Authors: Joe Buff
Each face was a mask of utter exhaustion. Felix forced himself to smile. He looked at his men with pride. To talk he drew a breath so deep his stomach pushed out at his flak vest. “And you thought Hell Week was bad.”
The man who was carrying the dead lieutenant looked at Felix blankly. There was grief in his eyes, for the loss.
“Don’t think of death until later. Just
put out
for me, for the team.” Felix threw his head back to pull in more air.
The wounded man tripped. Felix reached and caught him. The man lost consciousness and wouldn’t revive. Even with other guys lugging his gear, Felix was amazed he’d managed this far. He quickly inserted another transfusion of blood expander and lifted the SEAL in a fireman’s carry; SEALs took turns running beside him, to hold the plasma bag high.
With this new burden over his shoulders, Felix gave his men another forced smile. They still had so far to go. “Faster. Quit slacking off.
The only easy day was yesterday
.”
At dusk, Felix hid in the stinking trash dump, making observations. His team rested in the jungle growth behind him.
The small village beyond the outskirts of Ferreira Gomes was crawling with Brazilian Army troops. From things they said to one another, Felix knew the troops were preparing to make a sweep to the south. He wasn’t surprised—he’d heard the noise of helicopters during the late afternoon.
The wounded SEAL was in very poor condition now. Felix was sure that if he didn’t get into surgery before dawn, he would die.
Felix didn’t like the options. He couldn’t afford to wait for the Brazilian troops to leave. They might take hours yet, assembling for a night reconnaissance—he saw some men with night-vision goggles. Even if they did depart soon, to scour the country Felix and his team just covered, they’d surely leave behind a rear element for communications and logistic support.
We’ll just have to brazen it out.
Felix crawled backward out of sight of the village. Dogs barked, chickens cackled, pigs oinked, but they’d been doing that already because of the army troops. Felix pulled rotting fruit rinds and maggot-ridden animal bones, and even more unspeakable waste, off his clothing and equipment. But the garbage pile had been high ground of a sort—and he was unlikely to be disturbed by playing children, or villagers dumping trash, without enough warning to slip away.
Felix rejoined his worn-out men. He led them forward, along a well-beaten trail running from some cultivated fields into the village. Felix already knew that most of the villagers had gone indoors because it was getting dark—and also to avoid interfering with the well-disciplined, orderly troops. He saw and smelled wood smoke coming from village shacks on stilts grouped around a main clearing. He also smelled delicious cooking smells, even above his own stench.
“Hey!” Felix yelled. “
Hey!
Patrol coming in!”
“Password!” a young and scared private shouted from behind a straw-thatched storage shed.
If he thinks that shed is good cover, I’d hate to see what his marksmanship’s like…. Still, I’d rather not find out.
“Password?” Felix shouted. “How should I know? Special Forces! We’ve been wild-westing it for two weeks!”
The private came forward, shrugged, and let Felix and his men go by. The private stared wide-eyed at the wounded man—carried now on a stretcher improvised from saplings and uniform shirts—and at the dead man in the body bag—carried now by two men using the handles on the bag’s sides.
“Be careful out there,” Felix said to the private. “You could be next!” As expected, he saw that the soldier held an M-16.
In the village, a Brazilian Army sergeant spotted Felix and walked over. He sniffed when he got closer, then tried not to breathe too deeply. “Do you need an evacuation? We can call back a helicopter.” The sergeant looked up at the sky. It was growing dark very quickly. “But I’m not sure they land at night.”
“No,” Felix bluffed. “Thank you, but we have our own arrangements.”
“I think your man needs a hospital.”
“Yes. Leave that to us.”
“I think I should tell my lieutenant.”
Felix hesitated. “Please be quick. We have a schedule.”
“Yes, yes. Quick.”
This is where it gets dicey.
The lieutenant approached. He seemed capable and battle-hardened, not someone easily fooled. He wrinkled his nose at his first whiff of Felix.
Good. The more I stink, the less he’ll really look at me, and the less he’ll think to ask me awkward questions.
Felix knew the best way to lie was to use as much of the truth as he could.
