At length, he went to board the waiting transport.

Graham cursed, gazing out his windscreen into the distance. He had spotted the taillights of a plane ascending through the gloom at twelve o'clock.

"Got to be the Lockheed, from the size of it," Winter said, scanning the FLIR readouts on his helmet visor. "Of all the stinking breaks."

"Yeah." They were back down at just over six thousand feet, preparing to tip the Osprey's rotors to their vertical positions as they swooped toward the plateau only two miles up ahead.

"I can see the other one on the strip," Winter said. He pointed slightly off to starboard. "The goddamn DC-3."

Now it was Graham who checked his HUD's sensor imagery.

"You catch its IR signature?" he asked.

Winter nodded. "Engines are cranking. It's getting ready to fly."

He cranked his head around, shot a glance portside and aft. He could make out the wingman's face close behind them, his dismayed frown communicating that he'd also seen the L-100 take off.

A moment later Winter and Graham got verbal confirmation.

"What the hell do we do, Batter One?" the other Osprey's pilot asked over the radio.

Winter breathed.

"Forget the big bird, Batter Two, we'll take the nest as planned," he said, and pulled throttle.

Hard.

Manuel knew the sound of helicopters. He had hidden from them in El Salvador when, eighteen years old and woefully naive, he had joined the Marxist FMLN in their failed revolutionary campaign. Years later, while a paid soldier of the Medellin cartel and the guerrilla armies that emerged after its downfall like countless tiny snakes issuing from the belly of a slain dragon, he had played cat-and-mouse with the Black Hawks, Bell 212's, and Cobras flown by U.S. Special Forces and Marine Corps personnel in Colombia ... and once or twice, had successfully assumed the role of the cat and swiped them out of the air. He knew the sound of helicopters, had heard it throughout Latin America as he had sold his services to whoever could meet his price, and was able to differentiate between them with his eyes closed.

However, the rotor aircraft he suddenly heard now, descending through the near-total darkness that had settled over the plateau, was unlike anything in his experience. But for the speed at which it was vertically dropping, he might have mistaken it for a large plane.

He stood outside the DC-3, looking up, listening along with the others who had frozen on and near the cargo ramp. His heart thumped in his chest. They were close, close, almost overhead--

Then he saw their winged shadows fall over him in the remaining daylight and, raising his Steyr bullpup, waved for his men to scatter.

Graham was about to deploy his landing wheels when he heard the first bursts of submachine-gun fire rattling against the cockpit floor.

Not this time, you fuckers, he thought.

He dipped the Osprey's nose slightly and turned toward Winter.