Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  “Tanker must have been headed north,” MacCready said, noting the incongruent white and black markings on the sling—obviously meant for snow-country camouflage.

  “Just rub some mud on that sling, sir,” Juliano replied. “You’ll find plenty of it where you’re going.”

  MacCready, who would rather have been picking out a pan drum, was suddenly interested. He flashed back to a Ford assembly line he’d seen near Detroit and remembered reading somewhere that the PPSh was one of the first examples of mass-production techniques applied to automatic weapons.

  MacCready pointed to a small switch in front of the trigger. “What’s with the lever?”

  “Push it forward, it’ll fire a burst; pull it back, single rounds.”

  Unexpectedly, the corporal flipped the gun around and gripped the muzzle. He took an imaginary cut with the weapon, then another, as if he were swinging a baseball bat. “Sir, you run out of ammo—you can always use this thing as a club. It’s solid.”

  Juliano held the gun out stock first. “All in all, sir, a top-shelf weapon.”

  MacCready took the machine gun and hefted it. “I don’t know. Seems like a load to drag around.” He handed it back to Juliano.

  “Captain, Major Hendry wants you to carry something besides a sidearm. He was quite insistent. I figured you might find the PPSh kind of interesting.”

  MacCready had to admit—it was kind of interesting. “And what happens when it gets dirty or wet?”

  Juliano responded by demonstrating a record-time field strip that reduced the gun to a layout of parts. After he finished, he picked up the barrel and peered into one end, holding the other up to the light. “Sir, you could shit down this thing and it would still fire.”

  “I’ll take your word on that one,” MacCready replied quickly.

  Satisfied that everything was in order, the corporal began to reassemble the gun. The zoologist’s eyes never left Juliano’s hands. “Just think, Corporal: Before the war, we used to worry about what type of tent we wanted to hump into the field. Now it’s which machine gun.”

  He paused, waiting for some response from Juliano. He got none, so he responded to himself, “That’s not what I’d consider progress.”

  The corporal examined each part, looking for defects and dirt. “I guess you’re right about that, Captain . . . But you’re not going to scare too many bad guys swinging a tent pole—now are you, sir?”

  Once again, MacCready found himself agreeing with the man, while another part of his brain screamed, This cannot be good!

  The C-47 had been idling on the runway for ten minutes by the time MacCready returned Juliano’s salute, hauled his gear up a portable ramp, and stepped into the twin-engine transport. There were two rows of folding seats that ran down the length of the cabin, room for twenty-eight paratroopers and their gear. But the plane seemed to be empty. He took a seat near the tail.

  MacCready watched Juliano’s jeep pulling away from the plane and he winced as the transmission was submitted to another round of “corporal punishment.” But soon the slam of metal on metal was lost in the roar of twenty-eight cylinders of supercharged Pratt & Whitney.

  MacCready’s departure from Waller Field was less eventful than his arrival. Once the plane had leveled off, a flight-suited figure ducked out of the radioman’s compartment. Mac was immediately reminded of a circus clown emerging from an absurdly tiny car. He appeared to be at least six and a half feet tall, all arms and legs, but he could not have weighed more than 160 pounds. The man made his way aft, saluted, and spoke over the engine noise. “Afternoon, sir. I’m Richards. Tex Richards.”

  MacCready returned the salute. “MacCready . . . R. J. MacCready.”

  “We know, Captain,” Richards said, and MacCready caught a hint of annoyance in the man’s drawl. “Y’all make yourself at home. S’gonna be a long ride—twenty hours, not counting a fuel stop. There’s a cot back here. Toilet, too. And some sandwiches.”

  MacCready nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Just give a yell if ya need anything, sir,” Richards called back over his shoulder, before smoothly folding himself back into the tiny, equipment-filled space.

  MacCready suppressed an urge to see what the man looked like, jammed into his cubbyhole. Instead he double-checked that his gear was securely stowed in the starboard baggage compartment, settled into his aft window seat, and fastened the seat belt.

  Thirty minutes later, the Skytrain was cruising west-southwest at five thousand feet.

