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  Billy—the mercenary who had survived the worst trench wars from Angola to Cambodia—turned away as he felt his throat roar with the urge to scream. He put a hand to his mouth and bit his fingers, gasping for air, controlling the gag reflex, then forced himself to turn away just as Ramirez stepped quietly into view. Schaefer was a couple of paces behind him.

  Gaping at the decomposing and desecrated bodies ravaged by the vultures, a whimpering Ramirez crossed himself in an almost childlike way.

  “Holy Mother,” he gasped, his voice shaking. Then he shouted over his shoulder, breaking the code of silence. “Somebody—somebody get some help!” he cried.

  As if he’d forgotten that they were the help. As if he still didn’t realize, even with the evidence bleeding all over the matted ground, just how very alone they were.

  F O U R

  As Billy and Ramirez stood there frozen and helpless, Schaefer moved into the clearing, kneeling beside the bloody pile of clothing and entrails. He examined the discarded gear carefully, turning it over, then stood up holding a dog tag on a broken chain. His expression grew stony, his face taut and strained as he stared at the tag, recognizing the name.

  “ ‘J.S. Davis, Captain, U.S. Army,’ ” he read out loud, toneless and grim. His bewildered eyes moved from the dogtag up to the gutted bodies. He swallowed once, and a muscle in his jaw fluttered for a second. Then he turned and faced the six men who stood pale and dumbstruck at the clearing’s edge.

  “Cut them down, Mac,” he instructed coldly. The evenness of his voice masked a rage beyond a mere soldier’s revenge after a bloody battle. Davis and Schaefer had a long history together. Since boot camp nearly twenty years ago, they had been mates and comrades. They’d barely squeaked out with their skins on a secret mission in Malaysia in seventy-nine, Davis was the best chopper pilot in the business, and he’d twice come in under fire to scoop Dutch up. Silently Schaefer vowed to destroy whoever had desecrated his friend. Now it was private between him and the enemy. He would walk through hell to make them pay.

  Mac moved forward, obeying Schaefer’s command. He shinnied up the tree and one by one cut the bodies down. With a slice of his razor-edge combat knife, the severed vine released the first corpse, and it fell with a sickly thud to the ground. Then the second, then the third. The men stood around like an honor guard, too proud to fall apart, steeling themselves till the shock had passed, knowing that as with Schaefer it would quickly slide into rage and make them strong again. Mac bent over the bloody pile, picking out the other two dog tags.

  At last Schaefer turned to Dillon, who had been standing silently like the others, mouth slightly agape, as incapacitated as the men he was meant to lead.

  “I knew this man,” said the major, holding the dog tag close to Dillon’s face, swaying it like a hypnotist. “Green Beret, out of Fort Bragg. What the hell was he doing in here? Last I heard he was runnin’ taxi service to Camp David, transportin’ the Big Man’s sheepdog. He needed a tour of jungle duty like he needed a second dick. So what’s he doin’ gettin’ himself scalped in this jerkwater two-bit country? You got any answers to that, Dillon?” he demanded angrily.

  “It’s—it’s inhuman, that’s what it is,” Dillon replied with difficulty. “I’m sorry, Dutch, I didn’t know—”

  “Maybe we should call the ACLU, huh? See if we can file a little complaint. All nice and typed, ya know?” His voice was thick with contempt.

  “Look, Dutch, I wasn’t told about any covert operations in this area. They shouldn’t have been here. I would have known.”

  “Well, somebody sent ’em,” Schaefer snapped, unsatisfied and irritated. As of this moment he was clearly uninterested in official bullshit. He walked off as Mac stepped out of the clearing, sheathing his knife with a violent gesture as he passed Ramirez.

  “Must’ve run into guerrillas . . . fuckin’ animals,” growled Ramirez. He wiped his sweaty dirt-encrusted brow with his forearm, then realized his hands were shaking. He shoved them violently into his pockets.

  Everyone was trying to understand, to throw together some rational reason how this thing could have happened. None of them had ever seen such barbaric treatment by an enemy—not in Cambodia, not in Lebanon, not in all their combined years of combat service, which probably amounted to a century. Deep down they still believed that between enemies there was an unwritten code, setting limits to the degree of torture inflicted, at least among so-called professional soldiers. This was so far beyond the code that they didn’t even have any context for it. Why strip a man of his skin? Why bother? There were so many easier ways to hurt. It was like some demented autopsy.

