last for all eternity. The waterfalls in most places fell in steps, where smaller and lower plateaus jutted out from the face of the main escarpment. Everywhere water plummeted and smashed; in some spots the drop went straight to the bottom, thirty stories below. When islands on the edge were big enough to block the flow from wide patches, the entire cliff face beneath was covered in unbroken greenery. Mist like plumes of smoke rose up from where water ceaselessly impacted at the boiling base of the cliffs. Down there the river recovered itself and rushed on, in fast- flowing white-water rapids that disappeared around a broad bend to the west. Birds darted high and low, safe from the power of the falls, feeding on insects that flew through the swirling clouds of foggy vapor. Updrafts drenched Felix’s face. A rich and vivid rainbow framed the entire awesome, magnificent scene.
Felix felt as if the waterfall complex and rainbow were reaching to wrap around and embrace — or crush — him bodily. He began to suffer vertigo, gazing down into this all-encompassing deluge powered by unforgiving, unrelenting gravity. He asked himself if the vista reminded him more of heaven or hell. He tried to imagine what it would be like here in the first few seconds and minutes after a nuclear weapon went off.
Then bullets tore through the bushes above his head, and Felix remembered he and his team had a job to do.
Felix and his men struggled through always-tugging water, saved from doom only by their anchored climbing ropes. They crawled over islets and rocks under enemy fire. The alternate up and down, the going in and out of the river — using Draegers one moment and shooting their MP-5s the next — became increasingly taxing both physically and mentally. The SEALs were getting closer to the Germans, which meant they were closer to the bomb. But the Germans were getting closer to the Devil’s Throat with the bomb, and the return fire from their submachine guns was growing progressively more accurate. At least the German machine cannon wasn’t shooting their way, not yet.
Then Felix felt total despair. He watched as kampfschwimmer on a fragment of walkway near the Devil’s Throat began to lower the bomb, at the end of a rope, straight down into the vortex. He ordered his men to try to stop them with sustained fire.
The SEALs’ silenced weapons coughed and sputtered, burning through magazine after magazine. Kampfschwimmer on or near the walkway returned the fire just as viciously. Both sides began to take losses.
Felix saw one kampfschwimmer pitch headfirst off the walkway, then snatch up short on a rope that had secured him to a fragment of the railing. Right at the edge of the Devil’s Throat, his body twirled like a rubber doll in the torrent. More bullets flew in both directions.
Other kampfschwimmer kept playing out the rope attached to the bomb. Finally, with a triumphant toss, the man Felix guessed to be their leader threw the free end of the rope into the vortex, after the bomb. The end of the rope vanished instantly. The dead German continued to twirl, as if grotesquely mocking the SEALs.
The kampfschwimmer began to withdraw, back the way they’d come.
The SEAL chief crawled up next to Felix. He had to shout in Felix’s ear. “We’ve lost, sir!”
That was exactly how Felix felt, but hearing the other man say it out loud helped him find new courage from somewhere deep inside himself.
“We haven’t lost until the warhead blows! We have to go down after it!”
“Down
Felix nodded. He looked around. One of his men was dead, hit by a round that had pierced the base of his neck as he lay prone. Felix assigned their combat medic to stay and aid another enlisted SEAL who was wounded, seriously but not mortally.
Something in the sky caught Felix’s eye and he looked up. It was a Global Hawk surveillance drone. These were new and each cost millions. Felix guessed da Gama had given the U.S. Air Force permission to launch the unarmed drone — Jeffrey Fuller’s negotiating with da Gama must have succeeded completely.
The Global Hawk possessed sophisticated sensors, including live color video imagery relayed back to its portable ground-control station.
Knowing that people were watching, that they cared, that he had an audience, gave Felix more renewed strength. He told the chief the two of them would have to work as a team.
Using the same techniques as before, moving underwater held by ropes and leaning on crossing sticks — and transiting islands on their bellies — they worked their way to the Devil’s Throat. They ignored the dead kampfschwimmer as they rigged the last of their climbing ropes to this anchored, isolated stretch of damaged walkway. Each rope, three hundred feet long, ought to be just enough to get within range of the bottom of the furious vortex, if they were lucky.
Surviving kampfschwimmer saw what they were doing and began to shoot.
“I’ll stay,” the SEAL chief yelled, “tie myself to an abutment in the water for better cover! I’ll keep the Germans from coming back!”
“Thanks, good, perfect!” Felix said.
He waved to his two remaining men in the distance, the wounded SEAL and the man who was caring for him. They signaled they understood: lay down a base of covering fire.
Felix gave the chief all of his ammo and his own MP-5. It would do him no good where he was going.
“Good luck, Chief!”
“Good luck, sir!”
Felix was now on his own. The maw of the vortex beckoned before him. The way river channels crashed into one another, and creamed into waves that piled high before suddenly vanishing, reminded him of a demon foaming at the mouth.
Felix went underwater and played out the rope through his harness belt’s rappelling buckle. The turbulence here was exceedingly strong. It tried to turn him over and over and pound him against the final margin of the rocky riverbed. Visibility was zero again. The overwhelming noise had a very strange quality. It came at him from every direction at once, as if the cauldron were trying to swallow him whole.
Felix scraped over a hidden submerged outcropping and lost one of his swim fins. He gripped his Draeger mouthpiece even more tightly between his teeth. The pure oxygen tasted stale, laden with carbon dioxide he was exhaling. Never had he hyperventilated so rapidly. Never had he felt such raw fear. What he was attempting, he knew, was utter madness. Each cubic yard of plunging water weighed almost a ton. There was no way he could survive.
Suddenly Felix was over the edge, dangling straight down. The water tore off his dive mask, and seemed to tear at his flesh.
The tension of the rope against the buckle was so great, Felix needed to exert all his strength to make some slack to let it pass through the rappelling harness. For the first time since the battle began, he was using the rope and buckle for their intended purpose: to go
He made himself go on. He kept his eyes tightly closed as water bashed at his face and his shoulders. His other swim fin was torn from his foot. He came to a ledge in the cliff face. Felix forced himself to move sideways, first right and then to the left, to make sure the bomb wasn’t lodged here.
He continued down. Felix had no idea how much time was left on the atom bomb’s timer. He hoped the SEAL chief and the enlisted men could hold off the kampfschwimmer long enough. At any moment his rope might be untied and he’d go into free fall — and have just enough time to curse his fate before he hit the rocks and got killed. The rope was supposed to be unbreakable — impervious to chafing, or cutting by knives. Felix knew, today, he was putting the supplier’s claim to the ultimate test.
Coming to another ledge, this one eroded into the cliff face by a backwash, and sheltered from the main force of the vortex flow, Felix once again checked for the bomb. Nothing. He allowed himself only a moment to rest. His arm and leg muscles felt like they were on fire. He was almost asphyxiating inside his Draeger, so heavy and rapid was his heartbeat and his breath.
Felix continued to struggle to play out rope. Down he went, blindly, as roaring water cascaded at him from three different sides at once, inside the chasm in the escarpment face that made the Devil’s Throat. The plunging water whirlpooled and caromed and then recoiled against itself, all as it raced for the chasm floor. The wild crosscurrents inside the vortex threatened to tear him limb from limb.
Felix went down even farther. Here the water had accelerated, just as a falling body would. It slammed into
