The canvas flap of Dugout Seven was thrown open with a violent gust of wind. Arthur Vance stepped through the threshold, his smock drenched in foul-smelling chemical rain. In his arms, wrapped carefully in a layer of oiled wool, was the mud-caked, rotting form of the eight-two-pound terrapin.
Sergeant Corvo hurried over, holding a heavy zinc-coated bucket of powdered limestone. Behind him, three young commoner infantrymen looked up from the straw pens where Bruno and the other mastiffs lay resting. The air in the dugout was still thick with the lingering scent of antiseptic wash, singed iron, and the sharp bitter-salt tang of the tracheostomy flush.
“Arthur! You found the limestone scree?” Corvo asked, setting the heavy bucket down with a metal clatter. “We scouted the stone retaining walls like you said. We brought four more buckets from the backup mortar pits. If we mix this with the groundwater, we can start assembling the nebulizer pipes by midnight.”
Corvo stopped mid-sentence. His eyes dropped to the bundle in Arthur’s arms.
The greasy wool had slipped aside, exposing the jagged, pitted wreckage of the tortoise’s back shell. The smell of boiling sulfuric acid, rotting bone, and stale pond scum was so pungent that one of the young privates gagged, turning his face toward the wall.
