Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  “So what’s your take on all this?”

  “No soap, Mac. But for what it is worth—and that has always been a lot—Yanni says these locals are on the right track.”

  “Not for nothing, Bob, but I think Yanni’s on the right track, too.”

  “How so?”

  MacCready described his “stroll” through the dead village, and the condition of the bodies he’d seen there. He left out the part about the shriek that had driven him away in a near panic, keeping that to himself for no reason that he could consciously explain.

  “Sounds like we could be looking at the same killers,” Mac said. After pausing for a moment, he added, “The day isn’t getting any younger. Let’s go take a look at these dead animals.”

  Thorne held his unlit cigarette, unable to hide his disappointment. “Now personally, I am thinking more along the lines of munchin’ mangoes and weightin’ down those hammocks over there—you know, so they do not fly off their hooks and all. But if you would prefer to look at dead animals . . .”

  MacCready nodded.

  Bob Thorne grimaced.

  After breakfast, Thorne led his friend across town. MacCready kept alert for a reappearance of his welcoming party, but except for a few dismal-looking dogs, the streets were nearly deserted.

  “Probably inside, sharpenin’ their machetes,” Thorne mentioned, cheerfully.

  “Swell,” MacCready mumbled.

  Thorne stopped in front of a rough-hewn stall, connected to a simple wooden home that appeared to have been recently abandoned. The buzzing of flies reached the men just before the sour smell of spoiling meat.

  “This happened last night?” MacCready asked.

  Thorne nodded, holding his nose. “It is the main reason you got such a warm reception this morning.”

  Mac swatted at the air as he stepped through the doorway of the stall. “Well, this is getting good already,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Flies. I am really starting to hate flies.”

  “Well, we are lousy with flies—mangoes we got, too—but somebody wanted to see dead animals.”

  Before MacCready could protest, Thorne waved him off. “Yeah, I know, I know . . . the mission. Although I see no connection between strange thunder and this shit.”

  Thorne shook his head, still holding his nose, before following his friend into the stable.

  A blackened crust of slowly drying and coagulating blood covered the dirt floor. In the center of the gore lay a dead donkey, on its side, mouth open. As MacCready approached, a cloud of flies emerged from the gaping mouth.

  Even the zoologist had to turn away, and as he did he saw the body of a dog—a big one—something like a German shepherd. Like the donkey, its eyes were wide open, the white scleras barely visible behind a black film. Both animals were cemented to the ground by what appeared to be buckets of blood. And what hadn’t spilled on the floor had been sprayed across the nearby walls.

  “Do you smell that?” MacCready said.

  “Of course I smell that. And I am less than envious of the guy who cleans up this horror show,” Thorne said.

  “No, Bob . . . something else. I’m smelling something more . . . flowery.”

  “Flowery? I am smelling something more . . . shitty.”

  Mac ignored his friend, instead kneeling to examine the dirt at the edge of a tarry-looking blood pool. “These scratches—there’s something very odd here.”

  “Now that is a relief, Mac, because I am just thinking about how normal all of this is.”

  “Look at these,” the zoologist said, pointing at a spot on the floor. “They’re animal prints—very strange animal prints.”

  Thorne squinted, peering at the seemingly random scratches in the dirt floor. Mac continued. “See how they’re squared off perpendicular to the puddle. It’s almost like—”

  “—like animals gatherin’ round a watering hole,” Thorne finished for him.

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  “But there is no animal that feeds like this, correct?”

  “Right. Except this one does—and there’s more than one of them.”

  Then MacCready did something that even his friend didn’t expect. He waded into the dark paste and squatted down next to the dead donkey. “A blunt probe would be helpful,” he said, with an actual hint of hope in his voice.

  “Yeah, well, unfortunately, my dissection kit was traded some time ago . . . for some, ah . . . research material,” Thorne said.

  “Then get me something pointy. I need to get a better look at this.”

  After leaving the stall for about thirty seconds, Thorne returned—proudly holding out the six-inch twig he’d managed to scrounge up. “Ta-da!”

