Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  The major snatched the envelope out of MacCready’s hands, withdrew a cutaway drawing of the I-400, and grunted. Had the scale bar at the bottom of the drawing not been covered by grease and what appeared to be blood, MacCready would have seen immediately that the sub was more than three hundred feet long. It wasn’t like him to miss such an important detail.

  Hendry handed the drawing back with the same awful expression of a mentor disappointed by his prize student. “You’re slipping, Mac, and this is no time for complacency or slipups.”

  MacCready looked at the paper—more closely this time.

  The major continued, “The I-400 is no U-boat. It’s a new Jap design. And while it’s no news that they’ve been using subs to exchange supplies and technology with the Krauts, this vessel is a different kettle of fish. It’s got a huge cargo hold and a sixty-five-foot hangar right below the conning tower. We think it was built to carry up to three Seirans—single-engine, floatplane bombers.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit. And here’s the kicker—they found this thing on the upper Rio Xingu.

  “But that’s—”

  “Seven hundred and fifty miles inland.”

  “They ran a three-hundred-foot sub seven hundred and fifty miles upriver and nobody saw anything? How the—”

  Mission or not, the major took a measure of pride in surprising MacCready—which wasn’t very often. There were few living Westerners who knew the South American tropics better than the zoologist. Coupled with his fearless daring and his ability to do almost anything—fly a plane, embed himself in a hostile tribe, help remove the spear point they’d embedded in him—if there was anyone capable of untangling the current cluster-fuck, it was, Hendry knew, Mac—even in his present, darker state.

  “We don’t know how they did it,” Hendry conceded. “The region had a serious rainy season last year. That much we do know. Anyway, the boat was half-sunk.”

  “Pat, that’s a big boat. How much rain are we talking about here?”

  “Not quite enough I guess. The sub is hung up tighter than General Montgomery at an intel briefing. Our divers said the cargo hold was clean as a whistle. No nothing. Just some strapping and padding.”

  “So . . . let me get this straight,” MacCready said. “You think somebody hauled some heavy equipment out of this sub.”

  “A shitload. The cargo crane on this thing would be right at home on a Jersey City dock. No sweat gettin’ their planes back on board with that thing.”

  “And what, they just . . . left?”

  “Like I said, the sub wasn’t going anywhere, so yeah, they covered the whole thing in brush and abandoned it.”

  “How long’s it been there?”

  “Tough to say. Two, three months. We can’t tell for sure.”

  “Nobody could figure out when that brush had been cut?”

  “Um . . .” The major shifted uncomfortably. More than he liked besting MacCready, he loathed when the adventurer pointed out his own mistakes. “Not that I know of.”

  “Right,” MacCready said, with a mirthless laugh before turning his attention to the map.

  The dismissive laugh troubled Hendry, but not nearly so much as his friend’s sudden focus on the map. The Old MacCready would have spent fifteen minutes explaining exactly how small changes in slashed wood could be traced over days, weeks, and months—until he had to be grabbed by the shoulders and forced to study the map.

  “Well, they couldn’t have gotten too far,” MacCready ventured. “What about a trail? They must have cut a pretty wide swath through the forest.”

  “Our scouts found no trail. No abandoned cargo, either, and no reports of Jap seaplanes.” Hendry hesitated, watching MacCready. If he could hook him in through his insatiable curiosity, the major could forgo the inevitable order to send his friend on yet another suicide mission. “Who knows? Maybe they hauled it off with porters and covered their tracks.”

  “Porters? I don’t care how clever these guys were. They would have left some trace.” MacCready turned to Hendry. “Something . . . ?” he added, hopefully.

  “There was nothing. It’s like they levitated out of there.”

  “Well then, forget porters,” MacCready said, turning back to the map. “They must have used the river—rafts, maybe.”

  Hendry, who had never cared for real fishing, began to reel in his catch. “You think so, huh?”

  MacCready nodded his head, very slowly, and the major saw a glimmer of excitement rising in the man, something of the delight one might see on a child’s face if he had been given a new puzzle to solve.

