Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  “We aim for the moon,” von Braun had said, then giving a shrug, “but sometimes we’ll hit London.”

  Voorhees pulled up short, wondering if perhaps he had misunderstood. The two men turned to him as he rounded the corner. Although they said nothing, their expressions told him that he had not misheard or misunderstood anything. Voorhees nodded at them as he passed, wishing he could rewind the last thirty seconds, wishing he could have been a minute late to the meeting rather than a minute early.

  During the last night that he saw either von Braun or Lisl, Voorhees was called to a gathering for the famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch. One of Hitler’s die-hard supporters, Reitsch had arrived at Peenemünde earlier that day “to help with the latest V-1 tests.” Voorhees, having heard that Hitler’s pet aviator once crash-landed a glider into a stadium full of crazed Brazilian soccer fans, expected that the meeting might be interesting. (Now, at Nostromo Base, he was sorry that those soccer fans had not torn her to pieces.) He remembered hesitating outside the officer’s mess hall, watching as the moon climbed nearly ten degrees up the sky, before he stepped inside. Voorhees understood, perhaps even more clearly than von Braun, that their great machines were being aimed at the wrong planet.

  You know, I never planned to become a test pilot,” Hanna Reitsch had said. Voorhees noted that the famed aviatrix was a shade over five feet tall, slightly built, with close-cropped blond hair. “When I entered medical school,” she continued, “my dream was to become a flying missionary doctor in Africa.”

  Several of the men chuckled but others might have been reminded of how the Treaty of Versailles had clipped Germany’s wings in 1919. With her country’s air force dismantled by decree, missionary work and gliders were two of the only ways that a German could ever hope to fly. Now she flew experimental aircraft, including a new class they were calling “jets.”

  She had stood in the Hearth Room of the officers’ mess, surrounded by a crowd of approximately twenty mesmerized admirers, engineers and officers mostly. A few, though, stood away from the crowd. They detested this woman, solely because of the heights to which she had risen (literally and figuratively). Heights that they could never hope to attain—even as men.

  “Time has a way of rewriting our decided paths,” Reitsch said, “of setting us upon destinies we’d never planned for, or even dreamed of.”

  Thank God Lisl hadn’t come, Voorhees thought. He knew that when Adolf Hitler ascended to power, the vivacious pilot quickly became one of his favorites. Her fame peaked after she piloted the world’s first helicopter, whereupon the Führer himself appointed her an honorary flight captain. She was the first woman to garner such rank. Now here she was in Peenemünde—far removed from gliders or soccer stadiums.

  “Destinies we’d never dreamed of,” she emphasized. “Unfortunately, these are challenging times, my friends. So no more talk about me. I’m here with an announcement and a proposal. Some of you already know why I’m here, but I’ll now make it official. This week I plan to test-fly a piloted version of the V-1, the V-1e.”

  There were audible gasps from some of the crowd but a few of the men stood by silently. They had either worked on the prototype before coming to Peenemünde or had heard about it from coworkers. Others, like Voorhees, were completely taken by surprise.

  The gasps died away and after a moment the room went so silent that the grandfather clock in the corner could be heard emitting its single chime—forty-five minutes past midnight, forty-five minutes into the new day.

  “Where is the cockpit?” someone asked rather meekly.

  “On the fuselage, directly in front of the pulse engine,” the test pilot replied.

  There was a momentary pause, then it seemed that everyone present had a question or a comment.

  “What about landing?”

  “. . . or bailing out?”

  “. . . with a flight time of only thirty-two minutes . . .”

  “. . . and a range of only three hundred kilometers . . .”

  “. . . putting severe limits on any potential targets!”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Reitsch said, raising her hands to calm the crowd. “Understand—again—that these are challenging times. But the Führer’s call is our sacred order! And now he calls on us to meet these challenges and to overcome them. The design of this craft is the product of the Luftwaffe’s greatest minds.”

