“Seven minutes,” the pilot said in Whitman’s ear as they shot past another obsidian mountainside—he didn’t have to add “to insertion”; they all knew.

Whitman, a slim, leathery cowboy of a man, had been born and raised in Montana, but that life seemed part of someone else’s past, not his. All his adult years, and some before, had been spent overseas, in places marked out in bright red on Pentagon maps. He was in charge of planning and tactics; the trio was on the path he devised and designated. With a small flashlight held between his teeth, he bent over the plastic-coated topographical map, though he had previously memorized each and every formation. He had the ability to instantly translate two dimensions into three. In so doing, he had already been to their target area many times in his mind’s eye. When they landed he would be on familiar ground.

Another gust of wind sent the rain rattling against the helo’s skin like buckshot. Orteño staggered as he made his way forward, the flat of his hand against the gunship’s metal bulkhead.

“Hey, Flix,” Jonas said into his swing mike, “how’s the gut?”

“Nothing a couple of tacos with a squirt of hot sauce wouldn’t cure.”

The helo creaked and groaned like a seventeenth-century ship of the line in a storm far out to sea.

“I’ll stake you to ’em after we get home.”

Orteño grinned, cocked his forefinger like a gun barrel at Sandofur. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“Settle down, ladies,” Whitman said without looking up from his map. “Two minutes to the drop point, Sandy. Make sure our protection’s kosher.”

Sandofur handed over the small-arms weapons he had so lovingly prepared. “Into the valley of heathens dropped the three sombreros,” he intoned. This, too, was a ritual performed before each drop.

“Ai de mi!” Orteño yelled, getting into it as he settled the parachute more comfortably between his shoulders.

The gunner slid open the helo’s side door.

“Valley dead ahead! Get the hell off my ship!” the pilot shouted over his shoulder. The trio had ditched their comm sets for Flix’s wireless earwigs. “See you girls at oh-five-hundred sharp, before the sun rises. And, for fuck’s sake, don’t any of you break a leg!”

Out the open doorway, into the stinging blackness, one after the other, an unholy shrieking in their ears, a rush of adrenaline, a hollowness in the pit of their stomachs as they fell between leaning black walls, the ground, invisible in the rain-swept night, rushing up to meet them with hellacious velocity.

* * *

As usual, it was Sandofur who landed first. Shrugging off his parachute rigging like a sailboat in dry dock, he raced to the metal case that had landed a hundred yards away, one corner buried in the soft, loose earth. Righting it, he set about releasing the clamps.

By the time the others had come up beside him, he had the case open. He distributed the AR-15s and other large-bore weapons with a sure hand. He had done this so many times he could have parceled out the armaments one-handed and wounded, a point of pride with him.