by Joe Buff
Felix knew he was coming to the end of his rope, literally. He had to find an anchor point. The water was so thick with silt, it was impossible to see. If he wasn’t careful, the magnitude of its flow could tear the dive mask off his face into oblivion.
All things considered, it wouldn’t make much difference. I might just as well work with my eyes closed anyway.
Felix dived a few feet deeper. He tried to find the bottom again as the submerged riverbank sloped down. The farther out he moved the more insistent the surging current force became. Any moment, an uprooted tree weighing tons could wash down the river and smash right into him. As he whipped around in the turbulent flow near the end of the anchoring rope, he might be impaled on a steel rebar projecting from a broken concrete abutment of the now-damaged upper tourist walkway. There were hidden reefs and rocks, which might knock him unconscious to drown. Felix decided he’d better let some gas out of his buoyancy compensator to make himself heavy and gain more traction.
Submerged in brownish darkness, he touched the pebbled bottom with his flippered feet, standing in a low crouch sideways to the current to minimize his water resistance. The pressure in his ears told him he wasn’t dangerously deep. The men tried to steady him by steadying their parts of the rope—they certainly couldn’t see him from even a few yards away, and could only guess at what he was trying to do from minute to minute. The anchor rope, the lifeline, was his sole connection to the team.
Felix kept his river-crossing stick upstream of him, slanted down into the flow as he leaned into it. The stick helped break the current, while the pressure of the current lodged the stick against the bottom and levered its high end down on his chest. This gave him firmer footing and added stability as he inched along. Felix began to search the bottom blindly, systematically, by touch alone. Sometimes he used the stick instead to cast about in order to give himself greater reach. He became afraid of losing all sense of direction, and wandering unknowingly right over the edge of the falls.
Finally he found what he was looking for before it found and pierced or fractured him. A subtle back swirl in the feel of the current just downstream was his guide. He’d located the remnants of one of the walkway support piers. To work, Felix now required both hands. He collapsed his crossing stick and wrapped its lanyard tighter around his wrist so he wouldn’t lose it. The intense flow of the river still dragged at him constantly, and its hiss and rumble were relentless in his ears. No sunlight penetrated from the tumultuous surface above.
Felix took a free end of the coil of rope draped over his torso and deftly secured it to the bent steel bars that jutted from the concrete of the pier. Using this new length of rope as his safety anchor now, he secured the end of the first rope to the pier, then tugged a signal, which told the team that the far end of their rope was secure, and he was ready to advance another hundred yards. Keeping himself on a short leash for the moment, he let more gas into his buoyancy compensator.
Felix popped his head above the surface; he had to squint in the sudden brightness. He could barely make out the cluster of boulders that was his next objective. The noise of the falls was much louder with his ears out of the water. He kicked with his swim fins to try to lift his head high—the waves that were created as the river converged on the falls, and split into channels between all the islands and rocks, made it hard to see far.
Small splashes raised up all around him. Felix ducked below and heard the impact of the bullets against the surface. Those German MP-5s weren’t accurate for long-range sniping, but one lucky hit from a spray of rounds would still have high velocity, enough to kill any man it struck. Felix knew his team had to reach that cluster of boulders soon, and leave a man behind there temporarily in order to give the rest of them covering fire.
Felix was growing tired. His team had reached a flat little island on the very edge of the falls. It was covered in thick green underbrush, and he used this for concealment as he crawled forward. His men followed.
For a moment Felix paused to rest and gave hand signals for his team to do the same. Here, the noise of the falls was overwhelming. Speech was out of the question.
Felix lay on his back, supporting his Draeger with his arms, and glanced up at the sky. Streaks and fluffs of white cloud drifted peacefully far above. Butterflies swarmed, in amazing numbers, immune to any sense of danger; some were vivid turquoise with wingspans of four inches. He sighed and rolled over onto his elbows and knees, fighting the weight of his Draeger, then crept to the side of the island for a broad field of view in order to judge the enemy’s progress. The Germans had a head start and a clearer plan, but he hoped their pace would be slowed by the weight of the bomb.
