Authors: Joe Buff
“Commander Fuller speaking. Yes, sir.”
“Captain,” Hodgkiss said from distant Norfolk, “we’re having a lot of trouble keeping in touch. It’s not just radio jamming. Our basic communications-management software is under information warfare attack. We’re fighting back, but it’s as if the Axis can find and block our most important voice and data links. I may lose you soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain, I want you to—”
The line went dead.
“Admiral? Hello?” Nothing.
I said before, “Unless otherwise directed.” He wants me to do
what?
Or
not
do what?
Jeffrey gave the phone to the aide. “Thank you. See if you can reestablish the connection quickly, please.”
“Look!” Colonel Stewart pointed at the TV.
From a control room in the bunker, a technician was feeding in live video, windowed in a corner of the wall screen.
“This must be coming from the B-one,” Stewart said, “from its long-range visual-observation sensor pod.”
The main status plot showed the B-1 at the inner edge of international waters in the estuary off Buenos Aires. The angle of the view suggested it had ascended to very high altitude.
Jeffrey saw an aircraft that looked like a Learjet or a Gulf-stream putting down on a civilian airfield at La Plata, a town right on the water forty miles southeast of central Buenos Aires. The tarmac and hangar areas held a number of other small planes. He figured these were corporate jets, or aircraft Argentina’s rich elite used for pleasure flying.
The jet with the kampfschwimmer and warhead aboard slowed at the end of a runway, turned onto a taxiway, and met a refueling truck. As Jeffrey watched, another truck drove up to the plane.
Several men got out of the plane and began removing bulky packages from the back of the truck, carrying them onto the plane. The packages looked like rectangular canvas sacks. Another man got out of the plane and climbed in the back of the truck and stayed there, out of sight.
“Argentine liaison, probably,” Jeffrey said, meaning the man who wasn’t returning to the plane.
“Uh-oh,” Stewart said. “I think those sacks are parachutes.”
“You mean in case they’re shot down?”
“No,” Stewart said sourly. “That’s
not
what I mean.”
Then Jeffrey understood. Kampfschwimmer, like SEALs, were airborne qualified. “With chutes they can deploy just about anywhere with the warhead, by jumping right out of that plane.”
Jeffrey looked at the map, unfolded on the conference table, of airfields on the Argentine side of the border. The paved ones, long enough to handle a corporate jet, had been circled with a red marker by someone on the Brazilian staff. “I guess we won’t be needing this now,” Jeffrey said with concern and disgust.
An hour later, Jeffrey watched the status display on the TV screen on the wall in the underground bunker. The tension of waiting with nothing to do, and yet with so much at stake, was having a physical toll on him. There was just so much adrenaline his body could handle. He felt as if tiny buzz saws were tearing up and down his spine and countless scalpels were stabbing him in the heart and intestines. The only consolation was that he knew everyone else in the room, in his own way, must also be feeling the strain.
Contact with Admiral Hodgkiss, or anyone else in Norfolk, hadn’t been reestablished. No one could reach the U.S. Army’s Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, either. Communication satellites appeared to be going haywire. When the technicians in the bunker tried to relay a message by radio through the AWACS or the B-1 bomber, Axis hackers somewhere on the ground inside the U.S. interrupted the connection almost immediately. Mr. Jones said that even attempts by some of his people to call the U.S. by telephone, from their offices or homes or public pay phones in Brazil—to the White House or special CIA unlisted numbers or even an innocuous public library picked at random in Idaho—just kept giving “busy circuits,” and no one could get through. The tattered remnants of the war-torn Internet were no help either: international server links had been broken on purpose months ago, as the ultimate firewall against unstoppable, incurable worms and viruses.
The enemy has prepared very well for whatever it is they plan today. But by such a systematic and widespread attack, these hostile information warriors reveal their methods and algorithms. Their routes of infiltration can be traced. Pentagon and FBI experts will find some of them, and Axis operatives will be compromised or captured or killed. The Germans must feel the sacrifice is worth it…. The implications of that alone are scary. The damage they’re doing will certainly be worked around or repaired, but will it be soon enough? Tomorrow, or even tonight, may be too late, and the Germans know it.
Jeffrey watched the situation plot; communications inside Brazil remained mostly intact—and he wondered how much longer
that
would last.
The helicopter with Estabo’s team was near the middle of the border between Brazil and Argentina. They were orbiting in a holding pattern, waiting for further instructions.
Everything depended on what the plane with the Germans and the American bomb did next. The AWACS had a solid radar lock and followed its every move. So far, it kept heading north.
“Something doesn’t make sense,” an exhausted Colonel Stewart said. “They aren’t slowing or turning. They’re heading into Paraguayan airspace.” The American diplomat sounded worried and confused—Paraguay and Uruguay were neutral, both in the larger conflict and in the impending fight in South America.
The Brazilian generals began to show signs of agitation. “Might we have followed the wrong plane?” one of them said. “Did we fall for a deception, and that isn’t even the bomb?”
An oppressive, uncomfortable silence suddenly filled the room.
Jeffrey turned to Mr. Jones, who now looked deadly serious despite his outlandish garb. He’d taken off his jacket and loosened his tie, and there were spreading marks of sweat on the armpits of his shirt. Jeffrey, in contrast, thought the conference room was too cold, and his hands felt like ice cubes.
“Can we get that aircraft’s flight plan?” he asked Jones.
“On such short notice? I doubt it. There’s nothing says they filed one, or if they did they could’ve lied.”
