Hell's Gate(13)
Down on the forest floor, even when something enormous moved suddenly into the spider’s field of vision, there was only an instantaneous summoning of limbs and fangs to a defensive posture. The intruder descended with astonishing rapidity, but there was nothing in the predator-turned-prey that could have been called either astonishment or horror.
For the coati, however, there was something that might have been called a sense of self. He was a leaner, sleeker rendition of the American raccoon, and although he’d lived these past three years alone, he felt nothing like regret. An arthritic hip had begun to slow him down, but even the fastest responses of a spider were all too predictable. The coati’s meal reared up on four hind limbs, projected its fangs, and waved its forearms menacingly.
In five ticks of a stopwatch, confrontation flared and died. Feinting with his right paw, the coati distracted the spider just long enough to blindside it with a crushing blow from the left. To the coati, tarantulas were a rare and satisfying delicacy—as fine in texture as the yolk of a freshly broken egg.
In the forest surrounding the little clearing, something watched, and waited.
The coati was more focused than usual on his meal, and for this reason more careless than usual. Ordinarily, he might have felt a faint vibration, might have sensed that in the surrounding tangle of vines and twigs, crickets had stopped chirping and even the delicate lacewings no longer stirred. In the trees only the tiniest creatures—springtails and mites, mostly—registered any change at all, in their unseen empires of bark and leaf. Had they been sentient beings, able to communicate, they would have sounded the alarm. But they too were creatures of mechanized instinct. So instinct waited, silent and deep in the night, waited for the shadows to shift, and to move away.
Unmindful of shadows, the coati was finishing its meal when there came a new sound—a whoosh of air, followed by the crack of bushes or brambles being snapped by a pair of large animals approaching. They moved with all the grace of a tree fall—large enough, the coati sensed, not to care about moving so clumsily and attracting attention. The coati stood up on his hind legs, facing the sound, trying to assess the danger. He was unfamiliar with these animals. Reckless and lumbering, they emitted an alternating sequence of calls, birdlike yet at the same time quite unlike a bird. The sounds brought a surge of fear and adrenaline, and the coati lost all sensation of pain in his arthritic hindquarters. Seemingly without effort, his legs springboarded him away from the threat, and from the last few morsels of a favorite meal.
Having closed within striking distance, the shadows in the trees waited, silent. They had been tracking the old coati for almost an hour. The game, and it was a game in every sense of the word, was to get as close to the creature as possible without alarming it. But the unexpected and strange new sounds had put an end to all of that.
Now they turned their attention to a new set of calls.
The two soldiers had set off on patrol from Nostromo Base in daylight; but deep within the river valley, the sun’s rays never quite burned through the ever-present blanket of mist. Now they had lost the light altogether. It had taken the better part of fifteen hours to find the parachute, and now the Germans were staring up through a drizzle of rain at a tangle of white cloth. The fabric was hung up on a tree limb about ten meters off the ground. They could just make out the nose-cone-mounted camera housing and its harness, dangling alongside the rest of the chute.
“I can’t climb,” one of the men said, throwing up his hands. “My back is shot.”
“That’s just great,” his colleague mumbled. Private Wilhelm Becker was already squinting up into the rain, searching for the lowest branch that might support his weight. “Well, you’ll need to give me a boost, bad back or not.”
Private Karl Fuchs let out a loud sigh, then stomped over to the tree trunk. Leaning against it for support, he clasped his fingers together. “Come on, then,” he said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Becker used Fuchs’s boost to get a grip on a horizontal branch only a little higher up than he was tall. Deftly, he swung his legs upward, twisting his body around and over the limb. He sat for a few moments, catching his breath and shaking his head. The incessant heat and humidity seemed to turn even the simplest of physical tasks into a sweat-drenched struggle.
“You taking a break already?” Fuchs asked.
Becker responded by standing up. Holding on to the vertical trunk with one hand, he feigned pulling down his fly with the other. “Open wide, Karl,” he called down, but the other man ignored him.
Carefully, Private Becker made his way up a ladder of branches.
On the ground, Fuchs squinted into the forest. Feeling queasy, he reached into his tunic, extracted a cigarette, then lit it. He remembered his first impression of the place—with its strange, never-lifting cover of fog. He had been standing on Nostromo’s deck after the seemingly interminable submarine voyage.
His first thought had been that it was a mist that only Poe could love, and he soon discovered that he wasn’t alone in this regard.
“If this is what London is like,” his friend Auerbach had whispered, “then that fat f*ck Churchill can keep it.”
No, this was not London. Nor was it anything like what he had expected.
Fuchs had convinced himself that their assignment to the enormous Japanese submarine was the start of a fantastic Jules Verne voyage. Soon after their brief stopover in Peenemünde, rumors began to circulate about a secret base in the tropics, which served only to stoke his imagination. There would be an idyllic lagoon, ringed with white sand and palm trees. There would be butterflies as well, swirls of metallic blues and reds against a cloudless sky. And there would be no war.