  He peered out a small rectangular window, and as if on cue, the green forests of Venezuela disappeared under dense, unbroken cloud cover that stretched to the horizon.

  Bob Thorne—alive.

  MacCready turned forward and let out a long breath. What if he’s changed? What if he’s pulled some kind of Kurtz act? He had often wondered what czarist demons had driven a Ukrainian named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to write about the malarial backwaters of Africa. Very strange . . .

  MacCready’s head slowly ratcheted down toward his chest.

  very . . . st . . .

  Sometime later, the C-47 hit turbulence and MacCready came awake for a few seconds. He’d been dreaming about the summers of his childhood on Long Island’s South Shore. It was a time filled with sun-drenched beaches and books and baseball. And never any talk of Japs or Nazis.

  Jesus. Seems like a thousand centuries ago.

  As the drone of the engines faded once again, R. J. MacCready had a final thought before drifting back into sleep.

  Nazis. How on earth did people turn into Nazis?

  For most people, after the age of sixteen, the perception of time’s passage seemed to speed up. Yet for MacCready, the past twelve months were so crowded with new and unprecedented events that it felt to him as if twelve years had passed—maybe twenty. He sometimes wondered if his mind itself, and not just his perception of time, had started to become unhinged.

  Nazis, how on earth did people turn into Nazis?

  Whenever this question intruded upon him—whether sleeping or awake—the pictures in his head shifted easily backward in time, to childhood summers on rural Long Island. Mac’s two cousins were as innocent as any other children then, and brighter than most. Together with Mac, they were the three stellar children on an Irish-German family tree, each seemingly destined to go far in whatever fields they chose.

  Recently, though, it seemed that every time he slept, his wonderful childhood memories morphed into an ever-worsening series of nightmares. His cousins now slithered into his dreams, mutated from boyhood pals into goose-stepping monsters, even as the end of the Nazi parade was within sight. And the face of his little sister flashed brightly, then dissolved to air. With each passing night, it became harder to recall what she looked like.

  And the worst horror of all was the never-ending haunting by the two words MacCready wished no one had ever put together: If only.

  If only I hadn’t been overseas when my family needed me most.

  If only having a son fighting against the Axis had weighed more heavily in Mom’s favor than having nephews who became part of that evil.

  No one would have believed, before it actually happened, that the same American president who had damned the Axis powers as “apostles of racial arrogance” was condoning, along the entire west coast, the forceful relocation of almost anyone with Japanese or Italian ancestors. Along the east coast, Italian-Americans received a special dispensation from such intrusion, after Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s crime family volunteered to protect New York City’s waterfront from Axis saboteurs. However, along that same waterfront, German-Americans were not faring much better than west coast Italians.

  MacCready, who was German on his mother’s side, had been on an assignment with some indigenous allies in the Solomons. And as he came within a gnat’s breath of losing a leg to a poison-tipped lance, thousands of miles away, rogue elements of the government back home brought unspeakable calamity into the MacCready household.
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br />   Ostensibly in the name of “protecting children,” some newly empowered faction of New York’s wartime bureaucracy decreed that any American child adopted into the family of a German-American should be returned to its “natural” family. Mac learned that it mattered not at all that his father was an American veteran who had recently suffocated from the long-term effects of mustard gas—thanks to the Germans he’d fought in World War I. Nor did it matter that his mother had been born and raised on Long Island. During what turned out to be more of a condemnation than a hearing, the court sat idle while Amelia MacCready was referred to as “the Führer.” Soon after, Mac’s thirteen-year-old adopted sister, Brigitte, was removed from their loving home and forced back into the snake pit from which she had been rescued a decade earlier—half-starved, with the fingers of one hand broken. This time, the girl did not survive. Mac’s mother soon followed her down, slowly and agonizingly; and since then, the “if onlys” gnawed at him, day and night.

  If only I’d heard of this atrocity in time to return home. To try to stop them from taking Brigitte. To call on favors from the people I knew in high places. To remind Mom she still had something to live for.

