The dive left the colonel momentarily stunned. He had fully anticipated a feeble attempt to run deeper into the corridor. But this? This?
Wolff remained motionless. His gun arm had been late in tracking the movement of the American but he left the pistol pointed toward the opening in the floor.
Will there be more of these creatures emerging? he wondered. How many of them can there be? Five? Five hundred?
The colonel decided to wait another minute and, while acknowledging that there was little time to ponder the prisoner’s suicide leap, he had to admit that it had been completely unexpected, and in its own way, admirably spectacular.
Evidently the man preferred dashing his brains out at the bottom of a filthy cave to the efficiency of a single, finely crafted bullet.
On second thought, though, Wolff knew that a head shot wasn’t exactly what he had planned for the smart-assed American. It would have been more like a bullet in each knee. All the better to keep any more of his little bat friends occupied if—
The colonel anchored his mind to more immediate matters . . . survival . . . and the mission.
Yes, above all else—the mission.
Wolff moved away from the wall, bending to retrieve a lantern, all the while keeping his pistol trained on the hole from which the bats had emerged. He approached the opening tentatively, holding the lantern out. A breeze rose up out of the dark, setting the red and yellow flame into motion. The German officer went down on one knee.
There was a stone ledge just below the rim but his eyes moved quickly past it, drawn to the floor of the chamber. Something moving. The colonel shifted the light, struggling to obtain a clearer view, hoping it was only the American twitching and dying on the floor, before realizing that the floor itself was moving.
Rice, Wolff thought, incongruously. But rice was indeed exactly what it looked like—a deep pool of live, unusually fat rice grains, set in motion around once-towering stalagmites, now half-sunk in a lake of black matter.
There were bones in the rice. But no body. And no more bats.
The officer lay down on his belly. “Where are you?” he whispered, as much to himself as to MacCready. Now he could see the entire floor of the subchamber clearly, but there was still no sign of the American.
Could he be—
The colonel’s brain registered a new source of movement, this time out of the corner of one eye. Now he swung the lantern back to the level of his head, illuminating the roof of the subchamber. Without the hulking sergeant anchoring his feet, Wolff was unable to attain MacCready’s panoramic view, but what he saw was clear enough. Something resembling a wave was rippling across the ceiling—a wave of teeth and reflecting eyes, advancing toward him.
Wolff jumped to his feet but even as he backed away, his eyes remained focused on the hole.
click, click, CLICK, CLICK
The Nazi officer turned and sprinted down the corridor, lantern in one hand, Luger in the other.
Behind him, the clicking grew louder.
The past ninety seconds had seemed longer than any hour to MacCready. He was lying facedown, trying to catch the breath he had lost diving onto the stone ledge. The landing was as soft as he had hoped for, which was a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing: His neck wasn’t broken. The bad thing: His dive had been cushioned by two feet of living bat guano, and now the plethora of cave-dwelling species—spiders, roaches, maggots—who called the place “home” were eagerly probing their unexpected but welcome new food source.
One of the troglodytes had already scurried through a tear in the leg of his field pants, but before the intruder could head too far north, MacCready swatted at his thigh. He experienced a small measure of relief at the crunch of a chitinous arthropod body.
Golden cave roach, he told himself. That’s gonna leave a stain.
He felt a pinch on his uncovered wrist and another on his cheek. Pseudoscorpion? A sudden frenzy of tiny jointed legs spread across his back, and something the size of a walnut muscled its way past the ineffectual barrier of his shirt collar. Cave crab, definitely, he confirmed. MacCready had decided that the only way to keep a grip on his composure was to take a mental inventory of the creatures that were now beginning to eat him alive. Nevertheless, he hoped that the living membrane of “cave bugs” would blanket him completely enough, and fast enough.
MacCready also concentrated on keeping his mouth and eyes closed, as a tide of grateful hunters swarmed over his shoulders, neck, and head, staking thousands of tiny claims.
He could not see the glow of Wolff’s lantern from above, but he could hear a muffled voice.
Can he see me? MacCready wondered, trying to concentrate on something else and coming up with a question. What could be worse than this?