  That’s what I was afraid of, three of the scientists thought, simultaneously.

  “As approved by our brilliant Führer, a pair of V-1e’s will hang below the wings of our bombers like mistletoe hangs from its host plant. The bomber will draw close to the target . . . then release her mistletoe. The pilot will steer the V-1e, lock on to the target, and then bail out. Since the V-1e will have been destroyed along with its target there will be no landing. You’ll be happy to learn that just last week the Führer himself told me—”

  “Bail out at six hundred kilometers per hour?” Voorhees interrupted. “From directly in front of the engine intake? What happens to the canopy? What happens to the pilot?”

  There were several more audible gasps and many of the faces in the crowd turned toward Reitsch, expectantly. But the test pilot said nothing, and her silence told them everything they needed to know about the potential for a successful bailout.

  Voorhees turned to the man next to him and spoke loud enough for everyone to hear, “That thing is a death trap and a piece of shit.” What am I doing? he thought. And why now? Am I losing my mind?

  The grumbling had grown louder now. Nobody had ever heard Voorhees speak like this. The officers present made a point of stepping away from the scientists. And the stepped-away-from scientists now regarded Voorhees as one might regard a stranger who had barged into a wedding.

  No, I’m not losing my mind, Voorhees thought. It’s von Braun’s words, getting to me. It’s the Statue Man. It’s Lisl.

  Hanna Reitsch shot Voorhees an icy stare that lasted only a second, then she was smiling again, as if his last comments had never been uttered. “Of course, I was the first to sign on, and as of a week ago I was pleased to report to our Führer himself that we have over one thousand volunteers.”

  Looking around, Voorhees could see that the pride in her voice contrasted with the mood in the room. There were no more questions, and many of those present were trying to think of excuses for hasty but less than obvious exits; the late hour or paperwork that suddenly needed shuffling.

  “A thousand heroes! Heil Hitler!” Reitsch shouted, but for several seconds, there was no response, until a pair of officers snapped to attention and returned Reitsch’s Nazi salute. However, their voices served only to emphasize the dread that had settled on the men. A few of the scientists appeared to be in shock and even the officers looked uncomfortable, shifting in place as if their boots had suddenly shrunk two sizes. No one said a word.

  Voorhees shook his head, realizing at long last that the Dream was dead. And it had been ridiculous all along, now that he thought about it. For what was the Dream? Nordic mythology sewn together with romantic notions from the nineteenth-century? Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and the Chariot of Odin arching toward Mars. It was ridiculous and now it is over. “A thousand suicides,” he muttered, and turned away.

  “Heroes, not suicides!” Reitsch snarled at him, the soft features of her face suddenly pulled tight. “The Leonidas Squadron!”

  Voorhees took a deep breath, then let it out. He felt exhausted but turned to face the test pilot. “With all due respect Flugkapitän Reitsch, wasn’t it King Leonidas who led the three hundred Spartans to their deaths at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.?”

  Reitsch seemed surprised for an instant, then she smiled at the engineer. Voorhees thought, This must be what a captured bird feels, just before the cat’s nervous system initiates a death-dealing bite.

  “I took you for a coward,” Reitsch said calmly, “but I see now that you are more than that. You are a coward who knows his military history.”

  Then
the room trembled slightly and, as dust sifted down from the ceiling, they heard the wail of sirens.

  Operation Hydra was, this night, at this point in history, the largest single bombing sortie ever carried out by the RAF. Currently, Voorhees and his colleagues were in the bull’s-eye of nearly six hundred Halifax, Sterling, and Lancaster bombers. They were trying to kill him and as many of the other rocket men as possible. But now the party for Hanna Reitsch had intervened, putting many of them only steps away from a bomb shelter.

  Voorhees, however, wasn’t thinking about the bomb shelter. He emerged from the officers’ mess with only one thought. Lisl. I must find Lisl.

