Authors: Joe Buff
Beneath the rainbow swirled a cloud of billowing mist.
Beneath the mist, the land and the river seemed to end abruptly. Water poured over the edge of the plateau, between and around hundreds of small wooded islands and moss-covered rocks—from there a deadly maze of stepped and layered cataracts of foaming angry water plunged in stages straight down three hundred feet. Every foot of the way, that reddish-brown water gained speed and momentum, until it pounded without end onto boulders below. From there, it collected itself and raced on, barely diminished in power and energy.
The entire waterfall complex was two miles across. It dwarfed Niagara and Africa’s Victoria Falls combined. Near its center was a maelstrom where river branches converged from three directions into a vortex of terrible violence and overwhelming force. Countless tons of water slammed into this area every minute. The locals, Felix knew, called the vortex Garganta del Diablo in Spanish; it was Garganta do Diabo in Portuguese. It held both names because it sat precisely on the border between Brazil and Argentina.
Either way, the words were apt. They meant the “Devil’s Throat.”
Through his earplugs, even over the noise of the engines and rotors of the helicopter, he could hear the thunderous roar of the falls.
Direct orders from Captain Fuller, relayed in code in Portuguese from Rio, had told him to be ready to dive down seven hundred feet behind the Itaipu Dam—using mixed-gas scuba rigs the Brazilians would supply—to retrieve the bomb and disarm it at all costs. Every second was vital, and Captain Fuller’s grim but unquestionable orders told Felix and his men to risk a fatal case of the bends to get the bomb up and away from the dam.
Felix gripped his MP-5 even tighter.
A fast return ascent from seven hundred feet down, with no time to pause for decompression stages, is a guaranteed death in pure agony…. In the Iguazú Falls, in the Devil’s Throat, I can think of ten more awful ways to die.
Jeffrey and the others sat mesmerized. Technicians in the bunker had patched another radio link—between the AWACS and the SEAL team’s helicopter—into a speakerphone on the conference-room table. Now he heard two separate airborne conversations at once.
Jeffrey listened to the AWACS vector the pilot of Felix’s chopper toward the Argentine corporate jet. The flight director in the AWACS and the pilot of the Brazilian Army helicopter both used English—the international language of air-traffic control. The TV-screen map on the wall tracked their movements.
“Are you taking ground fire?” the AWACS director asked.
“Negative! Negative! No sign of troop activity below.”
Da Gama ordered his units pulled back, to avoid a friendly-fire tragedy and save lives when the stolen warhead blows…. The Argentine commanders might have done the same on their side.
Ground-to-ground howitzers shooting from now on might hit the wrong Special Forces team, or have an unintended bad effect when the SEALs and kampfschwimmer collide face-to-face.
But the Brazilian antiaircraft fire continued. The Argentine corporate-jet pilot’s voice became so high-pitched that he sounded like a woman. He screamed things in garbled Spanish that Jeffrey knew must be bad news. Jeffrey heard straining engine noises and other jagged sounds and shouting, picked up in the background over the pilot’s open mike.
“They’re at the secondary target,” the Brazilian general translated. “An engine fire, loss of hydraulics, he can’t control the plane much longer.”
Jeffrey heard the word
kampfschwimmer
amid the chaos of whistling, screeching noise, and yelling from the aircraft.
“Visual contact!” the chopper pilot shouted. “Bandit is trailing smoke! It’s losing altitude!”
Badly damaged by ack-ack from the dam.
“I see chutes! Four good chutes! One more, big, an equipment container!”
The warhead.
“Four more chutes!…That’s it. The bandit is going down.”
The screeching noise from the corporate jet grew louder, edgier, ominous, and the pilot’s voice shot up another octave. He was cut off by a sudden very hard smash. From that speaker now came only heavy silence.
“Impact! Impact!” the Brazilian helo pilot shouted over the speakerphone. “I see smoke and fire!”
“Status of the parachutists?” the AWACS director asked. His voice was calm and cool, involved but impassive.
“They’re in the jungle, on the highlands, on the Argentine side of the falls!…Navy SEAL team is fast-roping down from my aircraft!…SEAL team is on the ground. I am egressing the area.”
An aide came into the conference room, breaking Jeffrey’s concentration. “Captain Fuller, your transport back to
Challenger
is ready now.”
F
elix listened as the noise of the chopper receded into the distance. That sound always caused him to feel mixed emotions, which flowed in a predictable stream. A sense of being abandoned in hostile terrain. A nostalgic, wistful longing to still be on that aircraft and heading for safety. A powerful feeling of duty. A strong drive to get on with the job. Then his instincts to lead and achieve would kick in, and he wouldn’t look back until his work was complete.
He did an immediate sensory recon.
Felix’s team was down on the ground, through the triple-canopy overhead cover. In the murky lighting of late afternoon, amid the squawk and chatter of parrots and toucans and monkeys and the languid chirping and croaking of insects and frogs, everyone geared up. The heat and humidity were only slightly less severe than at the equator, but this heavily wooded area wasn’t true rain forest. The trees weren’t quite so tall, and the canopies weren’t so dense. Felix had noted this firsthand—as he slid down the rope that led from the chopper to the jungle-penetrator weight that had lain in the mud at the rope’s end.
For the most part the men, including Felix, were equipped as they had been during his intelligence raid into northern Brazil days before—the raid on which the SEALs’ lieutenant was killed.
Now I’m the lieutenant. Terrific.
The team had silenced MP-5 firearms and ammo and ceramic flak vests and helmets in anticipation of action against the kampfschwimmer team with the bomb. Each man—including Felix—also bore a heavy rucksack on his shoulders, with his Draeger in a cover on a load harness worn at his hips. The differences now were that one man 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 Iguazú, 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 Iguazú 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 Iguazú, 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 Iguazú, fifteen miles northwest—but now Foz had been evacuated, and Felix was very glad. Buses had also run from the Argentine city of Puerto Iguazú, twelve miles off to the west, where the Iguazá fed the Paraná.
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.