Guzman didn’t hesitate. He grabbed de Santiago by the collar of his starched khaki shirt and leaped off the trail, over the bluff and down the steep mountainside.
"Got to move!" he bellowed as they dropped into open space.
Projectiles zipped past them and over their heads as the two men fell a good twenty feet straight down, then began rolling and tumbling. The thickness of the vegetation was the only thing that kept them from falling much farther and much harder. They finally stopped rolling. They were in a thick tangle of vines. Chewed-up leaves and tree limbs peppered down on them.
De Santiago listened to the final screams of his slower reacting troops, the continuous buzz saw of the chain gun, and the guttural rumble of the helicopter, now directly overhead.
It was finished. The patch of mountain where the rebel leader had been standing a moment before was now gnawed down to bare rock. What remained of four of his best men lay in bloody pieces amid the litter of the attack. Two others were cowering in the brush, checking their wounds. Down in the valley, the remains of the Black Hawk continued to burn fiercely while one of its brothers hovered above, checking for signs of life. Seeing none, it swooped up and followed the rest of the helicopters that were already disappearing over the ridge.
“Damn them to hell,” de Santiago grunted under his breath as he shoved Guzman off the top of him. He fought through the ferns and vines and climbed out of the small ravine where they had landed. He took stock of himself. Nothing broken. Cuts and contusions but nothing that would not stop bleeding on its own. A knot on his forehead from a tree trunk he had bounced off on the way down.
"You okay, El Jefe?" Guzman asked as he emerged from the wall of green. The bodyguard limped slightly but seemed all right otherwise. He looked at his leader, tilted his head, and ventured an unsolicited opinion. "That was a very foolish thing to do, you know."
De Santiago’s rage flared once again as he turned on his bodyguard.
"What would you have me to do? Would you have me run like a coward? Is that what you want? Look what those damned Americans have done. They will pay far more than one helicopter! I will make them pay!"
De Santiago stalked off, angrily slapping aside the vegetation. He followed the trail that led up from the field and over the mountain. Guzman shook his head. It was difficult for him and the other rebel troops to keep pace with their leader. Years of fighting in these cloud jungles had toughened the man, given him the ability to endure pain and weariness without even appearing to be aware of it. He never noticed that his best fighters and his rock-hard bodyguard often struggled to stay up with him.
Guzman tried to ignore his twisted ankle and hurried after de Santiago before he was too far gone.
“Catch up after you have buried the dead and bandaged the wounds of the others,” the rebel leader called back to him.
The progress was slow. The two injured fighters lagged far behind. They climbed back up the mountain, beyond the tree line. Scrambling over rocks and scree, they came again to the pass over the mountain ridge.
De Santiago paused there for only a moment. He glanced over his shoulder, to the west, and a strange calm seemed to come over him. He knew that from up here, from this high trail first blazed by his Inca ancestors, if it weren't for the clouds, they could see the ocean over two hundred miles away. A realization struck him. He was disgusted with himself for not having seen it before. As much as he loved his mountains, the leader knew at that instant that the key to all that he must accomplish rested out there, with the sea.
He walked on, deep in thought.
They stopped for a short rest in the saddle of the pass. A stack of rocks left centuries before by the Indians marked this high point on the trail. The two troops caught up, falling in their tracks, exhausted from the brisk climb and gasping for breath in the thin air. They checked their crude bandages. Guzman loosened the laces on his boot so the swollen ankle would have more room.
“Does he never rest?” one of the soldiers asked, nodding toward Juan de Santiago.
“No,” was Guzman’s answer.
De Santiago paced back and forth, an odd look on his mud-smeared face, muttering crazily all the while. The other men tried not to look at him. They had never seen their leader in such a state.
Mountains on either side of this narrow pass soared to over eighteen thousand feet. The wind whistled through the cut. It was bitter cold at this altitude, driving snow and bits of sleet at them. The rough trail clung to the side of a near vertical rock face. It would take very sure steps and nerves of steel to descend without falling a thousand feet to sure death.
De Santiago turned and set off down the trail even faster than before. It was as if he had heard a call the others had missed. Guzman groaned and followed after him, favoring the ankle. The other two men looked at each other, then stood and obediently straggled along behind as best they could.
Headquarters was another twenty miles away. Worse, sunset would come in less than an hour. Trying to traverse this trail in the dark would be suicide. De Santiago charged on, unaware
