“I’m okay,” Nimec answered. Flat on his stomach in the grass, his mouth full of dirt, he’d been hauling Loren up beside him as DeMarco’s tense radio call went out, too busy to respond at once. “Have to stay low. That son of a bitch in the tree almost took me out with that last shot. I think he’s using a thermal sight.”

There was momentary silence in his earpiece.

“Hang on, chief,” DeMarco said. “I’ll get you back in here—”

Nimec cut him short. “Forget me,” he said. “I told you to evac those sitting duck vehicles.”

“I was about make the call. Use the Type Four mist for cover—”

“So use it.”

“That sharpshooter’s got you pinned. You start moving again, trying to lug a wounded man with you, the fucker’ll nail you in a second.”

Nimec inhaled, wiped blood from his forehead. He’d gotten some juice from a broken euphorbia stem into the cut, and it burned as though on fire.

“If I’m being scoped through a thermal, Type Four’s what I need,” he said, lying through his teeth.

“That stuff won’t disperse fast enough to screen you—”

“I’ll keep hugging the ground, find the Rover once the smoke starts to lift.”

DeMarco waited several heartbeats before answering him.

“You’ll never make it that way,” he said at last. “I can use fog oil instead . . .”

Nimec inhaled. He wasn’t about to fool anybody here, leaving him to pull rank.

“No,” he said. “You’ve got any sudden ideas in your head, you damn well better shake them.”

DeMarco was silent again.

“Steve—”

“Your signal’s breaking up, chief. Couldn’t hear you.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t hear me?”

“Getting worse, I’m losing you—”

“Don’t pull this on me, Steve . . .”

“Lost you,” DeMarco said very clearly over their comlink. “Proceeding at my own discretion. Over.”

The headman had determined he’d waited long enough. An ambush must have surprise and speed; lose either, allow the situation to become static, and it would fail.

Lowering his glasses so they hung over his chest on their strap, he brought his palm-size tactical radio to his mouth and sent out his command to the men he’d divided up on both sides of the trail. His voice was level and controlled.

In the brush at the convoy’s rear, in the forest up ahead, the bandits left their stationary positions and started to converge on the vehicles according to plan.

Moments after breaking contact with Nimec—hanging up the phone on him, figuratively speaking—DeMarco resumed his countdown where he’d left off, twelve seconds minus. He’d moved his finger away from the Type-IV release button on his touch pad to another about an eighth of an inch over to its right.