by Joe Buff
He’d guessed right all along. His ankle was caught in a carrying handle of the casing for the bomb.
Felix got a firm grip on another carrying handle and worked hard to give his foot some slack. He freed his foot and grabbed the handle with his other hand.
Felix used the bomb now as a moving anchor. Again, so close to the infernal object, he wondered how much time was left until it blew. In spurts, as his dwindling reserves of strength allowed, he lifted and shoved the bomb along the bottom of the river. Slowly he worked his way toward the shore. He began to drag the bomb up the slope of the bank, underwater. Here the force of the river was less strong.
Felix raised his head. He could see above the surface. The shore was very near. This gave him new hope. He dragged the bomb out of the water, onto a narrow gravel beach, strewn with shattered driftwood, that fronted a solid wall of jungle growth.
He was just below the falls. The view was stunning, sublime, but Felix was so numb it barely registered. He bent double, hands on knees, drawing in natural air raggedly, at long last not needing his Draeger, catching his breath.
Then he looked up at the sky. He saw two drones above him. One was the Global Hawk, from before. It was maneuvering oddly, swooping and then turning, as if its controller pilot was trying to tell Felix something.
The other drone was an older type, a Predator. Felix thought it must be Brazilian: he knew they owned a couple.
But the stealthy Predator seemed to be sneaking around behind the Global Hawk. He realized it was the enemy.
The German plotters must have brought one into Argentina—maybe broken down and disguised as different parts before the war.
Beneath the wings of the Predator were two missiles.
Felix panicked again, fearing the Predator would kill him before he could disarm the bomb.
But the missiles were long and thin, meant for air-to-air combat only. As Felix tried to wave a warning, the Predator fired one and then the other missile. The first streaked at the Global Hawk and detonated in a loud and sharp hot-orange flash. Fragments of the drone and burning fuel rained from the sky. The second missile flew through the cloud of debris formed by the first, and kept going into the distance, leaving a trail of dirty yellow-brown exhaust smoke.
Felix ducked as metal bits fell. Liquid fire hit the river, then the flames were washed away.
The Predator came closer, and watched Felix on the ground.
Someone in a black wet suit rushed toward him. Felix thought it was his chief.
He must have somehow made it down the vortex, just like I did.
But the figure wore no American flags on his sleeves. Then Felix recognized the man. They’d been face-to-face before, on the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks; that time both had worn protective suits. It was the leader of the kampfschwimmer team.
Either he followed me down the vortex, or his automatic-cannon team silenced my light-machine-gun crew—and the German came down the easier way, using ropes and parts of the stairs along the dry parts of the escarpment face. One way or the other, he lost his MP-5.
But the German was armed with a knife. Felix reached for his K-bar fighting knife. It was gone, lost in the falls. He felt for his survival knife; it too was gone, ripped off by the vortex. He went for his titanium dive knife, his final hope, and felt its reassuring haft fit into his hand.
The German obviously recognized Felix; he drew his lips back in an animal sneer. A rematch.
The German held every advantage. Felix was burdened by his Draeger—which out of the water weighed three dozen pounds. He was far beyond exhaustion, into a realm of grim exertion for which he knew no name.
But Felix Estabo would be damned if he lost the contest now.
He crouched to use his Draeger as a shield and forced the German to come at him. Memories flooded back, of another knife fight twenty years before. Felix fingered the old, ugly scar along his cheek, caressing it, and flaunted it at the German, to tease him, egging him on.
The German was taller, so Felix stayed low. The German wore a flak vest, so Felix planned to aim low.
The German lunged and Felix leaned away. The German’s knife struck him on the collarbone. The blade deflected up and cut deep into the top of his shoulder bone. Felix felt an icy agony there, and the agony gave him power. Instantly he drove his knife deep into the German’s belly. He lifted and dug and twisted with the knife in his right hand. With his left arm, already covered with blood from his wound, he parried clumsily as the German’s right arm flailed around.
