Tidal Rip by Joe Buff Read Free Book Online Page B

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,