by Joe Buff
“I’ll make the request Flash Immediate, route it through Atlantic Fleet so Admiral Hodgkiss can press his support.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Can the B-One break the sound barrier at sea level?”
“I think it can manage a thousand knots or so.”
“Have it do that a few times in the estuary. Make big noises at Mar del Plata, rattle windows in Buenos Aires, get on the enemy’s nerves and keep them wondering why it’s there.”
Jeffrey turned to da Gama. “Is this acceptable to you, Mr. President?”
“Yes.”
“And Colonel Stewart, if you don’t mind acting as my executive assistant for the duration of this, add a summary of our intentions for Atlantic Fleet, with informational copies to whoever you think makes sense. Do it in my name, and say up front ‘Unless otherwise directed.’ Then we go into motion and hope nobody upstairs screams.”
Stewart nodded, his wounds forgotten now.
“And Mr. Jones. I don’t want to take any chances your local people might be compromised or neutralized. Call Langley now. Get technical specs to the air force, pronto. Make sure that B-One’s avionics include a black box that can listen for those bottle-cap things to go off. The magic word is Mercury.”
CHAPTER 31
B eck was startled out of his sleep when a messenger knocked on his cabin door. He pulled on a robe and answered.
“Sir, the communications officer sends his respects, and he has received this over our floating wire.” The messenger handed Beck a sealed envelope.
“Did the Einzvo see this?”
“Yes, sir. I gave him a copy at the conn. He awaits your further instructions.”
“Very well.”
Beck sat at his desk and read.
Berlin—with help from Moscow—was seeing a suspicious pattern to Allied radio communications and aircraft flights to and from Brazil and near Argentina. Axis High Command believed that the enemy might be aware of von Scheer’s plans. The timetable was therefore being moved up aggressively, with support by added information-warfare attacks and jamming.
That’s easy for them to say, but my ship even at flank speed can’t work miracles. We’ve a very long way to go to reach Mar del Plata.
Beck read on. The kampfschwimmer team and von Loringhoven were ordered to leave von Scheer immediately, using Beck’s minisub, along with the one working U.S. atom bomb. Once Beck and von Scheer proceeded farther south, the minisub was to ping on the frequency commonly used by Argentine diesel subs. Sonobuoys being dropped from an Argentine seaplane would thus locate the minisub by triangulation, a simple process. While a two-man crew stayed aboard the mini per standard procedures, everyone else would swim out and deploy a rubber raft to the surface. The seaplane would pick them up and return with them to Mar del Plata as if they were Argentine submariners or commandos on an exercise or an emergency personnel transfer. Then the mini would return to the von Scheer covertly, and Beck would wait beyond the continental shelf.
Beck grew concerned that the Allies might indeed be on to the plan. If so, with the enemy forewarned, able to take active countersteps or even just prepare a firm and persuasive-enough denial, the Axis scheme might begin to unravel. Beck appreciated now why Berlin saw the need to hurry. He dressed.
Beck left his cabin and knocked on von Loringhoven’s door.
President da Gama left the room to attend to other duties—Jeffrey reminded himself the man had an entire country to run.
Lunch was brought in. Jeffrey and Colonel Stewart made small talk with the two Brazilian generals. The admiral and Mr. Jones were working in another part of the underground bunker.
Jeffrey let Colonel Stewart set the tone, but the inconsequential chitchat was driving him crazy. Every neuron in his brain tingled for news of the stolen warhead, and every nerve in his body screamed for him to get back to his ship.
The Brazilians said they were having communications and mechanical difficulties making final arrangements for Jeffrey’s clandestine departure.
Jeffrey exerted tremendous self-control to master this latest lesson in command and diplomacy: patience.
But his self-control only went so far. He couldn’t help glancing often at the TV screen on the wall. Now it was set up to show a master status display. Estabo’s team had landed at Paranaguá and were airborne, heading west toward the inland border in a Brazilian helo; another Brazilian Navy hovercraft was dashing south, presumably with Challenger making forty knots right under it; the U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber launched from Venezuela was over the Rio de la Plata estuary now, its supersonic dogleg sprint out past the coast of Brazil complete.
Mr. Jones burst into the room. “The warhead’s come ashore!”
CHAPTER 32
A drenaline surged through Jeffrey’s body, and he fought hard not to ball his fists in frustration. The generals were very apologetic, but there were continuing snags getting Jeffrey away. They hinted darkly at message jamming, even sabotage, by Axis agents inside Brazil.
In the meantime, Jeffrey could do nothing but watch. He was stuck deep underground, yet ironically had a bird’s-eye view of the action.
The data from several of the CIA’s bottle-cap gamma-ray detectors was conclusive. According to other intelligence—of some undisclosed kind but probably visual recon—a group of men had carried the suspect package from a flying boat onto a small corporate transport jet at Mar del Plata. Now powerful radars on the B-1 and the AWACS were tracking that jet as it neared Buenos Aires at over four hundred knots. The B-1 and AWACS were also tracking Estabo’s helo, which was making for the border at barely half that speed.
