Tidal Rip

“This,” the Brazilian general said after a pause. “Now that we know how they’re thinking, from the Axis point of view it’s the next best thing.” He tapped a spot a few miles southeast of the dam.

“What’s this?” Jeffrey said.

The general looked at him grimly. “The Iguazu Falls. Massive, horseshoe-shaped, exactly on the Brazil- Argentina border.”

“I need to get new orders to my SEAL team, redirect them to the falls.”

The general nodded and picked up a phone; it was quickly done.

From opposite directions as Jeffrey watched the situation plot, the corporate jet and the chopper converged on the falls. The general explained what little the map itself didn’t make clear: The mighty Iguazu River drained the central Brazilian highlands, then plunged off the escarpment of an ancient earthquake uplift fault. Below the plateau lay Brazil’s southern geological depression.

A few miles past the falls, the Iguazu fed the Parana River — the same river that was fed by the Itaipu Dam, the same river that flowed through Argentina all the way to Buenos Aires.

Felix Estabo caressed his MP-5 submachine gun tightly in both hands as the helicopter flew along the border. He looked down at the top of the Brazilian jungle as trees raced by beneath the chopper’s skids. They were over the southern highlands, following the Iguazu River as it flowed west. The river was wide and fast-running, and the water it carried was reddish brown from silt — to Felix it looked like the color of drying blood. Then, in the distance ahead of the aircraft, he saw a giant rainbow arcing across the entire sky.

Beneath the rainbow swirled a cloud of billowing mist.

Beneath the mist, the land and the river seemed to end abruptly. Water poured over the edge of the plateau, between and around hundreds of small wooded islands and moss-covered rocks — from there a deadly maze of stepped and layered cataracts of foaming angry water plunged in stages straight down three hundred feet. Every foot of the way, that reddish-brown water gained speed and momentum, until it pounded without end onto boulders below. From there, it collected itself and raced on, barely diminished in power and energy.

The entire waterfall complex was two miles across. It dwarfed Niagara and Africa’s Victoria Falls combined. Near its center was a maelstrom where river branches converged from three directions into a vortex of terrible violence and overwhelming force. Countless tons of water slammed into this area every minute. The locals, Felix knew, called the vortex Garganta del Diablo in Spanish; it was Garganta do Diabo in Portuguese. It held both names because it sat precisely on the border between Brazil and Argentina.

Either way, the words were apt. They meant the “Devil’s Throat.”

Through his earplugs, even over the noise of the engines and rotors of the helicopter, he could hear the thunderous roar of the falls.

Direct orders from Captain Fuller, relayed in code in Portuguese from Rio, had told him to be ready to dive down seven hundred feet behind the Itaipu Dam — using mixed-gas scuba rigs the Brazilians would supply — to retrieve the bomb and disarm it at all costs. Every second was vital, and Captain Fuller’s grim but unquestionable orders told Felix and his men to risk a fatal case of the bends to get the bomb up and away from the dam.

Felix gripped his MP-5 even tighter. A fast return ascent from seven hundred feet down, with no time to pause for decompression stages, is a guaranteed death in pure agony…. In the Iguazu Falls, in the Devil’s Throat, I can think of ten more awful ways to die.

Jeffrey and the others sat mesmerized. Technicians in the bunker had patched another radio link — between the AWACS and the SEAL team’s helicopter — into a speakerphone on the conference-room table. Now he heard two separate airborne conversations at once.

Jeffrey listened to the AWACS vector the pilot of Felix’s chopper toward the Argentine corporate jet. The flight director in the AWACS and the pilot of the Brazilian Army helicopter both used English — the international language of air-traffic control. The TV-screen map on the wall tracked their movements.

“Are you taking ground fire?” the AWACS director asked.

“Negative! Negative! No sign of troop activity below.”

Da Gama ordered his units pulled back, to avoid a friendly-fire tragedy and save lives when the stolen warhead blows…. The Argentine commanders might have done the same on their side.

Ground-to-ground howitzers shooting from now on might hit the wrong Special Forces team, or have an unintended bad effect when the SEALs and kampfschwimmer collide face-to-face.

But the Brazilian antiaircraft fire continued. The Argentine corporate-jet pilot’s voice became so high-pitched that he sounded like a woman. He screamed things in garbled Spanish that Jeffrey knew must be bad news. Jeffrey heard straining engine noises and other jagged sounds and shouting, picked up in the background over the pilot’s open mike.

“They’re at the secondary target,” the Brazilian general translated. “An engine fire, loss of hydraulics, he can’t control the plane much longer.”

Jeffrey heard the word kampfschwimmer amid the chaos of whistling, screeching noise, and yelling from the aircraft.

“Visual contact!” the chopper pilot shouted. “Bandit is trailing smoke! It’s losing altitude!”

Badly damaged by ack-ack from the dam.

“I see chutes! Four good chutes! One more, big, an equipment container!”

The warhead.

“Four more chutes!.. That’s it. The bandit is going down.”

The screeching noise from the corporate jet grew louder, edgier, ominous, and the pilot’s voice shot up another octave. He was cut off by a sudden very hard smash. From that speaker now came only heavy silence.

“Impact! Impact!” the Brazilian helo pilot shouted over the speakerphone. “I see smoke and fire!”

“Status of the parachutists?” the AWACS director asked. His voice was calm and cool, involved but impassive.

“They’re in the jungle, on the highlands, on the Argentine side of the falls!.. Navy SEAL team is fast-roping down from my aircraft!.. SEAL team is on the ground. I am egressing the area.”

An aide came into the conference room, breaking Jeffrey’s concentration. “Captain Fuller, your transport back to Challenger is ready now.”

CHAPTER 34

Felix listened as the noise of the chopper receded into the distance. That sound always caused him to feel mixed emotions, which flowed in a predictable stream. A sense of being abandoned in hostile terrain. A nostalgic, wistful longing to still be on that aircraft and heading for safety. A powerful feeling of duty. A strong drive to get on with the job. Then his instincts to lead and achieve would kick in, and he wouldn’t look back until his work was complete.

He did an immediate sensory recon.

Felix’s team was down on the ground, through the triple-canopy overhead cover. In the murky lighting of late afternoon, amid the squawk and chatter of parrots and toucans and monkeys and the languid chirping and croaking of insects and frogs, everyone geared up. The heat and humidity were only slightly less severe than at the equator, but this heavily wooded area wasn’t true rain forest. The trees weren’t quite so tall, and the canopies weren’t so dense. Felix had noted this firsthand — as he slid down the rope that led from the chopper to the jungle-penetrator weight that had lain in the mud at the rope’s end.

For the most part the men, including Felix, were equipped as they had been during his intelligence raid into northern Brazil days before — the raid on which the SEALs’ lieutenant was killed.

Now I’m the lieutenant. Terrific.

The team had silenced MP-5 firearms and ammo and ceramic flak vests and helmets in anticipation of action against the kampfschwimmer team with the bomb. Each man — including Felix — also bore a heavy rucksack on his shoulders, with his Draeger in a cover on a load harness worn at his hips. The differences now were that one man