Final Option (Oregon Files 14)

For two hours, it was a monotonous trudge through the forest, without any sign of a single man-made object.

Juan then heard a sound that was definitely made by man. The throb of a helicopter rotor was approaching. He held up his hand, and they all stopped.

The chopper passed to the south of them, the noise faded into the distance.

“Must have been a surveyor,” Eddie said.

“Or a transport,” Raven suggested.

“Out here?” MacD asked.

“Let’s keep going,” Juan said, although the close proximity of the helicopter bothered him.

They continued on for another fifteen minutes. Juan, who was right behind Murph, looked at his watch and saw that they had

just another forty-five minutes before they had to give up the search for the day and return to the Zodiacs.

That’s when he heard Murph’s foot clank as he stepped up onto what looked like a decaying brown log.

Everyone halted. Juan put his foot against the object and tapped it with his toe. It rang out with a hollow sound. He bent down and wiped dirt away until he saw gray paint and rusted steel.

A stand of bushes was blocking the view to the right, so Juan walked straight ahead for another forty feet and turned to face the rest of the group, who were all gawking at the discovery. It was only now that he could make out the conning tower sticking out of the ground like the stump of an immense tree. He had just walked across the stern of a World War I U-boat sitting in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

The entire surreal shape was unmistakable, even though it was partially camouflaged by vines and other vegetation. The only part that had been uncovered completely, the muck and grime having been wiped away by the previous visitors, was the German Iron Cross and the name stenciled on the conning tower.

BREMEN.

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It took five minutes of pounding with the sledgehammers they’d brought to knock away the rust and loosen the gears enough to turn the wheel on the top hatch of the conning tower. A musty smell drifted from the interior, over ninety years of air closed off from the world. Juan put on his headlamp and descended the ladder.

When he stepped onto the deck of the control room, his light settled on a mummified corpse, sitting up and leaning against the periscope. Two more bodies were sitting at the dive controls, mouths agape.

As more of the team came down after him, their lamps gave a fuller view of the tiny room crammed with pipes, dials, levers, and switches, all of them labeled in German. There were dozens of valve wheels on virtually every surface for operating the ballast and compressed-air tanks. Although everything was filthy from its operational days, being closed to the humid air outside all these years had kept corrosion to a minimum. The Bremen still looked as if she were ready to put to sea.

“Fan out and look for anything about the sonic disruptor,” Juan said.

Raven and MacD went forward, while Murph and Eddie took the stern.

Bradley was the second to last to enter, and he easily came down despite his broken arm. Linc followed close behind.

“And I thought the Kansas City was cramped,” Bradley said, taking in the room that now looked even smaller with Linc’s huge frame taking up so much space.

“This was actually a huge submarine for the era,” Juan said, having studied up on the Bremen during the trip on the Amazon. “Over two thousand tons, with an extended range of twenty thousand miles.”

“How many crew members?”

“Eight officers and sixty enlisted.”

Linc whistled. “I hope they were all good friends.”

“If they weren’t at the start of the cruise,” Juan said, “they would be by the end.”

“As long as they didn’t kill each other first,” Bradley joked, before clearing his throat, embarrassed, when he realized his statement echoed what happened to the KC. “Why is it so big?”

“She was designed as a blockade-runner,” Juan answered. “The Brits were trying to keep any materials from reaching German ports, so the Bremen and other U-boats like her were meant to sneak under the blockade. She could carry up to seven hundred tons of cargo.”

“The question is, how and why did it end up in the middle of the Amazon jungle?” Linc said.