Tidal Rip (6 page)

The man to his right tapped Felix on the wrist, in code. He was relaying a message from the lieutenant, who was lying in the circle facing directly away from Felix, in the opposite direction from the forest disturbance. The LT wanted an assessment from Felix immediately. Someone might be approaching, and no one the team might meet here was friendly.

Felix tapped the man in a signal meaning “Wait.” The men would relay this around the circle one by one, back to the lieutenant—a silent jungle telegraph.

Felix shifted his body slowly and smoothly, like a sniper. Actually, Felix had begun life in the navy as a hospital corpsman on a cruiser, before being seasoned enough to put in for the SEALs. But he had become a very good shot during firearms training, and he’d thoroughly learned what it took to be a skilled sniper or spotter observer.

Felix was careful not to brush against the leaves of the bushes right overhead. He was cautious as he moved slightly, so his arms or legs wouldn’t give off a sucking sound from the mud. Gingerly, he shifted his weapon and then brought his hands toward his head, trying to avoid getting snagged on the thorns and needlelike leaf ends abounding in this underbrush. Because it would leave lasting signs that they’d been here, the team dared not do any pruning with the one machete they shared.

Felix cupped his hands to his ears, a standard jungle warfare method to hear better. He rotated his head to pinpoint the source of the zoolike din. He tuned out the endless mosquito hum. He tried to make out luminescent fungi amid the clutter on the forest floor or on the bark of trees—he might notice something or someone walk between him and a fungus. But he could see no subtle, dim blue-green glows from where he lay.

Felix heard more birdcalls—he recognized species of ant-follower birds. He tried to assess the distance to the center of the noises and judged the speed and direction in which the disturbance appeared to move. He heard more monkeys calling, in a way he knew was monkey talk for “no big deal.” Felix had been trained in many such things by naturalists who consulted to the navy—it paid dividends for SEALs to be one with the biosphere they worked in.

Now Felix got it. A column of army ants was on the march, devouring everything in its path. The ant birds were specialized feeders. They followed the army ants and snapped up insects fleeing the oncoming ants…. The antsweren’t coming toward the SEAL team’s position. This was a very good thing, because if they had been, the team would need to move, and quickly. No one in his right mind would lie on the ground to let army ants get close. They’d crawl all over you by the hundreds and thousands, and force their way into every opening in your clothes and under your headgear, and then get into your eyes and up your nostrils. Their bites were horribly painful, and even a brave man would scream. Though they weren’t likely to kill a healthy large animal, swarms of them could pick a decomposing carcass clean, leaving absolutely nothing but hair and white bones.

Felix tapped a message for the lieutenant, to be passed around the circle. “Army ants. No danger.” No danger, at least for now. His teammates tried to relax. The half of them on watch remained alert. Felix was much too keyed up now to sleep.

The pitch blackness of the nighttime rain forest began to lift subtly. Felix’s well-adapted eyes could make out shapes in the silvery patches of weak light from the rising moon. The team knew the exact time of moonrise and moonset for each night of their patrol—another reason they hadn’t brought night-vision gear. The moon’s schedule and also its phase—approaching full—were important parts of the mission profile. So was the weather. Though the sun rose close to six
A.M
. in northeastern Brazil, almost precisely on the equator, and set near six
P.M
. all year, the rain forest did have its seasons. The rainy season—given that it was late March—would end within a few weeks. But it was very much still the rainy season now.

Americans often thought of Brazil as being to the south of them, but it was actually southeast. The easternmost tip of Brazil, not far from where Felix lay motionless in all this goo and muck, was two or three time zones ahead of the United States’s East Coast. So it would still be daylight in Miami and at Norfolk’s amphibious warfare base—where Felix was stationed and where his wife and children lived. This made Felix think of his family, but he forced them from his mind. He knew the wives helped one another constantly, and the base’s health care and recreational facilities were outstanding. He did worry that at some point the base might be nuked, but if that happened it was probably the beginning of the end for everybody.

