The night the ISS Compound was raided, he'd been on his day shift rotation, off duty, picking up a pretty girl in a Cuiaba barroom. He'd never thought he could possibly regret getting invited back to her apartment, but that turned out to be the case just the next day, when he reported to base and heard about the raid--and about the men who had died defending the facility in his absence.

He was not going to let anyone else be murdered without doing whatever he could to prevent it.

Peterson caught sight of the guy with the Stinger an instant after the SAM was triggered and twisted his VVRS barrel control to its man-killer setting, taking no chances. Then he called out for him to disarm, noticing an assault rifle over his shoulder in addition to the missile launcher in his grasp.

The guy half-obeyed his warning and did indeed drop the Stinger--but only to free his hands for bringing up the rifle.

As Manuel raised and angled the Steyr in Peterson's direction, his movement a near-blur, Peterson hit him with two short bursts, aiming directly at his heart.

Blood sprayed from the center of Manuel's chest, then ejaculated from his mouth in a red gush.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

A lo hecho, pecho.

After dropping four hundred feet from the table of the plateau in its VTOL attitude, Batter Two perched on a weathered spur of cliff above the ravine, its LZ chosen after careful examination of relief maps prepared from Hawkeye-I's stereoscopic terrain images. From here its twenty-five-man strike team would rappel another hundred feet down to the floor of the trench, then wind their way between its sheer sandstone walls to the hostile camp.

The Osprey's cargo ramp opened and the rappellers, led by Dan Carlysle, debarked in hurried single file, night-vision goggles lowered over their eyes, rubber-soled boots crunching on the rocky earth.

There were five ropes, five climbers to each. Removing blade-type titanium pitons from their web rigs, the men drove them into the projecting rock with mountaineer hammers, slipped their ropes into the piton rings, fastened them with square knots, and tossed the ropes over the side of the cliff, glancing downward as they uncoiled to make sure they were long enough to reach bottom.

Gloved hands gripped the ropes. One, two, three, four, five hard tugs tested that the pitons were securely anchored. Five nods confirmed that they were.

Straddling their ropes as they faced the anchor points, the lead men wound the ropes into harnesses around their bodies--once around the hip, then diagonally across the chest and back over the opposite shoulder. This done, they began their rapid descent along the cliff wall.