Hell's Gate(38)
Puzzled, he repeated the call, this time casting a wider beam of energy that painted a sonic picture of the dense foliage bordering both sides of the clearing. The return information was processed instantly. A long stretch of forest had disappeared.
From her position at the center of the cluster, the mother could already sense the combination of fear and anger in the pheromonal response of her mate. Hanging from the same branch, she felt the twins stirring uneasily in response to their father’s chemical message.
The lead male’s body vibrated for a moment, then his jaws snapped open. A pair of specialized salivary glands swelled, filling the front half of the bat’s mouth. The creature let out a long audible hiss that was accompanied by a thin, aerosolized spray, and from behind the mother, several subordinate males, including the male twin, responded immediately, mimicking his call.
Before, they had taken the new bipeds only when they encountered them by accident. Now they would hunt them.
Moments later, the branches of the great tree were empty. The creatures who had been roosting there were now returning to the cliffs, racing the coming dawn, and leaving in their wake the scent of gardenias.
MacCready peered down from a thickly vegetated ledge of rock into the valley of Hell’s Gate. Dawn was only moments away, and a hundred feet below his perch, a sea of fog stretched unbroken across the miles.
He had arrived the evening before, deciding that the high ground would reveal the best possible routes into the valley. Thankfully, he’d also been able to catch a few hours of sleep, but Mac was still feeling exhausted as he looked out across the surface of the mist.
His first impression was that if it weren’t for the treetops poking up here and there, an observer might have been fooled into thinking there was water under the fog instead of a lush forest. Indian Lake, at sunrise, he thought, smiling as he remembered the early morning view from a hilltop cabin in the Adirondack Mountains.
The squawk of parrots, moving from the high ground into the valley, brought him back to present reality. Like clockwork, the birds noisily left their nests each dawn, descending into the lowlands to feed. At twilight, the same loud commute took place in reverse. There were other sounds as well—insects mostly, and frogs.
Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, there was only silence.
MacCready’s brain barely had time to register the change when the earth began to tremble. A second later, he felt a low rumble.
It’s coming from under the mist! MacCready thought, and with this realization, he saw a small patch of fog begin to glow, about a half mile away. Almost simultaneously, from the center of the glow, the missile appeared. From this distance it seemed to measure around twenty-five feet long and maybe three feet across, with four backward-sweeping wings located mid-body. Reddish black exhaust trailed behind the engine and MacCready watched it ascend, accelerating rapidly.
That’s not what I saw in Chapada, he realized. Then his eyes caught another object coming onto the scene, barely visible because of its great height.
MacCready strained to hear the engines. It’s Allied photo recon—gotta be. A B-24 by the sound of it. “Shit,” he whispered.
The rocket’s exhaust trail took a sudden, sharp turn, and for a moment MacCready thought that it had been thrown off course, but only for a moment. And in that moment, he knew he was watching an antiaircraft missile, one that was headed directly for the plane.
Somebody is controlling that thing, he thought, and in the same instant, missile and reconnaissance plane merged in the flash of a fireball.
The sound of the explosion reached him several seconds later and MacCready’s body jerked in response. Stunned, he allowed his gaze to drop back down into the valley, but now there was only the fog and a scattering of skeletal branches, pointing skyward like accusing fingers.
I need to contact Hendry with these exact coordinates, he thought. If only Thorne hadn’t already left. As his mind sought the fastest way to get this new information back to civilization, something bit him just below the right ear.
It’s—
MacCready neither heard nor saw anything. All sense of danger, all sense of time, all conscious and subconscious thought, all sense of self, had simply ceased to be.
Far above MacCready’s prone form, the jagged scar of a missile contrail was already fading against the blue sky of morning.
CHAPTER 13
Maruta
The legacy of cruelty, pain, and fear left behind by the Japanese Chemical Weapons Division under General Ishii Shiro still haunts the world today. There has been little effort to make restitution to the victims’ families who suffered through his barbaric experiments. Ishii Shiro is gone, but the results of his work are a threat to disrupt the free world today.
—GREGORY DEAN BYRD, “GENERAL ISHII SHIRO: HIS LEGACY IS THAT OF GENIUS AND MADMAN,” M.A. THESIS, 2005
Nostromo Base
January 26, 1944
Who killed my men?” Colonel Wolff asked in perfect but accented English.
The prisoner stood on unsteady legs, his hands bound tightly behind his back. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like that actor?” the captive asked. Then he turned to Wolff’s hulking right-hand man, SS Sergeant Schr?dinger. “You know who I mean, right? Tall guy, like you—only human.”
The giant’s face betrayed no emotion.
“Who killed my men?” Wolff repeated. His voice held no malice. It was almost soothing.