Felix glanced around again, in the subtle moonlight that managed to make its way in dapples down through all the branches and leaves. He’d oriented himself as the team made camp during the very short tropical dusk. But things looked different at night. He watched carefully for the slightest telltale change. No one,
no one
must know the team was here.

He reminded himself that antigovernment leftist guerrillas were active in the area, cut off from the main landmass of Brazil by the miles-wide Amazon River. Felix’s present position was a few days’ forced march in from the Atlantic, not far north of the Amazon’s mouth, with its gigantic waterlogged delta and its busy heavy-shipping channels.

There was a railroad line a few days’ march from their present location, farther into the rain forest. The railroad was an isolated short line. It ran from a group of manganese mines southward to Porto Santana on a navigable branch of the Amazon. Brazil exported this manganese ore. America needed to buy it. The Axis didn’t want America to have it.

The rail line ran through a rain-forest wilderness. It was an obvious target for guerrilla troops. The recently installed prewar electronic Amazon Surveillance System, designed to guard against drug smugglers and animal poachers and illegal lumbering, could tell that guerrillas were training, staging, somewhere vaguely in the area—between the railroad and the coast. But the dense greenery of the canopy cover, and the frequent overcast skies and violent thunderstorms of the rainy season, tended to make surveillance by human beings on foot much better than airborne surveillance. Visual, infrared, radar—all were blocked or distorted, and hopelessly spoofed by false alarms. Ground-based remote-controlled sensors—like seismometers to feel people walking, or urea sniffers to pick up their sweat or body waste—were equally stymied by environmental noise and signal clutter—from the constant wandering of man-sized animals under all the trees. Besides, as Felix well appreciated, the whole Amazon River basin was much too large to cover effectively from the ground by any affordable sensor grid: it was more than half the size of the entire continental United States.

It was really the presence of the railroad that tagged the area as a probable guerrilla target. And therein lay America’s problem, and the reason why Felix was here.

There were only two practical ways to reach the area, unless you were lowered by helicopter or inserted from the sea, because the railroad itself—freight trains only, no passengers—was patrolled by Brazilian security troops. One route, from the scattered urban parts of Brazil far south across the Amazon, was by boat and then on foot through the swamps and the jungle. The other way was on foot down from the north, through the French Guyana highlands. Since France was occupied by Germany, French Guyana—a French possession—had seceded and made itself neutral. Like much of neutral soil during war since time immemorial, French Guyana was now a hotbed of intrigue containing all sides. The Pentagon’s intelligence assessment was that Germans were helping the leftist guerrillas by coming south through French Guyana. That was a long and difficult trek, since there were no roads whatsoever—this part of the Amazon basin was truly the middle of nowhere.

Felix heard a quick pattering from above and then a loud plop. The quality of the noise told him it was an overripe fruit, falling through the intervening branches to the ground. He watched something the size of his fist scurry along the ground in his field of view. It reared up at him on hind legs for a moment, then scurried away.
A spider
. Tarantula, probably. Their bites were painful but not deadly. Felix wondered if a tarantula’s fangs could penetrate his gloves.

In the shadows between the protruding tree roots and creeping vines, he saw something else move. It moved deliberately, with practiced stealth. Slowly, silently, it came for him, closer and closer.

Felix cursed to himself. It was a vampire bat, doing what vampire bats do—stalking a sleeping large mammal. The bat’s fangs were razor sharp, so sharp they could slit the hide of a cow or tapir without the victim even waking. Then the bats drank the sweet fresh blood till their stomachs were so bloated they could barely move. The vampire bat would stumble away like a drunken sailor, to digest its tasty meal.

This particular vampire bat had its eyes on Felix’s hand. He flicked it in the nose with his thumb and index finger. It jumped back, then tried for him again. He bopped it in the nose, harder. The ugly bat gave up, and went into the underbrush.

Felix sighed. He felt drained from his exertions of the past few days but knew he’d be lucky to get much rest tonight. The constant stress and need for alertness were wearing. By the end of the mission, in another ten days or so if he was lucky, he’d be ready for a nice long break back aboard the
Ohio
. The
Ohio
was an old boomer sub, and the ample space of her missile compartment had been specially converted for SEALs. Compared to the claustrophobic confines of a typical fast-attack sub, where SEALs squeezed into improvised sleeping racks in the torpedo room, the
Ohio
was like an undersea resort hotel.