  “If that sub’s as big as you say it is—”

  “It is,” Hendry emphasized.

  “With enough storage capacity to hold planes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Damn! That’s a handy toy to have in your arsenal. And not the sort of thing you’d want to lose.” MacCready was talking to himself as much as he was to Hendry. “So what the hell were they doing so far upriver? They must have known that they’d never get back out of there. And what were they carrying that was so risk-worthy?”

  “Good questions, Mac. And like you said, whatever it was, it was important enough for them to sacrifice a world-class submarine. Hell, it was too damned important to risk leaking in their own coded messages.”

  MacCready turned from the map. “So, we’ve broken their latest code?”

  Hendry looked away; suddenly interested in a gecko that was stalking a cockroach across the ceiling.

  MacCready didn’t take the hint. “Who was it? Not those Limeys at Bletchley Park?”

  Ignoring the question, Hendry drew hard on his cigar. Exhaling, he pointed to a spot on the map. “Working on your theory that the sub was brought within range of a few days’ rafting, and taking into account the most likely river routes, we think they were headed here: Portão do Inferno.”

  MacCready smiled. “My theory, huh?” Squinting at the location on the map, he continued, “Hell’s Gate. Where that British explorer went in the twenties, looking for El Dorado, or whatever he was calling it?”

  “That would be Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett and his City of Z,” Hendry answered, a little too quickly.

  The zoologist continued. “There never was any city, and Fawcett and his men never came out.”

  “Right,” Hendry said finally, and blew a puff of smoke at the map. “Well, this ‘Hell’s Gate’ is actually a canyon below the Mato Grosso Plateau. The cliffs are roughly two thousand feet high and the valley floor is perpetually shrouded in mist. That’s where I’d be if I wanted to hide something from Allied recon.”

  MacCready remained silent, his eyes focused at a small point along the river.

  “So . . . what do you think, Mac?”

  MacCready cleared his throat. “Great effect with the cigar smoke.”

  Hendry let the remark pass without comment, and especially without showing any signs of bristling. It was something he’d learned to do with his friend: try, try, and try never to let him know if he’s scored.

  Mac turned back to the map. “Perpetual mist, two-thousand-foot cliffs, sounds about right. Have you got anybody in there?”

  “Three weeks ago, we sent in a squad of Rangers. Tough fuckers.”

  “And?”

  “We haven’t heard a word from them. Nothing.”

  MacCready remained silent.

  Hendry picked up a lead paperweight from his desk. It was shaped like a stack of cannonballs, and the major flipped it slowly from one hand to another. “I realize now . . . maybe it wasn’t Rangers we needed to send in there.”

  “And what? Now you want me to go in there?”

  Hendry banged the paperweight down like a gavel. “First guess, Mac. Not bad!”

  MacCready never flinched and his eyes never left the map. He shook his head. “I can’t believe you guys,” he said, quietly and to himself.

  As Hendry puffed more smoke, he opened a file cabinet and withdrew a bottl
e of Jack Daniel’s and a pair of shot glasses. “You know, I remember talking to this fellow a couple of years ago. He was going on and on about how the Age of Adventure was dead.” The colonel paused, taking his time as he unscrewed the bottle. “Guy sound familiar to you?”

  MacCready finally turned toward the other man. “Yeah, I know him. Damn fool.”

  Hendry poured a pair of stiff shots, then offered one to his friend. “Big pain in the ass, too. But still, I’d never ask him to do something like this if—”

  “—if it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” MacCready said, and took the glass.

  “You got it.” Hendry tossed back the sour mash and MacCready followed.

  The scientist approached the map again—closer this time. Slowly, he drew a finger across the plateau, the valley, and a knot of river tributaries so hopelessly tangled that he knew the mapmaker had to be guessing. Had to be.