The map showed that it was 720 nautical miles from Mar del Plata to the middle of the Brazil-Argentina border—with Buenos Aires as a way point a third of the distance along the route. It was half that far, coming from the opposite direction, to get to the border from Paranaguá.
Half as far, but barely half the speed.
It was a toss-up whether the bomb or the SEALs would reach the border first.
Jeffrey, Colonel Stewart, and the Brazilian admiral were getting all the information they could as to where that flying boat at Mar del Plata had come from. All that was known was that it first appeared on radar miles out at sea on a course due west. Jeffrey was sure the flying boat had somehow rendezvoused with the von Scheer or her minisub. This was his first datum of any kind on the German submarine since the encounter at the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks days ago. Jeffrey was busy working backward from what he knew—using clues about the flying boat and time elapsed and the maximum range and speed of German minisubs—to pin down a circle on the nautical chart where the von Scheer had to be.
Everything’s coming to a head at once…. I need someway to warn Bell.
And Christ, I must get back to my ship.
An aide rushed into the conference room. In heavily accented English he told Jeffrey that Admiral Hodgkiss was calling. He handed Jeffrey a cordless phone, whose shielded signal was patched into the bunker’s main communications center.
“Commander Fuller speaking. Yes, sir.”
“Captain,” Hodgkiss said from distant Norfolk, “we’re having a lot of trouble keeping in touch. It’s not just radio jamming. Our basic communications-management software is under information warfare attack. We’re fighting back, but it’s as if the Axis can find and block our most important voice and data links. I may lose you soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain, I want you to—”
The line went dead.
“Admiral? Hello?” Nothing. I said before, “Unless otherwise directed.” He wants me to do what? Or not do what?
Jeffrey gave the phone to the aide. “Thank you. See if you can reestablish the connection quickly, please.”
“Look!” Colonel Stewart pointed at the TV.
From a control room in the bunker, a technician was feeding in live video, windowed in a corner of the wall screen.
“This must be coming from the B-one,” Stewart s
aid, “from its long-range visual-observation sensor pod.”
The main status plot showed the B-1 at the inner edge of international waters in the estuary off Buenos Aires. The angle of the view suggested it had ascended to very high altitude.
Jeffrey saw an aircraft that looked like a Learjet or a Gulf-stream putting down on a civilian airfield at La Plata, a town right on the water forty miles southeast of central Buenos Aires. The tarmac and hangar areas held a number of other small planes. He figured these were corporate jets, or aircraft Argentina’s rich elite used for pleasure flying.
The jet with the kampfschwimmer and warhead aboard slowed at the end of a runway, turned onto a taxiway, and met a refueling truck. As Jeffrey watched, another truck drove up to the plane.
Several men got out of the plane and began removing bulky packages from the back of the truck, carrying them onto the plane. The packages looked like rectangular canvas sacks. Another man got out of the plane and climbed in the back of the truck and stayed there, out of sight.
“Argentine liaison, probably,” Jeffrey said, meaning the man who wasn’t returning to the plane.
“Uh-oh,” Stewart said. “I think those sacks are parachutes.”
“You mean in case they’re shot down?”
“No,” Stewart said sourly. “That’s not what I mean.”
Then Jeffrey understood. Kampfschwimmer, like SEALs, were airborne qualified. “With chutes they can deploy just about anywhere with the warhead, by jumping right out of that plane.”
Jeffrey looked at the map, unfolded on the conference table, of airfields on the Argentine side of the border. The paved ones, long enough to handle a corporate jet, had been circled with a red marker by someone on the Brazilian staff. “I guess we won’t be needing this now,” Jeffrey said with concern and disgust.
An hour later, Jeffrey watched the status display on the TV screen on the wall in the underground bunker. The tension of waiting with nothing to do, and yet with so much at stake, was having a physical toll on him. There was just so much adrenaline his body could handle. He felt as if tiny buzz saws were tearing up and down his spine and countless scalpels were stabbing him in the heart and intestines. The only consolation was that he knew everyone else in the room, in his own way, must also be feeling the strain.
Contact with Admiral Hodgkiss, or anyone else in Norfolk, hadn’t been reestablished. No one could reach the U.S. Army’s Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, either. Communication satellites appeared to be going haywire. When the technicians in the bunker tried to relay a message by radio through the AWACS or the B-1 bomber, Axis hackers somewhere on the ground inside the U.S. interrupted the connection almost immediately. Mr. Jones said that even attempts by some of his people to call the U.S. by telephone, from their offices or homes or public pay phones in Brazil—to the White House or special CIA unlisted numbers or even an innocuous public library picked at random in Idaho—just kept giving “busy circuits,” and no one could get through. The tattered remnants of the war-torn Internet were no help either: international server links had been broken on purpose months ago, as the ultimate firewall against unstoppable, incurable worms and viruses.
The enemy has prepared very well for whatever it is they plan today. But by such a systematic and widespread attack, these hostile information warriors reveal their methods and algorithms. Their routes of infiltration can be traced. Pentagon and FBI experts will find some of them, and Axis operatives will be compromised or captured or killed. The Germans must feel the sacrifice is worth it…. The implications of that alone are scary. The damage they’re doing will certainly be worked around or repaired, but will it be soon enough? Tomorrow, or even tonight, may be too late, and the Germans know it.