Felix heard distant thunder.
Another rainstorm coming.
This would cool things off for a little while, though trying to sleep outdoors in a tropical downpour was a losing proposition.

No. Not thunder. Grenades.
Now there were pops and stutters and tearing sounds, like rifles and machine guns. They were coming from northeast, farther up the Brazilian coast. Everybody was wide awake now. There was a larger boom, like a Claymore mine, from the same direction, far away and muffled but distinct. Felix was alarmed. He no longer noticed his sweating and itching. He forced himself to stop breathing so hard.

The shooting in the distance died off quickly.

The left hand of the man clockwise of Felix reached for Felix’s right hand. Felix felt a rapid series of taps and strokes and squeezes on different parts of his fingers and palm. The lieutenant was signaling Felix again: “Assessment?”

Felix responded, “Somebody triggered an ambush.”

“Who versus whom?” the lieutenant asked, still passing hand signals. Felix was glad the LT wasn’t breaking silence discipline, even surprised as he must have been by the outof-nowhere eruption of that violently one-sided firefight. The ambush proved how precarious the SEALs’ position truly was.

Felix thought through the LT’s question very hard. The noise had been too far away for him to identify it as specific types of weapons. It might have been a Brazilian Army patrol taking out a guerrilla band. Or it could have been guerrillas getting the jump on a poorly trained army squad…. Or it could involve the other team of Navy SEALs—who’d deployed from the
Ohio
at the same time Felix did—sent to cover a different area nearer the Guyana Shield highlands. This worried Felix, because the SEALs would never have started an ambush themselves. None of them were even supposed to be here.

Brazil was formally neutral. American armed forces operating on Brazilian soil was an outright violation of international law. It could be taken as an act of war.

Which is why we didn’t just drop in by helicopter, and why the other team can’t call for helo extraction or air support.

Yet U.S. national command authorities had deemed the mission important enough to risk it anyway. The SEALs’ vital role was to provide military indications and warnings. The U.S. simply
had
to know how far the Axis was willing to go to stir up trouble in South America. If the Axis in fact was active in this part of Brazil, then Felix and the others were tasked to bring back concrete proof—all without being detected. Exactly how this physical proof was supposed to be obtained, Felix and his lieutenant were told they’d best improvise on the spot.

So who hit whom in that ambush?
Tensions were already riding too high, with Brazil and Argentina mobilizing along the stretch of border they shared in the middle of the continent. The two countries were on the brink of war, over imagined slights or real provocations. It reminded Felix of India and Pakistan—both of whom were neutral and keeping their heads well down right now—except that the CIA didn’t know if Brazil or Argentina had atom bombs. Felix reminded himself that following deadly attacks and near atrocities by the Boers in the South Pacific, Tokyo had announced just weeks ago that Japan was a nuclear power. Japan, neutral up till then, declined to say if she intended to choose sides. After that, the whole world seemed to go crazy—the parts that hadn’t already gone mad.

With paranoia and warmongering running rampant everywhere, an illegal U.S. incursion into a neutral Latin American nation, if found out, unmasked, could prove disastrous. There was surely much more to the story, or Felix’s team would never have been sent. Felix, a master chief, wasn’t fed the big strategic picture by the higher-ups. But he could use his head, and he guessed that the German presence here—if any—was intended to create an annoying diversion, to draw Brazilian troops away from the faroff Argentine front. That, Felix figured, seemed to imply the Germans intended to back the Argentines in any outright fighting.
And
that,
my man, means one way-serious problemo.

Felix still had to answer his lieutenant. “Ambush adversaries unknown. Possible other SEAL team involved.”

“Should we help them?”

Felix was torn. SEALs trusted one another with their lives and never left a man behind. If the other team was in trouble, Felix and the lieutenant should do everything to assist. But there was nothing they could possibly do. The scene of the ambush was much too far away. Felix judged it would take till noontime tomorrow to get there, at the earliest.