  Someone grabbed him, forcefully, by the arm. “This way!”

  “I must find Lisl!”

  “No time for this,” the soldier said, and smacked him with a gun butt. “Come to your senses and get in.”

  Voorhees went down the concrete steps, half-stumbling, half-pushed. He heard the blast door slam shut above him, and then the six hundred giants came stampeding, directly overhead.

  After an hour, Voorhees heard only the faint crackle of burning wood from above—thousands of tons of burning wood. The last of the enemy bombers had moved on, and soon after, a siren sounded the “all clear.” Someone gave an order, “Everyone outside to help!”

  Voorhees emerged into pitch black—even though the moon was full this night. The world was eerily quiet, considering all that had happened. The smoke made it hard to see, and even harder to breathe, but the red glow, burning through from every direction, gave the impression that every building had been destroyed.

  The engineer looked around. Nobody was paying attention to him now.

  Maurice Voorhees disappeared into the smoke.

  It had ended for Voorhees and Lisl much as it began—in a crater. The second and final crater had once been Lisl’s dormitory but that building had disappeared—utterly disappeared. In the bowl of the crater, Voorhees had located tattered pieces of garments belonging to at least a dozen people, and broken crockery that turned out to be chips of bone. Hope forever died the moment he found a familiar shoe. It was spotlessly clean and still warm.

  When two of Sänger’s men found Voorhees, the morning after the RAF’s Operation Hydra had reduced much of Peenemünde to a smoking ruin, they did not know if the man they had been ordered to ferry to the newly arrived Demeter would ever be right enough in his mind to be of any use again. They had looked down from the crater rim upon a man whose expression gave the impression of a scientist working on a difficult mathematical problem. Although their memory of the event would blend undetectably with the chaos of the weeks to come, their initial impression was perfectly correct. Maurice Voorhees, who had an ability to “walk around” the intricacies of a rocket engine in his head, with every aspect of its three-dimensional geometry intact, did not know how to collect Lisl—or how to bury her.

  CHAPTER 18

  Lifeline

  Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

  —MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  January 28, 1944

  5 A.M.

  Science had always been MacCready’s refuge, but tonight, in his cell, not even the draculae—his wonderfully obscene discovery—could save him from sliding down again into darkness.

  Not very far ahead of first light, the distant, fog-muffled screams had ceased. Those who came and went in the night, removing the blood-spattered native woman from her cage, had neglected to shut off a lightbulb near the ceiling. Mac saw his own shadow stretched across the floor. He did not fully believe that his new bid to stay alive was going to succeed, and he was reasonably certain that in a day or two, the shadow on the floor would be that of another.

  Little snatches of sleep came and went despite the interruptions. Survival instinct and prior mission experiences had seen to this, for the scientist knew he would need every watt of alertness and verbal sparring power if he ever got another audience with Wolff.

  At least there are no draculae in here, he thought.

  Outside, they, and not Wolff’s soldiers, were the real agents of the night. In retrospect, Mac’s contact with the creatures had been like receiving a personal message from the dark. He could not shake the feeling that sentient beings had surrounded him and looked right into his brain, using senses like those of some alien race. A bite from any of them was clearly deadlier than cobra venom, and yet there seemed an even more frightening intellectual quality about these beasts.

  Why the fuck didn’t they kill me? he wondered. And how long until Wolff puts an end to my reprieve?

  He had determined to force himself into an hour or two of uninterrupted sleep, but the shrieks in the night allowed the zoologist’s imagination to flit too easily over thoughts of what Wolff must have done to Bob and Yanni. After becoming slowly accustomed to how the war had erased everyone he loved, his brief reunion with Bob Thorne was an unexpected lifeline back into a saner world—back to humanity. The line had been cut the moment Wolff showed off the Russian machine gun, with its unmistakable signature of arctic camouflage. Until that moment, Mac really did feel as if he were becoming human again.

