Tidal Rip (53 page)

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 end 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.

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.