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.
I guess that means they’re the ones with the initiative… and that’s not good.
Captain Fuller had told him by radio in the chopper that the kampfschwimmer would almost surely emplace the shock-hardened, pressure-proof American atom bomb somewhere against the base of the falls, with its arming device on a timer. This way they’d achieve almost the same amount of outrage and damage as if they’d blasted the Itaipu Dam itself: detonated against the bottom of the escarpment, in the center of the horseshoe of the falls, the warhead would vaporize millions of tons of rock and silt-laden water. The whole flow of the river would suddenly stop. Then more massive chunks of the escarpment would collapse, and the atomic shock front that held back the river flow would dissipate.
The mighty Iguazú River would resume, its pent-up force released as a major flash flood. Neutron bombardment would make elements like silicon and calcium in the rocks and clay become intensely radioactive. The mess would rage down toward the Paraná River, then pound its mad way south until it passed by Buenos Aires. The Germans would have all the excuse they could possibly need for the von Scheer — wherever she was lurking — to hand over Axis atomic warheads in bulk to the Argentines. The scenario that would unfold from there surpassed Felix’s worst nightmarish visions of Armageddon.
Felix signaled his men to move faster.
Navigating by compass, the team neared their first phase line. Felix could tell they were at the proper way point by using his ears and his nose.
The team was moving onto the spit of land that projected into a wide oxbow curve of the Iguazú River. Here the river turned south, went around a giant bend, then came back north, before resuming its course due west. At the narrow base of the spit, Felix could hear the rush of the river on both flanks as his men headed south. The Iguazú Falls were in the middle of this oxbow curve. The roar of the falls lay directly ahead — but so did commanding ground, where the SEALs could interdict the Germans by long-range fire.
On the Brazilian side of the highlands plateau, overlooking the falls, were an old hotel and two tourist observation towers. This much Felix knew from his map and his hasty briefing notes. The odor of smoldering wreckage and rotting flesh grew very strong.
The team’s point man reached the edge of the jungle cover. He signaled, and Felix crawled forward.
Argentine artillery had blasted the hotel and observation towers. Then Brazilian Army engineers had dynamited the remains as they withdrew just hours before. Everything lay in ruins. Places deep in the rubble — sheltered from the daily rain — still burned. A horrible stench told Felix there were bodies trapped deep in that rubble too.
“Let’s get our base of fire set up,” he whispered to his chief in Portuguese. The man nodded. He had the team spread out along the verge of the jungle. Felix felt everyone’s blood pressure rise. Each man drew in a few deep breaths despite the smell. On a signal from Felix they dashed all at once across the open ground, and gained cover and concealment amid the rubble of the hotel.
Felix gave more orders, and the men worked their way gingerly forward, hugging the east side of the collapsed and burned-out structure. Felix rounded a pile of shattered masonry and brick, and the view took his breath away.
Arrayed before him, in all their deadly majesty, were the vast and always plunging, smashing, boiling cataracts of the Iguazú Falls.
As before, like from the chopper, the water was an incongruous reddish brown.
That color comes from topsoil, erosion from the highlands because of years of clear-cutting forestry mismanagement. Every new rainfall washes away a little more of Brazil’s future — assuming Brazil even has a future, after today.
Across the river, atop the escarpment on the other side of the falls, lay the ruins of another hotel, of more modern and solid construction.
That hotel sits in Argentina. Militarily — with this sweeping, split-level terrain — it’s as pivotal to the kampfschwimmer as the ruined Brazilian hotel is to me and my team.
Lying in shadows under a slab of shattered flooring, careful to avoid broken glass and twisted, jagged steel and sharp-edged aluminum, Felix turned to his chief. “The range look right to you? Three thousand yards?”
The SEAL chief nodded.
Felix and the chief picked good spots to set up their.30-caliber machine gun and their.50-caliber sniper rifle, choosing voids in the rubble that gave them the widest possible arcs of fire. Everyone passed their belts of machine-gun ammo to the men who worked the gun. The sniper said he saw an even better place to hide. He and his spotter shifted their positions.
The range was extreme, but now their weapons threatened the wreckage of the Argentine hotel, plus the wreckage of the stairs and walkways that led from the Argentine side toward scenic overviews of the falls, or out onto the upper river itself for even closer views, or down the steep escarpment toward the bottom of the falls.