Mercer looked to where Erwin Puhl huddled silently in his sleeping bag, the lantern glow reflecting off his glasses like tiny sunbursts. “How about it, Erwin? Are you ready to drop your cover story and tell us what you know?”
It was such an unexpected question that they all turned to the German meteorologist. For his part, Erwin tried to look shocked, but he’d experienced too much trauma in the past few days to sustain the facade. “How did you know?” he asked simply.
“Your friendship with Igor Bulgarin,” Mercer said. Erwin knew what he meant but the rest waited for an explanation. “When Igor and I first met, he told me he was coming to Greenland to search for meteor fragments. The only problem with his story is that finding meteorites on Greenland is next to impossible. They do it in Antarctica all the time because there’s so little precipitation that much of it is considered a desert. Chunks of space rock can lie around for years waiting to be picked up. Here, they’re usually buried in minutes.”
He looked around the cabin. “I read about an expedition in 1998 that spent six weeks on Greenland’s west coast looking for microscopic bits of the Kangilia meteor. That one weighed an estimated one hundred tons and there was a video and satellite information telling them where to look. They didn’t find a trace. There’s no way that one man walking around the ice could ever hope to find extraterrestrial debris.” Mercer returned his gaze to Erwin. “I figured that, since you were friends for years, you already knew that Igor’s cover was bullshit and knew what he was really doing here.”
Puhl didn’t deny the accusation.
Mercer took his deductions to their obvious conclusion. “He must have known about the Nazi cache and gone into Camp Decade because he suspected the body might have come from the cavern. Someone in Geo-Research knew what he was doing and murdered him to keep it a secret.”
Erwin’s lack of reaction told Mercer that the meteorologist had already figured out Igor’s “accident” was premeditated murder. His near-catatonia in the past few days was likely due to the fear that his friendship with Bulgarin meant he was next.
“Do you know who killed him?” Ira asked Mercer.
“Since Igor was struck on the back of the head, the murderer had to be someone he didn’t suspect and would turn his back to. The killer also had to be strong enough to bludgeon a man who was the largest in the camp. And finally the killer dragged the corpse out of officers’ area and abandoned it when he reached the first major obstacle. This means he wasn’t strong enough to actually carry the body.”
“Makes sense. So who was it?”
“The only person who fits all three criteria is Greta Schmidt,” Mercer answered and received a number of dubious looks.
“I think he’s right,” Erwin said after a moment. “Although Igor and I didn’t think Geo-Research knew who we really were and why we were on Greenland, we did discuss people we should be careful about. Neither of us considered that Greta could be part of this.”
“Erwin, do you know if Geo-Research is affiliated with a company called Kohl?” Anika asked. “Schroeder mentioned the name in his journal as the company given the actual contract to dig the cavern. He was among a handful of military experts sent to help.”
“Kohl bought Geo-Research last year so they could hide behind their scientific credentials and execute their true aim.”
“Which is the recovery of the gold?” Marty asked.
Erwin echoed Schroeder’s words. “The gold is only a small part of what’s going on.”
“What were the Germans hiding?”
“They weren’t hiding anything. They were trying to recover something, something that was never meant to be on this planet.”
Mercer put it together quicker than the others. “A radioactive meteorite that landed here in 1943?”
“Not quite,” Erwin said. “Most of it slammed into Russia in 1908.”
The sudden insight came to Mercer in a rush, and despite the horror surrounding this search and the loss they had already felt, he couldn’t help but be excited. They were talking about one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the twentieth century. There was a hushed awe in his voice. “Tunguska.”
“Yes, Dr. Mercer. The Nazis were looking for a piece of the Tunguska meteor that exploded over Siberia on June 30, 1908.”
“How? Why?”
Puhl looked at the blank faces of the others. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Tunguska explosion has remained an enigma since it occurred. Some theorized it was an asteroid, others a comet or black hole. Some even believe it was the detonation of a UFO’s nuclear power plant. What everyone does agree on is that it leveled a thousand square miles of forest, although trees at the very epicenter were left standing like certain buildings in Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Seismographs as distant as Washington, D.C., registered the shock wave, and an unearthly glow was seen as far away as Copenhagen. Furthermore, eyewitness accounts say that a portion of the object was observed continuing in a northwesterly direction and was actually gaining altitude after the explosion.
“To answer Mercer’s questions as to how and why the Germans were searching for the wayward fragment those witnesses saw, I have to give a bit more history.” Erwin accepted the brandy bottle when Ira passed it to him. “The first scientific expedition to search for the site wasn’t conducted until 1927 by a man named Leonid Kulik. He is important to remember because he was captured by the Germans and died at a prison camp in 1942. During weeks of brutal interrogation he revealed everything he knew about the mysterious impact.
“After they learned the truth about the blast, the Germans spared nothing to secure his research notes. In fact they sacrificed thousands of troops in what became one of the most desperate battles of the entire war just to find a couple of notebooks.” He paused again, more contemplative than dramatic. “When the war broke out, Kulik had sent his more secret findings to an associate in Stalingrad.”
“Are you saying the Battle of Stalingrad was all about a couple of notebooks?” Marty scoffed. “Give me a break.”
“No, but hundreds of commando teams were sent behind Russian lines during the fighting to find them. Thousands of men died in the search. When it came to Hitler’s obsessions, fact is a lot stranger than fiction. Let me tell you another story to illustrate this.” Erwin lectured as if to a child. “In April of 1942, he sent a team of scientists equipped with state-of-the-art radar gear to Rugen Island in the Baltic Sea to test a new theory that he had. Hitler had become convinced that while the Earth was indeed round, we didn’t live on its outer surface but on the inner curve of a hollow sphere, like insects in a salad bowl. The scientists spent weeks beaming radar waves into the sky hoping for a rebounded signal from the British naval base at Scapa Flow.
“You must realize at the time Germany lagged far behind the Allies when it came to radar equipment and yet Der Fuhrer,” Puhl mocked the title, “wasted valuable resources on a quest doomed to fail.”
“What’s this have to do with Tunguska?”
“Not all of the ludicrous scientific avenues the Nazis pursued during the war were such dismal mistakes. The Pandora Project was much more successful. As I said, the first official investigation into the Tunguska blast didn’t occur until 1927. However, there had been a great deal of local interest. The first unofficial search was sent out a year after the celestial impact, although they were turned back because of weather and the site’s inaccessibility. It wasn’t until two years after that, in 1911, that anyone saw the devastation first hand.
“While Tunguska is one of the most remote tracts in the Siberian taiga, news of this success reached the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1912 because so many of the explorers died in the forest or shortly after their return from the site. Their deaths were horrifying, a mysterious disease that dissolved the flesh from their bodies. They ended up as nothing more than skeletal figures.”