  Instead, Mac lived now with rage and regret, guilt and solitude. For him there seemed nothing left to think about except the death of the innocent, the death of a mother and child.

  If only the telegram had found me sooner.

  If only Mom had been just a little bit stronger.

  In the end, they had given Mom shock therapy. “The most effective treatment for nervous breakdowns and schizophrenia,” the doctors had said, though none of them could agree on a diagnosis.

  “Experimental quackery!” MacCready called it, after he first read about it in a telegram from home, a month after it had been sent.

  If only I’d been there to stop it.

  If only.

  In Mac’s current dream, his mother’s face screamed and screamed until it shifted into something grotesque and strange—which revealed itself to be a hideous hand puppet pushing toward him, snapping and biting, at the end of his little sister’s arm.

  Brigitte, Mom—I’m sorry. So sorry!

  MacCready awoke on the verge of a shout, willed it to stay inside, then looked around the cabin. However uneasy his dreams, he had not been loud enough to stir Richards from his compartment. It was a very small blessing, but he’d take it.

  He looked out the tiny window for a few seconds, then dozed off to face the next round of nightmares. On the world below, an immense carpet of trees spread from horizon to horizon.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Hidden

  I ran to the rock to hide my face,

  But the rock cried out, “No hiding place!

  “No hiding place down here!”

  —“NO HIDING PLACE DOWN HERE” (AFRICAN-AMERICAN SPIRITUAL)

  Portão do Inferno, Central Brazil

  January 19, 1944

  In the forests of the night, nothing existed except life and death in nature’s extinction lottery.

  Nothing more.

  And nothing less.

  A half-billion years of scurrying monstrosities—of entire empires hidden underfoot—had led, here and there, to thoughtless existence. The mind of a tarantula was as close to nothing as anything could be and still be something. The spider, poised to strike at a cricket, was no more thoughtful than a bundle of mechanized neurological responses, no more aware of itself than the digi-comp machines that the Allies were using to break Axis codes. The arachnid had come this far, and not a step closer to sentience. But this was enough. Her kind had been walking across the planet five hundred million years before the first human footprints entered the fossil record; and they would still be here five hundred million years after the pyramids had turned to dust.

  Down on the forest floor, even when something enormous moved suddenly into the spider’s field of vision, there was only an instantaneous summoning of limbs and fangs to a defensive posture. The intruder descended with astonishing rapidity, but there was nothing in the predator-turned-prey that could have been called either astonishment or horror.

  For the coati, however, there was something that might have been called a sense of self. He was a leaner, sleeker rendition of the American raccoon, and although he’d lived these past three years alone, he felt nothing like regret. An arthritic hip had begun to slow him down, but even the fastest responses of a spider were all too predictable. The coati’s meal reared up on four hind limbs, projected its fangs, and waved its forearms menacingly.

  In five ticks of a stopwatch, confrontation flared and died. Feinting with his right paw, the coati distracted the spider just long enough to blindside it with a crushing blow from the left. To the coati, tarantulas were a rare and satisfying delicacy—as fine in texture as the yolk of a freshly broken egg.

  In the forest surrounding the little clearing, something watched, and waited.

  The coati was more focused than usual on his meal, and for this reason more careless than usual. Ordinarily, he might have felt a faint vibration, might have sensed that in the surrounding tangle of vines and twigs, crickets had stopped chirping and even the delicate lacewings no longer stirred. In the trees only the tiniest creatures—springtails and mites, mostly—registered any change at all, in their unseen empires of bark and leaf. Had they been sentient beings, able to communicate, they would have sounded the alarm. But they too were creatures of mechanized instinct. So instinct waited, silent and deep in the night, waited for the shadows to shift, and to move away.