“Special Forces, sir. We met some opposition. Our officer was killed. We have our own plan of egress. Classified mission orders.”
The lieutenant called the sergeant over. “Give me the map.”
As they wasted precious minutes and the sky became increasingly dark, Felix showed the lieutenant the vague area of where he’d made contact with the enemy—it had poured rain again that afternoon, and the brushfires from the fighting had surely been snuffed. Felix was certain the Germans would be hiding or gone long before the Brazilians could get anywhere near them on foot.
A villager lit straw torches. They gave off dancing yellow light.
The lieutenant went to brief his squad leaders by red flashlight. Felix led his men in the other direction, toward the river. The Araguari was high and running fast, and Felix could hear it even before the torchlight outlined the near edge of the riverbank against the wet blackness beyond. To his great relief, there were a handful of boats tied up at a rickety pier, at an indentation in the bank sheltered from the main flood current.
To steal a boat at this point, they’d have to wait some time for all the villagers to be asleep, and even then they might be caught—some shacks with light in their windows were close to the pier. Time was one thing the team’s wounded man did not have. Getting caught would surely start a noisy, attention-getting argument with the natives, or an even more compromising waterborne chase.
No, outright theft, discovered quickly
or
at first light, is definitely not advisable with genuine Brazilian forces right here.
Felix found an old man who owned one of the boats and said he needed to requisition it. He told the man to speak to the authorities in Ferreira Gomes, and he’d be reimbursed. That ought to create enough bureaucratic confusion to cover the SEAL team’s tracks. Felix wasn’t happy about needing to tell this sort of lie to an innocent villager.
The man wasn’t going for it. He threw up his hands. “How am I supposed to get upriver to Ferreira Gomes without my motorboat?”
Felix forced himself to hide his real annoyance. “How much?”
“Huh?”
“How much for the boat?”
“It’s not just a boat. It’s my livelihood.” The boat smelled of dead fish, and the inside looked greasy and slimy.
“How much?”
Felix and the man began to bargain. They settled on a price in local currency.
“How far are you going?”
Felix refused to say.
“You’ll need petrol.”
Felix sighed. “How much?”
Again they haggled.
“You’ll need lanterns. It’s dark.”
“All right. Lanterns. What kind?”
“Kerosene.”
“Full?”
“Yes, I’ll fill them.”
“How much?”
The man named a figure.
Felix sighed again, as if he regretted having to part with hard cash. The total price agreed to was high but not unreasonable.
Felix nodded to one of his men, who’d been leaning exhausted against the wall of the fisherman’s shack—the walls were made of old plywood, with no glass in the windows, and the roof was rusty corrugated tin. The SEAL pulled a roll of worn Brazilian bills from a pocket of his rucksack. Felix counted out the proper payment and handed it to the fisherman.
Felix gestured for his men to get in the motorboat. With all their equipment and the lieutenant’s body, it almost sank right there.
Felix turned to the fisherman. “Order and progress!” The Brazilian national motto.
“Huh?”
“I said, ‘Order and progress!’”
“Whatever. Hurry up. If you’re going east you’ll hit the
pororoca
.” The old man turned and went into his shack. The
pororoca
was a huge wave—a tidal bore—that rushed in at the mouth of the Araguari every twelve hours.
Another time bomb ticking on our heads.
Felix started the motorboat’s engine and left the pier. It ran surprisingly well. As skilled as he was in small-boat handling, the current was just too strong for the overloaded boat. The men had to bail for their lives and balance carefully, and even so they were in danger of capsizing any second.
When they were out of sight of the village, Felix turned down the kerosene lamps. He told the men to jettison their unneeded equipment in a deep part of the channel. This improved the freeboard just enough to keep the boat from swamping. They kept their weapons and ammo—they didn’t have much ammo left. They also kept their diving gear. Felix relit the lanterns, and put one at the bow and one at the stern.
This way no one will think we’re trying to hide.
