the temperature close to his own body's, it was as though he'd been denied all tactile sensation. They drifted for a mile, the men lazily finning to maintain steerage, before Cabrillo ordered them back to the surface.
The isolated village was well behind them, and they found they had the river to themselves. Even had there been traffic, their black gear, and the fact that only parts of their heads were exposed, would lead any native to believe the team was just a couple of branches being slowly swept down toward Argentina.
Hours rolled away. It was a faint glow emanating around the next bend that told them they were approaching the border. During their briefing, they had all seen satellite shots of the area. On the Paraguay side was a three- hundred-foot concrete quay fronting tumbledown warehouses and a customs shed. The sleepy little town was maybe four streets deep and equally wide. A white-steepled church was the tallest building. In response to the troop buildup, the local military commander had brought a detachment of soldiers to town. They were camped just north of the village in a field that ran right to the river's red-clay bank.
The Argentine side was almost identical, except there were at least five hundred soldiers garrisoned there, and they had strengthened their position by deploying search lights on spidery towers to sweep the black river, and strung thickets of concertina wire on the dirt road connecting the two towns. The satellite pictures showed two slim boats tied to the pier near where it looked like the military was headquartered. To Juan's eye they appeared to be Boston Whalers, and, if he had to guess, they were probably armed with machine guns and possibly grenade launchers. They would be a problem if things got hairy.
Keeping close to the bottom, but not touching it so the hull didn't disturb the silt and leaves and kick up a telltale wake, the men swam through the formidable gauntlet. They knew they had reached the Argentine position when a shaft of light pierced the dark water. They were too deep and the river too muddy for anyone on shore to see them, but they steered away from the silvery glow anyway. On the surface, the two men in the tower watched whatever the beam revealed empty water slowly flowing southward.
Cabrillo and the team remained submerged for another hour, only coming up when the border was miles behind them. It took another hour of drifting silently to reach a nameless tributary seen earlier from the satellite pictures. This time, the men had to work against the current, wrestling the unwieldy craft against the flow. Twenty minutes of struggle gained them only a hundred yards, but Juan called a halt, judging they were far enough upstream to keep them from potentially prying eyes.
He sighed as he stripped off the heavy Draeger set and laid it into the half-sunk boat. That feels good.
My fingertips look like white prunes, Mark complained, holding them up to the moonlight.
Quiet, Juan admonished in a whisper. Okay, boys, you know what's next. The quicker we get it done, the more shut-eye we get.
The steel plates used to lower the RHIB's profile weighed fifty pounds each, a not-unreasonable load for men in peak physical condition, but there were hundreds of them that had to be lifted over the gunwale and dumped into the river. The men worked like machines, Jerry Pulaski especially. For every plate Murph or Mike Trono got over the side, he moved two. Slowly, so slowly, the boat began to emerge like some slimy amphibian from the primordial ooze. Once the sides cleared the surface, Murph engaged a battery-powered pump. The steady stream of water sounded like a babbling brook.
It took an hour, and when they were finished all four rolled onto the still-wet deck and lay like dead men.
Juan was the first to rouse himself. He told his men to sleep, and let Jerry know he would have second watch. The night sounds of the jungle were punctuated by the occasional snore.
Two hours later, shortly after dawn, the RHIB left the small tributary and returned to the river proper. The air cells they had emptied remained limp, but on such smooth water, and with such a light load, it wouldn't affect the boat's capabilities.
The four men now wore Argentine combat fatigues with the insignia of the Ninth Brigade and their trademark maroon berets. The Ninth was a well-trained and -outfitted paramilitary unit that answered only to General Coraz +|n. In other words, a death squad.
Pretending to be a Ninth Brigade officer, Cabrillo knew he would be able to talk them into or out of any situation that could arise.
He stood at the RHIB's helm, wearing aviator-style glasses favored by members of the Ninth, his beret at a cocky angle on his head. Behind him, the twin outboards threw up a volcanic wall of white froth while the bow planed over the still surface like a rocket. Mike and Murph stood at his sides, Heckler and Koch machine pistols, a Ninth Brigade staple, slung across their backs. Jerry was still curled up on the fiberglass floorboards like a dog, somehow able to sleep despite the motor's roar.
The speedometer quivered just below forty miles per hour.
Twenty minutes downriver, they came to their first village. It was impossible to tell how long ago it had been destroyed the amount of vegetation creeping into the burned-out shells of thatched huts led Juan to think months rather than weeks. Land behind the village that had been cleared for agriculture was also succumbing to the jungle's intractable advance.
I know what those guys must have felt going upriver in Apocalypse Now, Mike said.
There were no bodies lying on the ground animals had seen to that shortly after the assault but the savagery was still in clear abundance. The hamlet's score of cement-block buildings had been destroyed by high explosives. Chunks of concrete had been blown as far as the river's edge, and the few remaining sections of wall were riddled with machine-gun holes. There were countless impact craters from the mortar fire used to drive the frightened people into their fields, where the Argentines would have set up a perimeter picket of men. The villagers would have raced into a slaughter.
Good God, Murph gasped as they continued past. Why? Why did they do this?
Ethnic cleansing, Juan replied, his mouth a tight, grim line. This far north the villagers were probably Indians. Intel reports I've seen say the government in Buenos Aires wants to eradicate the last few pockets of natives remaining in the country. And to give you an idea of the characters we're impersonating he nodded in the direction of the little town that's most likely Ninth Brigade handiwork.
Lovely, Mike spat. He'd tucked his beret into a shoulder epaulet, so his fine hair blew free around his head.
Same thing's going on in the cities and towns. Anywhere they find natives, they drag them out and ship them off to either labor camps here in the Amazon or they just simply disappear. This place is a mix of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
How many Indians are left?
There were about six hundred thousand before the coup. God only knows how many have already been killed, but if this regime stays in power for a few more years, they're all going to end up dead.
They passed a ferryboat, lumbering its way slowly upstream. It was big enough for eight vehicles, and maybe forty passengers on its upper deck. The trucks aboard were all painted in camouflage colors, and the men lining the rail were soldiers. They waved over at the speeding RHIB, shouting greetings in Spanish. Keeping in character, the three men standing at the helm didn't deign to respond. When the Argentine soldiers were close enough to recognize the maroon berets, their happy calls fell to instant silence, and most of them suddenly had the need to see what was happening on the other side of the old craft.
There was little other traffic on the river, mostly hand-built pirogues with single paddlers working along the bank in search of fish. Juan felt bad when they were caught up in the RHIB's churning wake, but slowing down would have been the last thing a Ninth Brigader would do. Truth of it was, they probably would have aimed for the dugout canoes and rammed their occupants under the water.
Two and a half hours of hard running down the river brought them to a tributary about half the size of the main branch, the Rio Rojo, and because of the high iron content in the soils upstream the water was indeed a reddish brown, like a bloody stain that spread into the current. Pulaski was awake by now, and he and Mike had been scanning the river for any sign that they were being watched. There was nothing but the river and the jungle, which was a solid wall of intertwined vegetation.
Clear, Mike called over the engines' growl.
Clear, Jerry echoed at the bow, and lowered his binoculars.
Juan cut power just enough to make the sharp turn, and opened the throttles again as soon as the bow pointed upstream. The Rio Rojo was less than fifty yards wide, and the towering jungle seemed to meet overhead, filtering the sunlight with a greenish tinge. It was like they were making their way up a tunnel. Their wake caromed
