Hell's Gate(88)

An instant later, Wolff rolled his lidless eyes and spat at him.

“Jesus Christ!” Thorne cried.

Incredibly, Wolff began to chuckle and his head stayed up, straining against visible tendons, as MacCready backed away, nearly toppling over Wolff’s “other body.”

“Jesusss? Where is heee?” The German looked at MacCready through air-dried and bug-bitten corneas, his voice damp air escaping from a tomb. “Youuu . . . I knew you weren’t deadddd.”

Uncharacteristically, MacCready could not think of a reply.

Sensing this, Wolff attempted what might have been a smile, several cordlike facial muscles drawing upward but with no lips to complete the expression. A moment later, the muscles relaxed and the Nazi concentrated on what he knew would be his final words: “The Silverbirds . . . I did thisss . . . Kimura’s bomb . . . You did thisssssss.”

And with those words, Wolff’s head slumped forward.

Thorne approached cautiously, half-afraid the Nazi would reanimate himself a second time. He was also unnerved by the strange expression MacCready wore.

“What does he mean by this, Mac?”

“I’m not sure, Bob,” MacCready lied, looking rather unsteady and knowing that Wolff had called it correctly. He had done this. Looking back now, at each fork in the road, every decision seemed like the right one. Yet still, in the end, he wound up leading his enemies directly to the biological weapons they craved. How, he wondered, might events have unfurled had his plane’s collision with a scarlet ibis killed him at Waller Field? How much better would things have turned out?

“I’m not sure,” Mac repeated. He went silent, not knowing whose question he had just answered.

Yanni’s voice broke the silence. “Mac, you need to see this.”

She was holding open a notebook that she’d pulled from a small pile of Wolff’s belongings. Mac took the book from her without losing the page she’d been staring at.

Colonel Wolff’s lab notes were written in a clear and easily readable German script, but what immediately caught Mac’s attention were his drawings of the plateau. They showed the cave entrance, the passageway leading to the draculae roost, and the subchamber itself. But it was a drawing of the cave’s antechamber that caused MacCready’s eyes to widen. Four small squares spread across the floor, each with a line stretching to a point several feet away. They booby-trapped that cave, he thought, recognizing what, to his mind, could only be trip wires.

MacCready scanned additional figures on the adjacent pages. One of them showed similar boxes arranged across the top of the plateau.

And what are these? he wondered, noting that the squares were arrayed along what seemed to be a series of fissures in the earth. Mac remembered the strong breeze that nearly blew out his lantern—a breeze that could only have come down through one of these faults. While two of Wolff’s men were being slaughtered by turtles, he must have been sending others back to survey weaknesses in the plateau roof.

“Jesus,” MacCready said, “they’re going to blow that cave.”


Absolutely not, Mac,” Major Hendry barked, dismissing the request with a wave of his hand. The two men were standing outside the ruins of Wolff’s and Kimura’s lab.

“But Pat—”

“And that’s an order. I’m sending you back with the first convoy to Cuiabá,” Hendry announced. “You need a break.”

“Pat, you don’t understand. I’ve got to go up there.”

“No, you don’t understand. If any of these *s survived, and if they’ve gotten back to that cave—let ’em blow it and God bless ’em. You are not going up there alone.”

“But what about an antidote, and what if they’re trying to capture another one?”

Hendry held up his hand. “Hold the bullshit, Mac. I can read German just as well as you. Wolff’s entire plan was to get those rockets away and to make sure nobody on this side of the Pond ever got access to those microbes again. Ever!”

MacCready knew his friend’s argument made perfect sense, and yet he had to go back.

Everything was turning upside down in MacCready’s head. It seemed that the voices of his mother and little sister had already decided his course. Last time, he hadn’t been around to prevent the deaths of an innocent mother and child. There was no choice in the matter. This time, without taking pause to question the sanity of his decision, Mac would do everything in his power to prevent the extinction of the innocent. In his mind, Amelia, Brigitte, and the draculae were becoming hopelessly entangled.

And why do I want to go back there?

The elders who drove Yanni into the forest years before could have answered him. “Once the chupacabra have been allowed to live inside your skull, you are never the same again.”


Bob and Yanni Thorne watched a commotion begin near one of the spare rocket engines, while nearby a group of Hendry’s men had mounted what was left of the monorail track and were taking measurements.

“Ants,” Thorne said. “Just like ants.” And in his scientist’s mind there was no doubt now, that a new day, a new era had begun. “I am seeing the world to come, Yanni. And it ain’t pretty.”

“And speaking of ain’t pretty.” Yanni gestured toward MacCready, who was striding toward them at a brisk clip.