

“Great job.”

“You think we’ll find the cruise ship?”

“She’ll be lit up like a carnival, and the weather’s cooperating for once. I think we’ll spot her.” Mercer moved to the hatch. “I might as well let a couple of the others stand watch. I’m freezing my ass off.”

Marty took over on the conning tower while Mercer spent a few minutes in the engine room, soaking up heat from the big diesel. He was back in the control room when, with a grinding crash, the port engine seized. The thrashing propeller stopped so suddenly that the entire boat torqued over. The eerie silence seemed unnatural after so many hours of clanking noise.

“You goddamned whore!” Ira was heard shouting. “You filthy piece of shit! You can do better than this.”

“Chief, you’re supposed to whisper sweet nothings to machinery,” Mercer yelled back.

“This is a German engine. They like the rough stuff.” He came forward. “Sorry, folks. The bus stops here. We’ve got about twenty minutes of juice in the batteries if we just creep along.”

Mercer double-checked the chart and his position estimates. “We should be right in front of the Sea Empress when she comes through. With any luck we won’t need that much from the batteries.”

“Have you thought of how we’re going to board her? With antiradar coating on the conning tower, she’ll never see us and if we do appear on her scopes we’re going to look like a tiny iceberg that she can plow right over.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Mercer answered. “You’ve never seen a picture of the Sea Empress, have you? She’s a huge catamaran capable of launching boats from between her hulls. We just line up in the gap and let her come right over us. Once abeam of her integrated marina, we jump aboard.”

“I’ll be damned.” Ira nodded in admiration. “Teachers must have hated you in school.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you have an answer for everything.”

After half an hour of waiting on the still waters, Marty shouted to the control room, “Mercer, I see her. She looks like she’ll pass to our starboard.”

Mercer joined him on the icy bridge to judge for himself. He took a pair of binoculars from Bishop. As he’d predicted, the Sea Empress blazed like a small city under the wavering curtains of the northern lights. She looked beautiful. And she looked like she would indeed pass them to starboard. “Okay, get below and prepare to move the sub.”

As the cruise ship drew nearer, Mercer could better judge her speed and direction and ordered the U-boat positioned accordingly. The sub crept forward at a fraction of her normal power and barely made a ripple as she came about. Ira had been generous saying they had twenty minutes of juice remaining. They’d be lucky to maneuver into the path of the fast-approaching hundred-and-fifty-thousand-ton monster.

They got the stern of the sub pointed directly at the Sea Empress. “All right. Hold us here. Anika, you and Hilda get Erwin up to the front deck.”

Through the binoculars Mercer could clearly see her twin hulls and the yawning channel between them. He continued to order small bearing corrections, making sure the U-boat was properly aligned with the Sea Empress. She was now close enough for him to see individual windows along the front of her wide superstructure. If he stood perfectly still he could feel the power of her whirling props through the water.

“Jesus, she’s huge,” he said to himself as the ship continued to widen as she closed, eating further and further into his range of view. They had to pass between her hulls at the exact center to avoid being slammed against one side or the other. Even a glancing blow would capsize the U-boat. “Ira,” he yelled down, “when I give the order, give her everything she’s got. Marty, you’ll need to move the boat a little to port or starboard to get close to the dock. I won’t know which way until we’re between the hulls.”

“Aye, aye.”

He watched as it came at them, the sub in position. Bow waves peeling off the hulls reached the U-boat before she entered the gap, rocking her violently before she could find her center. The wide span of the superstructure didn’t begin until fifty feet back from the prow of each hull, so for a moment it felt like they were motoring between two stationary ships. The water pulsed.

Then they were under the main part of the vessel and their perception of motion changed. Instantly, they could all see just how fast the Sea Empress was cutting through the water around them.