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A grim scene like something out of a disaster movie lay before them.
There were bodies with sheets pulled over their heads strapped to bunks in the first three of the sections that Maddock checked. They hadn’t begun to stink, the extreme cold trapped within the sub effectively refrigerating the dead. It was the smallest of mercies. He glanced at the faces. He wouldn’t remember them. There were no clues as to what had killed them save for a faint yellowness around one of the dead submariner’s lips. It wasn’t much, and didn’t discount any pathogen being airborne, or poison being tracked back to any surface that he came into contact with... if there was even a contagion... a poison...
The clock was ticking.
He moved through the sub, footsteps echoing as he ventured forward. The long galley, cramped and narrow, contained the smallest working surface he’d ever seen. It was miraculous that food emerged from it. The tiny dining area on the far side revealed the effects of the trauma that had happened onboard. There were a pair of tables that sat eight men and chairs secured in place, but the floor was littered with broken plates, cutlery, and scraps of food.
Was this what the end looked like?
It was a sobering thought—one day, maybe a day like today, one of these places would be his end. It was never as you imaged it, he knew that much. Never as heroic, normally commonplace and tragic. This was different on so many levels, and so much more horrific for it. This was drawn out, tortuous. Had they turned on each other at the end? Fought over scraps, desperate to survive a few hours more just in case help did arrive? He had no way of knowing, but it felt as though the last few days of their lives these men hadn’t been living, or even just surviving, they’d been slowly dying.
He moved on, climbing gradually higher as he followed the rise of the sub where it was trapped trying to break through the ice.
One room was different from all of the others.
A man sat on the bunk in the corner, his back pressed against the bulkhead. For a moment Maddock thought he was still alive. He raised his pistol instinctively, drawing down on the corpse on the bed. There was a small pillow behind his head and blood on the walls around it. Maddock let out a long slow breath, but didn’t take the gun off the man until he was absolutely sure he was dead. He played the flashlight around the cramped room for a moment. Unlike the others where the roll-on roll-off bunks were stacked three high, nine to a chamber no more than eight feet by eight, there was only one bed in here, meaning he was face-to-face with the captain. He’d blown his brains out. The blood was a dark smear on the wall behind him, fused around his hair and scalp, keeping him upright. He’d known that help wasn’t coming and hadn’t wanted to drag it out. Maddock couldn’t understand that. In his philosophy hope was the last thing to die, not the first, even in a hellhole like this.
He stepped inside the comparatively spacious room. The door slammed behind him and bounced back open, the resonant clang echoing through the silence of the coffin. He heard a voice calling. Unless the dead had found a speaker, it had to be Bones.
“In here,” he called back into the passageway, his voice sounding every bit as metallic as its surroundings as it filled the space. “I’ve found it.”
He waited for a moment before he approached the captain’s corpse, hearing Bones’ footsteps approach.
Not in his wildest dreams had he expected that Pandora’s Egg could be as beautiful as this. It was a work of art, of supreme craftsmanship, a testament to the mastery of its creator.
“What have we got?” Bones asked as he stood in the doorway.
Maddock played the light over the dead man’s hands. He slipped his gun back into its sheath, then took another step forward, reaching out for the object the man had clung onto even as he blew his own brains out, as if it was the most valuable thing in the world. And looking at it, maybe it was. Maddock had seen pictures of these things. Who hadn’t? But pictures couldn’t hope to live up to the reality of one of the jewel encrusted eggs created by Fabergé for the Russian royal family. The Romanovs.
“Romanov’s Bane,” he breathed. “Isn’t that what the Russian said?”
“I thought this thing was supposed to be a weapon?” asked Bones.
“Pandora’s Egg. We haven’t found anything else that fits the bill and it’s too big a coincidence for it to be anything else.This has to be it.” Maddock took the object from the ice cold hand of the dead man. “Which means that assuming our intel is right, it has to be a weapon.” The body shifted in its final resting place as he took it, as if the man was reluctant to let it go, even in death.
“And worth a couple of bucks by the looks of it.” Bones eyed the egg with admiration.
“Understatement of the year.” Maddock turned the egg over in his mittened hands, noting the way the faint light danced along the surface of the gold filigree and patterned rubies and emeralds. The craftsmanship was exquisite. But his admiration for the beauty of the piece was overwhelmed by the knowledge that he held a rare and important piece of history in his hands.
“Well, assuming you’re right, we need to get out of here, and scupper this thing if we can.”
There was a dull rumble as he said it, almost as if the submarine was listening to him and voicing its objection to the idea. Maddock stood motionless for a moment as they both listened. The noise came through the hull, tortuous, anguished, as if the ice were losing its grip and the submarine was about to slip back into the water.
No. That was only part of it.
The sounds weren’t just coming from outside the vessel and the shifting in the ice.
They were coming from inside.
For a heartbeat, less, Maddock thought the dead had risen as the dull clang of footsteps haunted them, then the door swung open.
Maddock turned, Pandora’s Egg in his hands, to see Professor standing in the doorway. An unseen figure held a gun pressed against his temple.