A big rotting fruit bashed down on Felix’s helmet; pungent juice from it dripped into his eyes. A wounded sloth slammed into the earth and Felix almost stumbled. He shot it once in the head to end its agony.
The dead lieutenant’s body, with all its equipment, was an almost unbearable weight across Felix’s back. SEALs never leave a man behind, dead or alive. From somewhere deep inside himself, Felix found the strength to carry on. He spun and fired a long burst from his submachine gun. He turned and ran. Grenade rounds probed toward him, but the enemy gunners were guessing the range.
Then bullets pounded into the lieutenant’s body from behind. Felix staggered, more from fright than from the force of the impacts. He hurried on.
Felix did a head count on the run. The rest of the team was following, but one man had been hit in the arm. The bullet struck the side of his shoulder, next to the edge of his flak vest. He seemed okay, at least for now. The wounded man was keeping up with the others, and there didn’t seem to be much blood, but he was having trouble reloading with his injured arm. Other men had lacerations from wood splinters or steel shrapnel — they kept running.
Felix’s heart pounded hard as he splashed through the puddles and mud. His back ached terribly from the deadweight of his lieutenant, and his breath came in overrapid painful gasps. He turned and fired his weapon again.
Bullets punched hard and squarely at his chest. Only his flak vest saved his life. Felix turned again to cover more distance and lead the withdrawal. He yelled for two of his men to throw more smoke incendiaries behind them.
Felix glanced at his chest. Sticking from his flak vest were what looked like long thin nails. They had little fins at their protruding ends. Each was bent, from its own momentum after it struck the ceramic plate of his vest. Each was smoking hot.
Fléchette rounds.
Felix yelled for his men to pick up the pace.
They’d been ambushed by a very sophisticated enemy. The weapons were state-of-the-art. The air-burst shrapnel rounds were ideal to take out men in helmets and flak vests — the shrapnel would hit faces and arms and legs. Fléchettes were perfect for use against the extremities of men in body armor too. The United States had decided not to use them in combat because the wounds they caused were so cruel. Each fléchette had such kinetic energy, and yet was so thin, that hitting anywhere unprotected in a human body it would fishhook — twisting and caroming inside to mutilate organs and rip blood vessels and sever nerves. A fléchette in the knee could ricochet and lodge inside your liver. One in the elbow could end up in your spine.
I think we found what we came here for.
Physical proof of German interference. This last ambush hadn’t been led by any insurgent band, using sloppy tactics and weapons designed fifty years ago. These were German Special Forces, maybe even kampfschwimmer.
Their goal is to do whatever it takes to kill or capture U.S. Navy SEALs on Brazilian soil. Then after they do their own interrogation, they’ll have local Axis sympathizers turn us in to the government. Those earlier half-botched ambushes were a setup after all. They were waiting for us.
Another grenade round flew past Felix’s head and embedded itself in a tree. He flinched, but it failed to detonate.
Felix was taking a terrible risk, but he had his orders. He stopped and used his survival knife to dig the intact round out of the trunk of the hardwood tree. He prayed its fuse was defective, a dud, or that it was programmed to burst after covering more distance and hadn’t flown its minimum arming range.
Just in case, Felix put it in his rucksack — outside the back panel of his flak vest, and covered by the dead lieutenant’s corpse.
Now we just have to break contact and get far away from here.
Felix shouted for his men to throw every white phosphorus grenade they had. A solid wall of heat and smoke flew up.
The enemy continued pursuing. Felix was impressed by their tenacity and stamina, as much as he was by their weaponry and tactics. He began to worry they were forcing him into another ambush, with more German Special Forces blocking the SEAL team’s rear.
Felix and his team reentered the stand of closely clumped trees. He handed the dead lieutenant to one of his men. They’d brought a body bag, just in case, and they placed the corpse in it quickly. This would avoid leaving more of a blood trail for the enemy to track. There was still enough blood and gore on Felix for what he planned to do next.
He ordered his team to split up. Most of the men would head east, at right angles to the pursuing Germans. Felix and one other SEAL would continue south, and make as much noise as they could to draw on the enemy.
Felix picked the most experienced unwounded man to assist him. They took two weapons, from the wounded and dead, to supplement their own. They began firing back down their escape path, toward the Germans, with one submachine gun in each hand.
Without the terrible weight of the lieutenant’s body, Felix felt a renewed surge of energy and strength. He and the other SEAL, impelled by a desperate cunning, charged ahead to lay a false trail. They emptied the magazines from all their weapons in the direction of the Germans. Then they shouldered the weapons and doubled back, literally walking backward, dashing toward the Germans as quickly but as quietly as they could.
“Here!” Felix ordered in a hoarse whisper. He used a canteen to wash the lieutenant’s blood from his gear. He and the other SEAL pulled special plastic sticks from their rucksacks. They ran west for several yards. They bent double and used the sticks and walked backward again, hurrying east, and picked up and followed the footprints of the other men in their team.
The sticks ended in fake boar hooves. Still bent over, glancing between their legs so they wouldn’t trip and ruin everything, the two men disguised their trail by pressing the stick ends into the mud and earth. Right and left hooves, front and rear hooves, over and over and over. They did this until the pain in their lower backs and knees made them feel as if they’d never walk again. Then they stood and flew east as fast as they could.
Felix’s team had reunited one hour later and was hurrying north on the run. Their shrapnel injuries wore field-expedient bandages. The men took turns carrying the dead lieutenant’s body. The man with the shoulder bullet wound had been given a transfusion of blood expander to delay shock and help him keep moving. But Felix knew he had internal bleeding — the high-velocity fléchette that entered his shoulder had lodged somewhere in his chest cavity.
Felix chose to head north because this was the direction the enemy would least expect him to take. North meant away from the Amazon, and farther away from the coast. It brought the team closer and closer to the Araguari River, a populated area and major obstacle, the last place a team of SEALs would want to be. The Araguari ran east, not toward the Amazon but to the coast and the South Atlantic Ocean.
“From now on,” Felix told his men between labored breaths, “I do the talking.”
Felix maintained a grueling pace. There was real danger the Germans had figured out his plan and were coming after him. There was danger the Germans were in contact with other hostile units near the Araguari, or in the big town ahead on the river, Ferreira Gomes. The team had many miles still to go. They splashed through puddles and dashed between trees with all their equipment.
From here, Felix could count on nothing but his and his men’s nerve and their will to survive. The sun was getting lower in the sky. Once it set, their progress would be badly slowed by poor visibility. The wounded man would die. German or Brazilian forces would close in. Time was vital. The enemy already knew the team was present; caution was thrown to the wind in a high-stakes gamble for life.