The barbed wire also imprisoned the migrant workers. Once inside the gates of the plantation, the campesinos left the twentieth century behind. The Quesadas ruled their fincaas a feudal state. For three dollars a day, the campesinos began picking coffee before light and continued until dark, the militia enforcing the quick pace of the work with fists and kicks and sticks. The workers slept in cardboard shacks, and tents made of plastic scraps. Injuries went untreated. Children splashed in the muddy stream and died of pesticide poisoning. A Quesada store sold beans and canned food to the workers at prices calculated to take back the few dollars the Quesadas paid in wages. If workers complained of the abuse or the deaths of their children or the low wages and expensive food, their corpses joined the bones of Indians and mestizos who had first farmed the valley.

In case of a revolt of the campesinos or an assault by insurgents, a private airfield ensured the immediate arrival of troops. And the prefab hangars housed several private planes. The Quesada militia had mounted machine guns and bomb-release mechanisms on two of the planes. They regularly dropped twenty-gallon cans of gasoline mixed with concentrated insecticide on bands of suspected guerrillas. Igniters sparked an explosion of flame and choking, sooty smoke that caused convulsions and lung hemorrhages.

But primarily, the airfield and private planes provided safe transportation for the family's most important members — such as the colonel. In good weather, family aircraft shuttled between the plantation and their mansions in San Salvador, avoiding any chance of skirmishes or assassination along the highways linking the fincato the capital. The light planes also carried vital supplies — weapons, ammunition, French whores, liquor, cocaine and videocassettes of North American television.

This morning, the storm and unnaturally violent winds had grounded all planes and helicopters.

Lieutenant Lizco looked down at the landscape graying with the first light of day. El Nifto, he thought.

The shift in a sea current somewhere in the Pacific Ocean had caused climatic changes throughout the Americas. California enjoyed a mild winter and a long, cool spring. Mexico suffered drought. Guatemala experienced strange incidents of two-hundred-kilometer-per-hour jet streams descending from the stratosphere to rip through the countryside and cities. Hundreds died in Peru and Ecuador when torrential rains washed away pueblos, and avalanches of mud buried entire highways.

It is a warning from God, the lieutenant thought. He can change the currents of the ocean, deny the life-giving rains, or send floods down on our countries. If we do not stop the atrocities and massacres, if we do not stop the injustice and hypocrisy, He will end this world and begin again.

And the trial and punishment of Colonel Roberto Quesada would remove one offense to God from His earth.

Now, after twelve hours of waiting, the lieutenant watched the road for Colonel Quesada. He glanced at the road snaking through the foothills and forested valleys, but he did not take his binoculars from their case. The headlights of the trucks would announce Quesada.

As the day came, the shadowy forms of the mountains became landscapes of undulating green. Black storm clouds obscured the mountain peaks and swirled through gorges. Gusts of wind whipped the trees of the forest from side to side. The swaying branches created a pointillistic panorama of seething fertility and life.

The lieutenant stared at the beauty of El Salvador. At moments such as this, after nights without sleep, his fatigue and fear and adrenaline heightening his emotions, he loved his El Salvador with an intensity beyond simple military esprit or mere patriotism. For a moment, he surrendered his identity to the embrace of the earth of El Salvador, the warm rain drumming on his back becoming the blood drumming in his ears, his flesh merging with the warm mud, his eyes and what his eyes saw becoming inseparable. All became one: his dark skin, his Olmec-Nahua-Spanish face, his European name, his Indian heritage and his twentieth-century hopes — the earth of Cuscutlan-El Salvador received him as the faithful son it had created, Indian and Spanish, sometime poet and dreamer and full-time commando…

A hiss from his nearest soldier startled him. Lieutenant Lizco realized he must have slept with his eyes open. Now the storm clouds glowed silver with the sun. He looked down to the road.

Trucks approached.

What the lieutenant saw confirmed the information he had gathered in the preceding months.

The first truck was a four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser with a whip antenna. It served as the point vehicle. The militiamen inside watched for guerrilla roadblocks and ambushes, the radio always on, the microphone at hand to instantly transmit warning to the other trucks following a kilometer behind. They also had the duty of finding any land mines placed by guerrillas in the road. The second and third trucks, both armored Silverados, identical in year and color and trim, stayed in the tracks of the Toyota's oversized tires. Colonel Quesada rode in the second or third truck, unseen behind the gray-tinted windows. No guerrilla could aim an antitank rocket at one of the Silverados with confidence of hitting the fascist colonel.

The trucks moved as fast as the mud-slick asphalt of the road permitted.

To his sides, despite the drumming of the rain and wind-lashing branches, the lieutenant heard the faint clicks of weapons going off safety as his men prepared to counterstrike the Communist assassins.

The soldiers watched the roadside for the Communists. This section of road, so close to the gates of the finca, offered the ideal opportunity for an ambush with rocket-propelled grenades. Following the folds of the mountains until the hillsides sloped into the valley, the road ran straight for the last few hundred meters to the gate. Flat expanses of truck-rutted mud created a trap. If the convoy swerved from the road, the mud would stop the trucks. If Quesada and his bodyguards stayed on the road and returned fire while they waited for rescue by the fincamilitia, the mud flats would become a kill zone. Only a hundred meters away, the forested hillsides could hide machine guns and rocket teams and snipers.

Finally taking his binoculars from the case, Lieutenant Lizco focused on the last Silverado, hoping to see through the windshield. Did Quesada ride inside? The high-powered optics revealed only silhouettes. Then the lieutenant watched the gate. A militiaman, rifle slung over his shoulder and walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, pushed open the steel-and-barbed-wire gates. In the watchtower, another militiaman casually held an M-16 as he watched the approaching convoy.

The point truck left the winding curves. The lieutenant looked to his soldiers. They shouldered their rifles and grenade launchers. The unit's sniper put his eye to the scope on his match-grade G-3 rifle while the spotter swept the scene with binoculars.

In the quiet of the rainswept morning, they heard the Silverados shift into high gear and accelerate into the straightaway. The lieutenant refocused his binoculars on the gate. He hoped to see one of the guards salute.

Perhaps Quesada would wave to his militiamen. Perhaps, once inside the finca, the lead truck and the Silverado carrying only the bodyguards would take a different road while Quesada sped in his Silverado to his luxurious home in the center of the valley.

No rocketflashes came from the mountains. No machine guns fired on the convoy. The lieutenant watched as the trucks roared across the last straightaway. The drivers screeched the trucks' brakes to slow for the series of speed bumps. Once they passed through the gate, they accelerated to a hundred kilometers per hour.