“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.”
CHAPTER 34
Felix 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.