by Joe Buff
Felix was one of the men off watch, so it was his turn to sleep. He tried to cradle his head in his arms on the uneven ground, with his face cushioned next to the reassuring heft of his weapon. In the Amazon rain forest, roots from towering trees grew right along or over the uneven ground, forming bumps and ridges and tangles everywhere. The team wasn’t far above the mighty Amazon River’s maximum annual floodplain level. Usable natural cushioning was scarce — very few trees shed leaves or nettles in the tropics. The ground cover consisted mostly of huge fallen branches, or fungus and rotting organic goo, so Felix couldn’t fashion a bed as he’d have done on a camping trip. It was hard to find much comfort at all. The men didn’t carry ground cloths or sleeping bags or similar luxuries — they were overloaded with other, much more vital equipment.
But Felix was used to it. He was actually enjoying himself, despite the tension and danger and tingling of fear. The heat and humidity and mosquitoes didn’t bother him — he’d grown up in Miami. Felix always thought of himself as the archetypal happy warrior. Tonight, he couldn’t have been happier. He’d led a clean life. He had a supportive wife and two wonderful infant girls to go home to. Felix’s mind was at peace, which was good. He needed every neuron focused on doing his job right now.
Felix was a master chief in the U.S. Navy SEALs, in the field in hostile territory, on a clandestine operation during war. His lieutenant, a promising kid but young and inexperienced as SEALs go, was in nominal charge of the group — but it was Felix, with his maturity and strong grasp of tradecraft, who worked hard to keep the team undetected, safe and alive and on schedule. Every man among them was Latino, handpicked for their language skills and knowledge of local cultures.
Felix was of Brazilian descent. His parents were born in São Paulo, the country’s biggest city and main business center. They’d been sponsored to the U.S., given green cards that allowed them to take menial factory jobs in southern Florida. When baby Felix arrived, at a Miami hospital, he was automatically a U.S. citizen. Eventually his parents were naturalized too. Felix was pretty good in Spanish, which he spoke with a Cuban-American accent, and he was fluent in the idiomatic Portuguese that was Brazil’s national language.
So his mission was like coming home, visiting the old country. He could blend in well.
Felix wasn’t tall, five-foot-six, but he had a blocky, muscular build. When not on an operation, he liked to comb his jet-black hair straight up, forming half-inch spiked bristles with styling gel. His head was very big — his hat size was a whopping seven and seven-eighths — and his neck was broad and strong. In moments of vanity mixed with self-mockery he liked to think he resembled a bullet atop a tree stump — except with a higher IQ. In bars he’d joke with his buddies that either his brain was large or his skull was too thick, he wasn’t sure which. And when people saw the old, old scar of a knife wound down his cheek, a jagged line from below his left eye socket to his jaw… He smiled to himself at the thought. Nobody in a bar ever messed with Felix.
Again Felix tried to sleep. He listened to the unending sounds of the Amazon rain forest at night. Nocturnal monkeys chattered, high up in the triple canopy formed by the spreading limbs of different species of tropical trees. Some of these trees, Felix knew, were fifteen stories tall or more; their lower trunks could reach a thickness of six or even ten feet. The mosquitoes continued to whine near his ears, but he ignored them. His team had come prepared for such pests. Too overtired to be able to give in to drowsiness and doze off, Felix double-checked by feel that the elastic ends of his sleeves were fastened snug around his flame-retardant jungle warfare gloves. He and the other men swallowed special tablets daily so that the pores of their skin secreted an odorless insect repellent. His one-piece camouflage fatigues were made of layered synthetics to draw away moisture and let it evaporate, to help keep the multitudes of biting or stinging insects at bay, and to double as a diving wet suit when the men had to go in the water. The bottom of the wet suit’s legs were tucked tightly into his boots to keep out scorpions and fire ants, which were also nocturnal; ticks and lice and chiggers stayed active all day. Every morning before breaking camp, Felix made sure each man took medications with the team’s one daily meal to prevent malaria and intestinal worms and suppress any symptoms of dysentery. Before deploying for the mission, they’d had booster vaccinations for a dozen other diseases, from cholera to yellow fever to smallpox, not to mention anthrax and some bad coronaviruses.
In the inky dark, Felix sensed more than heard bats swooping between the trees and through the brush, feeding on the copious insect life. There were many sorts of bats in the Amazon rain forest. There were also poisonous snakes and big ugly spiders… not to mention pumas and jaguars and ocelots, South America’s big cats. The countless river tributaries harbored schools of sharp-toothed piranhas, plus several varieties of mean and hungry alligators and crocodiles.
But the most dangerous life form here in the forest was man. This was why Felix’s team avoided moving by the rivers — which were lines of travel and commerce for the native population — and they avoided moving altogether at night. Horizontal sight lines were short, from all the foliage and tree trunks. A surprise encounter after dark could happen much too suddenly, literally at arm’s length, spelling disaster. Visibility under the all-concealing triple canopy of leaves and vines was bad enough in the perpetual gloom during daytime. It was because of the short sight lines, tactically, that sounds and smells were so important. That was why, for two weeks before their present mission began, Felix and his team had eaten a special diet to make their body odor blend in with their surroundings. That was also why, during the approach to the coast on the nuclear sub USS Ohio, Felix and his men never showered with soap. And that was why, right now, they had to be so quiet. A clicking of metal, the smack of a hand on a wasp or hornet sting, a muffled human cough carried a surprising distance in the rain forest, even above the forest’s natural din.
Finally, that was why the team didn’t bother bringing thermal or night-vision gear. The devices and their batteries added weight, and they tended not to hold up well under rugged use in such wet and dirty climatic conditions. Instead, at night, the men hid and watched for trouble with the naked eye.
Felix suddenly heard parrots squawking somewhere in the distance. He immediately grew more alert. He was supposed to be off watch now, but as the team’s master chief, he was never truly off watch. He’d be lucky to get by on brief catnaps throughout this whole covert reconnaissance patrol. A split second after Felix zoned in on the noise of the parrots, he felt it through his feet as other members of his team grew tense. Two of them, the most experienced enlisted men, continued to sleep. Their unconscious combat minds knew their on-watch teammates would wake them in case of real danger; in the meantime, they were fully determined to get all the shut-eye they could.
The parrot squawking continued, and now howler monkeys hooted and screeched. Felix heard the pounding of hooves as other creatures hurried along through the forest floor’s thick red muck. Sheep-sized rodents, the capybara? Miniature deer? Local types of wild boar? Felix couldn’t be sure in the dark. He noticed other, quieter stirrings high above him, probably three-toed sloths, moving grudgingly in their lazy way.
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 wha
t 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, th
en 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.
