Hell's Gate

by Bill Schutt

  It had seemed impossible.

  Therefore, quite naturally, it occurred.

  CHAPTER 26

  I See You

  We are of nature, not above it.

  —STEPHEN JAY GOULD

  Nostromo Base

  February 16, 1944

  Deep within the hull of Nostromo, where the captive draculae was held, Wolff’s feelings of claustrophobia, of the jungle closing in from the fog, of his entire operation now falling apart, grew stronger each passing day. He found it odd that a three-night hiatus in draculae attacks, rather than easing his worries, had intensified them. On several occasions he found himself standing before the captive in his lab, and his observations had brought him, independently, to MacCready’s belief that the animals possessed intelligence at the level of a higher primate—a rhesus monkey or even a chimp.

  Like the Allied forces, the bats are up to something, Wolff supposed, straining to keep his paranoia below the surface. Like the Allies, they are probably thinking it through, observing, and waiting.

  His only hope was that somehow he would get the two spaceplanes and their payloads away before the attacks came and the jungle swallowed them all. After the Silverbirds were launched, and safely away, nothing else would matter. Wolff had no illusions about his fate. Once Hanna Reitsch was up there, winging her Silverbird across the Atlantic, and once his other pilot, Lothar, was out of the atmosphere and targeting Washington, Pittsburgh, and New York with his reentry pods, Nostromo Base and all of its inhabitants would be expendable.

  The mother hung from a dead branch, flanked by the twins. There were two bipeds standing on the riverbank. They seemed to be concentrating on two small, glowing objects. She could “see” them quite clearly through the reeking smoke they were producing, could hear the food pulsing faster and faster within them, though the bipeds were standing still. They stood just downriver from the biped nest where the child had been brought so many nights earlier, the last time the mother had heard him or even sensed his presence at all.

  The twins had already moved into position, their thumbs and feet locked on to the bark of the tree, bodies suspended head-downward, twenty feet above the ground.

  GENTLE

  Private Richardt Woessner suddenly felt better then he had since his arrival at Nostromo Base. Standing guard near the submarine was dull work, but he felt a flash of contentment. “Is there something new in these cigarettes, Hans?”

  “Hans?”

  Woessner turned and saw his friend lying on the ground. “What—”

  Something bit him in the shoulder. Something else bit him in the neck.

  Yanni lowered the dart gun as the Indian canoe they’d “borrowed” pulled stealthily up to the bank next to the collapsed men.

  “Nice shootin’, Tex,” MacCready whispered. “Get the guns, float the stiffs.”

  After sending the bodies of Private Woessner and his friend Hans adrift, MacCready and the Thornes began a canoe-based recon using the fog as cover, careful not to raise an alarm or accidentally ignite their supply of tree-sap-smeared TNT sticks. “Sticky bombs,” Mac had called them. “We’ll slap ’em onto anything that looks like it needs blowin’ up.”

  Near the center of the lagoon, not far from where the submarine was moored, the trio paddled up to a series of strange pipes and support struts. Each pipe began at an openmouthed cone near the water’s surface, then converged toward a single point on the shore.

  “Just like I thought,” MacCready whispered, his index finger tracking the array of cones from the lagoon to what he expected, if he could see that far, would be a series of pressurized tanks on shore. “They’re collecting natural gas, bubbling up from the river bottom.”

  “What for?” Thorne whispered back.

  “That missile I told you about, the one that took down the recon plane. I think they’ve got something bigger in this sub—something big enough to carry their bioweapons.”

  “Hit the sub then?” Yanni offered.

  “Not directly,” Mac replied.

  “Then what are we goin’ after?”

  MacCready smiled. “Fuel blows up. Remember, Yanni?”

  Yanni smiled back at him.

  Mac acknowledged her with a nod. “If those fuel storage tanks are as full as I think they are, if we blow them they’ll take out the sub and maybe the whole base.”

  From the far side of Nostromo Base, the rocket team heard the lagoon erupting into chaos—explosions and gunfire, a tremendous amount of gunfire.

