“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.”
CHAPTER 33
Da 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.
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.