And you wouldn't disclose all these secrets unless I'm about to be sacrificed,
the pilot thought gloomily.
"And so the idea that came to me is to use this microbe not as an instrument of mass murder but of mass salvation. To put an end to this war once and for all. To bring the world to its senses. Because with your antibiotic, Greta, suddenly we're not threatening death. We're offering life."
"What?"
"Look. Even if we could unleash this plague and perfectly protect our own people, Germany's peril would not be over. The other side would still seek to retaliate. There are rumors the Americans are working on a superweapon of their own: some new kind of bomb. German scientists think such a bomb is years away, but who knows? What if we escalated the war and the United States replied in turn? Killing begets killing. That's been the lesson of this century. But what if we offered
life?
What if we offered the Allies the opportunity to
cure
a terrible plague, in return for agreeing to an armistice? What if we could achieve a cease-fire on our terms? Yes, peace! By an emergency effort of German doctors and nurses to end a pestilence in Washington or London or Moscow."
The couple looked confused. "But, Jürgen," Greta objected, "how would such a plague get started?"
"By rocket," he answered matter-of-factly. "Or plane or submarine or even truck. We'd have to deliver the spores. The swiftest would be a V-2 air burst at night. Whole cities could be held hostage to the germ, the clock ticking. But no one would have to die if the Allies agreed quickly enough to German help in return for peace. And then the war could end."
"You'd infect a whole city?"
"Yes. And then save it. To end the war, you see. To balance terror with mercy, and thus bring peace. In the final accounting we'll be heroes." He looked at them expectantly.
"But women? Children?" Greta objected. "People will flee, the problems with distributing an antibiotic— "
"Those are
details.
It will work. It will work! If we
make
it work. And it begins here, in this cave. So you see, I'm
not
a monster, Greta. I'm a man of vision. The one man who can clearly see how to end this war on German terms."
She looked at him with dismay.
Hart spoke up. "Well, I quit."
Drexler sighed. "Hart, you can't quit— until I say so." The threat was clear.
"Jürgen," Greta said despairingly, "just let the war end by itself— "
"No! I refuse to be a victim of events when I have the opportunity to direct them. What we have here is a dazzling opportunity, far more dazzling than what we hoped for when we first came to Antarctica. This is what I've been waiting to tell you. This is what I've been waiting to share with you. Will you help?"
Greta studied her husband for a long time. Then, slowly, sadly, she nodded. "I'll do what I have to do, Jürgen."
* * *
"Are the charges ready?" Schmidt asked mildly, hunching in the cold wind of the dry valley. His voice was muffled behind the visor of his gas mask.
"Yes, Doctor. It should be quite a show." The SS man was splicing the wires to the detonator.
Schmidt looked sourly at the smoking volcano above them, the vista blurred by the scratched eyepieces of his mask. The plume of ash had made him nervous the whole time they were collecting spores at the upper end of the frozen lake and he wanted to get back to the submarine before the damned woman did: she might become irrational if she knew he was collecting more than a few spores to test the antidote— if she realized they'd come to stockpile the disease as well as the cure. That was not the only reason for his impatience: he hated the outdoors and couldn't wait to get back to the controlled environment of the U-boat. He also hated the clammy rubber of the mask but knew it was all that was keeping him alive until Greta returned with the antidote. The mummified bodies they'd passed in the valley had been warning enough. He dared not breathe a spore.
It was obvious the bacteria were carried to the surface in hot springs, spores drying on the surface and then carried by wind across the island. It might be impossible to permanently shut off the source but it seemed feasible to hide it at least until the end of the war, lest the Allies come here. The Reich had enough spores now to begin mass propagation in laboratories. At the rapid rate of bacterial growth there'd be plenty of plague within weeks. Their flowering would coincide with the readying of the rockets.
Schmidt thought Drexler's elaborate scheme to hold Allied capitals hostage to peace was absurd. Too complicated. Better to kill as many of the enemy as possible while waiting for additional German superweapons to reach the field. War was about killing, not psychology. But Drexler was most energetic when allowed his naive dreams, so the doctor let him prattle. And the question was moot until both disease and cure were in hand. Schmidt was content to leave the final strategy to others: as a man of science he preferred the purity of research.
