“Just so,” Mengele said. “So there’s only one thing left before we finish with you, before I step on you like an insect. Where is von Schiffen?”
“Von Who?” Caine asked. He was genuinely astonished.
“How tiresome,” Mengele remarked. “And our discussion was going so well,” he sighed. “Still, I’ll give you one more chance. Perhaps your position isn’t entirely clear. You are going to die. It’s up to you whether we do it quickly, or whether you die a few days from now, screaming in agony, begging for me to kill you. So I’ll ask you once again, where is von Schiffen?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Mengele shrugged. This agent was a dead man in any case. It didn’t matter what he told him. Besides, the man clearly had Aryan blood in him. Perhaps he could be reasoned with.
“Von Schiffen is the Starfish, didn’t you know? Once he learns that you failed, he will send others. I have to eliminate him before he gets me. Have you forgotten what I said before? I want to live. Surely every human being has a right to fight for his survival. Now, where is von Schiffen?”
Caine took a deep breath, returning Mengele’s cold gaze with his own ruthless stare. It was time to show and tell—only he didn’t have the foggiest idea who von Schiffen was, and even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. The only consolation he would have as he died was that Mengele would still be worrying about this von Schiffen character. It wasn’t much, he reflected. But still, men have died for less.
“Whatever gave you the idea that you’re a human being?” Caine said carefully.
Mengele smiled and Came knew he had been right. It was not a human smile. He had to hang on to one thought now, only one. If he ever got free again, even for a second, he would kill Mengele as mercilessly as he would a plague-carrying rat.
“That was a very foolish thing to say. You see, here in the jungle one has no need of elaborate torture apparatus. The jungle itself provides all the discomfort necessary to persuade you to do anything I say. Take him to the Anthill,” Mengele ordered.
Rolf placed the muzzle of the Winchester against Caine’s back as Helga began to carefully untie his feet, squatting between his legs like a giant toad. It was useless to hope, Caine realized. He could barely move.
“I don’t think I’m going to like the Anthill,” Caine said. He really didn’t think he was going to like it at all.
“Nein, I’m sure you won’t,” Mengele said, and patted Caine’s hair paternally with the same comforting air of a doctor prescribing foul-tasting medicine for the patient’s own good that he used as a bedside manner with the Indians.
“We built a tin shed over an anthill,” Mengele said conversationally. “Of course, the shed is incredibly hot and uncomfortable, like an oven in the sun. But that is nothing. You see, my friend, this is the Amazona and these are fire ants. Any one of them is from two to five centimeters long and can give you a bite far more painful than any beesting. You will be bitten thousands and thousands of times. They never stop.
“You can scream all you like. There’s no one to hear you except the ants and the Indians. And they won’t mind or help you, I assure you. Usually after two or three hours on the Anthill, even a strong man goes completely and permanently insane. I may decide to keep you there for days. It’s up to you.” Mengele smiled and affectionately pinched Caine’s cheek. “Now get him out of here. He has taken up too much of my time already,” Mengele snapped to Rolf and Helga.
They forced Caine into a squatting duck walk, his hands and torso still tied to the chair. Rolf prodded him with the Winchester toward the door, Helga never taking her eyes off him. Now he knew how a cripple felt, he thought as he paused near the door, throwing a last glance back at Mengele, who smiled.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Foster,” Mengele said.
“Heil Hitler, you creep,” Caine retorted with a bravado he was far from feeling, as Rolf kicked him and he fell heavily to the ground. Rolf kicked Caine to his feet and prodded him across the compound in his awkward squat, while the Indians watched his progress with silent, open stares.
A shadow crossed his face for a second and he glanced up at the blinding bluish-white glare of the tropic sun until he could make out the black speck of a large bird in the blue immensity of the sky. For a moment he wondered where Inger was. Then Rolf prodded him again with the gun and they resumed their slow pilgrimage across the compound to the small corrugated metal hut that stood at the outskirts of the institute on the leafy fringe of the jungle. All the way across, Caine had only a single thought in his mind: kill Mengele.
