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.

"I mean, like that Chinaman must be totally messed up in the head, loco, dusted... This scene out here is total weirdness. Like I'm part Apache Indian. And what am I doing? Wasting Indians. I do not like this crap. And Chan Sann the Man! When I see that dude, I see skulls. A world of skulls."

"Hey, maaan, ssshhh. He could hear, dig?"

"Oh, yeah. Jesus. He gives me the shakes."

Flat on the small rocks and grasses, Lyons inched forward. One man faced the river, the other watched the river and the slab-strewn hill, his head swiveling back and forth, the back of his head to Lyons.

Lyons forced his limbs through a flat slow-motion crawl, sweat running from his body as he strained. He pressed forward, then waited, relaxing, breathing, listening to their conversation. He watched the lookouts as they smoked and bitched.

Only a body-length's distance of rocks and flattened ferns separated Lyons from the mercenaries. He slipped off the safety of the Beretta. With the fingers of his left hand, he found a pebble. He flicked it past the lookouts. The pebble hit a wide leaf.

"You hear that?"

"What?"

Another pebble skipped across an exposed stone slab. The mercenaries whipped their heads from side to side, staring into the night.

"Something's moving out there — put away that flashlight! You want them to cut loose at the light?"

Another pebble.

"Ohhhh, shit! I'm turning this gun around already!"

Hearing the scraping and clanking of metal on stone, Lyons scrambled the last few feet. He threw an arm around the neck of one man, pointed the Beretta into the face of the other man. The one he held was bucking and twisting.

"Don't move or you die!"

A black hole yawned in the pale circle of the seized man's face as his mouth fell open, cigarette clinging to his lip for an instant.

"You speak English, mister?" gasped this man that Lyons gripped in a choke hold. "We talk, we help you. Anything. We the good guys."

"Thomas! I got them. "

A few steps away, shadows rose from the ferns. Thomas and the hunter walked up to the mercenaries and began to search them. Lyons kept his arm clamped around the one man's throat, the Beretta never wavering from the face of the other one. The Indians found knives, a snub-nosed .38 revolver, tobacco and marijuana cigarettes, a plastic bag of pills.

Lyons laughed. "Did you come out here to shoot people or to party?"

"We no shoot people! We good guys, supercool dudes."

"You American?" the Latin asked. "I'm American, too. I'm Miguel Lopez, from San Antonio, Texas. That's Pierre Hoang."

"You're mercenaries, killing these people and their families." Lyons motioned to Thomas and the hunter. "You take them for slavery, you work for terrorists..."

"We didn't know that until we got here!" Lopez protested. "We're a thousand miles from anywhere. If we don't do what the Chinaman and Chan Sann tell us, he'll skin us alive. And that's the truth. For real. He's done it to guys. Skinned them. We've wanted to get out of here since the day we got here!"

"What do you know about the reactor?"

"You don' wanna go there. It's a death trap. Radiation city. But I'll show you where it is if you'll get us out of this jungle. This whole scene's insane."

"First, you take us to Chan Sann."

Chan Sann lifted the rifle to his shoulder to scan the night with the electronics of the Starlight scope. He saw a phosphor-green river extending into the distance. No boat, no mass of branches and wood, nothing moved on the calm surface. Every few minutes as he paced the deck of the gunboat, he switched on the Starlight's power, scanned the river again from the north to the east, where the form of the airboat waited in the shallows, then returned to the north in a long, slow sweep.

For an hour he waited, pacing the deck, scanning the river. His soldiers held their weapons ready to direct the fire of auto-rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers at the boats coming downriver. Camouflage or fire power would not save the enemy. The Brazilian or Bolivian army unit that had captured the two patrol craft would die in the concentrated fire of the gunboat, the grenade launcher on the airboat, and the M-60 atop the cliff.

But the enemy did not float into the trap.

At 3:00 a.m. precisely, Chan Sann radioed his other soldiers. He spoke first with the airboat.

"No movement at all on the river," came the report.

"Now lookouts. Lopez. Hoang. Report."

Static hissed. He waited, impassive, his thick Asian features like a mask carved in stone, his hooded eyes unblinking, focused on his thoughts. His muscled neck tensed slightly, tendons and veins beginning to stand out from his dark and flawless skin. "Lopez. Hoang. Report. Immediately."

"This is Williams. I saw them before I came down the hill."

"Were they in their position?" asked Chan Sann, his voice toneless.

"Hey! We're here. This is Lopez reporting. Everything's okay here."

"Why did you not answer immediately?"

"We... we had a snake problem... this black snake. It crawled up on us."

"Did you leave your position?"

"No! No, no, we didn't. But we had to deal with the snake. Todo es bueno ahora."

"What have you seen?"

"On the river? Nada. Zero. We heard some shooting. We don't know who it was..."

"Report if you see movement. Williams, report."

In the mud and rotting vegetation of a trail on the hillside, Lopez and Lyons sprawled next to the radio. In the darkness around them, the Xavantes listened for movement around the unit. Lyons held his hand radio ready as he listened to the Cambodian question his other mercenaries. "Williams. Did you meet the enemy?"

"No. Not yet."

"There was shooting."

"We thought we made contact, but..."

"Go to the river. Find the enemy. Report when you make contact. I will radio for the plane."