Tidal Rip

carried a bipod-mounted light machine gun and another a thick-barreled sniper rifle. And everyone, again including Felix, wore draped around his shoulders and torso a roll of one hundred yards of spun-monofilament climbing rope, plus belts of extra ammo for the machine gun. Festooned and overburdened this way, Felix thought they looked like a bunch of bandit outlaws spoiling for a fight.

At least they didn’t have to wear those oppressive antiradiation suits like on the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks.

Either the stolen A-bomb goes off or it doesn’t. If it does, at this range, no amount of protective clothing will do my team any good.

But having learned a lesson on the Rocks about the need to identify friend or foe when everyone wore the same garb, the SEAL team all had subdued black and yellow versions of the American flag patched onto their composite jungle-fatigues-and-wet-suit sleeves.

Using hand signals, Felix formed his men up for a hurried approach march to combat: he set flank protection, rear security, and assigned a seasoned man as point. He knew from watching the chutes that the kampfschwimmer had landed on the other side of the Iguazu, in Argentine territory. Even so, he wasn’t taking chances and kept the team’s chief with him, in the center of the eight-man formation, so they could go over tactics and exert all-around control. He kept the radioman and combat medic near him too.

Felix quickly took stock in this pregnant moment before the clutter of tree trunks and underbrush all around them began to block the team from his easy view.

The men were pumped and excited; once they’d hit the ground, their repressed fear and visible nervousness gave way to eagerness for action. Each of them knew what his country was asking: for the next few minutes, or hour, or however long it took, the fate of the world would hinge on their courage and skill against a hardened enemy kampfschwimmer team. But all of Felix’s men were battle-tested veterans by now, volunteers since their earliest days in the SEALs; superb team players, they were also fiercely competitive.

As cold-blooded as it sounds, as dangerous as this mission task might be, every one of my guys is thrilled to be here. Something like this is what they trained for, lived for, for long and tough years. High pressure and high stakes is what they thrive on… and it doesn’t come higher or better than this.

Most other SEALs, all over Navy Special Warfare, would sell their grandmothers to be in their place.

Felix himself felt privileged, and proud. On a practical level, he was satisfied with whom and what he’d been given to work with.

He ordered the team to move out.

Felix set a blistering pace for the approach march toward the Iguazu Falls. He was sweating and breathing hard already. He and his men eyed their surroundings very carefully, watching for signs of booby traps or mines — and constantly scanning for dips and hollows that might give them the slightest cover from incoming fire. Plants of various species intermingled. Some tree trunks were red, others gray and smooth like newly poured concrete, and some had primeval-looking wrinkled green-brown bark like dinosaur hide. Strangler vines had grown around one tree in a killing embrace — all that remained was the fused skeletal framework of the vines; the tree itself was long gone, decayed away. Fungus and lichens were everywhere.

The atmosphere was thick with the usual fermenting stink of the jungle, but soon a different smell began to coat Felix’s throat: a poisoned sweetness, the stench of rotting flesh. The team cautiously approached a more sunlit area, where the canopy cover was open. Soon Felix saw the reason for the smell. Fresh bright scars of naked raw wood, and snapped or shattered tree limbs dangling down or lying broken in the mud, showed where howitzer shells had hit and gone off in the air.

Four shells, looks like, 105s, Felix thought appraisingly: 105mm rounds. One quick salvo, a battery of four guns… Tree bursts like this — when you have no solid overhead protection like sandbags and logs — are a real bitch.

The stench of putrefaction was even stronger: Brazilian soldiers recovered any of their dead comrades between artillery duels, but dead animals lay where they fell.

The team skirted this unnatural open area to avoid surveillance from the air. They hurried on. On slightly higher ground, closer to the bank of the Iguazu, they passed a forward Brazilian Army observation post, deserted now. The dug-in bunker was made out of rails and ties taken from the nearby tourist railroad. Once, Felix knew, before the border troubles began, that narrow-gauge line had brought visitors to the falls. Back then, buses ran from the city of Foz do Iguazu, fifteen miles northwest — but now Foz had been evacuated, and Felix was very glad. Buses had also run from the Argentine city of Puerto Iguazu, twelve miles off to the west, where the Iguaza fed the Parana.

Some scattered — now empty — hotels were the closest civilization. Beyond that, the falls lay in the middle of national parks, on both the Brazilian and Argentine sides.

The parks were supposed to be nature preserves. Lizards darted along the ground. Beautiful white and lavender wildflowers bloomed amid the brush and thickets, and colorful orchids grew on the trees, nurtured by the ceaseless “plant-mister spray” from the nearby but still unseen falls. Lianas and hanging vines of different lengths and thicknesses bridged between tree branches and the ground.

Toucans used their huge, specialized beaks to pick fruit from the trees. A band of inquisitive coatis, reminding Felix of raccoons except that they had more pointed noses and were active during the day, approached the team to beg for food with their striped tails raised high in the air. The SEAL chief waved his arms to chase them off.

The rushing noise of the river and the roaring of the falls was growing louder by the minute. The air was much moister and water dripped from the trees. Felix began to see swarms of butterflies. Above him, over the triple canopy, he heard the raucous cry of hawks.

His route-march formation pressed on.

Again the smell of festering carcass grew strong. Felix heard a powerful feline growl, then caught glimpses of graceful, menacing movement between the trees: something big, orange-brown fur, mottled with round black markings. A jaguar, scavenging, determined to guard the remains of a deer killed by a mortar shell or shot by a nervous sentry. Felix made more hand signals, and the team gave the jaguar a very wide berth.

The sky grew dark, and lightning flashed and thunder cracked. Felix and his men all cringed reflexively against incoming cannon or rifle rounds. The usual afternoon rainstorm began.

The thunderstorm passed through quickly, leaving the wet trees and vines and brush even wetter; the reddish mud was more slippery; puddles took up added space between the soaring trunks and the protruding roots on the ground. The birds and butterflies became active again. Felix and his men were soaked, but they hardly noticed or cared. Felix and his chief exchanged quick glances, and the mixed emotions on their faces let them read each other’s mind.

We’re in a race against the Germans. They have the advantage since they’re the ones with the bomb. But they know they’ve lost the element of surprise: the Brazilians’ dam defenses fired on their jet while it was still over neutral Paraguay. The alerted kampfschwimmer must have seen my chopper from the jet, and they probably saw us fast-roping down while they hung in their parachutes.

Felix wasn’t sure which side held the edge. But a lot of his tactics depended on what he saw the Germans do.

I guess that means they’re the ones with the initiative… and that’s not good.

Captain Fuller had told him by radio in the chopper that the kampfschwimmer would almost surely emplace the shock-hardened, pressure-proof American atom bomb somewhere against the base of the falls, with its arming device on a timer. This way they’d achieve almost the same amount of outrage and damage as if they’d blasted the Itaipu Dam itself: detonated against the bottom of the escarpment, in the center of the horseshoe of the falls, the warhead would vaporize millions of tons of rock and silt-laden water. The whole flow of the river would suddenly stop. Then more massive chunks of the escarpment would collapse, and the atomic shock front that held back the river flow would dissipate.

The mighty Iguazu River would resume, its pent-up force released as a major flash flood. Neutron bombardment would make elements like silicon and calcium in the rocks and clay become intensely radioactive. The