Helga unlocked the door to the shed and the heat from the dark interior almost knocked them down. It was as blistering as a sauna. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Caine could make out the anthill, a low sand-colored mound swarming with scurrying dark rust-brown insects about half the size of his little finger. A few Yagua Indians had come up to the door of the shed to watch what was going on. As the light from the doorway invaded the hut, the ants ran about in turmoil and Caine felt his flesh crawl. He had that same feeling of unreality as in a nightmare—that feeling of helplessness as the worst you can imagine is happening and you can’t do a thing to stop it.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered. With a curse Rolf shoved him into the shed and kicked his legs from under him. Caine fell heavily onto the anthill, landing on his side. The mound seemed to boil with a frenzy as the excited insects milled and ran about in confusion.
Rolf and Helga quickly tied the chair arms with hemp line to rusty hooks on opposite sides of the shed, slapping at the insects on their clothes as they worked. Then they hastily retreated to the door to watch. Helga took a spray can from her dress pocket and she and Rolf sprayed each other, while the Indians began to giggle at the strange antics of the white people.
Caine felt the first bite almost immediately on his calf and he screamed desperately. It was like being stabbed by a white-hot knife. His body began to twitch uncontrollably as tears rolled out of his eyes. There was another bite on his arm and another on his cheek and he screamed again. With horror he realized that he had never really known pain before. Not like this. His body thrashed spasmodically and he screamed again and again as thousands of insects swarmed over him, running and biting. It was like touching fire, like being burnt alive, each bite raising a bright red welt on his skin.
His screams echoed in the dark, stifling shed. His skin was crawling with maddened ants, and they were biting his thighs, back, and stomach. He felt his mind shrivel like burning paper as his body seemed to explode with agony. “Help me,” he begged. “Help me!”
For one horrible moment he opened his eyes and saw the Indians in the doorway. They were laughing and slapping each other on the back, almost falling down with laughter, as though they were watching a hilarious slapstick comedy. Rolf and Helga smiled grimly at each other as they regarded Caine, his body almost black with a moving surface of insects. He screamed desperately as an ant bit his eyelid. Then the doorway went dark as Helga slammed the door shut and locked it. Caine was alone in the crawling darkness.
The pain seemed to get worse and worse, his body quivering with hundreds of burning, stabbing wounds. In desperation he tried a Zen mind discipline, attempting to concentrate on each bite, to experience it into disappearing—but it was impossible. His screaming nerves were feeding in too much pain from too many points and the agony was unbearable.
He could feel his skin crackling and sizzling like meat on a grill, as the pain grew and grew and there was nothing left of him, no part of him that wasn’t pain. The frenzied ants crawled under his clothes and stampeded into every crevice of his body. They swarmed through his hair, into his ears and nostrils, across his screwed-tight eyelids, and into his mouth. His skin and clothes were black with the rustling, scorching mass of them, piercing him again and again with sharp, stinging jaws. He felt his mind going as the top of his head seemed to explode. Please stop, someone was whimpering over and over and he didn’t even know it was him. And some part of
him broke and he lay there quivering like jelly, his tears and sweat soaking into the ground and everything was darkness and pain and crawling terror.
He was in hell, a noisy, burning hell filled with laughing, tormenting demons who devoured his living, screaming flesh with the mindless savagery of machines. He was in a black, fiery tunnel, the darkness growing to engulf him, and even as he welcomed it, the bliss of nothingness, of death, he knew that the world was a horror, a place of madness. And he became one with the insects devouring him and as the horror carried him to the crawling, cruel insect that he finally knew himself to be, a single thought filled his tiny insect brain, black with hate: kill Mengele. Kill Mengele. Kill Mengele.
CHAPTER 14
The water was dark and steaming, boiling with the heat and grotesque alien shapes. A school of piranha were tearing at his flesh in a feeding frenzy. The salt taste of the water was the taste of blood, and like the fish, he was feeding on his own bleeding flesh. The dark shape of a shark, blacker than the darkness, ripped away his groin and he could almost see the bloody remnants of his manhood dangling from the gaping maw of the shark’s saw-toothed jaws.