Jeffrey watched the situation plot; communications inside Brazil remained mostly intact—and he wondered how much longer that would last.
The helicopter with Estabo’s team was near the middle of the border between Brazil and Argentina. They were orbiting in a holding pattern, waiting for further instructions.
Everything depended on what the plane with the Germans and the American bomb did next. The AWACS had a solid radar lock and followed its every move. So far, it kept heading north.
“Something doesn’t make sense,” an exhausted Colonel Stewart said. “They aren’t slowing or turning. They’re heading into Paraguayan airspace.” The American diplomat sounded worried and confused—Paraguay and Uruguay were neutral, both in the larger conflict and in the impending fight in South America.
The Brazilian generals began to show signs of agitation. “Might we have followed the wrong plane?” one of them said. “Did we fall for a deception, and that isn’t even the bomb?”
An oppressive, uncomfortable silence suddenly filled the room.
Jeffrey turned to Mr. Jones, who now looked deadly serious despite his outlandish garb. He’d taken off his jacket and loosened his tie, and there were spreading marks of sweat on the armpits of his shirt. Jeffrey, in contrast, thought the conference room was too cold, and his hands felt like ice cubes.
“Can we get that aircraft’s flight plan?” he asked Jones.
“On such short notice? I doubt it. There’s nothing says they filed one, or if they did they could’ve lied.”
Jeffrey grunted. He knew Jones was right, but what the man said, the way he said it, couldn’t help but sound defeatist.
The generals now seemed paralyzed by doubt or indecision.
Jeffrey reminded himself that these men vastly outranked him, and this was their country—but they had no experience at all of total war, while he’d been fighting and outsmarting Germans for months. He realized that he’d better show some initiative and interpret his fragmentary orders from Admiral Hodgkiss—plus the existing assent from President da Gama—in very broad terms. I don’t know if the White House or Pentagon ever meant for Operation Mercury to go nearly this far, but I can’t stop now. These times demand strong leadership from the bottom up.
Jeffrey was in his element.
“We have to work with what we’ve got. Let’s look at a detailed map of the northern part of the border. And somebody, tell the chopper with the SEALs to start heading north.” The Brazilian admiral nodded and left the room.
Someone handled the map-viewer controls. Jeffrey now saw the tongue of Argentine land that stretched north between Brazil and Paraguay.
“That’s the Triple Border,” Stewart said. “I thought we ruled that out.”
“Maybe we were wrong,” Jeffrey said. “Look.” He stood up and pointed at places on the map. “If they cut through Paraguay, they gain protection from Brazilian antiaircraft fire until the last possible moment.”
The generals nodded. “But that would severely limit the area they can attack,” one of them said. “When they turn east from Paraguay, they’ll only have access to a short fringe of the shared frontier. If our army attacked Argentina from there, our ground forces would be canalized into a narrow front aiming south, and it adds two hundred fifty kilometers to the route to Buenos Aires! I thought they were faking a breakthrough by our army going through the center of their lines.”
Jeffrey stared at the map. “Can we get President da Gama in here?”
One general rose wordlessly and went out. In a few minutes da Gama preceded him back into the room. The admiral returned with them.
As the Brazilian president took in the situation plot, Jeffrey pointed at a place on the map that was marked with a cluster of standard military icons that represented heavy antiaircraft artillery.
“Mr. President, what are these ack-ack guns protecting?”
“That’s the Itaipu Dam.”
“What is it, exactly?”
“It’s the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world. Enough steel for four hundred Eiffel Towers. Plus fifteen million cubic yards of concrete and cement.” Da Gama was obviously proud of the dam; he rattled off the figures like a tour guide.
“All this blue here is the lake built up behind it
?”
“Yes. The dam is seven hundred feet high, and altogether almost five miles wide. The reservoir is something like a hundred twenty-five miles in length.”
“That’s one huge head of water, sir.”
“I think the visitor brochures say it’s a trillion cubic feet, behind that dam.”
Mr. Jones whistled.
“The dam spillways drain south?” Jeffrey asked.
“Yes, into the Paraná River.” Da Gama sounded impatient now; he obviously thought the American questions were distracting, even irrelevant.
Jeffrey was undeterred. “And the Paraná goes where, Mr. President?”
“It runs south through Argentina, then drains just north of Buenos Aires into the Rio de la Plata estuary.”
“The dam might be their target.”
“But it’s on our side of the border.”
“Just barely, from what this map seems to say.”
“Yes. But the dam is owned by Brazil…. Paraguay soldus their shares during their latest banking crisis.”
“Don’t you see? Brazilian ownership just gives you better, easier access, sir, to implant an American bomb…. Nukethe Itaipu Dam, and where does that gigantic radioactive tidal wave go? Whose border troops are wiped out or cut off from reinforcements? Which capital’s shantytown suburbs get flushed by the surge of contaminated water, laced with so many tons of vaporized and neutron-activated concrete and steel?”
“Argentina. Argentina. Argentina.”