  “Pat, not even the Brazilians know much about this place. Except that it defines remote. A quarter of a million square miles of wilderness—and shit for roads, where you can find ’em. We could go in with a hundred men, a thousand, and still not run across anybody. The bad guys could be anywhere. And those Rangers you sent in . . .” He trailed off into thought, trying to dredge up everything he knew about the region. It wasn’t much. In fact, no one really knew anything. It was a blank spot on South American maps, as inaccessible as any place on the planet.

  Hendry pressed on: “I don’t know if our men ran into that I-400 crew, but it’s only fair to warn you, the alternative’s not pretty, either. One of the tribes living in Hell’s Gate may be a real problem: the Xavante,” which he pronounced “zhah-vahn-thee.”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Then you know these babies are no good from way down deep. In fact the last recorded meeting with the tribe happened around the time the Conquistadors were working over the Inca for their gold. Story has it that the Xavante chieftain promised to satisfy, once and for all, the newly installed governor’s appetite for the shiny stuff. The Portuguese thought they’d finally gotten a peace offering, you know, out of sheer desperation. Well, at the feast of the treaty signing, the Xavante grabbed the governor and bound him. Then they propped his mouth open and poured molten gold down his throat. Just to make sure everybody got the message, they slaughtered every white man for a hundred miles around.”

  MacCready grimaced. “Lousy party.”

  “You can say that again. Since then, just about the only thing they know about these Xavante is what their arrows look like. Kids swim out and recover ’em from the backs of guys who come floating down that river.”

  “Sounds like effective advertising. The mist, the river, friendly Indians.”

  “Right: ‘Stay the fuck out!’”

  “And just the kind of place you’d want to bring a three-hundred-foot submarine into, if . . .” MacCready’s voice trailed off, unable to fill in the blank.

  Hendry slammed the empty glass down on the desk. “Exactly, Mac. And that’s why I need you to find out what those Axis bastards are up to. And while you’re at it, find out what happened to our men.”

  The major drew in a mouthful of cigar smoke, held it, then blew it past MacCready’s face. The blast of smoke impacted on the map, downriver; and Hendry pointed to a small dot marked “Chapada dos Guimarães.” “Jesuits built this town in the late 1700s. Now it’s mostly farmers: half-breed Caboclos. But there’s a fine assortment of scumbags there, too—gold miners and the like—so watch it. We’re dropping you just outside of Chapada. You’ll hook up with an old friend of yours: Robert Thorne.”

  MacCready, who’d been wondering what the gold looked like once it hardened inside that Portuguese governor, did a double take. “Wh—what?”

  “You heard me, Mac.”

  “But Bob Thorne disappeared five years ago in—”

  “—the Amazon. Yeah, yeah—we know all about his disappearance.”

  “They found his campsite in ruins. There was blood. They said he’d been—” MacCready paused for a moment at the memory. Things had already started unraveling back home, and the loss of a close friend made it even worse. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

  “Brooklyn boy, right? Leaf-head.”

  “Botanist,” MacCready corrected. “But that can’t be.” Then his voice dropped, almost inaudible. “Everyone said that Bob was—”

  “They’re right. He is dead. And he’s working for us now.”

  Hendry saw MacCready’s head come up. “There you are,” he thought, aloud. “Oh, and before I forget, Thorne says to bring him a dozen packages of cigarette papers. So, I figure not only is he dead, he’s growin’ his own tobacco. Now if I was a hotshot scientist like you—that’d be my theory.”

  MacCready shook his head, then smiled broadly. It was Bob Thorne. “Jesus, Pat . . . I spoke at his memorial service.”

  “Well, now you can tell him all about it. And I betcha folks’ll be streaming out of the bush for miles around, just to be on hand for that historic reunion.”

  “Bob Thorne,” he said to himself, drifting.

  “Captain MacCready, are you quite finished?” Hendry said, not bothering to mask his growing annoyance.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When you get to Chapada, pick up any new information you can from your dead friend. He’s chummy with the natives—big-time. And if anyone is going to notice signs of an incursion by Axis assholes, it’ll be the locals. Get that information, then hike into Hell’s Gate and figure this out. You’ll be going wheels-up as soon as you pull your gear together. Corporal Juliano will assist you.”

