Hemingway had done the Special Patrol Insertion & Extraction System procedure during SQT. When the terrain or the environment wasn’t conducive to a landing, the SEALs, wearing harnesses that clip to a rope from the helo, were picked up and dangled below the vehicle. The chopper then flew them out and they were lowered down to the ground to unclip from the rope.
“The layout is in your brief packages.” She clicked the screen off. “The Paraguayans don’t know we’re going to snatch this guy, and if you’re discovered involved in this mission, they will be royally pissed, to use the vernacular. The US gets a black eye and gentlemen, we don’t like black eyes. So, do what you guys do best.”
“As long as the intel is good,” Mad Max said, “We’ll smash and grab.”
“The intel is the best that we have up to now. We’re taking this opportunity because it’s opened up to us. There were many chances to stop Bin Laden, and we didn’t take those, so it’s a new mind set.”
“Get them before they get us?” Max asked.
Kelly tilted her head and nodded with a wry smile. “Something like that. Good luck.”
She left and Fast Lane said. “We’ll do this dark and dirty. We’ll assault the house, take down the bodyguards and grab Said, then we’ll head to the LZ and extract. We’ll have twenty minutes.”
The chopper hovered at the edge of the property as Hemingway and the rest of his team hit the ground running. They covered the distance at a punishing sprint, arriving at the ranch house in record time, Max and Jugs taking point. The team had been briefed on their roles, and they moved into position automatically. They took out the armed guards, and Dodger picked the lock to the back door while Pitbull, Dragon, Saint, and Hemingway took out the patrolling bodyguards at the front, entering and neutralizing the guards inside. Saint and Hemingway went upstairs, pulled Said from his bed, gagged and cuffed him and were out of the house in five minutes. Mad Max hefted him over his shoulder, and they ran back to the extraction point. The helo dropped down and after fitting Said with a harness, he was attached to the rope.
Hemingway was next to last in the order, with Mad Max and Jugs last. The helo took off, clipping the edge of the jungle before heading back to the military base in Asunción. Just as the chopper banked, gunfire emitted from the dense overgrowth. Hemingway saw a muzzle flash red and the helo dropped. Had they been hit? But then righted itself. That was a head rush, Hemingway thought, then looked down, expecting Mad Max to be looking up at him with a grin.
All he saw was empty air and a frayed rope beneath him.
“Max!” Hemingway called, alerting Fast Lane through his comm. “He and Jugs are gone, LT! They fell!”
Dr. Renata Cavalcante woke sleepily in her tent. She had to pee, so she grabbed her flashlight, unzipped the opening and slipped out into the jungle, her pathway spilling with moonlight, then squatted and did her business. Suddenly, she heard a chopper in the distance. Walking a few feet, she peered up into the sky, but she couldn’t see anything. The moon was directly over her and it felt almost warm in the darkness, a cool breeze pushing at the treetops. She stood for a few more minutes, then the unmistakable popping of gunfire cut through the night.
Yards before her, the water of the Paraguay river was mirror flat, the trees reflecting as if under the surface. The breeze shifted the bushes. Her heartbeat, which had sped up when she’d heard the gunshots, now evened out.
She was a newly minted anthropologist, and at the behest of her mentor, internationally renowned anthropologist, Dr. Carlos Benitez, she was out here in the dense jungle searching for the possibility of discovering Spanish galleons who were reported to have sunk in the river. She had just come from Capiatá, where she had been interviewing the locals about the treasure that was reported to be lost in the area.
The government had a stake in anything that was discovered, and Renata was happy to make sure anything monetary would be returned to the state coffers, and anything cultural to their museum.
She thought she heard something in the distance, but after listening for a bit, there was nothing but the chittering and chirping of the jungle. She headed back to her tent. An American with Brazilian roots, Renata was comfortable in South America, speaking the language and understanding the culture. She was well provisioned by Benitez and the Universidade de São Paulo, located on the east coast of Brazil on the South Atlantic Ocean.
He’d promised her a position there if she were interested, and it was a generous offer, as USP was the highest ranked university in Brazil. But she was also holding an offer from the University of San Diego. She’d have to decide within the month, but that gave her time. She zipped the enclosure closed and snuggled back into her sleeping bag, unconcerned with the gunfire and the outside world.
She slipped into sleep, dreaming about finding one of the galleons and exploring all it had to say about the history of this area and the conflict that had sent the Spanish here in the first place.
When the sun woke her, she slipped out of the tent and washed up. Getting dressed, she filled a knapsack with some power bars, a compass, and a change of clothes. Heading toward the shore, she started to walk along its edge. She turned into the jungle and spent a better part of the morning looking for anything significant.
Finding nothing, she broke for lunch, then resumed her search. As the sun dipped down, she started back for camp, but tripped. Once she’d regained her balance, she suspected it was a stone, but when she looked down, something dark and flat glinted.
She crouched down and dug around the metal object with her fingers, her heart caught, and she hastily pulled off her backpack and dug deeper. It was a helmet, or more accurately, a morion, a type of open helmet originally from Spain, with a flat brim and a crest from front to back. She was sure of it. She pulled out her bottled water and poured it over the object.
Renata worked until she’d excavated the artifact and, walking over to the river, she ducked it in to clean it off. Wow, this was amazing. The helmet had intricately etched floral designs on the central part and small raised flowers around the brim. It was beautiful. Her first find and she was elated. She tucked the precious object into her backpack, and after noting the location of where she found the relic, she headed back to camp.
She stowed her backpack inside her tent and started a fire, placing six rocks into the flames. They would need to heat for about three hours, then she dug a hole in the dirt about a foot deep and a couple feet across. Searching for some tall bamboo, six feet would be perfect, she cut it with her machete. Making two intersecting crosscuts at one end, she created four prongs.
Using vines, she wedged them into the crevices and then sharpened the prongs with her knife.
She waded into the river slowly and waited. She was looking for a medium sized pirarucu that would yield her a couple of delicious dinners. She could cook it while she was mapping this part of the river for signs of the sunken ships and hopefully more relics.
She speared a pirarucu, which was just a big catfish, and pulled it wriggling from the water. Knocking it a couple times in the head, it stopped wriggling. Using a tree branch, she moved the rocks into the hole. Then she went on the hunt for large banana leaves. Wrapping the fish inside and tying it off with vines, she placed the fish on top of the rocks and covered it all with the soil.