Hell's Gate(73)
“Mac?”
Jeez, it even sounds like Bob, he thought, and that convinced him to play along. “Sorry, Bob, no rolling papers.”
“Don’t worry, Mac. I got it covered.”
MacCready turned to the other apparition. “Hey, Yanni.”
“What’s buzzin’, cousin?” came the reply.
“Nuttin’,” MacCready said, then he dismissed the apparition with a wave of his hand, “’specially since you’re both dead.”
“How do you figure, Mac?”
“Fuckin’ Nazi showed me that Russian grease gun.”
The hallucinations exchanged brief confused looks before apparently deciphering their friend’s last comment.
The Bob mirage smiled sheepishly. “Yes, well . . . about the so-called grease gun . . .”
“Spill it,” the female ghost added, sounding disappointed.
“Hey, who has time to pack the gat when some Nazi * and his button men are bustin’ down the door?” the Bob mirage chimed in, defensively.
Mac stood up on wobbly legs, now acutely aware—mission-aware. These were not mirages. Bob and Yanni were alive. There was no time to waste, sick as he was. “Did you get to Queequegbah? Get a message out to Hendry?”
Yanni threw her husband a puzzled expression.
“He means Cuiabá,” Thorne explained, then turned to his friend. “No dice, Mac—as we found ourselves immediately on the lam from the Krauts. But since we also thought they’d iced you, it is no little relief that Yanni picked up your trail three days ago.”
Yanni held the empty bottle of turtle repellant up to Mac’s face.
MacCready struggled to keep his eyes focused. It was still their voices but now they were fading echoes. “Yeah, works fine on turtles,” he said. “You got something for vampire bats and Nazis?”
And with that he collapsed into Bob’s arms.
Yanni moved in quickly and together the couple gently lowered Mac’s body to the ground.
“Ingrate,” Yanni muttered.
CHAPTER 24
Marching to Valhalla
I hope these new mechanical meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and the idle, and will not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures.
—HORACE WALPOLE, 1785
Nostromo Base
February 8, 1944
By late morning, the two spacecraft lay gleaming in their wooden cradles, ready to be sled-mounted, ready for their tanks to be pumped with fuel and oxidizer, ready to roll out onto the tracks, one after another, toward their shared, central launch rail.
Colonel Wolff was looking for any excuse to get away from the rocket scientist, S?nger, who had once again fallen under the spell of his own voice while briefing the science teams and Silverbird pilots. Trimmed of excess verbiage, S?nger’s message was that “everything was proceeding as planned,” but the man had dragged out every possible speck of rocket-related minutiae until even Voorhees looked bored.
“. . . so the same vectored explosives I designed to dig diamond mines in Africa are now redesigned to propel my Silverbirds.”
It was about the point at which Voorhees looked like he was actually about to nap, that Colonel Wolff was approached by one of Dr. Kimura’s assistants, who gestured toward the door, emphatically. Wolff exited the meeting swiftly, without a word, and without acknowledging S?nger.
As the colonel walked the muddy path between buildings, his thoughts drifted back to the recent expedition to the cave. Ultimately, the mission had been a success—if only because he had managed to return with a live specimen. More important, his people were managing to keep the creature alive, although he had been infuriated to learn that that Kimura was using local “volunteers” to study how the bat attacked and fed, something the doctor had done without asking Wolff’s permission.
“All of my maruta have been burned up,” Kimura had responded matter-of-factly when confronted. The volunteers were evidently women living above the fog line. “Alone in huts,” he explained, “just like the two witches and the boy.” According to Kimura, they were easy pickings for his men. “Outcasts. No one will miss them.”
Wolff was not so sure. He knew that up until now, their reluctant Indian allies had been placated by generous gifts that included crates of canned meat and fruit, and finely honed German steel. But now the locals were dying at the hands of his own people. And that was definitely not a recipe for appeasement.
To make matters worse, there was the realization that securing the specimen had come at a steep cost, seven men, valuable men, including Schr?dinger, and quite possibly Vogt and Kessler. The two guides were never seen again. Then there was the unfortunate Private Schoeppe, catheterized by an even more unfortunate catfish. Neither of those two specimens had made it back to the base, which was doubly disappointing. He had looked forward to seeing a candiru up close.
What an interesting interrogation aid, Wolff thought, just before stepping into Kimura’s Bio Lab.
“The bacterium has proven to be surprisingly cooperative,” the Japanese scientist announced as the colonel entered. “Especially for an organism that was completely unknown to man until only a week ago.”