with bombs or gas?'
'Takes a whole lot of high explosive to chop up the jungle,' Gadgets answered. 'I'd bet it's gas. Dig a hole, get behind a tree, can't hide from gas.'
'Thomas told me about entire villages dying,' Lyons said. 'People dying with yellow blood coming out of their mouths.'
Lieutenant Silveres listened to the exchange without comment. He cleaned and oiled the G-3 auto-rifle, watching Blancanales sketch a map by the glow of a rag-shaded flashlight. Blancanales drew the curve of the river around the headland and pinpointed their position. An X marked the cliff overlooking the bend in the river. He put a question mark on the west side of the hills intersecting the river.
Setting down the auto-rifle, Lieutenant Silveres took the pencil and indicated two more snaking curves in the course of the river to the northwest. At the edge of the paper, he drew a zigzagging line.
'This is the border of my country, the Mamore. The first town is 108 kilometers from there.'
'Is that where your unit is stationed?' Blancanales asked.
'There is a garrison in Guajara.'
'Is that your unit?' Blancanales persisted. 'Will they have the soldiers to assist us when we attack the...'
The lieutenant interrupted him. 'It would be better for you to discuss that with my superiors. I will help you while we are in Bolivia. But I cannot talk of what the army will or will not do when we enter Brazil.'
'Then a Brazilian force will intercept us here?' Blancanales pointed to where the river from Bolivia met the Mamore River.
The young officer only shrugged.
'Forget the Brazilian army!' Lyons stopped the questioning. 'That's tomorrow. The slavers will annihilate us...' he grabbed Gadgets's wrist, looked at his watch '...in three and a half hours.'
'If we stick around,' Gadgets said.
'If we cut loose and try to continue north...' Blancanales pointed to the next bend in the river '...we get gassed. And we have another problem. Our plane will be coming in at dawn.' He looked at Lieutenant Silveres. 'And maybe the Brazilians, too. We can't offload that plane in the middle of a three-way firefight.'
'Problems? We got no problems!' Lyons buckled on his bandolier of Atchisson magazines and slipped the weapon's sling over his shoulder. 'Who wants to go for a walk? We got the best jungle fighters in the world sleeping out there. Their fathers were headhunters and their grandfathers ate missionaries. Me and them are going over that hill for a rumble with the crazies. Want to come, get with the fun?'
Gadgets grinned to Blancanales. 'That's our man, back to normal.'
'I'll come,' the lieutenant volunteered, standing up.
'You sure, kid? I kicked you hard, you could be...'
'It was nothing.'
Lyons laughed at the young man's machismo, threw him a rag soaked in genipap. 'Then black up.'
A hunter who had once lived in the area with his family and tribe led the North American and the Brazilian and their Xavante allies along an Indian trail. Cutting straight south, they followed the narrow overgrown track, the hunter guiding them by memory and touch through the darkness. Every man walked with his hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of him in the line. Lyons walked third in line. Several positions behind him, he heard the lieutenant's boots crushing the rain forest debris that matted the trail, his uniform's pockets and flaps catching on branches and vines.
Night sky finally appeared above them as the trail led up the hillside. By starlight and the light of the setting moon, they crouch-jogged between the rock slabs and low growth of the ridge. A clinking rang from a pocket of the lieutenant's fatigues. Lyons called a halt and padded silently back to the young officer.
'You're making noise,' Lyons whispered. He slapped at the lieutenant's pockets. He felt keys under the cloth. 'Get rid of those! You don't need those in the middle of the Amazon.'
'They are the keys to my apartment in Belem. I forgot I had them,' Lieutenant Silveres apologized. The key ring jingled as it fell to the trail.
Lyons buried the shiny pieces of brass under the forest mulch, then returned to his place in line. The group continued in silence, moving fast.
An auto-burst stopped them. Flat in the wet ferns and mud, Lyons listened. The line of Indians sprawled along the trail, shotguns and G-3 rifles pointed into the night. More shots blasted the silence, one rifle firing, then another.
But no bullets winged past them. A hundred yards down the hillside, in the total darkness of the jungle, a rifle fired a last burst.
A soldier shouted in English, 'Quit that, you demented fool! You're shooting at me!'
Lyons recognized the voice from Gadgets's tape recording. He crawled to Thomas and the hunter-point man. 'That's the squad from the helicopter.'
'We kill?'
'You think your perimeter men can handle them? The men standing guard? '
'If slavers come to boats. They lost in night.'
'We want the two men who are watching the river.'
Thomas and the hunter whispered back and forth. 'He knows all the trails. We kill men on mountain, then kill squad.'
'Maybe.' Lyons keyed his hand radio, whispered. 'Politician. Wizard.'
Both men answered. 'Here.'
'You hear the shooting?'
'What's the body count?' Blancanales asked.
'We didn't even see them. That was the slavers shooting at each other. They're wandering around, shooting and screaming. You could warn the perimeter men...'
'How?' Gadgets asked. 'We don't know their language.'
'Yeah, that's right. If there's an emergency, give them one of your radios. Thomas will give the instructions. We're continuing on. Over.'
Tapping Lyons, the black-painted hunter pointed to the north. Thomas questioned the man in whispers, the hunter nodding. 'He says we go take slavers. You, me, him. They close.'
Lyons leaned his Atchisson against a rock and slipped off his bandoliers. He pulled back the Beretta's slide to chamber a subsonic 9mm slug. 'Let's go.'
Leading the way through the angled stones, the hunter moved like a snake, slithering through crevices, slipping through undergrowth without stirring a fern or branch to betray his passing. He carried only a machete. Thomas followed a body length behind the hunt. Lyons struggled to keep pace with him. He scuffed his knees and elbows; he caught his web belt on rocks. He reached into shadow and felt insects skitter up his arms.
After several hundred yards, the hunter stopped and motioned Thomas and Lyons to crawl up beside him. They sprawled on the high point of the ridge. To the west, black masses of treetops blocked the moon. To the north, starlight illuminated in grays and blacks the rocks and the wide river and the rain forest on the far shore. The hunter pointed.
A red spark flared where the ridge fell to the river, a glowing face emerging from the black. The amber mask disappeared, the cigarette zigzagging as the smoker gestured in the darkness.
'Jerk-off clowns,' Lyons almost laughed.
'What?' Thomas whispered.
'We take them prisoner. For information. Is that possible?'
Thomas nodded. 'Possible.'
'Tell your man. I go first. And watch for trip lines, booby traps.'
Sliding and crabbing over the rocks, Lyons closed in on the mercenaries. He heard their voices. He slowed, keeping his chest pressed to the rocks. He dragged himself over uneven stones, infinitely slowly, watching the phantom cigarette-lighted faces of the two men. A sharp stone gouged the skin of Lyons's chest, belly, hip.
One man talked in the English of prime-time American television and tits-and-ass movies; he had a French accent. The other mercenary spoke Tex-Mex street argot.