Felix felt his way gingerly through the underbrush. Suddenly he felt nothing in front of him at all. He crawled forward inch by inch, very carefully, and peeked between the leafy ferns and branches.
He was on the verge of a gaping precipice two miles across. Curving wide around both sides of him, literally hundreds of waterfalls poured down. Brown water churned into white as he watched. Droplets turned into foam that turned into spray. Thick sheets of water ran over the edge in unimaginable quantities, as if the supply would last for all eternity. The waterfalls in most places fell in steps, where smaller and lower plateaus jutted out from the face of the main escarpment. Everywhere water plummeted and smashed; in some spots the drop went straight to the bottom, thirty stories below. When islands on the edge were big enough to block the flow from wide patches, the entire cliff face beneath was covered in unbroken greenery. Mist like plumes of smoke rose up from where water ceaselessly impacted at the boiling base of the cliffs. Down there the river recovered itself and rushed on, in fast-flowing white-water rapids that disappeared around a broad bend to the west. Birds darted high and low, safe from the power of the falls, feeding on insects that flew through the swirling clouds of foggy vapor. Updrafts drenched Felix’s face. A rich and vivid rainbow framed the entire awesome, magnificent scene.
Felix felt as if the waterfall complex and rainbow were reaching to wrap around and embrace—or crush—him bodily. He began to suffer vertigo, gazing down into this all-encompassing deluge powered by unforgiving, unrelenting gravity. He asked himself if the vista reminded him more of heaven or hell. He tried to imagine what it would be like here in the first few seconds and minutes after a nuclear weapon went off.
Then bullets tore through the bushes above his head, and Felix remembered he and his team had a job to do.
Felix and his men struggled through always-tugging water, saved from doom only by their anchored climbing ropes. They crawled over islets and rocks under enemy fire. The alternate up and down, the going in and out of the river—using Draegers one moment and shooting their MP-5s the next—became increasingly taxing both physically and mentally. The SEALs were getting closer to the Germans, which meant they were closer to the bomb. But the Germans were getting closer to the Devil’s Throat with the bomb, and the return fire from their submachine guns was growing progressively more accurate. At least the German machine cannon wasn’t shooting their way, not yet. It must be busy arguing with my light-machine-gun crew.
Then Felix felt total despair. He watched as kampfschwimmer on a fragment of walkway near the Devil’s Throat began to lower the bomb, at the end of a rope, straight down into the vortex. He ordered his men to try to stop them with sustained fire.
The SEALs’ silenced weapons coughed and sputtered, burning through magazine after magazine. Kampfschwimmer on or near the walkway returned the fire just as viciously. Both sides began to take losses.
Felix saw one kampfschwimmer pitch headfirst off the walkway, then snatch up short on a rope that had secured him to a fragment of the railing. Right at the edge of the Devil’s Throat, his body twirled like a rubber doll in the torrent. More bullets flew in both directions.
Other kampfschwimmer kept playing out the rope attached to the bomb. Finally, with a triumphant toss, the man Felix guessed to be their leader threw the free en
d of the rope into the vortex, after the bomb. The end of the rope vanished instantly. The dead German continued to twirl, as if grotesquely mocking the SEALs.
The kampfschwimmer began to withdraw, back the way they’d come.
The SEAL chief crawled up next to Felix. He had to shout in Felix’s ear. “We’ve lost, sir!”
That was exactly how Felix felt, but hearing the other man say it out loud helped him find new courage from somewhere deep inside himself.
“We haven’t lost until the warhead blows! We have to go down after it!”
“Down there?”
Felix nodded. He looked around. One of his men was dead, hit by a round that had pierced the base of his neck as he lay prone. Felix assigned their combat medic to stay and aid another enlisted SEAL who was wounded, seriously but not mortally.
