"They want to avenge themselves on Gomez and the soldiers who are alive," Lieutenant Silveres translated. A nurse, wife to one of the settlers, stitched the slashes in the young officer's legs. The lieutenant spoke to the group of elders. They turned their shouting to him.

Blancanales cleaned Lyons's piranha bites. He pulled back a flap of skin on Lyons's upper leg to spray the wound with alcohol. Lyons went rigid with pain. The alcohol dissolved the genipap, leaving a splotch of Southern California tan surrounding the gaping tear.

"Looks like the fish liked that lizard lotion, too," Gadgets joked to Lyons. Lyons ignored him, his eyes closed, his face set against the pain of the disinfectant. "But it could have been worse, you walking around in that water with only a jockstrap on..."

"Any of our men get hit?" Lyons gritted through clamped jaws.

"Hit by fish. But we took these slavers cold. No firefight here. We came in the side doors fast, caught them in across fire..."

Gadgets pointed to the wide doors on each side of the passenger lounge. "They had the passengers jammed in here, everyone down on the floor. Only the Gomez-men and the gooks standing up. Gomez saw his men dropping, saw us, went down on his knees begging. Mucho macho bad man."

Now the lounge served as a hospital. Wounded men lay on the floor, tended by their families. Women comforted women assaulted by the slavers. A knot of grim-faced men stared at a door guarded by Indian warriors. Inside, ropes lashed Gomez and two soldiers to chairs. Of all the slavers, only Gomez, one of his Brazilians and a Cambodian mercenary survived.

Pale with blood loss, the lieutenant slumped. The nurse braced him, kept him from falling to the floor. Blancanales finished with Lyons, then eased the lieutenant down. Blancanales and the nurses eased the crowd of shouting elders back.

"Civilians! They talk without end, I cannot argue more with them," the lieutenant sighed. "They want the traitors... They will not listen to the law."

"First we interrogate the three of them," Lyons said, "then the settlers can have them."

"No!" The lieutenant bolted upright. "Gomez betrayed his country and his uniform. He will be judged and executed by the armed forces."

"He take our women!" A young man shouted in broken English. "He kill my cousin. His wife alone now. With five children. We hang the colonel, cut off his balls and hang him!"

"I say give him to the people," Lyons commented.

"No!" The lieutenant countered. "Military justice."

Blancanales's low, resonant voice interrupted the shouting. "If the settlers want revenge, good. But it will not feed the children or help the women who lost their husbands. If they kill Gomez, — they will only kill one slaver. They must still fear all the others out there."

"What others?" the young farmer demanded. "We see all dead."

"Gomez and the soldiers were only one patrol. There are many more soldiers in this region. Mercenaries. Killers. They take Indians to be slaves. They wanted you for slaves. Soon we go to attack them. If you want revenge, come. Then your families will be safe."

"More soldiers? Of Brazil?"

"No!" the lieutenant shouted. "Traitors. Mercenaries in the uniform of the army of Brazil," he explained in Portuguese.

Fear and hatred and rage pulsed in the faces of the men. Some of them rushed away to tell the others in the lounge. Women shrieked. All the men, even a few of the injured, crowded around Lieutenant Silveres and the foreigners, shouting, waving their fists.

"They want the rifles of the dead soldiers," the lieutenant translated. "To defend themselves. Some of them want to know where the other soldiers are. To attack them. Others want the army to come. Others fear the army, because of Gomez."

"Will you come with us?" Blancanales asked the crowd in Portuguese. "To attack the slavers?"

"Yes. We attack!"

Lyons grinned to Blancanales. "Okay, recruiter. Make a deal with these people."

In the next half hour, Blancanales and Lieutenant Silveres negotiated an agreement with the settlers. Balancing the blood lust of the men against the concern of their wives, Blancanales stated that he needed boat pilots and dependable men to fire heavy weapons, machine guns and grenade launchers, at a distance from the actual fighting. He would not risk the lives of the family men in close fighting.

As payment, and to help the families of men murdered on the riverboat, the settler community would receive all equipment captured from the slavers — boats, weapons, radios and whatever the settlers found at the camp, except for equipment stolen from the government of Brazil.

A work party with lights and power tools left immediately on one of the PT boats. They would strip the heavy weapons and their mounts from the several slaver cruisers and airboats on the other river. Able Team wanted the weapons to be mounted on the fast PT boats.

Other settlers smeared black paint on the riverboat's dinghies. The small aluminum boats and an aluminum canoe found in the cargo would take the assault force ashore. A blacksmith wired sheets of steel together to protect the men who would stay in the patrol boats, to machine-gun and bombard the camp from a distance.

Activity and war spirit replaced the settlers' grief as the refloated riverboat, its lights and windows blacked out, steamed downstream. At the fork where three rivers met — the one from Bolivia, the Mamore and the river leading to the nuclear complex — the riverboat would go no farther.

Gadgets assembled his electronic gear in the mahogany-and-polished brass bridge of the old paddle-wheeler. First, he swept out the shattered glass, then wiped the captain's blood from the walls and floor. The sixty-year-old white-haired immigrant from Zaire had died with a pistol in his hand, defending his ship and his passengers.

Switching on the recorder playback, Gadgets listened to the tape of slaver frequencies during the assault. While he worked, he heard static, the pops and squeaks of over-the-horizon transmitters disrupting the slaver radio frequencies, electronic noise from space. Then came the Asian voice, the words in textbook English, yet alien and macabre when Chan Sann spoke.

No. Gadgets shook away the thought. That's superstition. It's not in his voice. It's what I've seen in the last three days. Now I can't hear that Cambodian talk without thinking about dead people.

Chan Sann relayed a curt announcement of the capture of the steamboat to Abbott — an American, Gadgets judged from his Massachusetts accent. Other transmissions announced numbers of workers captured and the departure of Chan Sann by helicopter. But during the time of the assault, nothing. No clicking of a transmit key, no emergency call words, no voices cut off by rifle fire, nothing.

We did it. Took them out without a sound.

Spreading out his shortwave and scrambler on the captain's chart table, he carefully positioned the units. He set a note pad precisely where his right hand would rest. Then the tape antenna went up the flagpole.

Keying codes, receiving automatic coded replies, Gadgets taped a burst of Stony Man intelligence transmitted from Virginia, relayed by satellite. He replayed it through the scrambler as he wrote out his own message on the yellow pad.

His writing stopped. He listened another moment, then rushed out to find Lyons and Blancanales. Replaying the tape, they heard a conspiracy of depravity and assassination beginning before they were born.

Now, that conspiracy threatened every living man and woman and child in the Free World, and unknown generations of the unborn.