  Now there was hardly anything left to live for. Nothing except revenge and the mission.

  CHAPTER 19

  Carrier

  Some of those who rush into this madness do not realize that they are foolish, but think they are wise. . . . Do not think of them as human beings, but consider them as animals. For as animals devour each other, so also people like this [shall] devour each other . . . since they love the delights of fire, they are slaves of death.

  —GOSPEL OF DIDYMOS JUDAS THOMAS (FIRST CENTURY A.D.)

  January 28, 1944

  5 A.M.

  It was not the tragic way the boy had died that kept Wolff and Kimura awake through the night; it was not the disturbing manner in which vascular and muscular systems had failed in the end, causing the child to vomit up portions of his own stomach. What kept the pair manically alert was the realization that these manifestations resembled disease processes. Wolff and Kimura, driven by motives that would remain unknown to historians and anthropologists of the future, loved the delights of fire, and pestilence, and human suffering. Trapped either by the genes that rendered them “born rotten,” or by their times—or trapped by some obscene combination of both—they had willingly (indeed, gleefully) become slaves of death.

  Colonel Wolff wore a puzzled expression as he stared down into the boy’s lifeless eyes. “How can a human body sustain such bleeding?” Wolff asked the corpse. He paused, as if waiting for a reply, then turned his attention yet again to a pair of odd-looking wounds—half a centimeter across and located midway between the child’s right ankle and the back of his knee. Bitten from behind, he thought, noting that the wounds were still oozing blood, so many hours later. Why hadn’t they—?

  The sound of a scalpel hitting the floor drew the colonel’s attention to an adjacent table and he peered over the top of his surgical mask. Clumsy heathens, he thought. Nearly five hours had passed since his men had brought the bodies down from the hill. But even now, two members of Dr. Kimura’s medical team, their isolation-suited arms buried below their elbows in gore, continued to probe the flayed-open remains of the old woman. Wolff knew that any ill feelings he might have harbored toward the Japanese scientist and his men were meaningless. What was important was the fact that they were clearly well versed in the biology and chemistry of death.

  Wolff leaned in closer, examining the strange wounds again, this time with a hand lens. They’re not puncture wounds, he thought, noting instead that divots of flesh had been removed with apparent surgical precision.

  What could have done this?

  Kimura entered the room carrying a tray of microscope slides and blood samples. Immediately, everyone, including Wolff, looked up from his work.

  The odd-looking man said something in Japanese to his colleagues, who exchanged glances but made no reply.
Kimura turned toward the colonel.

  “This is no typical anticoagulant,” he said in fluent German. “Not a chemical, as delivered by the bite of a leech or mosquito. In this case the bleeding was definitely caused by a bacterium.”

  “Then we are looking at an infection,” Wolff said.

  “Yes, and no,” Kimura answered. Handing the tray to an assistant, the physician nodded toward the body of the boy. “The microbes entered through those cutaneous wounds,” he explained. “Once inside the circulatory system, they initiated massive hemorrhaging, all within minutes. This process is absolutely unique.”

  Wolff spoke through his mask. “But the animal experiments we performed last night—none of the lab rats bled out after being inoculated with the boy’s blood.”

  “Nor did the last of the American Rangers exhibit any ill effect when I repeated the experiment on him,” Kimura added. “Our vivisection proved that. The young woman who was with the boy also remains uninfected, and I’ve injected her three times already.”

  “But if it is a microbe, then tell me why it isn’t transmittable,” Wolff demanded.

  “Because the bacteria were already dead by the time we sampled the blood. What puzzles me is how the organism can work so quickly and on such a systemic scale. After the bite, it must divide—remarkably fast, according to my slides. Minutes later, the newly divided and thin-walled cells simply rupture, releasing a flood of whatever this hemorrhagic toxin is that they’ve produced. By the time a victim bleeds out, all of the microbes have died. Basically, the pathogen neutralizes itself.”

  “And the toxin?”