After hoisting himself to the top of the labyrinth’s subchamber just long enough to snatch one of the lamps, MacCready had ducked down again onto the ledge of guano and little “biters” and followed the first corridor he could find that led away from the smoke-disoriented mass of bats on the antechamber level above. With any luck at all, the scientist hoped, many of them were preoccupied up there, with Sergeant Frankenstein and his friends.
The plateau seemed to be literally honeycombed with damp underground passages. The one he chose led deeper into the weathered rock and, initially, uphill into thicker, choking smoke. He knew that fresher, smoke-free air was blowing upward through a passage beneath the roost chamber. He also knew that the fresh-air “low roads” were the paths the bats would most likely choose, and which he therefore needed to avoid. Using his filthy shirt as a smoke filter, Mac decided to follow the fumes along the higher corridor, far uphill and far beyond the “manhole” through which he had entered—away from Wolff’s Nazis and away from the determined procession of draculae he hoped would have killed them all by now.
“Somehow, I doubt it,” he mumbled, finding a sharp downward bend in the “high road” that allowed him to crawl along a narrow passageway into more breathable air. He descended another two hundred yards deeper into the plateau before encountering a fork in the passageway. Mac decided to take the wider of his two choices, until a steady gust from a crack in the ceiling nearly extinguished the lantern, forcing him to consider doubling back. Coaxing the flame slowly and more fully to life, and shambling forward in the dark, he was lulled into a false sense of security. He had, after all, entered a region in which the ground was level and he could stand easily. When at last the lantern completely illuminated the path ahead he was reminded of his last discussion with Major Hendry: This is no time for complacency.
The drop-off was only about twelve feet, but the floor of the dead-end chamber was covered with stalagmites—pointing up at him like a field of swords.
MacCready shook his head. Why worry about Wolff and the draculae when your own stupidity can kill you?
Some thirty minutes after doubling back to the fork, MacCready extruded himself through a rib-compressing crevice and into late afternoon daylight. He took a small measure of satisfaction from the fact that this exit had deposited him far beyond the sight of the cave entrance he and his captors had used earlier.
The respite and the fresh air also gave him a chance to think. MacCready initially believed that, like their well-known counterparts, the draculae’s salivary glands produced an array of anticoagulant chemicals that would be applied to a wound immediately after the prey was bitten, thus preventing the victim’s blood from clotting. The fact that the draculae bite caused a far more spectacular flow of blood had forced him to consider an alternate hypothesis. Maybe these creatures had a different bite physiology—based not on chemical anticoagulants but on something else. But what?
He knew that certain monitor lizards transmitted whole consortia of bacteria through their bites, then tracked down their fever-weakened prey at their own leisure.
What if the draculae had evolved something similar? And what if Wolff’s team was seeking just such a hemorrhagic pathogen, something that could be used as a weapon?
The choice the German had given him—the choice of ways to die—had telegraphed as much. It should have been easy, from the start, to peg Wolff as a biologist, possibly even a microbiologist. He had threatened death under a cluster of rocket engines, and let out that this had originally been proposed as a means of sterilizing specimens. Of this much, Mac was reasonably certain: One did not go to the trouble and expense of assembling a missile base in the middle of the Brazilian wilderness merely to hurl one-and two-ton payloads of dynamite or poison gas at the enemy. Wolff was a man on a rather larger mission.
And now he just might have stumbled upon a new payload, something far more deadly than anything they’d brought with them.
MacCready’s plan hadn’t changed, it had only been interrupted. But now his mission was more urgent than ever. Get back to Cuiabá. Contact Hendry. Let him know of the coordinates of the base and the enemy’s mission. It was worse than he could have imagined initially. This was biological warfare. And if I know Wolff, he’s already snagged a couple of these bats by now.
After carefully scanning the surrounding cliff for signs of anything that might possibly shoot darts or fire a rifle, MacCready focused on the rock-strewn but serviceable remains of what appeared to be an alternative trail leading off the plateau.
This is too easy, he thought, while another part of his mind wondered where this “negative-attitude thing” had suddenly come from.
If Wolff’s alive, he’s looking for me. And if his guides know about this trail, they could be on it already—waiting.
MacCready surveyed the open expanse of the valley below, took a deep breath of fresh air, and squeezed back into the narrow crevice. I’m not going anywhere in broad daylight, he thought as he shimmied down deeper into the dark.