Then, in the reflecting yellow glow of a flashlight, Lyons saw the faces of the men. One had the thick features and beard of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But the other man had black skin and African features. His Afro shone like a halo when a flashlight swept past him.

Soto slid up beside Lyons. He noticed the black man and whispered to Lyons, "A negro?"

"Yeah." The grunting and cursing of the two men and the distant battle covered their whispered words. "Bet you a thousand pesos he's an American. A norteamericano. We ran into a black nationalist in Beirut," Lyons said.

"I cannot understand. Black North Americans attacking the United States?"

"They hate whites. They think whites are devils created by God. They say they are Muslims, but real Muslims don't accept them. I guess he's working with the Iranians to kill white people."

The Iranian and the black man froze. Had they heard Lyons and Soto?

Autofire sprayed the Toyota, slugs hammering the heavy steel bumper, shattering the windshield and side windows. The two men went flat in the mud. The black man unslung an Uzi and sprayed out a magazine of 9mm.

Then both men ran. Forms splashed through the stream, muzzle-flashes from an Uzi tracking the retreating Iranian and black. But the noise of the men running — splashes and curses and arms thrashing against branches — continued to the north, back to the rancho.

A Mexican soldier rushed to the Toyota and looked inside. He carried an Uzi. Web gear taken from Iranians crisscrossed his camou-patterned fatigues. A second Mexican appeared, his bloody right arm strapped against his body, his FN FAL slung over his back. The wounded man held a pistol in his left hand.

"Mis muchachos!" Soto called out. "Tus vivas! Vienen aqui! Aqui!"

The Mexicans stared around them, startled by the voice. Captain Soto blinked his penlight, then pointed it upward to illuminate his face for his soldiers. They smiled.

As they came to the gully wall, Lyons reached down and pulled the Mexicans up. Captain Soto whispered and laughed with them. They checked the wounded man's arm. Then the two soldiers traded weapons, the wounded man taking the Uzi and the mm magazines, the other soldier taking the FN FAL and all the ammunition. The wounded man gave Lyons and the Mexicans a left-handed salute and hurried into the moonlit brush of the hillside.

"I sent him to wait with the other wounded man," Captain Soto explained. "Now we pursue the terrorists."

"We take them alive," Lyons stressed. "That black one could lead us into his organization up north. And the other one? Who knows?"

Soto nodded and translated to the other Mexican. They marched north again, moving fast along the now-familiar path. Ahead they heard only occasional bursts and single shots of gunfire from the rancho. A vast column of black smoke rose against the night sky, obscuring the stars and moon. As Lyons ran, he saw ashes falling, like black snow.

They soon overtook the two terrorists. Slinging his Konzak, Lyons pulled his silenced auto-Colt. He eased back the slide to chamber the first hollowpoint and thumbed up the ambidextrous fire selector to safe.

A rifle fired. One of the Mexican soldiers watching the ranchohad killed a fleeing Iranian with a point-blank NATO slug to the chest.

In the gully, the other terrorists went silent. Lyons waited, listening. He heard their feet on the rocks of the streambed. A pair of boots splashed through the water. He listened as the sounds of boots on rocks, then boots breaking dry weeds crossed to the opposite side of the gully.

Lyons turned to Soto and the other soldier. "Captain, I'm going alone. Tell your men not to shoot me. Not to shoot anyone over on that side of the stream. Might be me."

"And what of the North Americans there?" Captain Soto pointed to the ridge.

"Just a second..." Lyons spoke into his hand radio. "Calling Politician, calling Mr. Wizard. What goes on?"

"What you see is what we did," Gadgets answered. The hammering of the M-60 machine gun continued behind his voice. "Did you get the ones in that Toyota?"

A line of tracers arched down. Lyons watched an Iranian break cover and run to the shelter of a ditch. Silhouetted against the burning ranch buildings, the Iranian raised a Kalashnikov and fired at the ridge. One of the Mexican soldiers near Lyons sighted carefully and put a bullet through the Iranian's back.

"I'm chasing them. One's an Iranian, who may be a leader. The other one's a negro male. Might be a black nationalist, like we encountered in Beirut. They cut to the west. I'll be following them. Why don't you send Powell and Akbar down to talk to the Iranians. Maybe some of them will surrender."

"That's an idea. Happy hunting."

Lyons clipped the radio to his web belt. One step took him down the gully in a controlled slide. He paused, listening. He heard only the firing of rifles and auto weapons.

Light from the flames rising from the airstrip and ranch created shadow along the east side of the gully. Lyons stayed in the shadow, his boots silent in the soft sand. He moved quickly for a hundred meters, then slowed as he approached a curve in the stream.

Crossing the stream, he went flat and peered around the curve. Smoke from smoldering brush obscured his sight. A blackened corpse lay in the stream. He saw no one moving, heard no shooting.

He clawed up the gully wall to the hillside opposite the rancho. Taking his hand radio from his belt, he reported his position. "I'm on the west side of the creek, going north."

Blancanales answered. "I think I spotted them. There's a section of burning brush..."

"Yeah, I'm at the south end."

"I saw them come out of that."

"Can you slow them down without killing them?"

"Maybe..."

On the ridge, the muzzle of the machine gun flashed. A line of tracers cut through the smoke. For Lyons, the tracers pinpointed the position of the terrorists. He moved quickly through the sage and small trees, the auto-Colt in his hand.

The NATO-caliber slugs hit with a sound like a whip, striking with a dull crack, followed by the sound of the bullets ripping through the air. A tracer ricocheted past Lyons, the pinwheeling bullet passing him and ripping into dry brush. Other ricochets hummed past, invisible.

Another projectile came down, this one slow, rushing through the air, then exploding fifty meters north. Bits of wire shrapnel rained around Lyons. Then he heard the black man, "Those white motherfuckers are throwing all kinds of shit down! They got to know who we are, they got us spotted, we got to..."

The Iranian interrupted in another language. Switching to that language, the black man continued as Lyons crept ahead. Finally Lyons could not risk approaching closer. The terrorists had the embankment shielding them from Blancanales's machine gun fire. Lyons did not.

He reached to the hand radio. Turning off the voice speaker, he clicked the transmit key three times, then three times again.

Talking fast, in what Lyons assumed to be Arabic, the black man scrambled for the top. He reached back to help up the Iranian. On the ridge, Blancanales fired again, tracers sparking off the rocks only three steps away from the black man. The black dropped the Iranian and ran into the flames of the rancho.

As the Iranian pulled himself to the top of the gully, Lyons lined up his auto-Colt's tritium dots on the right knee of the Iranian. He fired once.

The forty-five-caliber hollowpoint smashed through the cartilage and tendons and bones of the Iranian's leg. He fell screaming. Rolling on his back in the streambed, he reached for his knee. He found his leg, flopping, folded backward over his thighs. Blood spurted from the severed artery.

Lyons jumped into the sand. The Iranian saw him and reached for his pistol. Lyons fired again; the slug smashed the Iranian's hand to ragged flesh and shattered on the steel of the holstered pistol, spraying lead fragments.