  “Ain’t no way for a soldier to die,” Mac said tightly to Blain, hawking a yellow-brown stream of chew saliva that landed on a banana flower, drooling to the ground. “Time to get ol’ painless out,” he added with relish. He ripped at the Velcro closures on the canvas bag draped over his shoulder and pulled out his baby: a six-barreled automatic adapted for field combat. It caught the sun’s rays and glimmered darkly, deadly as a portable minefield.

  Billy had meanwhile moved a short distance ahead of the others and was examining the ground beyond the carnage. He plucked at the beaten grass several times, as if he were picking up coins. Then he stood and held out for Schaefer to see a handful of spent cartridges. Dutch walked over to him.

  “What happened here, Billy?” he asked quietly, sensing the younger man’s churning mind as he desperately struggled to put it together. Schaefer knew well that of all his men, Billy had the most intuitive feel for unraveling a puzzle. Billy moved to a subtler rhythm, his ears tuned to a higher pitch. Schaefer used to tell him he was part bird dog, part witch doctor.

  “I don’t get it, Major,” Billy said haltingly. Yet as always he was stubbornly certain, no matter how mismatched the evidence seemed. “There was a fire fight here. Shooting in all directions. Like four, five hundred rounds.”

  “I can’t believe Jack Davis walked straight into an ambush, even if he was a prisoner,” Schaefer retorted, recalling his dead friend’s radar. Davis had eyes at the back of his head. Nothing had ever taken him by surprise. In that he was just like Schaefer himself. The whole idea of an ambush was an insult.

  “No, it wasn’t like that, sir,” Billy agreed. “Besides, there’s not a single track to show what they were shooting at. It’s like they were firing like crazy into the air. It just doesn’t make sense.” Billy scratched the stubble on his chin and brooded a moment. “And I don’t know where the fuck those guys with the new boots went. They must have turned off somewhere.”

  “Wait a minute—what about the rest of Jack’s men?” Schaefer was vehement. It was as if he wanted to slap Billy back to reality—whatever that was. “Where’re the guerrillas who took ’em out of the chopper? And where’re the goddam politicians?” He was practically yelling now.

  Billy shook his head. “No sign.” he said simply. “They never left here, Major.” Then, shying at the mystery of it even as he told it, he added awkwardly: “It’s like they kind of disappeared.”

  Schaefer struggled a moment, grappling to form a strategy in his head. Then, with a huge effort of will, he instructed bluntly: “Find me a trail, Billy. I wanna blow me away some guerrillas.”

  Turning to the rest of the team he barked: “Okay guys, funeral’s over. Let’s keep movin’. Five-meter spread. Don’t even breathe.”

  Like lightning the major had thrown all systems to full throttle, which in his case was several cylinders more explosive than an eighteen-wheeler. But he simply couldn’t endure ambiguity and inaction. It was as if his muscles and mind together suddenly snapped to attention, senses cued for anything and everything. His veins pumped with adrenalin as he whipped himself up to combat mode—all engine, power on—into a force of near superhuman prowess.

  The others quickly geared up, too, following Schaefer like a coach. Though none could match his uncanny stamina or his brute singlemindedness, at least they could keep pace with him. Psych
ing themselves for an encounter with whoever was responsible for the senseless torture and desecration, the men readied themselves for battle each in his own way.

  Blain fed a magazine of belted shells into his weapon, cocking it till it ached to shoot. He looked up at Mac as he loaded. Mac retied his boots with total absorption, stringing them up and pulling them tight as if the exact tension mattered—he would live or die by the lacing of his boots. Dillon jotted a compass reading in his notebook. Ramirez absentmindedly polished his black pearl ring on the sleeve of his fatigues. Hawkins adjusted the pins on two grenades and clipped them onto his belt; then drew out a comb and eased it through his black Irish hair.

  But at some moment in the elaborate ritual, each managed to exchange half a second’s glance with the others. They acknowledged their camaraderie obliquely, but somehow understanding the mix of signals in one another’s eyes—the anger, the fear, the lifeblood support. And twined through it all like the grip of a vine in a cottonwood tree was the certainty of death—their mates’, their enemy’s, their own. A match had been lit deep in the mine, and the fuel that would feed the fire might turn out to be the whole dark earth itself.

