The job’s sponsors had been anything but close fisted.

Although some members of the band had equipped their mortar tubes with reticulated, microprocessor-controlled electronic sights, most felt the attachments were burdensome and off-balancing to their aim. Kirdi and Kulani bushmen from northern Cameroon, they had been raised with the bow and arrow as rural Americans might be with the hunting rifle. Where seasonal drought defeats cultivation of food crops, live game is a vital source of protein, and the need to kill or go hungry does more to perfect one’s weaponry skills than gun sport. For these men, the ability to acquire a target was basic to their survival, and they were masters at calculating range and determining projectile trajectories.

Five hundred feet ahead of them, the dirt track plunged eastward into a thick, shaded grove of mixed okoumé and bubinga, where a smaller group chopped at the tree trunks with axes, perspiration glistening on their muscled brown arms, their blades snarling in epiphytic vines that coiled up and up around the bark into the leafy green crowns.

The trees crashed down one by one and were rolled across the road. Then branches, brush, and pieces of slashed vines were strewn over the felled trunks to lay a screen of foliage over the ax cuts. Obscured from sight by broken patterns of shadow, the treefall blended into the overgrowth from a distance, and to the drivers of the line of approaching vehicles, would appear to be a natural phenomenon. Long before they might inspect it closely enough to learn otherwise, their convoy would be surrounded on all sides.

Another indispensable survival tool of the hunter is his knowledge of how to exploit the terrain for camouflage and concealment.

The group’s construction of their road block took a little under two hours. When they were satisfied the job was done, several of them went over to join their fellows in the copse of tall grass and succulents, while others spread out amid the trees. A single man scaled up a bubinga to saddle himself in a fork of its widespread limbs and find a comfortable position for his Steyr SG550 sniper gun, custom-railed with an AN/PIS thermal, day/ night sight.

The men in the copse had also finished their preparations of the area. Their gloves and uniforms tacked with spines and dripping the pasty, whitish secretions of the euphorbia stems, they had cut fire lanes that were as unobtrusive as the log barrier.

Now the band of hired jungle fighters would plant their mortars, and rest, and wait.

It would be a while yet before the UpLink convoy reached them.

A few minutes before the outset of the Sette Cama supply and inspection run, Pete Nimec stood talking with Steve DeMarco, Joel Ackerman, and Vince Scull at the airport parking area where their UpLink team had gathered. Nimec was leaning back against the driver’s side of a modified Sword Land Rover, elbows propped on the hood. The other three faced him in a close ring. Their tight little huddle around Nimec, and the 4×4’s bulking frame behind him, would make it tough for anyone watching from out of sight to monitor their speech.