  Maurice Voorhees knew immediately that it was an enemy attack. An amphibious assault! How many have they sent? he wondered. A hundred? Three hundred?

  At the moment the first bombs went off, Voorhees and an assistant had been making a final check along the sled rail—ninety meters downrange of the rocket sheds. With the two Silverbirds now fully fueled, and finally prepped for takeoff, the timing of the raid seemed perfectly consistent with everything else about the engineer’s life: So close, and yet so far away.

  Now, he supposed, the door to space was about to be destroyed, and he along with it.

  So far, though, his luck seemed to be holding out. The explosions were coming from the direction of the Nostromo—and the fuel depot. The first near miss occurred when a piece of generator, trailing an arch of flame, pounded a crater into the ancient roadbed, two meters from the rail.

  No damage.

  Simultaneously, a leather glove with a hand still in it struck his face. The slap sent Voorhees and his assistant running, as more pieces of blast debris fell—lighter material now—sheets of tin roofing and glowing red embers of paper.

  By the time Voorhees reached the Silverbirds, Hanna Reitsch was already seated in the cockpit of the first ship, impatiently waiting as Dr. Sänger recited the prelaunch checklist. The two rocket-bombers sat on adjoining forks of a Y-shaped section of track that converged onto the monorail.

  “Scrap the goddamned list!” she cried abruptly, pulling the canopy shut so fast that it nearly clipped off the rocket designer’s fingers. Without hesitation, she began locking it down.

  “Get off!” she screamed at Sänger, who made no reply as he leaped down, then ran toward his young protégé.

  Voorhees noticed that the cockpit of the second ship was open and empty.

  “Where’s Lothar?” Voorhees demanded over the sound of machine-gun fire, but Sänger did not hear him. He seemed to be thinking about something else.

  Voorhees brushed past the rocket man and climbed up onto Reitsch’s Silverbird I.

  Avoiding eye contact with Reitsch, he performed a last double check of the canopy’s seals. He felt a sudden bump, then a rush of relief as he saw that the movement had been caused by a miniature locomotive that was struggling to slide the Silverbird I and its sled into its final launch position.

  Voorhees jumped down to the ground and shot a glance at the second rocket. It was still empty. “Where is Lothar?” he shouted at Sänger.

  But once again, the rocket man never heard him. As the words left Voorhees’s mouth, another wave of explosions occurred, much nearer this time, but luckily still too far away to have an effect on the monorail.

  This won’t last, he thought, and almost immediately, more gunfire erupted nearby.

  Even before the Silverbird I hit its mark on the straightaway, Reitsch fired the sled engines—which thundered to life, blast-furnacing the locomotive and its driver before the man could back his vehicle out of the way. Several technicians working nearby dove for cover as hot gases and locomotive fragments blew past them, instantly setting the Silverbird I’s vehicle assembly building aflame.

  Incredibly, given his lifelong love for rockets, it never occurred to Voorhees to watch, or even to realize, that he was in the very midst of nothing less than the launch of the first “manned” spacecraft.

  But now was not a time for watching. There was no time left for anything except the Silverbird II.

  MacCready’s plan had begun to go south the very instant th
at his first sticky bombs detonated next to the fuel tanks. Some never exploded at all, while those that did failed to penetrate the tanks, which were more like Thermos bottles, well protected by layers of insulation. What the bombs did accomplish was to alert the entire base.

  After the blast, the trio tried to take refuge in the forest, a safe distance from what they hoped would be a base-ravaging ball of flames. But there had been no fireball. Instead it was as if they’d stepped on a hive, and the base defenders were swarming like wasps, firing their weapons in a hundred different directions, shredding trees up to a quarter mile away but finding no targets.

  “What are they shooting at?” Thorne wondered out loud.

  “Us,” Yanni replied.

  Now came a new sound, the velocity-driven buzz of enormous blades cutting through the air at high speed.

  “What the hell is that?” Thorne cried, pointing to something that looked like a giant dragonfly rising above the tree line. The machine’s rotors were so powerful they tore holes in the fog, drawing down clear air from above.