Jeffrey grunted. He knew Jones was right, but what the man said, the way he said it, couldn’t help but sound defeatist.
The generals now seemed paralyzed by doubt or indecision.
Jeffrey reminded himself that these men vastly outranked him, and this was
their
country—but they had no experience at all of total war, while
he’d
been fighting and outsmarting Germans for months. He realized that he’d better show some initiative and interpret his fragmentary orders from Admiral Hodgkiss—plus the existing assent from President da Gama—in very broad terms.
I don’t know if the White House or Pentagon ever meant for Operation Mercury to go nearly this far, but I can’t stop now. These times demand strong leadership from the bottom up.
Jeffrey was in his element.
“We have to work with what we’ve got. Let’s look at a detailed map of the northern part of the border. And somebody, tell the chopper with the SEALs to start heading north.” The Brazilian admiral nodded and left the room.
Someone handled the map-viewer controls. Jeffrey now saw the tongue of Argentine land that stretched north between Brazil and Paraguay.
“That’s the Triple Border,” Stewart said. “I thought we ruled that out.”
“Maybe we were wrong,” Jeffrey said. “Look.” He stood up and pointed at places on the map. “If they cut through Paraguay, they gain protection from Brazilian antiaircraft fire until the last possible moment.”
The generals nodded. “But that would severely limit the area they can attack,” one of them said. “When they turn east from Paraguay, they’ll only have access to a short fringe of the shared frontier. If our army attacked Argentina from
there
, our ground forces would be canalized into a narrow front aiming south, and it adds two hundred fifty kilometers to the route to Buenos Aires! I thought they were faking a breakthrough by our army going through the
center
of their lines.”
Jeffrey stared at the map. “Can we get President da Gama in here?”
One general rose wordlessly and went out. In a few minutes da Gama preceded him back into the room. The admiral returned with them.
As the Brazilian president took in the situation plot, Jeffrey pointed at a place on the map that was marked with a cluster of standard military icons that represented heavy antiaircraft artillery.
“Mr. President, what are these ack-ack guns protecting?”
“That’s the Itaipu Dam.”
“What is it,
exactly?
”
“It’s the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world. Enough steel for four hundred Eiffel Towers. Plus fifteen million cubic yards of concrete and cement.” Da Gama was obviously proud of the dam; he rattled off the figures like a tour guide.
“All this blue here is the lake built up behind it?”
“Yes. The dam is seven hundred feet high, and altogether almost five miles wide. The reservoir is something like a hundred twenty-five miles in length.”
“That’s one huge head of water, sir.”
“I think the visitor brochures say it’s a trillion cubic feet, behind that dam.”
Mr. Jones whistled.
“The dam spillways drain south?” Jeffrey asked.
“Yes, into the Paraná River.” Da Gama sounded impatient now; he obviously thought the American questions were distracting, even irrelevant.
Jeffrey was undeterred. “And the Paraná goes where, Mr. President?”
“It runs south through Argentina, then drains just north of Buenos Aires into the Rio de la Plata estuary.”
“The dam might be their target.”
“But it’s on
our
side of the border.”
“Just barely, from what this map seems to say.”
“Yes. But the dam is owned by
Brazil
…. Paraguay soldus their shares during their latest banking crisis.”
“Don’t you see? Brazilian ownership just gives you better, easier access, sir, to implant an American bomb…. Nukethe Itaipu Dam, and where does that gigantic radioactive tidal wave go? Whose border troops are wiped out or cut off from reinforcements? Which capital’s shantytown suburbs get flushed by the surge of contaminated water, laced with so many tons of vaporized and neutron-activated concrete and steel?”
“Argentina. Argentina. Argentina.”
“Now, Mr. President, would
anyone
believe you didn’t nuke the dam just because you
own
it? Could
anything
cause more widespread harm and outrage in Argentina? And could anything give the Germans better reason to help the Argentines nuke your country in revenge a dozen, a hundred times over?”
“You know the answers to those questions, Captain.”
“Sir, you must order your antiaircraft batteries to fire into Paraguayan airspace to protect that dam at all cost.”
D
a Gama had left the room again to issue more directives as commander in chief.
Jeffrey’s further thoughts were sharply interrupted: an American electronic warfare plane held radio intercept contact on communications from the aircraft bearing the kampfschwimmer and the bomb. Jeffrey listened to it all on a speaker while one of the Brazilian generals, who understood Spanish, translated. It gave Jeffrey the creeps to hear the enemy conversing—confirming all his best guesses and raising all his worst fears.
As everyone in the Rio bunker expected, the Argentine corporate jet reported to its headquarters that it was now taking heavy flak from gun emplacements protecting the Itaipu Dam. The Brazilian antiaircraft artillery was even firing across the border, violating Paraguayan airspace, in an effort to knock the jet down.
Jeffrey’s suggestion to da Gama had been turned into a presidential order, and now that order was being carried out.
Over the speakers came the hard crack of antiaircraft shells bursting near the plane, picked up by the enemy pilot’s microphone as he talked.
The Brazilian general leaned toward Jeffrey. In an undertone he said, “Someone is telling them to arm the timer on the bomb and fly over the dam and just parachute the bomb into the water. The pilot is saying the flak is too intense, they’ll never make it close enough…. A different voice istelling the pilot to shift to the secondary target.”
“What secondary target?” Mr. Jones said in confusion. Colonel Stewart looked ashen.
Everyone rushed to study the map of that part of the border.
“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 Iguazú 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 Iguazú 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 Iguazú fed the Paraná 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 Iguazú 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.