  Mac gave the stick a skeptical glance then took it. Leaning over the donkey’s hindquarters, he prodded its flesh with the wooden point. “Look at this!” he said, probing a craterlike divot on the back of the donkey’s left thigh.

  “That is an awful lot of blood from such a little wound,” Thorne observed. “What coulda—”

  “I almost want to say—” MacCready hesitated, using a thumb and index finger to measure the wound. It was about a half-inch long.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. This bite is all wrong. Too long, too wide, too deep.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I’m not sure, but something initiated massive systemic hemorrhaging.”

  “The bite, maybe?”

  “Yeah, maybe, but that’d be a first.” MacCready stood. Having finished his assessment he stepped out of the gore puddle then turned toward his friend. “Fun way to get your ticket punched, huh?”

  “Chupacabra,” Thorne muttered. Mac threw him a puzzled look before realizing that Thorne had answered his earlier, half-completed question.

  “Yeah, whatever the hell they are. You know, Bob, we could be looking at a new species here. Damn! Maybe a new genus or even a family.”

  Thorne saw that his friend had been jacked into zoology overdrive. “You are right, Mac. This is all very wonderful and exciting. So I’m thinking . . . you wanna buy a farm down here? Because coincidentally, mine is now up for sale.”

  “What, and give up your great new job with the—”

  Just then, a loud rumble—actually more of a prolonged hiss—reached down from the sky. Stepping outside, the friends saw that there were people in the street now—men, women, and children. And they were all looking up.

  “Now that is what I call timing,” Thorne said. “Since this is precisely the thunder we keep hearing.”

  “You got a phone in this town?”

  Thorne answered with a laugh. “Nearest phone or telegraph is in Cuiabá, ’bout fifty miles from here.”

  MacCready followed the track of several pointing fingers and saw a long, thin streamer of smoke, trailing up ten miles, maybe more. At its front end he thought he saw a spark of light. The flare of an engine burn? And then it was gone, leaving nothing but a smoky contrail.

  No mistaking it. A fucking rocket. “Shit,” MacCready whispered under his breath. His mission was still a needle in the haystack, but the haystack had just gotten smaller.

  Thorne shook his head. “So this is the other reason those local guys snapped their caps when you showed up.” The botanist was deadly serious now, gesturing toward the sky. “And five’ll get ya ten your pal Hendry expects you to sniff out those fireworks.”

  MacCready continued to watch the thread of smoke. No bet, he thought.

  CHAPTER 7

  To Hell’s Gate, Demeter

  I will give to anyone his weight in gold who can tell me where to find Eugen Sänger.

  —VASILLI STALIN (JOSEPH STALIN’S SON)

  As a high school freshman, Maurice Voorhees had once written to a relative, “If the devil could teach me how to reach the moon and the planets, I would gladly become his pupil.”

  In the winter of 1942, the devil had come knocking at his door and the twenty-three-year-old propulsi
on engineer pricked his finger and signed on the dotted line without taking pause to read the small print. Like most of history’s great misadventures, the sojourn of Maurice Voorhees, from Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic Coast to Brazil, had begun with tragic blindness, and was fated to end with tragic vision.

  Presently, Voorhees stood with another man at the bottom of a long, long thread of solid rocket booster smoke. The base of the trail had started out horizontal and, though originally hidden, was convecting up through the surface of the Hell’s Gate “fog lake,” as a kilometer-long stain of muddy, scalding mist. The horizontal exhaust trail followed an ancient paved road, recently refurbished and onto which a wood-cased monorail track had been built.

  “Your track won’t take much more of this, Dr. Sänger.”

  The older man waved, as if shooing away a fly. “Once the two ships are launched it won’t much matter what happens to the launch rail, will it?”

  Voorhees knew that Sänger appreciated the strategic significance of his design simplifications. It seemed like the flight director’s prior worries about using the last of the base’s concrete and rebar before his “Silverbirds” could be launched had gone down proportionally with each of Voorhees’s material-saving improvements.