Something in the sky caught Felix’s eye and he looked up. It was a Global Hawk surveillance drone. These were new and each cost millions. Felix guessed da Gama had given the U.S. Air Force permission to launch the unarmed drone—Jeffrey Fuller’s negotiating with da Gama must have succeeded completely.
The Global Hawk possessed sophisticated sensors, including live color video imagery relayed back to its portable ground-control station.
Knowing that people were watching, that they cared, that he had an audience, gave Felix more renewed strength. He told the chief the two of them would have to work as a team.
Using the same techniques as before, moving underwater held by ropes and leaning on crossing sticks—and transiting islands on their bellies—they worked their way to the Devil’s Throat. They ignored the dead kampfschwimmer as they rigged the last of their climbing ropes to this anchored, isolated stretch of damaged walkway. Each rope, three hundred feet long, ought to be just enough to get within range of the bottom of the furious vortex, if they were lucky.
Surviving kampfschwimmer saw what they were doing and began to shoot.
“I’ll stay,” the SEAL chief yelled, “tie myself to an abutment in the water for better cover! I’ll keep the Germans from coming back!”
“Thanks, good, perfect!” Felix said. If the Germans can fight their way back to the walkway while I’m still on my way down, they’ll untie my rope and I’ll fall inside the vortex and I’ll die.
He waved to his two remaining men in the distance, the wounded SEAL and the man who was caring for him. They signaled they understood: lay down a base of covering fire.
Felix gave the chief all of his ammo and his own MP-5. It would do him no good where he was going.
“Good luck, Chief!”
“Good luck, sir!”
Felix was now on his own. The maw of the vortex beckoned before him. The way river channels crashed into one another, and creamed into waves that piled high before suddenly vanishing, reminded him of a demon foaming at the mouth.
Felix went underwater and played out the rope through his harness belt’s rappelling buckle. The turbulence here was exceedingly strong. It tried to turn him over and over and pound him against the final margin of the rocky riverbed. Visibility was zero again. The overwhelming noise had a very strange quality. It came at him from every direction at once, as if the cauldron were trying to swallow him whole.
Felix scraped over a hidden submerged outcropping and lost one of his swim fins. He gripped his Draeger mouthpiece even more tightly between his teeth. The pure oxygen tasted stale, laden with carbon dioxide he was exhaling. Never had he hyperventilated so rapidly. Never had he felt such raw fear. What he was attempting, he knew, was utter madness. Each cubic yard of plunging water weighed almost a ton. There was no way he could survive.
Suddenly Felix was over the edge, dangling straight down. The water tore off his dive mask, and seemed to tear at his flesh.
The tension of the rope against the buckle was so great, Felix needed to exert all his strength to make some slack to let it pass through the rappelling harness. For the first time since the battle began, he was using the rope and buckle for their intended purpose: to go downward. But never had the equipment been meant for use inside a raging waterfall. Felix began to tire.
He made himself go on. He kept his eyes tightly closed as water bashed at his face and his shoulders. His other swim fin was torn from his foot. He came to a ledge in the cliff face. Felix forced himself to move sideways, first right and then to the left, to make sure the bomb wasn’t lodged here.
He continued down. Felix had no idea how much time was left on the atom bomb’s timer. He hoped the SEAL chief and the enlisted men could hold off the kampfschwimmer long enough. At any moment his rope might be untied and he’d go into free fall—and have just enough time to curse his fate before he hit the rocks and got killed. The rope was supposed to be unbreakable—impervious to chafing, or cutting by knives. Felix knew, today, he was putting the supplier’s claim to the ultimate test.
Coming to another ledge, this one eroded into the cliff face by a backwash, and sheltered from the main force of the vortex flow, Felix once again checked for the bomb. Nothing. He allowed himself only a moment to rest. His arm and leg muscles felt like they were on fire. He was almost asphyxiating inside his Draeger, so heavy and rapid was his heartbeat and his breath.
