Tidal Rip by Joe Buff Read Free Book Online

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