  “Still, I wish we could have launched that last sled with a water-filled, full-scale model,” Sänger lamented, utilizing an annoying and whiny tone that had unfortunately become a trademark.

  “Trust me on this,” Voorhees countered. “A fully weighted mock-up is not worth the extra wear-and-tear on the track—not to mention the risk. I can do all the relevant calculations from the launch results of a ‘naked’ sled.”

  Voorhees gazed up into the decks of mist as if he could peer straight through them. “The only difference, here, is that the sled left the rail sooner and flew a lot higher.”

  He glanced at his stopwatch. “I’m betting it reached thirty kilometers before starting back. Drogue chute will have deployed by now.”

  “Where’s your aiming point for the return impact?” Sänger asked.

  “Right here.”

  “Scheisse! Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Don’t look so concerned, Dr. Sänger. Your gyros are good, but not that good. We’ll never get a direct hit on the aiming point,” Voorhees said. “And besides, it’s a good test of your guidance systems for the reentry vehicles.”

  Not for the first time that day, he found himself grinning at the thought that his logic had prevailed once more. It felt strange to be smiling again; strange to be feeling enthusiastic about anything.

  Sänger had reminded Voorhees on several occasions that two officers literally had to drag him from a bomb crater the morning after the RAF had attacked the rocket facility at Peenemünde. “They found you digging on all fours like a dog,” Sänger added, seeming to relish this portion of the tale if only for the pain he knew it would cause.

  Up until the night of the bombing raid, Voorhees’s thoughts about Demeter would have been amazement over the engineering foresight that had gone into a submarine nearly half as long as the Hindenburg. But the man who used to dream that one day people would look down from the new oceans of space had stepped from the bomb-blasted pit into a vessel in which he was afraid to dream—and, to one degree or another, even ashamed to dream.

  On the long transatlantic voyage, Sänger had arranged for Voorhees to be bunked in a closet of a room that, in accordance with the standard of confined crew spaces aboard submarines, qualified as luxurious officer’s quarters. It was equipped with a pull-down bed, foldout table, and tiny chair. There was no door; only a canvas curtain through which he heard constant activity outside his cabin. Some of the voices were German. Others, though, had spoken Japanese.

  Initially, Voorhees had felt like a prisoner. But no one blocked his way when he went outside in search of the nearest toilet—which looked as if it had been wedged into a maze of copper pipes and multicolored valves almost as an afterthought. He received no orders. No one bothered him. Meals were delivered in silence by a Japanese galley assistant—dried fish and rice, mostly. Although the man smiled and bowed each time he entered the cabin, he never spoke, never tried to communicate.

  Voorhees liked that about the man.

  He barely touched his food.

  He tried to avoid sleep.

  Voorhees had lost track of the days, when he heard a voice calling his name from the doorway. Eugen Sänger did not wait for a reply.

  “We thought you could use some rest,” the unwelcome visitor said. “And in that regard I do hope you are finding the accommodations—”

  “Why am I here?” Voorhees asked. He was lying on his back on the fold-down cot.

  “You have been through much,” Sänger continued. It appeared that he was trying to sound sympathetic, but even in Voorhees’s post-Peenemünde physical and mental state, he could see through the act: The man might just as well have been commenting on the lumps in someone’s oatmeal.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Voorhees said.

  Sänger’s voice was cool and controlled. “You are here, Dr. Voorhees, because I requested that you be here. May I sit down?”

  Once again, the young rocket scientist said nothing. And once again, Sänger did not wait for permission. Instead he unfolded the small chair and sat intimidatingly near to Voorhees’s face.

  “Maurice, I wonder if you are aware that you and von Braun’s friends at Peenemünde were not the only group involved in a major rocketry program for the fatherland.”

  Voorhees continued to stare upward at nothing in particular and, noting this, the older man unfurled a set of drawings and spread them out on what little space was left on the cot.