Felix shoved the German backward and thudded squarely on top of him, Draeger rig and all; he almost screamed from the pain of his broken ribs. His face was inches from the German’s. He could smell the man’s breath, feel the warmth of his body. The kampfschwimmer opened his mouth, silently, and Felix could see down his throat. Still he dug his knife inside the German, seeking his liver and the major blood vessels below his heart.
Blood exploded from the German’s mouth. Felix was almost blinded, but the German was definitely dead. By the time he thought to look the man in the eyes, the corneas were glazed and cloudy.
Felix quickly washed the blood from his face at the edge of the river. His left arm was nearly useless. He saw no arterial spurting, so dressing the wound would have to wait.
One-handed, he undid the hasps that sealed the shock-hardened, pressure-proof casing of the atom bomb. He lifted the lid. Felix, like all SEALs since the war began, had received basic training in atomic-weapon-arming techniques, but he was no expert. He saw the physics package, the hollow sphere of fissile metal surrounded by implosion lenses. He saw a battery power supply, arming circuitry, and the readout of a timer. The blurry numbers on the timer said the bomb had less than five minutes to blow.
Felix registered now that he’d been suffering from a splitting headache, and his eyes had trouble focusing. I’ve got a concussion. I got it in the falls.
It seemed as if hundreds of thin wires ran from the arming circuitry to tiny components embedded in the implosion lenses.
Felix had no idea if the thing was booby-trapped. He doubted he had the time or strength to pull all the wires away from the high-explosive lenses—some were under the physics package where he couldn’t reach. His addled brain did know that if even a few wires were intact when the detonation signal came, the bomb would fizzle, but it still might have a small yield, or could explode just strongly enough to send ten pounds of carcinogenic plutonium dust right into the river, upstream of Puerto Iguazú and many other cities and towns.
Felix did the only thing he could. With both hands he grabbed thick cables that ran from the power supply. He pulled with all his might; in his battered rib cage every breath was torture. The cables wouldn’t budge.
Felix felt in the mud and blood for where he’d dropped his dive knife. It was meant for emergency cutting like this. He sawed away at the cables as the bomb’s timer ran down. With only seconds to go, he cut through two cables at once—sparks flew from the positive terminal and a painful electric shock ran up his arm. The digital timer went blank. Felix waited for what seemed like forever.
Nothing happened.
Again he glanced at the sky. The Predator was still up there, watching him. Felix realized that he’d become disoriented before. Looking at the river, he saw that it ran from his right to his left. Felix was on the Argentine side.
Cursing, he closed and locked the casing of the disabled bomb. He grabbed it and instinctively reached for the body of the dead German, put his Draeger regulator in his mouth, and wearily went back into the water.
He was barely in time. Enemy troops, whether German or Argentine, began to fire into the river after him.
Felix worked his way along the bottom of the chocolate-colored torrential Iguazú once more, zigzagging at an angle to the current. As before, he used the weight of the bomb as a safety anchor in the darkness. Unlike before, he was burdened by the German corpse, and his shoulder was badly cut. The corpse—his trophy and a pos
sible intelligence prize—kept wanting to rise to the surface. This would give his location away and draw an Argentine mortar round or grenade.
Ghoulishly, Felix elbowed the corpse’s solar plexus—below the sternum and flak vest and above the gaping wound in the guts. In a motion that aped CPR, he forced the German’s lungs to draw in water. This made the body heavy, so it sank.
But between his own unbandaged wound and gore from the dead kampfschwimmer, Felix knew he was in yet another race against time, an extremely personal one: piranhas frequented this part of the river. Though they were normally benign, a whiff of blood would draw them in hordes and trigger a feeding frenzy.
Felix struggled toward the far bank underwater as fast as he could, working blindly and in terrible pain, expecting at any moment that his strenuous efforts would cause a broken rib to puncture a lung. Before he got much farther he heard repetitive pounding through the water and he felt it through the upslope of the riverbank. Brazilians with heavy machine guns had converged on the scene. They were holding off the Argentines. Felix saw the water change color, streaks of livid green. He realized the Brazilians were releasing piranha repellent into the river.