  “Payback time,” Blain declared with controlled rage as he hefted the gun and poised the butt of it on his hip. Mac drew back on the breech bolt of his M-60, letting it snap into fire position. They grinned at each other, ready to find and face gooks, Huns, and Tartars.

  The blood-warrior hue of their faces streaked with camouflage grease was in strange contrast to their high-tech combat gear. It was like Hannibal crossing the Alps with V-1 rockets on the elephants’ backs. Mac and Blain, heading out in tandem, urged each other forward, a constant dare playing between them. That, and the memory of the brutal murders they’d just discovered, made them hungry to shoot first and ask no questions at all. If somebody innocent got in the way, so be it. Mac and Blain didn’t get all misty-eyed about innocence. Just as well not to ask them their opinions about My Lai.

  And observing them from the highest branches of a densely leafed baobab tree, the invader didn’t miss a beat. Incapable of guilt or rage or fear or pity, unable to understand that what it had done to the dead was a vile dishonor, it absorbed the marching commandos through its heat-sensitive optic cells. It hid so deep in the tree that it was impossible to say what form it took, whether monkey or crow or something more mutant. If one of the men had looked straight into the leaves with binoculars, he might have caught the yellow gleam of an eye, but the eye was only a nexus of nerves, spun from its own secretions like an insect’s nest. Though it stared and took in everything it did not need to see or to comprehend. It had evolved beyond such concepts eons ago. Yet still it could not stop looking.

  The men below knew nothing beyond themselves. Each took his own measure and adapted himself to the brutal terrain, blocking out everything but forward movement and absolute silence. Even with his enormous bulk Mac moved gracefully, soundlessly through the jungle. As he stepped along light as a deer, Dillon followed five meters behind. The black man accidentally stepped on the broken branch of a felled tree, his foot crunching through the rotting, grub-infested wood. A chunk broke loose and rolled down the hill, gathering bark and gravel, finally landing at the base of a rock with a thunk. Not a lot of noise, but it couldn’t have been made by anything else but a man.

  At once Dillon cringed and tightened into a defensive posture, listening for any signs that he had given away their position. The jungle was unmoved as he strained his eyes and ears, terrified he’d announced the team’s presence to the enemy. Accidents were not permissible under the tense circumstances. Dillon felt like a horse’s ass. This never would’ve happened if he’d only had a couple of days to get himself in shape. Twenty-four hours ago he was sitting dazed at his desk at Langley, being given the sudden orders for this mission. He had a bad ache in his calf muscle, and he’d managed to twist his back tripping over a root. Horse’s ass was right.

  As Dillon listened, teeth gritted at his own stupidity, Mac appeared silently from behind a bush, parting its broad leaves. He stood within inches of Dillon’s face, eyes burning with contempt and anger.

  “You’re ghostin’ on me, mutha’ fokaa!” he hissed, spraying spittle in the black man’s face. “I don’t give a shit what kinda big dick you got in Washington, You give away my position again and I’ll bleed you quiet and leave your fuckin’ ass right here. And you can write your fuckin’ senator if you don’t like it. Got it. pal?”

  Dillon glared back in cold hatred, but he didn’t answer back. He was stalemated by combat rules he knew as well as Mac, and he’d just broken them. Mac turned and vanished into the undergrowth. When his gun was cocked Mac didn’t give two squats about the chain of command. Even at the best of times he didn’t call anyone “Sir,” not even Schaefer.

  Dillon was left thrown and speechless, staring at the rustle of leaves that had swallowed Mac. But Dillon didn’t have any recourse, official or otherwise. He picked up the trail again, this time watching every footfall.

  Meanwhile, Mac had caught up with Blain, who was crouched beneath a banana palm, chewing quietly on a banana, absorbing the texture of his surroundings. He looked more like a gorilla than usual. Mac sidled up to him, and they spoke in whispers.

  “Say, Bull. What’s goin’ down? We got movement?”