  Voorhees glanced down at the figures, then sat upright. His first thought was that this must be Sänger’s idea of a joke.

  “There you are,” said Sänger, sounding like someone who had just hooked a prize-winning fish. “Shall I continue?”

  Voorhees said nothing, but sensed the older man reading the answer in his eyes. “Yes, I’ll continue, then,” Sänger said. “As you can see, these craft will be piloted. The best guidance systems our engineers have come up with are too heavy for—”

  “What is it that you want from me, Dr. Sänger?”

  “Maurice, we wanted you here . . . I wanted you here because of your expertise with rocket engine design and control—and because of your ability to redesign at short notice. Your talents have become vital to the success of our mission.”

  “You mean, now that Dr. von Braun is missing?”

  Now Sänger moved uneasily in his chair. “I don’t care where von Braun is. Your idol had become a liability. An increasingly unstable liability.”

  A strange expression passed across Voorhees’s face. At another time, seemingly a lifetime ago, his beloved Lisl, a bright young woman with glasses and a warm smile, would have laughed at the thought of von Braun or any of the rocket men being characterized as anything but unstable.

  “There is something funny, Maurice?”

  “No, I was just thinking, back to—”

  “Peenemünde. Yes. Your attachment to von Braun’s project is . . . admirable. Now, though, you must face the facts. Peenemünde was a dinosaur even before the RAF forced our hand. Now you must deal with the future, not von Braun’s future, Germany’s future!”

  Voorhees shook his head. “Dr. Sänger, Peenemünde wasn’t the dinosaur. It’s our so-called government that will soon be extinct. And you and I, and everyone on this boat . . . just a pile of bleached bones.”

  Sänger sat in silence for a moment. “That’s an interesting hypothesis. Perhaps the Reichsführer would—”

  “But now, what? Let me guess? You want me to help you build your new rocket?”

  “No. That won’t be necessary,” Sänger replied with nonchalance. “You see, we already have a fully functional rocket—two, in fact—sailing with us.”

  Voorhees flashed him a puzzled look and Sänger returned it with
the slightest hint of a smile. “Maurice, I want you to build me a sled.”

  For nearly twenty thousand years before Demeter’s arrival, the hoatzins had been nesting in trees along the banks of the Rio Xingu. The chicken-size birds were ancient survivors who, during their first years of life, possessed a set of claws on their wings, making them uniquely adapted to a riverine lifestyle. At the first sign of danger, nonflying juveniles would dive like a flock of penguins into the water, reemerging once the danger had passed, and using their wing claws to climb back into the trees.

  Because the hoatzins were highly specialized, and therefore not particularly adaptable, they were the first creatures to feel the change when a series of early winter earthquakes and earthquake-generated landslides began to alter the shape and even the course of the Rio Xingu. The quakes were relatively minor, but their impact on the hoatzin colonies was enormous. Trees that had recently overhung the water were now completely submerged, or had been thrust upward with the shoreline and were standing far back from the river’s edge. Hunting parties of flesh-eating monkeys took quick advantage of the birds’ confusion. Fast-moving troops of big-brained primates made deliberately loud approaches from the trees, while others hid in the muddy underbrush, waiting for a rain of disoriented birds, whose familiar escape routes no longer existed. Six weeks after the first earthquake, half a generation of Rio Xingu hoatzins had been eliminated. By the time the Demeter approached Brazil’s Atlantic coast in September 1943, they were extinct along the entire length of the river.

  Although few humans had felt these natural rumblings, the landscape was changing with such increasing frequency that previously navigated and mapped river bottoms were being reshaped into the first drafts of the broad, white-water interrupted passages that would become familiar to future cartographers. Even the unusually intense rains of the previous season could not raise the waters high enough to ensure safe passage—and especially not for a craft over one hundred meters long. And so, inevitably, the river bottom reached up, subtly at first, until at last it snared the Demeter, ever so lightly, some 1,200 kilometers inland.