He longed for a cigarette and wished he could tear off the mask to light one. Well. At least the first step was done. Time to start back home.
"Detonation," he ordered calmly. The soldier twisted the crank.
A boom thundered on the glacier that hung over the end of the valley and a geyser of snow and dirty till erupted into the air, cracks racing away on the ice. Then another and another and another, on and on, some explosions quite high on the frozen snout. Their crack was counterpointed by a deeper rumble of avalanche. A slurry of snow, chunks of ice, and glacial rock debris started down, pushing a billowing white cloud before it.
"Splendid!" The mask made Schmidt look like a gigantic insect. Behind it his eyes glowed as he watched the mantle of the mountain slide down. The SS squad faced away as a shock wave of air hit and staggered them, a momentary blizzard of snow and dust blowing by. Then the avalanche clattered to a stop and it was quiet again, the hot springs covered with a rubble of rocks, dirt, and chunks of ice. Wisps of steam curled upward.
The SS men cheered, the sound muffled behind their masks. The doctor studied their handiwork. There'd be some melt but the terrain was covered enough to discourage others from collecting. The secret was sealed.
"Gentlemen, the Reich now holds a monopoly on the trump card of history," he told them. "Let's take our prize back to the boat."
Greta was exhausted, slumped on a crate in the submarine's makeshift laboratory after almost thirty hours of nonstop work. She was alone. Schmidt, having succeeded in multiplying the microbe so they could test the antidote, had finally pleaded the weariness of age and staggered off. Now she sat breathing through a gauze mask, her hands rubbered, staring at the cages with a sense of ashen victory. Four of the rabbits were dead, their bodies elongated as if tormented on a rack. She could see the small white teeth of their final grimace. It was clear that the cave organism didn't immunize against the disease: giving it to the animals
before
they were injected with plague had done no good at all. The rest of the animals had survived, however, after being infected first by the microbe and then treated with antibiotic. They'd sickened briefly, some writhing in their cage, and then recovered. As a cure, the stuff worked.
She hated killing the laboratory animals. But maybe she had a bizarre tool now to save human lives and stop a greater madness, as Jürgen suggested. Had she done the right thing? Or was she making the unleashing of the microbe even more likely by combating it? In her weariness she felt she'd lost her moral compass and suddenly envied the certainty of the nuns she'd grown up with. But then what dilemmas did they ever face, the sheltered sisters? She wished she had Owen to talk to.
The biologist stretched, desperately tired and yet too tense to sleep. Conditions were so crude. A single water pipe and a crude drain. An alcohol stove. Planks had been set to make a workbench for Schmidt's microbial cultures, the originating spores harvested from the dry valley. The doctor hadn't wanted to draw on Germany's safely guarded microbe supply, he said, because of the risk involved in taking the cultures aboard ship sans antidote. Better, he explained to her, to wait until they arrived at Atropos to bring spore samples aboard. The cultures were lined under lamps now, petri platters of disease. Next to them were other cultures of more mild diseases, which they
had
felt safe bringing along. So far, the antibiotic seemed equally effective against them.
Greta intended to recommend destroying all the disease cultures before the U-boat sailed. Their usefulness had pretty much ended, and what was the point of taking chances?
The experiments suggested the expedition would be a success. Early tests in a vat showed promise that the drug organism could be grown and multiplied in Germany. Greta's experiment at reducing the scum to a more stable, storable, and usable dry powder with heat and evaporation had also succeeded: rabbits injected with it had recovered as rapidly as those given the compound raw. So the antibiotic worked, at least on animals or when swabbed or dripped into a lab dish. Admittedly, drugs were so mysterious and variable that the organism's true value couldn't be determined before clinical human tests at home. Still, they had the drug and that meant Jürgen must keep his promise: Owen would be released from the cave and would come to her again here in the submarine. Wouldn't he?
Unexpectedly, the idea depressed her. Owen's return would mean he would then attempt his escape, and even if he succeeded— which he admitted was unlikely— they'd be separated again at least until the end of the war. With Owen gone, the submarine would be sealed again for its long voyage home and she'd once more be imprisoned in a microcosm of the Reich she'd come to despise. Locked together again with Jürgen Drexler. She longed to run away with Owen but knew that if she did the alarm might be raised more quickly and their chances cut to zero. Aboard, she might delay or confuse any pursuit. To save him, she had to give him up. That was their plan.