By lantern light the racing water was silt-laden mocha brown. Felix revved the engine to maximum power. Dirty smoke poured out of the exhaust, and the motorboat went faster. The vibrations were so strong he was half afraid the boat would shake apart. But there was no compromising now. If an enemy was setting up to shoot at him from the bank, speed was everything. If they were too slow getting downstream and out to sea, they’d nose under the boiling forward face of the next inbound
pororoca
—and they’d never come up. Water around the fast-moving boat splashed higher; the men continued bailing for their lives.
The moon began to rise. First Felix saw its silver aura from below the horizon, and then the moon itself emerged. It reflected off the river sometimes, between the galleries of trees that lined both banks. The stars Felix could see overhead were very sharp and steady. He prayed it didn’t start to rain—without the moon and stars he couldn’t see far enough ahead to steer, and a downpour like the last one would drown them all. One of his team, an expert in first aid, was doing what he could for their injured man.
The injured man, his equipment and flak vest removed now, lay motionless. He didn’t moan or writhe. He just breathed slowly, and his respiration was more and more labored.
“There’s too much fluid in his chest,” Felix said. “It’s occluding his lungs.” As a former hospital corpsman, he knew about such things.
“I can try to rig a tube,” the first-aid man said. He meant insert a drain so the built-up fluid wouldn’t press against the lungs and heart.
Conditions here were hardly ideal, but Felix nodded.
“I’ll start,” the aid man said. One of the other SEALs brought a lantern closer. Bugs swarmed around the lantern light. Flies were drawn to the blood. Other flies and mosquitoes bothered Felix. He tried to ignore them.
Felix followed the twists and turns of the rushing river down to the sea. The noise of the outboard motor was very loud, a higher tone than the roar of the rain-swollen Araguari. The stench of gasoline and kerosene and fumes helped cover the smell of rotting garbage that even Felix splashing himself with river water couldn’t remove. The engine and lamp smoke also helped repel the insects, which would only get thicker as they neared the coastal swamps.
Felix looked at the moon and gave thanks to God for being alive. He gingerly felt for the unexploded grenade round in his rucksack. He fingered the bent fléchettes embedded hard into his flak vest; he was sure the surgeon on the
Ohio
would find another fléchette in the wounded man’s chest somewhere, plus who knew what sorts of bullets and shrapnel in the lieutenant’s corpse.
Felix glanced into the boat. Some of the men continued bailing, using their helmets. Others helped steer with oars they’d found in the bottom of the boat—if the boat veered broadside to the current they were doomed instantly. The aid man cared for his patient. The boat rocked in the current, and shipped a lot of water, and Felix and his team were barely holding their own.
One man killed in action. One wounded in action, condition critical. Mission accomplished, but at a high price.
Felix estimated their rate of speed along the bank.
Maybe we’ll beat the tidal bore, and maybe we won’t. If we do we kill the lights and sneak out past the reefs and sandbars…. We aim for a spot where the surf isn’t runningtoo high. We lower our sonar distress transponder and hope a minisub from the
Ohio
hears it and picks us up before broad daylight.
T
o leave the Norfolk Navy Base covertly and rejoin USS
Challenger,
Jeffrey sneaked in disguise aboard a
Virginia
-class fast-attack submarine, and hitched a ride out to sea. The
Virginia
boat submerged as soon as she could—to begin her own deployment protecting the African relief convoy. Jeffrey was forced to watch inside the control room, a mere passenger. He felt cheated of having the captain’s important privilege: that last view of the outside world and that last breath of fresh air, up in the tiny bridge cockpit atop the sail, before the sail trunk hatches were dogged and all main ballast tanks were vented. His only glimpse of the early-morning twilight was via the photonics mast, as another captain had the conn. The view on a video display screen just wasn’t the same.
Jeffrey grabbed some sleep in the executive officer’s stateroom fold-down guest rack. He had been up all night in briefings and planning sessions in Norfolk. A messenger woke him when the
Virginia
boat was beyond the continental shelf, saying that the minisub from
Challenger
was ready to pick him up. The entire rendezvous and docking took place submerged, for stealth.
Challenger
herself lurked more than thirty nautical miles away, for even more stealth.