"Think maybe there's some Indians who didn't see that?" Lopez asked Hoang. "Maybe Chan Sann should have included some skyrockets and sirens."
Their radio buzzed. "This is Williams. Where are you?"
Hoang waved a flashlight. One shadow broke away from the other forms, weaving through the rocks to the cliff edge.
Williams, a square-shouldered felon from the slums of London, wore no face blacking. They spotted the mercenary squad leader's white features from ten yards away. A black beret was tilted across his forehead. He carried an Uzi submachine gun.
"Over here," Lopez called out. "Watch where you walk, it drops off. Straight down."
"So where'd you see the soldiers?" Williams demanded.
"Didn't see nothing, man." Lopez pointed east, to the darkness and jungle below the hill. "We heard them chopping trees, digging in down there."
"I only saw one river boat when we flew over..."
"That's cause the other one got wasted."
"Blown away," Hoang added." Way gone."
"Oh, Lord," Williams sighed. "You think it's the army?"
"Who the hell knows?" Lopez flipped a glowing cigarette butt off the cliff. "That's why Chan the Man's sending you down there."
"Great, just blinking great. See you later." With a wave, Williams started back to his squad.
"Maybe, baby," Hoang said as the ten men filed away into the jungle, their weapons and equipment clanking as they hacked their way through the undergrowth with machetes. "Maybe we see you, maybe we don't."
In the shot-riddled cabin of the gunboat, Gadgets's electronics covered a table. Wires led from a cassette recorder to the circuits of a slaver radio.
While Lyons, Blancanales and Lieutenant Silveres waited, Gadgets rewound the tape, then pressed the play button.
"Calling Chan Sann. This is Lopez."
"This is Chan Sann. You reached the position?"
"We're here. Looking down on the river."
"Do you see the Brazilians?"
Advancing the tape, Gadgets skipped on to another exchange. "Do you see the boats? Lights?" the Asian-accented voice asked. The Latin voice replied, "No, nothing like that." Gadgets skipped again. The Asian voice spoke once more. "Find the Brazilians. Block their retreat." An English-accented voice pleaded, "You've got to get us out of there before the plane makes its run."
"I will radio you..."
"That's what I taped," Gadgets told them. "The one called Chan Sann is downriver somewhere. I figure he put some men on the ridge overlooking the river. And the helicopter brought in a squad."
"And then the plane," Blancanales added.
"The plane will come at daylight." Lyons touched up his body blacking with smears of genipap. "Question is, 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!"