  Unmindful of shadows, the coati was finishing its meal when there came a new sound—a whoosh of air, followed by the crack of bushes or brambles being snapped by a pair of large animals approaching. They moved with all the grace of a tree fall—large enough, the coati sensed, not to care about moving so clumsily and attracting attention. The coati stood up on his hind legs, facing the sound, trying to assess the danger. He was unfamiliar with these animals. Reckless and lumbering, they emitted an alternating sequence of calls, birdlike yet at the same time quite unlike a bird. The sounds brought a surge of fear and adrenaline, and the coati lost all sensation of pain in his arthritic hindquarters. Seemingly without effort, his legs springboarded him away from the threat, and from the last few morsels of a favorite meal.

  Having closed within striking distance, the shadows in the trees waited, silent. They had been tracking the old coati for almost an hour. The game, and it was a game in every sense of the word, was to get as close to the creature as possible without alarming it. But the unexpected and strange new sounds had put an end to all of that.

  Now they turned their attention to a new set of calls.

  The two soldiers had set off on patrol from Nostromo Base in daylight; but deep within the river valley, the sun’s rays never quite burned through the ever-present blanket of mist. Now they had lost the light altogether. It had taken the better part of fifteen hours to find the parachute, and now the Germans were staring up through a drizzle of rain at a tangle of white cloth. The fabric was hung up on a tree limb about ten meters off the ground. They could just make out the nose-cone-mounted camera housing and its harness, dangling alongside the rest of the chute.

  “I can’t climb,” one of the men said, throwing up his hands. “My back is shot.”

  “That’s just great,” his colleague mumbled. Private Wilhelm Becker was already squinting up into the rain, searching for the lowest branch that might support his weight. “Well, you’ll need to give me a boost, bad back or not.”

  Private Karl Fuchs let out a loud sigh, then stomped over to the tree trunk. Leaning against it for support, he clasped his fingers together. “Come on, then,” he said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

  Becker used Fuchs’s boost to get a grip on a horizontal branch only a little higher up than he was tall. Deftly, he swung his legs upward, twisting his body around and over the limb. He sat for a few moments, catching his breath and shaking his head. The incessant heat and humid
ity seemed to turn even the simplest of physical tasks into a sweat-drenched struggle.

  “You taking a break already?” Fuchs asked.

  Becker responded by standing up. Holding on to the vertical trunk with one hand, he feigned pulling down his fly with the other. “Open wide, Karl,” he called down, but the other man ignored him.

  Carefully, Private Becker made his way up a ladder of branches.

  On the ground, Fuchs squinted into the forest. Feeling queasy, he reached into his tunic, extracted a cigarette, then lit it. He remembered his first impression of the place—with its strange, never-lifting cover of fog. He had been standing on Nostromo’s deck after the seemingly interminable submarine voyage.

  His first thought had been that it was a mist that only Poe could love, and he soon discovered that he wasn’t alone in this regard.

  “If this is what London is like,” his friend Auerbach had whispered, “then that fat fuck Churchill can keep it.”

  No, this was not London. Nor was it anything like what he had expected.

  Fuchs had convinced himself that their assignment to the enormous Japanese submarine was the start of a fantastic Jules Verne voyage. Soon after their brief stopover in Peenemünde, rumors began to circulate about a secret base in the tropics, which served only to stoke his imagination. There would be an idyllic lagoon, ringed with white sand and palm trees. There would be butterflies as well, swirls of metallic blues and reds against a cloudless sky. And there would be no war.

  But as they emerged from the humid belly of the Nostromo, Fuchs saw the other men, officers and those they commanded, standing motionless and silent. Twenty meters away, and appearing to surround the boat on all sides, loomed the forest. Occasional breaks in the fog revealed dense stands of trees, and Fuchs’s image of butterflies dissolved into a vision of dark-hooded sentinels, their dead skeletal branches reaching out through the mist, crowding in on what had suddenly become a tiny patch of deck.

  Fuchs thought it couldn’t get any worse than the bad air and cramped quarters of the submarine. By then, of course, their sister boat had run aground. To say that anything felt more confining than the inside of the Nostromo was saying a lot, especially after the double jam-up of crew spaces they’d suffered through after the grounding of Demeter. But somehow, this fog-cloaked wilderness was even more claustrophobic, with the rotten egg scent of swamp gas (methane, he was informed) adding to the displeasure.