Hell's Gate(11)

Juliano held the gun out stock first. “All in all, sir, a top-shelf weapon.”

MacCready took the machine gun and hefted it. “I don’t know. Seems like a load to drag around.” He handed it back to Juliano.

“Captain, Major Hendry wants you to carry something besides a sidearm. He was quite insistent. I figured you might find the PPSh kind of interesting.”

MacCready had to admit—it was kind of interesting. “And what happens when it gets dirty or wet?”

Juliano responded by demonstrating a record-time field strip that reduced the gun to a layout of parts. After he finished, he picked up the barrel and peered into one end, holding the other up to the light. “Sir, you could shit down this thing and it would still fire.”

“I’ll take your word on that one,” MacCready replied quickly.

Satisfied that everything was in order, the corporal began to reassemble the gun. The zoologist’s eyes never left Juliano’s hands. “Just think, Corporal: Before the war, we used to worry about what type of tent we wanted to hump into the field. Now it’s which machine gun.”

He paused, waiting for some response from Juliano. He got none, so he responded to himself, “That’s not what I’d consider progress.”

The corporal examined each part, looking for defects and dirt. “I guess you’re right about that, Captain . . . But you’re not going to scare too many bad guys swinging a tent pole—now are you, sir?”

Once again, MacCready found himself agreeing with the man, while another part of his brain screamed, This cannot be good!


The C-47 had been idling on the runway for ten minutes by the time MacCready returned Juliano’s salute, hauled his gear up a portable ramp, and stepped into the twin-engine transport. There were two rows of folding seats that ran down the length of the cabin, room for twenty-eight paratroopers and their gear. But the plane seemed to be empty. He took a seat near the tail.

MacCready watched Juliano’s jeep pulling away from the plane and he winced as the transmission was submitted to another round of “corporal punishment.” But soon the slam of metal on metal was lost in the roar of twenty-eight cylinders of supercharged Pratt & Whitney.

MacCready’s departure from Waller Field was less eventful than his arrival. Once the plane had leveled off, a flight-suited figure ducked out of the radioman’s compartment. Mac was immediately reminded of a circus clown emerging from an absurdly tiny car. He appeared to be at least six and a half feet tall, all arms and legs, but he could not have weighed more than 160 pounds. The man made his way aft, saluted, and spoke over the engine noise. “Afternoon, sir. I’m Richards. Tex Richards.”

MacCready returned the salute. “MacCready . . . R. J. MacCready.”

“We know, Captain,” Richards said, and MacCready caught a hint of annoyance in the man’s drawl. “Y’all make yourself at home. S’gonna be a long ride—twenty hours, not counting a fuel stop. There’s a cot back here. Toilet, too. And some sandwiches.”

MacCready nodded. “Thanks.”

“Just give a yell if ya need anything, sir,” Richards called back over his shoulder, before smoothly folding himself back into the tiny, equipment-filled space.

MacCready suppressed an urge to see what the man looked like, jammed into his cubbyhole. Instead he double-checked that his gear was securely stowed in the starboard baggage compartment, settled into his aft window seat, and fastened the seat belt.

Thirty minutes later, the Skytrain was cruising west-southwest at five thousand feet.

He peered out a small rectangular window, and as if on cue, the green forests of Venezuela disappeared under dense, unbroken cloud cover that stretched to the horizon.

Bob Thorne—alive.

MacCready turned forward and let out a long breath. What if he’s changed? What if he’s pulled some kind of Kurtz act? He had often wondered what czarist demons had driven a Ukrainian named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to write about the malarial backwaters of Africa. Very strange . . .

MacCready’s head slowly ratcheted down toward his chest.

very . . . st . . .

Sometime later, the C-47 hit turbulence and MacCready came awake for a few seconds. He’d been dreaming about the summers of his childhood on Long Island’s South Shore. It was a time filled with sun-drenched beaches and books and baseball. And never any talk of Japs or Nazis.

Jesus. Seems like a thousand centuries ago.

As the drone of the engines faded once again, R. J. MacCready had a final thought before drifting back into sleep.

Nazis. How on earth did people turn into Nazis?


For most people, after the age of sixteen, the perception of time’s passage seemed to speed up. Yet for MacCready, the past twelve months were so crowded with new and unprecedented events that it felt to him as if twelve years had passed—maybe twenty. He sometimes wondered if his mind itself, and not just his perception of time, had started to become unhinged.

Nazis, how on earth did people turn into Nazis?

Whenever this question intruded upon him—whether sleeping or awake—the pictures in his head shifted easily backward in time, to childhood summers on rural Long Island. Mac’s two cousins were as innocent as any other children then, and brighter than most. Together with Mac, they were the three stellar children on an Irish-German family tree, each seemingly destined to go far in whatever fields they chose.