Caitlin took a moment to study the digital map in the Navman unit on her forearm. The road curved gently for a mile before climbing into a series of switchbacks as it approached the small hilltop community. There wasn’t much to the place: a cluster of mud-brick huts, a cantina, a chapel, a couple of stands where the local farmers sold produce in the mornings. Her briefing set hadn’t included any more data. The village was tiny and poor, but this had undoubtedly protected it as la colapso took down one South American government after another. It was so small and isolated, the murderous anarchy unleashed in the wake of the Disappearance had largely passed it by. The daily lives of the inhabitants there were probably little different as the loyal subjects of Roberto Morales, el Presidente por Vida, compared to what they’d been as loyal subjects of the long line of Latin brutocrats stretching back centuries before him.

The electronic map together with some quick and dirty math indicated she had about half an hour to get into position at the base of the climb, to catch the two guards on their return journey. Caitlin could run the mile there in much less than that if she took the road, but that would be ill-advised. She could be seen anywhere along that long, gentle curve. There was nothing for it but to cut a path as fast as she could through the thinner scrub at the road’s edge.

She made slow but steady progress, sometimes being able to dash forward through shaded patches of trees and brush. Only once did a vehicle pass by – an old Chevy, with what looked like close to a thousand goats crammed in the back. It didn’t slow down.

Caitlin made it to her ambush point with a notional five minutes to spare. The terrain rose steeply from the river basin here, climbing nearly three hundred yards up to the plateau where the village lay. She made a brief study of the area before deciding to lay up inside a curving U-shape formed by the thick root system of an ancient hardwood tree. It gave her a clear line of fire into the second-last switchback before the road levelled out. The ground fell away steeply into tangles of liana on the open side, while a small creek gave her an escape route if needed.

She prepared her main weapon, the HK-417, before pulling out the hand-tooled flash suppressor from her pack. She screwed the black, foot-long tube tightly into place on the barrel. The suppressor wouldn’t completely eliminate the sound of gunfire, but it would muffle things considerably. The forest would do the rest. She checked her mags, lined up a spare and pulled the charging handle, racking a round into the chamber.