“It’s going to sound crazy, but they said it was a German U-boat called the Bremen. When they started asking around about it, no one took them seriously until some American guy showed up and pressured them to reveal the location. Carlos’s cousins wouldn’t give up the info. They were scared of him and emailed Carlos about the man’s strong-arm tactics. After our mission, he was going to go down there to look into it with them. But then, just before we set sail, he got word they’d been murdered.”
Max looked at Juan and said, “That sounds like Tate’s handiwork. But what does he want with a U-boat?”
“It must be related to the sonic weapon somehow,” Juan said, before turning to Bradley. “Do you know what town these cousins were from?”
“Somewhere near a tributary of the Amazon River, but I don’t remember the name offhand.”
Juan sighed with disappointment. They were so close to finding out what Tate was protecting, and now it seemed just out of reach.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Bradley continued. “I can show you exactly where they claimed the U-boat was.”
Juan leaned forward with renewed hope. “How?”
Bradley smiled for the first time. “I have a map.”
42
THE AMAZON RIVER BASIN
From the open door of a chartered Agusta six-passenger helicopter, Zachariah Tate watched the jungle pass below, a nearly unbroken expanse of thick green carpet that was slashed only occasionally by one of the muddy brown tributaries of the Amazon. On his headset, he listened to Catherine Ballard recount the latest news about the discovery of the Kansas City. She was sitting across from him next to Farouk, who had his face buried in a laptop.
“Reports say that it was found by a Brazilian Navy corvette,” she said as she read from her sat-link phone, “and that twenty-six survivors have been transferred to an American Navy destroyer that arrived twenty-four hours later. A massive effort is currently under way by the Navy and the National Underwater and Marine Agency to raise the sub and bring it back to the U.S. NUMA is concerned that the nuclear reactor could contaminate the Brazilian coast if it leaks.”
“Did they report the names of any of the survivors?” Tate asked.
Ballard shook her head. “It’s only been a day and a half. They’re still notifying relatives.”
“Then it’s good we came here. If Jiménez is still alive, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes looking for the Bremen.” He turned to Farouk. “Any sign of it yet?”
Farouk shrugged without looking up. “It’s a big jungle. If we could ask the people who originally found the U-boat where it was, this would be a lot easier.”
Tate glared at him. “You think that it was a mistake for me to kill them??
?
Farouk looked up from the computer with alarm. “N-no. I just meant it’s difficult to find it with limited data. You were right to stop them from revealing the U-boat to the world. It could endanger everything we’ve worked for.”
Tate laughed. “Relax, Farouk. I’m just messing with you. We both thought the Kansas City was a total loss. How could we know some of the sailors would get out two weeks later? Anyway, Jiménez may have died in the wreckage. This search is just for insurance.”
Farouk smiled weakly. “No problem.” He went back to studying his screen.
Strapped to the underside of the helicopter was another piece of technology put together by Farouk. It was a LiDAR—a Light Detection and Ranging—imaging system. As the Agusta flew over the jungle, laser beams were being fired downward thousands of times every second. Most of the beams were blocked by the trees, but a good percentage got through to the ground, enough to form a picture of the terrain below by subtracting the tall jungle foliage from the image. It was the same tech archeologists used to map Mayan ruins hidden in Central American rain forests. Farouk’s computer was analyzing the data in real time and creating a map on his laptop. If the distinctive shape of a World War I–era U-boat was within their search grid, it should be easy to spot.
They had started by scanning all of the tributary banks in the area, but Tate thought the Bremen was unlikely to be found there. It would have been discovered long ago by fishermen cruising along the rivers.
So now they were searching the jungle’s interior. The U-boat had been abandoned in 1922, and the smaller rivers had shifted course many times in the nearly one hundred years since then. It was very possible that the U-boat had gotten stranded in a cut-off tributary and swiftly overwhelmed by the foliage that raced to cover any bare ground.
“This is taking forever,” Tate said.
“We must be methodical,” Farouk said. “Any deviation from the search pattern and we could miss it.”
“And you’re sure that Horváth didn’t reveal the location of the U-boat in his rants?”
“I wish he had. This is tedious.”
Istvan Horváth, the Hungarian scientist who invented the sonic disruptor toward the end of World War I, had emerged from the Amazon jungle in 1922 with wild tales of a German U-boat stuck in the middle of the rain forest. He claimed the Bremen, a sub built to be a blockade-runner, had escaped the war unscathed and used a remote Amazon River outpost as its base to raid ships for four years after hostilities had ended.
No one had believed him, even though the Bremen had indeed disappeared before the war was over and was never seen again. The problem was that Horváth was certifiably insane, driven mad by sickness and his long trek through the bug-infested jungle. He told his rescuers that a disease struck everyone on the sub and killed them before they could put to sea. He was the only survivor and managed to hike his way down the river to the coast, but his wild-eyed stories were considered too fanciful to be anything other than the ravings of a madman.