Hell's Gate(87)
—ISAAC ASIMOV, 1986
Nostromo Base
February 17, 1944
By the time Major Patrick Hendry arrived by seaplane the next morning, with a serious contingent of special ops boys, MacCready and his two friends were waiting to guide them in. The monorail and most of the compound’s buildings (what remained of them) were still gushing plumes of black smoke that mingled with the mists and rose above them.
As Hendry’s men spread across the base, the major pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his pack. He followed up by producing a pair of shot glasses.
“How’d you get in here so fast?” Mac asked.
Hendry smiled. “Air recon, reported that half of Brazil seemed to be on fire. I figured it was you.”
“Yeah, well, breaking things and killing people, setting shit on fire. That’s what we scientists are up to these days. Isn’t it?”
Hendry replied with a humorless laugh. “Mac, you don’t know the half of it,” he said, pouring a pair of stiff shots. “And speaking of which, we just heard from our boys back north. There were numerous sightings of an unnaturally bright meteor off the Virginia coast. It was heading south to north when it tore apart.”
“Let me guess, it was heading directly away from our position.”
“Quite a coincidence there, huh? Unofficially, they’re calling it a Foo Fighter.”
“And officially?” MacCready asked.
“A meteor.”
“What about casualties on the ground? Any word on whether this meteor dropped any bombs along its path?”
“None whatsoever,” Hendry responded, noting his friend’s unease. “An eyewitness said, ‘It simply flamed apart into a bouquet of bright sparks and disappeared over the ocean.’”
“A bouquet, huh? And what about the second rocket? Any more bouquets?”
“No . . . no word on that one. Intelligence thinks it was probably lost over the Atlantic as well.”
Mac shook his head. “That’s a stretch.”
“So maybe we got lucky this time.”
Hendry raised his shot glass.
MacCready hesitated, then lightly touched it with his own. “This time,” he said. “But judging from a Japanese sketchbook and the type of lab equipment they left behind, it’s pretty clear these guys figured out how to use pathogens in the draculae saliva to make a bioweapon.”
Hendry nodded. “Makes sense. And you know what I always say about wounded animals, right?”
Mac waved off the rather obvious dig. “Smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
As if on cue, Thorne approached the men, seeming either troubled or looking for trouble.
“Ah, the World-Famous Botanist, I presume,” Hendry said. “Would you care to join us in a toast to a job well done?”
Thorne flashed MacCready his best who-the-f*ck-is-this-guy look then addressed the major: “Excuse me, bub, but last I heard, those rockets were heading down that track in one piece.”
“One of them went down off the coast of Virginia,” Hendry said quietly. “And that’s classified information, Mr. Thorne.”
“And the second one?”
Hendry paused. “Presumed lost.”
“In any event, I will hold off on the celebrating, thank you.” Thorne turned to his friend. “Mac, have you seen Yanni?”
Yet before Mac could scan the grounds, Yanni emerged out of the shifting mists—shadowy, as if she were a ghost.
“Hey, Yanni,” Mac called, “I wanna introduce you to our brand-new fr—”
Something in her expression stopped him.
“You . . . must come,” was all she said. Then she turned and headed back into the fog.
MacCready and Thorne exchanged puzzled looks, before jogging off after Yanni.
They quickly caught up with her and she led them through the smog and dripping foliage until they came to a clearing in the woods. The remains of a small campfire were still smoldering.
MacCready stepped into the circle, realizing at once that there were two bodies near the center of the clearing. One was lying on the ground at the foot of the other—which had been lashed upright to a wooden post.
MacCready crept nearer. Something’s wrong.
“What is going—?” Bob Thorne froze.
Both of the “bodies” were Colonel Wolff. MacCready could see that, a centimeter at a time, the Xavante had put the Nazi to the same fate he once condemned him to by “choice.”
Somehow, they had removed his skin in a single piece. Mac estimated that it must have taken many hours to complete the task. He was also fairly certain that Wolff had survived their artwork and been left to die.
Morbid curiosity led him to take a step closer, and a cloud of flies rose noisily into the air, angry at having been interrupted in their meal and their egg-laying on the staked-out man and his twin. The colonel appeared to have died staring down at the wet pile, which was already black with ants.
Scarcely breathing, MacCready began to examine the upright corpse. He placed a hand under its chin and lifted the head up. The musculature is still quite warm, he thought, looking at his watch. “Six hours,” he said.
“Six what?” said Thorne, his voice subdued by shock. “I don’t understand.”
“After they’ve finished the job, it takes at least six hours for a man to die like that.”