Felix continued to struggle to play out rope. Down he went, blindly, as roaring water cascaded at him from three different sides at once, inside the chasm in the escarpment face that made the Devil’s Throat. The plunging water whirlpooled and caromed and then recoiled against itself, all as it raced for the chasm floor. The wild crosscurrents inside the vortex threatened to tear him limb from limb.
Felix went down even farther. Here the water had accelerated, just as a falling body would. It slammed into him and then streamed past with terrifying speed. The noise of it was louder, both above and below. It echoed between the walls inside the narrow chasm too, building even more intensity.
Felix felt like the water was flogging his back, like it would strip off his wet suit and then strip his skin. His head was ringing, his ears hurt from the incredible volume of sound.
He knew it would only get worse. To go downward, along with the flow of the water, was one thing. To reach the base of the cliffs—where that water punched into rock and changed direction to horizontal with unspeakable violence—was beyond the human body’s ability to endure.
Felix struggled to think.
To avoid being crushed by the weight of falling water, he had to find a place where the river under the vortex was least shallow—a hidden pool between the house-sized boulders—so the fluid mass of the river itself would help cushion the constant impact from above. There had to be such places: eons of blasting by water laced with abrasive silt would have carved out pockets in the riverbed at the foot of the escarpment.
With his eyes gritty and stinging, even though he’d scrunched his lids tightly closed for many minutes, Felix did his desperate search by feel in the wet and the dark. He prayed for the guidance of Providence.
Felix hit deep bottom on slippery stones. Water punished him from every direction. It poured down from above and rebounded from below and he was caught in a maelstrom of total chaos. It hurt badly each time he breathed through his Draeger mouthpiece, and he was sure he’d broken some ribs.
Even so, he was still alive, and still had a job to do.
He reached the end of the rope, underwater in the deep pool, but couldn’t find the bomb. Felix struggled through more-sheltered portions of the vortex, tightly hugging the cliff face, searching for quieter spots where the bomb in its hardened casing might have come to rest. Nothing.
He crawled over and between rocks while submerged, relying only on feel. Some of the stones were polished smooth, while others were newly fallen and jagged. He banged his head and smacked his elbows and knees. He searched systematically with arms whose muscles were worked to their very limits. Nothing.
Felix had no choice. He had to let go of the rope, and let the water take him.
I’ve followed pretty much the same path as the
bomb. Here I’d let myself loose at about the same point where the Germans let the bomb casing loose from above. My last chance is to hope the water carries us both in the same direction.
Felix was surprised his brain still worked enough to form rational thoughts.
He tried to position his body in the torrent feet first, with his legs held tightly together and slightly bent. This way he might guide himself, and soften any collision. He released the rope and used his rubbery arms to protect his unhel-meted head.
The Devil’s Throat was aptly named. Felix felt himself propelled through Satan’s own water slide. He bumped and scraped along, totally blind. He tried to stay deep, where he knew that water resistance with the bottom would slightly slow its velocity. But this only increased the risk of hitting a waterlogged dead tree, or a boulder, or the wreckage of some boat that had gone over the falls.
Felix’s legs smashed hard into something solid. The force of the river kept his body moving forward, and he did a somersault over the obstruction, underwater. His right foot caught on something; he was jerked to a stop and his hip joint almost dislocated. He was stuck, trapped. He began to panic.
He’d lost his crossing stick sometime before—he had no lever. He almost lost his mouthpiece, and without it he’d surely drown. He managed to open the valve for the Draeger’s emergency oxygen bottle, because the carbon-dioxide absorber was totally useless by now.
Instantly, Felix’s air supply became deliciously fresh and his mind cleared, but he was still held firmly by his left foot, by something heavy on the bottom.
Felix had to do a whole-body crunch against the force of the water to reach his foot to try to free it. He grunted from the effort, and gritted his jaw so hard he feared he’d crush his Draeger mouthpiece or crack his teeth. The muscular pain in his abdomen and chest were excruciating. He slowly bent himself double against the flow. His aching hands touched something.