The necessity was terrible.
With a sense of grim purpose, she reached into a drawer for the backpack she'd pilfered and set out for the ship's galley, where she hoped to steal enough food to keep a man alive on the open sea for— dare she think it?—several weeks.
* * *
Hart groaned. Hans was awakening him again by jabbing him with the tip of a boot. It was "morning," or what passed for morning in the sunless dungeon of the grotto. The pilot was still sore from his tantrum the evening before. The Nazi's arrogance had finally prompted Hart to take a tired, wild swing at the yellow-haired bastard and Owen had found himself expertly flipped onto his back, the Nazi's knees on his chest.
"You're too easy, Hart. I like to fight but you don't even make it fun." Hans had slapped him, almost casually, but enough to cut his lip. "You should learn to fight. It's part of being a man."
Hart spat at him and was cuffed so hard that his head rang. Then he lay still, defeated.
"He's a pussy," Hans said to Rudolf.
Hart was also tired from the increasingly long swims into the lake to gather the diaphanous organism. The SS men wouldn't help him, sitting instead at the top of the waterfall to haul up his harvest and playing cards in the lantern light. He knew they were trying to sap his energy as carefully as he was trying to conserve his strength. He was a slave and when the gathering was done his life would be over as well. No opportunity for escape had yet presented itself. As if to remind him of that, there was a clanking as he shifted his leg to get up. Each night Hans shackled him with a manacle to a cluster of cooking pots that served as a crude alarm.
"Like the bell of a goat," the storm trooper had said.
Now a new SS man named Oscar had descended for breakfast, unshouldering his heavy pack with a relieved grunt. The pans were unlocked from Hart's leg, rinsed quickly, and a small camp stove was turned on to heat water. Hart limped over to accept some bread. They didn't give him enough to eat for the work he was doing. When he'd complained, Bristle-Head had kicked his soup into the sand.
"You're in luck, American," the Nazi now growled. "We've got nearly as much as we can carry out of this hole. One more day! You're tired of swimming, no?"
"I'm tired of swimming."
"Yes, and you should learn to be tired of women." He waggled a spoon at the pilot. "They bring nothing but trouble. Look at you." The SS men laughed.
"Look at me." Hart chewed morosely then, thinking. "Oscar," he finally ventured, "that's a big pack you brought in if all we're doing is climbing out."
"Heavy, yes. But I get to leave it here."
"Leave it?"
The men looked at each other. Hans shrugged.
"Explosives," Bristle-Head explained. "To finish what the colonel started back in 1939. Seal this place up so that only Germany has this drug. Ka-boom!" He spread his hands, smiling. Then he squinted in mock suspicion. "You don't have other exits up your sleeve, do you?"
"Do you think I'd tell you?"
He sneered. "You'd tell me anything if I wanted you to."
"Well, the answer is no, but I think this place is going to blow anyway. Have you felt those tremors? That other volcano? Like the cave-in before."
Hans and Oscar looked uneasy but Bristle-Head nodded. "Good. We'll give Mother Nature a hand." He brought his hands together with a crash. "Now. Enough dawdling. Time to go swimming, Hart."
The pilot wearily stood and shed his boots and outer garments, stuffing them under a rock near his blanket. Then he trudged to the lip of the water chute and grasped the fixed rope, wincing as he stepped into the cold of the underground river. If he was going to escape he'd have to give those thick-headed bastards the slip on the climb out of the cave. First the shadowy lake, however. "I could use more help," he called.
"We have to pack out your damn scum," said Oscar. "That's help enough."
* * *
The morning watch had begun and Schmidt had risen with the sailors, unshaven and with his gray hair matted and tangled. Up on deck he took a drag on a cigarette and stared thoughtfully across the lagoon, reflecting on how splendidly the mission seemed to be coming together. He'd already cached a plentiful supply of the spores in a sealed container, and the last of the antidote organism was due to be gathered today. Assuming Frau Drexler's testing still showed it was effective, they were home free. The next step was to process the remaining cave sludge before more came aboard. He descended to the laboratory.