“Is there no redemption, then?” the shark asked him as it gulped and swallowed his flesh.
“No, there is no redemption,” he heard his dead, grinning skull say. His bones, picked clean by the piranha, began to rise in the current.
His skeleton rose slowly as the bubbles, like the time he had gone for his scuba certification dive near Anaconda Island, his instructor holding his chin up as they ascended. He had removed all his gear and left it on the ocean floor and they swam up together, forty feet toward the surface, exhaling all the way until he couldn’t exhale anymore and his chest began to burn for air. And still they rose, the water growing lighter and lighter as they neared the brightness that was the surface. Then it was brighter, and then it was dark again.
He opened his burning eyes, shimmering with fever. It was dusk. A giant red sun filled the jungle with fiery light, the edges of the leaves glowing as though they were burning. He could hear the chirping of the cicadas and the monotonous croaking of the frogs. From somewhere came the sweet, acrid scent of insect spray and he could feel the fish still nibbling at his groin.
His body radiated heat like a star and simply to breathe was agony. Descartes was wrong, he thought. I feel pain, therefore I am. And then he glanced down and saw his arms, still securely bound to the arms of the chair. His skin was mottled with red welts that seemed to cover his body. He saw the top of Inger’s head between his knees, her metal-bright hair glowing like an ember in the dying red light. She was sucking his cock. Madness, he thought. The universe is a mad dream.
He sat lifelessly bound to the upright chair, like the corpse of an African tribal chief. Inger had obviously dragged him to the doorway of the shed, where she had sprayed him and the area around the door with insect spray. He watched her with indifference as she moved her head, sliding his penis in and out of her mouth. He felt nothing but the pain and a mild sense of amazement that his penis could even get hard, because his body no longer seemed to belong to him. He stared at his bound hands, at the somehow reptilian network of crevices that covered his knuckles, spotted with welts from the ants, and saw for the first time what a prehensile claw his hand truly was. He willed his finger to move and was surprised when it did. It seemed to be the dead claw of some extinct animal, with a life of its own. Almost as an afterthought, he realized, with a surge of pain, that he was still alive.
Inger stopped sucking for a moment to look up at him, her mouth drooling like a beast, her eyes glowing like rubies in the fiery sunset and he knew that the fire in her eyes was madness.
“I wanted to have this one more time before they killed you,” she said, baring her teeth savagely.
As she bowed her head again to his groin, his leg lashed out, his shin catching her under the chin. He heard her teeth click as she tumbled to the ground. He rocked forward in the chair and fell on her stomach with his knees, knocking the breath from her. It had all happened without any thought; his actions had become totally instinctual. Every movement was agony for him, but that didn’t matter because he had only a single raging thought: kill Mengele.
He somehow managed to stagger to his feet as she lay there groaning and trying to get up. He planted his foot across her neck, pinning her to the ground and choking her. She struggled feebly against his weight, but Caine was implacable.
“Untie my hands or I’ll kill you,” he threatened, his eyes burning like the flames of hell itself.
“No,” she gasped and struggled desperately, but he leaned even harder, as though he wanted to stamp her out of existence.
“Untie my hands, you fucking animal,” he rasped.
“Yes, master. Oh, yes, master,” she managed to gasp and her hands fumbled at the knots around his wrist.
Caine squatted down, his knees on her chest, while she feverishly tore at the knots with her nails. The moment he felt the rope loosen, he freed his hand and grabbed her throat. He ordered her to untie the other hand and the seconds passed like hours till the moment he felt the knot give and he was free.
With a wide cruel sweep he slapped her face with every particle of strength in him, breaking her jaw. Then he grabbed her hair and hauled her into the chair. He gripped her hair tightly, as though he wanted to tear it out by the roots. Her eyes were wide with pain and horror as she stared up at him. And there was something else in them. It was beyond submission. It was, almost, gratitude. Because Mengele wasn’t her true love. Or the whip smacking against the leather boot. It was death she loved. He saw that now. Death and his handmaiden, pain. That was why she wanted and obeyed Caine, even as she trembled at the sight of him. With his hellish eyes and bloody, mottled skin he looked like nothing human.
