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.