  “Naw,” Mac murmured. “Shithead with the trench-coat was makin’ enough racket to get us all waxed. Don’t let him get too close behind ya, huh? You don’t wanna wind up skinned like a rabbit.” He chuckled hoarsely, his voice strained from whispering. Then he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Sweat mixed with dust and melting grease was dripping into his eyes, stinging and clouding his vision.

  Blain patted his weapon affectionately. “I hear you, Bull,” he nodded. “But don’t sweat it, man. Me and ol’ painless here’re watchin’ the front door. The nig-nog can play chopsticks on his drums, I don’t care.”

  As stubborn and hardened as these two were, their sense of brotherhood was critical; and they felt a need to remind themselves of it in the face of Dillon’s incompetence. They were also thoroughly enjoying Dillon’s outsider status, relishing the difficulty the black man was having keeping up the pace. If someone had called them on the racial slurs they would have looked completely blank. Mac and Blain slurred everybody. They didn’t spend a lot of their free time going to weddings and christenings.

  Mac advanced another ten meters, stuck his head out of the bushes to reconnoiter, then signaled slowly. The rest of the assault team moved swiftly up the hill, barely visible in the dense brush as they dispersed into defensive position. The bushes stopped just at the brow of the hill, which had been slashed and burned to serve as lookout, though no one stood sentry right now. The knoll appeared completely deserted as the commandos took stock and proceeded out of cover, crawling on their bellies across blackened ground alive with scurrying insects.

  The top of the knoll was almost peaceful, certainly quieter than the surrounding jungle, the blue sky brilliant above the tropical afternoon. The men, camouflaged as much by the ash and dirt as by their combat motley, were drenched with sweat as the bare, dark ground absorbed the harsh rays of the equatorial sun, increasing the temperature just above the turf to a searing hundred and ten degrees.

  Schaefer and Ramirez were the first to clear the crest of the hill, and they froze like a couple of lizards when they got a good look at the valley below. A makeshift guerrilla camp was flourishing in a grove of rubber trees. Yet the more the two men studied the operation the less makeshift did it seem. A huge spreading palapa covered several gun emplacements dug into the hillside. These weapons sites, descending as far as the winding stream on the valley floor, looked highly sophisticated, some of them anti-aircraft. What did the rebels think this was, Southeast Asia? Why were they so overarmed? The government wasn’t hitting them that hard, was it?

  About thirty men moved about the camp, dressed in various combinations of jungle fatigues and jeans an
d T-shirts—one man had “Bruce is the Boss” printed across his back. Several were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, and a heavy machine-gun emplacement guarded the main approach. It was well protected and hidden from the air by the trees, and clearly larger than most of the highland camps that dotted strategic points throughout the war zone. It was even big by Nicaraguan standards.

  And at that moment it was being guarded by just two men.

  Schaefer, peering through field binoculars, scanned every inch of the camp below. His observation located one guard standing above the huts on the opposite slope, half asleep in the sun as he squatted over his rifle. Another guard strolled up and down by the machine-gun nest at the main point of entry. It was inexplicable that they didn’t have a man stationed on the knoll where Schaefer and Ramirez lay hidden—unless perhaps they had just gotten cocky, having downed a big U.S. chopper the day before. Perhaps they were bloated and a little sleepy, like a snake who’s eaten a rat.

  In the camp itself Schaefer noticed a guerrilla carrying a hand-held rocket launcher, placing it beside a bandolier of rockets. He also recognized a radio set and consoles that couldn’t have come from anywhere else but an American surveillance craft. Schaefer put down his glasses and looked over at Ramirez, who nodded in acknowledgment. He’d picked up the association between the equipment and the downed chopper.

  “Seems like we got us some target practice,” murmured Schaefer with satisfaction.

  “Right on, Major,” said Ramirez with a smile. “No women and children neither. We don’t have to be too particular, ya know?”

  Suddenly their attention was riveted back to the camp at the sound of a muffled cry coming from behind a heavily curtained door on the largest hut. The curtain flew back violently, and a moaning hostage staggered out, shirtless and bleeding from whip wounds all over his upper body. Clearly he’d been beaten severely for hours. His hands were tied behind his back, and he stumbled just outside the door as if kicked from behind. He fell to the ground, feebly trying to maintain his footing. He coughed up a gout of blood and spat it defiantly over his shoulder.