  MacCready said nothing, but the major knew that wouldn’t last.

  “You got something to add?” Hendry asked.

  “Yeah. Well, besides the fact that this whole thing sucks, that would be a hypothesis you have about Thorne and the tobacco. Not a theory. Everybody gets those two terms mixed—”

  “Fuck your hypothesis!” the major barked, then paused and added calmly, “That’s an exclamation, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s good, Mac. Because I’m always gettin’ that one mixed up, too.”

  Now it was MacCready who looked annoyed. “Is there anything else, Major?”

  “Yeah.” Hendry stared into MacCready’s eyes. “It’s good to have you back.”

  The zoologist transitioned from annoyed to embarrassed.

  The sentiment hung awkwardly in the silence that followed. Hendry straightened his back and cleared his throat. “Just be sure to leave the mission brief on the plane when you jump, and don’t get killed down there. That’s an order.”

  MacCready snapped off a perfect salute. “Yes, sir.”

  Sure thing, the zoologist told himself.

  Japs.

  Xavante.

  And Bob Thorne.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Activity had slowed down as the heat of midday descended upon Waller Field, but the steady pounding of a sledgehammer shaping metal continued apace. A shirtless black teen stopped hammering and looked up as MacCready and Juliano passed by. Slick with sweat, the kid had been banging indentations onto the bottom of an empty fifty-five-gallon fuel drum. Now he had stopped in mid-swing. MacCready was puzzled, but as he passed, they exchanged nods.

  “What’s that all about, Corporal?” he asked Juliano.

  “Right up your alley, Captain MacCready. Guy’s name is Sparrow.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s a bird, sir.”

  “Thanks, Corporal. I’ve seen them. But why’s he banging on that can?”

  “Sir, Sparrow’s a kind of musician—calls himself a calypso man.”

  MacCready had a flash of recognition.

  “’Bout a year ago, some of these local guys started scroungin’ oil drums. Only when they got done with ’em, they weren’t oil drums no more.”

  “Pan drums, right?”

  “You got it, sir. Pan drums. Steel drums.�
�

  As they moved off, there was one more sharp bang—followed by a beautiful, repeated tone. MacCready stopped and turned. Juliano continued walking. The pan tuner was striking the heat-tempered steel with a wooden mallet and the ringing, clanging rhythm was like nothing he’d ever heard before.

  Without looking up, the kid seemed to sense the presence of an audience and began to sing.

  This war with England and Germany

  Going to mean more starvation and misery

  But I going plant provision and fix me affairs

  And the white people could fight for a thousand years

  As he finished, Sparrow turned toward MacCready and smiled broadly. MacCready nodded and gave the teen the “A-okay” signal. He was about to stop and exchange pleasantries but before he could the corporal began gesturing frantically toward the supply shack.

  “We got to get you going, sir.”

  MacCready gave Sparrow a last wave before catching up with Juliano. “Nice job if you can get it, Corporal.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Turning the Army’s junk into music.”

  “It ain’t bad, sir,” Juliano replied as they entered the shack. “It ain’t bad.”

  Twenty minutes later, the zoologist had finished drawing his field equipment. As he pulled hard on the canvas straps of his jump pack, he thought about a line in Sparrow’s song.

  “Fighting for a thousand years. Let’s hope not,” he said, turning as Juliano entered from a back room. The corporal was carrying something and his smile was as broad as the musician’s had been.

  As MacCready watched, Juliano unwrapped a leather pouch that smelled of gun oil, from which he withdrew a strange-looking weapon.

  “Sir, you are gonna love this. It’s a PPSh-41,” he explained. “Two pounds lighter than a Thompson.”

  “A Russian grease gun. Now Corporal, why would I want—”

  “It’s got a drum mag that holds seventy-three rounds,” Juliano continued, ignoring the interruption. “Accurate to about a hundred yards. And here’s the kicker, sir. She’ll give you nine hundred rounds a minute with almost no recoil.” He scanned the room, then lowered his voice. “It fell off a tanker, if you know what I mean?”