“You . . . must come,” was all she said. Then she turned and headed back into the fog.
MacCready and Thorne exchanged puzzled looks, before jogging off after Yanni.
They quickly caught up with her and she led them through the smog and dripping foliage until they came to a clearing in the woods. The remains of a small campfire were still smoldering.
MacCready stepped into the circle, realizing at once that there were two bodies near the center of the clearing. One was lying on the ground at the foot of the other—which had been lashed upright to a wooden post.
MacCready crept nearer. Something’s wrong.
“What is going—?” Bob Thorne froze.
Both of the “bodies” were Colonel Wolff. MacCready could see that, a centimeter at a time, the Xavante had put the Nazi to the same fate he once condemned him to by “choice.”
Somehow, they had removed his skin in a single piece. Mac estimated that it must have taken many hours to complete the task. He was also fairly certain that Wolff had survived their artwork and been left to die.
Morbid curiosity led him to take a step closer, and a cloud of flies rose noisily into the air, angry at having been interrupted in their meal and their egg-laying on the staked-out man and his twin. The colonel appeared to have died staring down at the wet pile, which was already black with ants.
Scarcely breathing, MacCready began to examine the upright corpse. He placed a hand under its chin and lifted the head up. The musculature is still quite warm, he thought, looking at his watch. “Six hours,” he said.
“Six what?” said Thorne, his voice subdued by shock. “I don’t understand.”
“After they’ve finished the job, it takes at least six hours for a man to die like that.”
An instant later, Wolff rolled his lidless eyes and spat at him.
“Jesus Christ!” Thorne cried.
Incredibly, Wolff began to chuckle and his head stayed up, straining against visible tendons, as MacCready backed away, nearly toppling over Wolff’s “other body.”
“Jesusss? Where is heee?” The German looked at MacCready through air-dried and bug-bitten corneas, his voice damp air escaping from a tomb. “Youuu . . . I knew you weren’t deadddd.”
Uncharacteristically, MacCready could not think of a reply.
Sensing this, Wolff attempted what might have been a smile, several cordlike facial muscles drawing upward but with no lips to complete the expression. A moment later, the muscles relaxed and the Nazi concentrated on what he knew would be his final words: “The Silverbirds . . . I did thisss . . . Kimura’s bomb . . . You did thisssssss.”
And with those words, Wolff’s head slumped forward.
Thorne approached cautiously, half-afraid the Nazi would reanimate himself a second time. He was also unnerved by the strange expression MacCready wore.
“What does he mean by this, Mac?”
“I’m not sure, Bob,” MacCready lied, looking rather unsteady and knowing that Wolff had called it correctly. He had done this. Looking back now, at each fork in the road, every decision seemed like the right one. Yet still, in the end, he wound up leading his enemies directly to the biological weapons they craved. How, he wondered, might events have unfurled had his plane’s collision with a scarlet ibis killed him at Waller Field? How much better would things have turned out?
“I’m not sure,” Mac repeated. He went silent, not knowing whose question he had just answered.
Yanni’s voice broke the silence. “Mac, you need to see this.”
She was holding open a notebook that she’d pulled from a small pile of Wolff’s belongings. Mac took the book from her without losing the page she’d been staring at.
Colonel Wolff’s lab notes were written in a clear and easily readable German script, but what immediately caught Mac’s attention were his drawings of the plateau. They showed the cave entrance, the passageway leading to the draculae roost, and the subchamber itself. But it was a drawing of the cave’s antechamber that caused MacCready’s eyes to widen. Four small squares spread across the floor, each with a line stretching to a point several feet away. They booby-trapped that cave, he thought, recognizing what, to his mind, could only be trip wires.
MacCready scanned additional figures on the adjacent pages. One of them showed similar boxes arranged across the top of the plateau.
And what are these? he wondered, noting that the squares were arrayed along what seemed to be a series of fissures in the earth. Mac remembered the strong breeze that nearly blew out his lantern—a breeze that could only have come down through one of these faults. While two of Wolff’s men were being slaughtered by turtles, he must have been sending others back to survey weaknesses in the plateau roof.
“Jesus,” MacCready said, “they’re going to blow that cave.”
Absolutely not, Mac,” Major Hendry barked, dismissing the request with a wave of his hand. The two men were standing outside the ruins of Wolff’s and Kimura’s lab.