“Where’s Mengele?” he rasped.
She tried to speak, but only unintelligible grunts came out of her broken jaw. He gripped her hair even tighter and twisted her head.
“If you can’t talk, point, you cunt,” he growled in her ear.
Her trembling hand pointed at the laboratory, where a single light was burning in Mengele’s office. She clutched at his grimy shirt as he began to pull away and shook her head desperately, her shiny eyes imploring him to stay. He shook her off and grimly tied her to the chair, gagging her mouth with a strip of her shirt.
He dragged her bound and moaning body back into the metal shed and closed the door. Then he began running toward the laboratory, his black figure almost invisible in the shadows of evening. Every step was agony, his brain burning with the high fever from the ant bites, but Caine was beyond mere pain. He was the hunter, closing on his prey.
As he approached the laboratory, he could hear the lilting sound of a violin playing the “Blue Danube” waltz. A mosquito bit his neck and he could have laughed because he scarcely felt it. He stopped to catch his breath in the shadow of the laboratory, then cautiously tiptoed to the lighted window and carefully peered inside through the screen. Mengele was standing near the desk, his eyes closed, playing his violin for Guenther and Helga, who were seated side by side on folding chairs, their faces rapt with the sentimentality of the music. Caine began to tiptoe around the building toward the front door. He had no plan, only the single consuming thought: kill Mengele.
He crept as silently as a shadow up on the porch and opened the screen door. The sound of the music was stronger now and it reminded him of Wasserman’s story, about how Mengele had ordered the inmate orchestra to play Strauss waltzes as the Jews were led to the gas chambers. His mind barely had time to register the fact that the sound of his footsteps was covered by the music before he was moving quickly through the doorway into the office.
Mengele saw him first and froze, his face a mask of shock and horror. Caine’s blood-splotched face, glittering green eyes, and savage, implacable movement gave him the appearance of a specter from hell. He moved irresistibly toward Mengele, who began to back away in terror against the des
k. Caine’s first move was a spinning round kick that caught Guenther in the back, knocking him to the floor.
Helga sprang for a table against the wall and grabbed a scalpel, whirling to face Caine. As he moved toward her, she slashed at his face with the blade. Automatically Caine went into one of the sequences Koenig had rehearsed them in, over and over, till they could do it in their sleep. He blocked the slash with his left forearm and kicked savagely at Helga’s midsection, staggering her against the table. She tried to block the right hand chop he aimed at her temple, leaving her left side open, and he finished her with a lightning left uppercut to the ribs. He felt the rib crack under the rubbery layer of fat and whirled to face Mengele as she sank to the floor, but by that time Guenther had a massive forearm locked around Cain’s neck in a choke hold from behind. Caine immediately unlocked his knees and sank down, grabbing Guenther’s forearm with both his hands. Then he bent forward at the waist with a sudden jerk, sending Guenther flying over his head and toward the wall. Guenther’s head cracked against the edge of the table and he collapsed in a heap on the floor, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. His neck was broken.
Mengele was fumbling at a desk drawer, probably for a gun, but before he could grab it, Caine had lunged across the desk, his fist smashing against Mengele’s shoulder and knocking him against the wall. Mengele cowered against the wall as Caine stalked him, their eyes locked on one another.
“Nein, bitte,” Mengele whimpered. “I can make you a rich man, a million—” and threw a clumsy right hook at Caine’s head.
Caine sidestepped the punch, blocking it with his forearm, and put all his rage into a savage right hook to the ribs that came from his toes. Mengele’s ribs snapped like dry twigs and he sprawled across the desk, howling in pain and kicking desperately out at Caine. A wild lucky kick hit Caine’s midsection, knocking him back, and Mengele scrambled to his feet, his hand holding his ribs. Caine could hear the sounds of movement and voices from outside. He was running out of time. Rolf and the Indians would be on him at any moment. He remembered what Koenig had taught him, that you only use your body as a last resort. “No matter where you are, there is always a weapon at hand. A rock, sand, a bottle, anything will do,” Koenig had said.
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