  “They’ve spotted us!” MacCready shouted, as a round buried itself into a tree nearby. He could see the aerial marksman, as unlikely a candidate as any for an assassin. The man was fat and clad in what appeared to be a kimono and the sheer incongruence of it held him spellbound until—

  In a flash of recognition, R. J. MacCready saw the perfect geometric alignment.

  Raising Private Woessner’s MP-43 skyward, he sent a stream of lead toward the helicopter’s port-side blade. The whole machine shuddered and whined, then tipped suddenly to port.

  “Watch this, kids!” Mac called out.

  Slowly, almost gracefully, the helicopter angled into the steel girders of a dockside crane, which in its own turn fell with the wounded Dragon I toward the methane tanks, squashing them like eggs. MacCready braced himself for “the big one” but remarkably neither the helicopter nor the methane exploded. The German pilot jumped out, and to judge from the speed at which he sprinted away, had escaped with no injuries at all. Without an ignition source, the supercooled liquid flowed across the ground like water.

  “Time to go,” MacCready announced. And as Mac glanced back over his shoulder, the kimono-clad man crawled out of the tangled helicopter wreckage and blundered directly into the chemical stream.

  Even from this distance, and while they fled from the spreading death tide, MacCready and his friends could hear the man screaming in startled surprise, as his feet snapped off at the ankles, frozen to the ground in a pair of wooden clogs.

  Finally, the rivers of methane found an ignition source, cracking open two leftover canisters of Voorhees’s hypergolics. The blast wave rocked the Nostromo over to one side, piercing the hull with speed-slung machinery.

  MacCready felt the heat of the fireball on his neck—the weight of his still bomb-laden backpack driving him forward and onto all fours. He and the Thornes were scattered like bowling pins. Quickly regaining his footing, Mac turned and saw the fog glowing ruby red under the fireball. Smaller, secondary explosions were igniting all along the shoreline.

  We did it! We did it! He almost allowed himself an indulgent grin but realized there were still plenty of well-armed bad guys around. Fortunately, most of them seemed to be on fire.

  And then came another rumble—this one from directly in front of him. Another rumble and another glow. His heart gave off what was becoming, these days, an all-too-familiar sinking feeling. MacCready knew this sound. He’d heard it at Chapada and again when Wolff’s team took down the recon plane. It was the sound of a rocket engine, an entire cluster of them.

  “Motherfucker!” he yelled, and began running in the direction of the sound. He slid the backpack down onto one forearm, concerned now that it felt too light for the job that lay ahead.

  If it’s not already too late.

  Less than ten seconds after Reitsch ignited the sled, Voorhees finally saw, in the receding glare, the second pilot, Lothar, staggering toward him, his back spewing smoke. His right hand was missing; the other, still clad in a glove, was pressed against his abdomen.

  “Looking for something?” Voorhees asked, wiggling the fingers of his right hand. Lothar and Hannah Reitsch were thick as thieves, cut from the same abominable block. He’d heard a too vivid description of what Lothar had done to the prisoners before Akira’s dissections began, including the woman with the bled-out child.

  Voorhees pointed to a hand on the ground. “Is that yours?”

  Lothar gave no response. He simply fell on his back with something ropey and pink flowing over his remaining hand. The air suddenly smelled like the bottom of a cesspool. In his last conscious moment, as the glow from Reitsch’s rocket disappeared, the pilot’s eyes met Voorhees’s pleadingly, and the dying man opened his mouth. Voorhees watched in shock-state fascination as a red bubble formed, grew large, then burst.

  He continued to stare at the dead man until Colonel Wolff appeared at his side, standing calm in the turmoil. “It seems as if Reitsch’s protégé has been disemboweled,” he observed, tapping Lothar’s torso with his boot.

  Voorhees wiped something thick and wet from his cheek. “No shit,” he said.

  Still calm, the colonel gestured toward the Silverbird II. “So, rocketeer, do you think you can fly this thing?”

  “Without a doubt, Colonel,” Voorhees said, watching as Wolff’s face widened into a grin.

