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.