Felix clambered up the bank to the welcoming arms of Brazilian soldiers. They grabbed the bomb and the German’s body while heavy machine guns continued to rake the far bank with crisscrossing red tracer fire.
Felix ran out of absolutely everything and collapsed.
Brazilian medics stripped off his gear and loaded him onto a stretcher, then carried him behind good cover. They started to bandage his wounds and inserted an intravenous plasma drip; they checked his pupils’ reflexes with a flashlight and seemed satisfied. Away from the machine guns, Felix could hear the noise of friendly helicopters. The enemy drone was gone.
He tried to talk but a medic told him to be quiet. The medic congratulated him for his man-to-man victory against the German. Felix desperately wanted to ask about his men, his team. He tried to rise from the stretcher, but grimaced as his torso muscles flexed against his ribs. Someone pushed him gently back. He felt a different jab in his arm. Felix drifted away on the irresistible bliss of a morphine shot.
CHAPTER 36
Beneath the helo, on the surface of the sea, Jeffrey saw a Brazilian Navy hovercraft. But instead of going at over forty knots in a plume of spray, it was barely moving and black smoke issued from the diesel exhaust. He knew the engine trouble was fake.
The helo approached the hovercraft, and dropped off Jeffrey and a Brazilian Navy specialist. Then the diving gear and spare parts were handed down.
Jeffrey went into the soundproof wheelhouse of the hovercraft. The repair specialist who’d come with him had been picked for the job because he spoke passable English and had a high security clearance.
The navy chief in charge of the hovercraft was very excited to see them. Jeffrey remembered the ticking atom bomb.
But the chief seemed happy, delighted even, not angry or scared. He and the specialist spoke in Portuguese, the latter translating for Jeffrey as best he could. Over the radio, they’d learned that Felix Estabo had disarmed the stolen bomb, and retrieved it. He was wounded but safe, in a good Brazilian hospital.
Jeffrey was very proud of Felix. As the news sank in, he felt elation and almost giddy relief, but he forced himself to refocus. He knew he still had some very big problems.
Jeffrey and the repair specialist donned their scuba gear. Together they entered the water and dove under the hovercraft, supposedly to fix a broken part.
Jeffrey swam deeper. There beneath him was Challenger’s sail. A pair of divers waited, in scuba gear like his own. Since they were right under the hovercraft, the extra bubbles the four men’s rigs gave off wouldn’t show on the surface.
Jeffrey traded places with someone from Challenger. He was an enlisted man, one of the ship’s qualified safety divers, selected by COB because his height and build were similar to the captain’s. Jeffrey was sure he’d be crestfallen to be left behind when the ship was going into combat, but security needed to be maintained: two men in broad daylight had dived under the conspicuous hovercraft, so two men had to come up. To cheer the departing crewman, Jeffrey patted him on the shoulder and shook his hand underwater. He gave the young enlisted man an encouraging thumbs-up; if all went well, they’d be reunited in New London soon enough.
The enlisted man swam up and out from under the hovercraft. Jeffrey swam down and joined the other diver from Challenger. Together they closed the clamshells and went through the hatch and dogged it. The sail’s lockout trunk was drained dry. Jeffrey opened the bottom hatch and climbed down into his ship.
His XO, Bell, was standing below the hatch, with a broad smile on his face. He welcomed Jeffrey warmly. “We were so shallow, Skipper,” he said, “we heard a call through our on-hull VLF antenna saying to trail the wire. The call came from the Brazilians, and then they told us all about Lieutenant Estabo and the bomb.”
Jeffrey nodded. “It’s real good news, XO. It makes our life much simpler. Now we head south and go after the von Scheer.”
The two men walked through the control room. Lieutenant Torelli, Weps, had the deck and the conn.
Gratified to see how happy everyone was to have him back, Jeffrey went into his cabin, pulled off his wet suit, and took a shower. He decided to reward himself and let the steaming hot water run over his body delightfully. His stiffness from tension and travel loosened up, and he began to feel refreshed.
Now that he was alone in the phone-booth-sized stainless-steel stall, everything sank in more. He felt a wave of elation bordering on ecstasy.
