Tidal Rip

Everything depended on what the plane with the Germans and the American bomb did next. The AWACS had a solid radar lock and followed its every move. So far, it kept heading north.

“Something doesn’t make sense,” an exhausted Colonel Stewart said. “They aren’t slowing or turning. They’re heading into Paraguayan airspace.” The American diplomat sounded worried and confused — Paraguay and Uruguay were neutral, both in the larger conflict and in the impending fight in South America.

The Brazilian generals began to show signs of agitation. “Might we have followed the wrong plane?” one of them said. “Did we fall for a deception, and that isn’t even the bomb?”

An oppressive, uncomfortable silence suddenly filled the room.

Jeffrey turned to Mr. Jones, who now looked deadly serious despite his outlandish garb. He’d taken off his jacket and loosened his tie, and there were spreading marks of sweat on the armpits of his shirt. Jeffrey, in contrast, thought the conference room was too cold, and his hands felt like ice cubes.

“Can we get that aircraft’s flight plan?” he asked Jones.

“On such short notice? I doubt it. There’s nothing says they filed one, or if they did they could’ve lied.”

Jeffrey grunted. He knew Jones was right, but what the man said, the way he said it, couldn’t help but sound defeatist.

The generals now seemed paralyzed by doubt or indecision.

Jeffrey reminded himself that these men vastly outranked him, and this was their country — but they had no experience at all of total war, while he’d been fighting and outsmarting Germans for months. He realized that he’d better show some initiative and interpret his fragmentary orders from Admiral Hodgkiss — plus the existing assent from President da Gama — in very broad terms. I don’t know if the White House or Pentagon ever meant for Operation Mercury to go nearly this far, but I can’t stop now. These times demand strong leadership from the bottom up.

Jeffrey was in his element.

“We have to work with what we’ve got. Let’s look at a detailed map of the northern part of the border. And somebody, tell the chopper with the SEALs to start heading north.” The Brazilian admiral nodded and left the room.

Someone handled the map-viewer controls. Jeffrey now saw the tongue of Argentine land that stretched north between Brazil and Paraguay.

“That’s the Triple Border,” Stewart said. “I thought we ruled that out.”

“Maybe we were wrong,” Jeffrey said. “Look.” He stood up and pointed at places on the map. “If they cut through Paraguay, they gain protection from Brazilian antiaircraft fire until the last possible moment.”

The generals nodded. “But that would severely limit the area they can attack,” one of them said. “When they turn east from Paraguay, they’ll only have access to a short fringe of the shared frontier. If our army attacked Argentina from there, our ground forces would be canalized into a narrow front aiming south, and it adds two hundred fifty kilometers to the route to Buenos Aires! I thought they were faking a breakthrough by our army going through the center of their lines.”

Jeffrey stared at the map. “Can we get President da Gama in here?”

One general rose wordlessly and went out. In a few minutes da Gama preceded him back into the room. The admiral returned with them.

As the Brazilian president took in the situation plot, Jeffrey pointed at a place on the map that was marked with a cluster of standard military icons that represented heavy antiaircraft artillery.

“Mr. President, what are these ack-ack guns protecting?”

“That’s the Itaipu Dam.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“It’s the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world. Enough steel for four hundred Eiffel Towers. Plus fifteen million cubic yards of concrete and cement.” Da Gama was obviously proud of the dam; he rattled off the figures like a tour guide.

“All this blue here is the lake built up behind it?”

“Yes. The dam is seven hundred feet high, and altogether almost five miles wide. The reservoir is something like a hundred twenty-five miles in length.”

“That’s one huge head of water, sir.”

“I think the visitor brochures say it’s a trillion cubic feet, behind that dam.”

Mr. Jones whistled.

“The dam spillways drain south?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yes, into the Parana River.” Da Gama sounded impatient now; he obviously thought the American questions were distracting, even irrelevant.

Jeffrey was undeterred. “And the Parana goes where, Mr. President?”

“It runs south through Argentina, then drains just north of Buenos Aires into the Rio de la Plata estuary.”

“The dam might be their target.”

“But it’s on our side of the border.”

“Just barely, from what this map seems to say.”

“Yes. But the dam is owned by Brazil…. Paraguay soldus their shares during their latest banking crisis.”

“Don’t you see? Brazilian ownership just gives you better, easier access, sir, to implant an American bomb…. Nukethe Itaipu Dam, and where does that gigantic radioactive tidal wave go? Whose border troops are wiped out or cut off from reinforcements? Which capital’s shantytown suburbs get flushed by the surge of contaminated water, laced with so many tons of vaporized and neutron-activated concrete and steel?”

“Argentina. Argentina. Argentina.”

“Now, Mr. President, would anyone believe you didn’t nuke the dam just because you own it? Could anything cause more widespread harm and outrage in Argentina? And could anything give the Germans better reason to help the Argentines nuke your country in revenge a dozen, a hundred times over?”

“You know the answers to those questions, Captain.”

“Sir, you must order your antiaircraft batteries to fire into Paraguayan airspace to protect that dam at all cost.”

CHAPTER 33

Da Gama had left the room again to issue more directives as commander in chief.

Jeffrey’s further thoughts were sharply interrupted: an American electronic warfare plane held radio intercept contact on communications from the aircraft bearing the kampfschwimmer and the bomb. Jeffrey listened to it all on a speaker while one of the Brazilian generals, who understood Spanish, translated. It gave Jeffrey the creeps to hear the enemy conversing — confirming all his best guesses and raising all his worst fears.

As everyone in the Rio bunker expected, the Argentine corporate jet reported to its headquarters that it was now taking heavy flak from gun emplacements protecting the Itaipu Dam. The Brazilian antiaircraft artillery was even firing across the border, violating Paraguayan airspace, in an effort to knock the jet down.

Jeffrey’s suggestion to da Gama had been turned into a presidential order, and now that order was being carried out.

Over the speakers came the hard crack of antiaircraft shells bursting near the plane, picked up by the enemy pilot’s microphone as he talked.

The Brazilian general leaned toward Jeffrey. In an undertone he said, “Someone is telling them to arm the timer on the bomb and fly over the dam and just parachute the bomb into the water. The pilot is saying the flak is too intense, they’ll never make it close enough…. A different voice istelling the pilot to shift to the secondary target.”

“What secondary target?” Mr. Jones said in confusion. Colonel Stewart looked ashen.

Everyone rushed to study the map of that part of the border.