  The trio of draculae overflew the battered biped nest several times but there was still no sign of the child. Everywhere, even through the thick confusion of burnt-forest smells, the scent of wasted food was noticeable—to the twins, tantalizingly so.

  With no thought of food, the mother dipped her right shoulder, while simultaneously flexing the elongated digits of her wing-hand. The bat’s body instantly responded by wheeling hard to the right, its wings carrying her beyond the shattered forest and out over water.

  The twins followed closely behind, deftly mimicking their mother’s movements, and they remained silent as she emitted a series of calls that probed the area just offshore. Instantaneously, the altered high-frequency signals returned, painting, in her brain, a three-dimensional picture of the enormous log that had brought the bipeds into their territory. But something about the structure had changed since their last, aborted hunt there. Now there were no bipeds, and the flattened surface where they had waited in ambush days earlier was tilted oddly to one side.

  After overflying the structure, the mother angled away, gaining altitude with a flick of her thumbs that changed the flow of air over her wings. The child was gone and now they would return to the stone roost, before any more of her children disappeared.

  The mother began casting long-range signals toward the faraway cliffs, when suddenly the female twin screeched an alarm call behind her and fell out of formation.

  NO! the mother called; but by then the twins had already completed a tight loop and were speeding back in the opposite direction.

  Furious, she followed them, but even before completing her own loop, she heard it.

  The calls were coming from inside the giant, floating log.

  The mother caught up with the twins just before they peeled out of their side-by-side formation and sped past a jagged hole in the log. She flew straight over the gaping tear, simultaneously gathering information and sending the child a message of her own.

  The draculae wheeled around again, as if preparing for another reconnaissance pass, but this time they drew the leading edges of their wings upward. The braking maneuver caused them to lose both altitude and speed, and the finely controlled stall brought the trio to a synchronous and silent landing on the Nostromo’s broken deck. Seconds later they disappeared down an open hatch.

  Below and behind Hanna Reitsch, the world was in shadow. Directly ahead, the stars were dust, and the same blackness seemed to go on forever . . . until the line of daylight began advancing toward her, at hitherto unattainable velocity. Dawn was striking across the western Atlantic
, just now about to touch parts of Brazil and the easternmost tip of North America.

  As predicted, Reitsch was following the curve of the earth in free fall. She resisted an urge to enjoy the sensation, instead concentrating on a problem. Down there on Earth, gravity normally kept the contents of a vehicle’s gas tank sloshing on the bottom, close to its uptake line. Because the Silverbird had neither gravity nor a bottom, the fuel and fuel oxidizer existed as globules—most of them floating far from where the fuel uptakes were located.

  But now I will take care of that, she thought.

  And as she sped toward daylight, it came time to test Sänger’s maneuvering systems. In accordance with the instructions of the rocket men, she vented a small amount of air from the tanks into the vacuum of space. As they had predicted, the effect was like a child’s balloon, released and allowed to fly free: The rocket was jetted forward, ever so slightly and, she hoped, just enough to force the remainder of the liquid fuel “downward,” into the throats of the engine uptakes.

  Now Reitsch knew for certain that she could make brief ignitions and course corrections at will.

  She began to orient her spacecraft for reentry.

  So, she told herself, it seems that the insufferable asshole and his disciple were good for something after all.

  Morning and noon came at her with astonishing rapidity, flooding the cockpit with light. But it was late afternoon that interested her most. Late afternoon in the Ukraine, which was sweeping up ahead, silently, moving toward her like the unstoppable minute hand of a giant clock.

  Down there on Earth, in the Cherkassy Pocket, 65,000 German soldiers were surrounded by as many as a half-million Russians. If the Silverbird came in on target, and if her payload did its work, more than half of the Russians would soon be dead, and by dusk the Germans would break free. In preparation for Hanna Reitsch and the dawn of disease warfare, the 24th Panzer Unit, which had slogged north through mud and melting snow to relieve the trapped German forces, suddenly halted its advance and turned back. The order had come directly from Berlin, the moment Nostromo Base broke radio silence and announced, “The first bird is away.”