He was actually looking forward to meeting Wolff again. When we do meet, it’ll be on my terms.
Waiting until dusk, MacCready poked his head out of the fissure, took a last look around, and then began his descent. He found himself pausing frequently (too frequently) as he fought off waves of nausea and dizziness, waves that seemed to be coming at shorter and shorter intervals. If I pass out now, I’m dead, he thought, trying to focus on feeling his way down toward the forest without glancing at the darkening abyss that stretched out beyond it. After two hours, he reached the base of the plateau, intact and with no sign of pursuers, human or otherwise.
He focused on everything he could remember about Major Hendry’s map of the region. Now MacCready wished he’d paid just a bit more attention to it as he dredged up what few useful details the map might have offered.
What I need is some high, dry ground, he decided. Something I can move across quickly.
Then it came to him. “Got it.”
He hoped.
CHAPTER 23
The Gift
From the moment I saw the Mato Grosso Plateau, and the strange world that surrounded it, I knew I had found the setting for my story.
—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (ON THE INSPIRATION FOR HIS NOVEL The Lost World)
January 30, 1944
5:15 A.M.
Shortly before dawn, R. J. MacCready stood before a vast primordial swamp. Dead tree trunks protruded from mist and black water. The air, which had a delicate rotten-egg bouquet, was also thick with mosquitoes. To top things off, he was feeling feverish and unsteady.
“High and dry,” he mumbled, waving ineffectually at a cloud of flying bloodsuckers that seemed to be celebrating his arrival. Great, I need more insect bites. And the thought reminded him of something. He swore at himself for not remembering it sooner.
With a shaky hand, he reached into his shirt. Groping around with swollen fingers, he was surprised to find the leather cord still in place—and, even more important, Yanni’s delicate-looking little vial, intact—having survived his encounters with Team Wolff and the troglodytes. Great name for a Greenwich Village bebop group, he thought.
“If you go into the swamps, rub this on,” he remembered. “It’ll keep ya from gettin’ bitten.” Yanni’s serene, caring face flashed in his mind. MacCready felt suddenly even sicker at the thought of her and Bob Thorne, dead.
MacCready used his fingernail to pry open the tiny bottle and immediately turned his head away, grimacing. “Creeping Mother of Shit . . . what is this, eau de squid?”
Still, smell or no smell, MacCready dabbed a blob of the oily stuff onto his palms and spread it over his bug-ravaged neck and arms. The bottle remained nearly full, so he recapped it, took a last look around, and waded into the algae and scum-covered bog.
By the time he’d slogged twenty yards, the swamp water had nearly reached his chest but the feeling was surprisingly soothing. At least the murky water would help wash away the dried bat guano and crushed bug glaze that covered him from head to foot like a fecal exoskeleton.
What was more important, though, was that he had not seen a soul since his dry dive back in the cave; hadn’t heard any gunfire, either. Might he just have succeeded in eluding his pursuers? Still, he knew better than to take chances, and continued moving as stealthily as possible from one muddy island to the next.
He was approximately a hundred yards into the swamp when, as Bob Thorne might have phrased it, “the shit-hammer fell.” It began with the sound of a careless stumble and splash, and was followed by an exclamation in German. He was being tracked.
The Nazis’ presence now revealed, his pursuers immediately picked up their pace, splashing through the water with no regard for stealth. He could hear the suck and drag of deep mud against their boots.
“MacCready . . . we hear you,” someone called, and he recognized Corporal Kessler’s voice. “It’s no use. Give yourself up.”
There was a pause, and he could hear a short exchange in German.
“We don’t want to kill you.” It was Kessler again. “We are just looking for our guides. Have you seen them?”
MacCready winced, reining in the part of his brain that already had three snappy answers to the stupid ruse locked and loaded, and which was begging to respond with one of them. Instead he ducked behind a long-dead tree trunk and quickly scanned the swamp ahead of him.
“Damn it,” he mumbled. The tree line that marked the beginning of the forest was more than a thousand yards away.
Nowhere to hide, he thought, hunkering down with his back against an all-too skinny section of dead tree. Now he could hear the labored movements of the Germans as they waded into deeper water.
They’re close now. Real close.
MacCready’s mind raced, desperately searching for a way out.