My excursion was a smashing success! Met a foreign president, won his and his armed forces’ covert support, deployed a winning SEAL team under my orders, saved a continent from nuclear war…Talk about your joint and combined operations, and projecting seapower on land!
Dad, you’ll be just thrilled. This’ll look so good in my service jacket. Did I get my ticket punched today big time, or what?
Jeffrey came back to earth and calmed down. He dried off, shaved, combed his hair, and put on fresh khakis. He checked himself in the dressing mirror.
Well, Ernst Beck, who’s got the upper hand now?
I respect you, and I’m gonna kill you.
Jeffrey went to the control room. The mood there continued to be celebratory. Bell seemed especially charged up, both from having held independent command of Challenger, if only for half a day, and also from anticipation of combat with von Scheer.
Jeffrey let Torelli keep the conn.
Then he cleared his throat and tried to assume a more levelheaded demeanor. “We’ll give the people up there a few more minutes to go through the motions.” He pointed at the overhead, meaning the fake repairs to the hovercraft. “Sonar, put it on speakers, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Milgrom said.
“Navigator,” Jeffrey said, “bring up a chart that goes from here to two hundred miles south of Mar del Plata, and extends from the coast five hundred miles at sea.”
“Aye aye,” Lieutenant Sessions said.
Over the sonar speakers, Jeffrey heard banging and clanking. Then he heard a muffled clatter and roar as the Brazilian helo returned to pick up the two-man “repair crew.”
The helo noises changed pitch and then diminished. Milgrom’s sonarmen and Torelli’s fire-control technicians tracked the departing aircraft. Jeffrey saw its icon moving away on the tactical plot.
“Sonar speakers off.” The hovercraft would be loud enough as it was, once it got going. Right through the hull, Jeffrey heard the rumble and growl as the diesel engine revved toward maximum power. Torelli issued helm orders.
Meltzer used his engine order dial to hold Challenger under the hovercraft as both vessels picked up speed. Meltzer and COB had their hands full controlling the ship, as her speed topped forty knots up on the shallow continental shelf. The slightest error in trim could cause a collision with the hovercraft, or with the muddy bottom studde
d with new and old wrecks.
The renewal of risk and responsibility helped Jeffrey sober up more. It’s time to practice my primary trade. His mind-set switched to envisioning undersea warfare tactics.
CHAPTER 37
Much to Ernst Beck’s distaste, but as had been planned all along, Rudiger von Loringhoven was back on the von Scheer.
He was happy enough to stir up nuclear war on another continent, but he lacked the intestinal fortitude to linger once the plan unraveled.
The baron’s return to the ship had been simple enough: While friendly Argentines sent out the flying boat as a diversion, von Loringhoven flew in an old army transport plane in a different direction. The baron used a parachute that opened at low altitude to land in the sea and get picked up by the von Scheer’s minisub.
Although showered now and freshly dressed, von Loringhoven was fuming exactly as much as he’d done when he’d first gotten back. U.S. Navy SEALs had foiled the plot to set off the stolen American warhead. A German-supplied Predator drone had seen the entire thing while von Loringhoven watched from the mansion on the grounds of his Argentine friend’s ranch.
The secure radio room called Beck on the intercom. A message was coming in on ELF, courtesy of the transmitter owned by the Kremlin. Beck listened, then hung up. He turned to Karl Stissinger, sitting next to him in the Zentrale.
“We’re ordered to bring the ship to floating-wire-antenna depth in listen-only mode.”
“More local news developments?” Stissinger asked. He didn’t look happy. The baron paced about, still enraged. To himself, Beck had to admit that he wasn’t entirely displeased that the nasty scheme had failed.
Beck issued the piloting orders to come shallower, then had the antenna wire deployed—if the ship was too deep the wire couldn’t properly reach near the surface.
The radio room copied a much longer message. Again Beck listened on the intercom, then hung up. He was suddenly rather dismayed. The broader situation was distressingly in flux and unstable. No one can predict, from the clean and tidy plans made in advance, how the people who made those plans will behave when things come unglued in the heat of action.