It took two minutes to negotiate the hairpin and return to the site where the Ninth Brigade soldiers had been swept from the road. Moans of anguish rose from the wounded. The dead lay in such unnatural angles it was difficult to believe they had skeletons at all.

None of the real Argentine Special Forces questioned the presence of more unknown men dressed in their uniforms. They were simply relieved that help had arrived so quickly. Juan squatted next to one of them, laying a hand on the man’s uninjured shoulder. The other had been wrenched from its socket.

“What truck had the piece of satellite?” he asked in Spanish.

“It was in back of ours,” the soldier said through gritted teeth and lips so compressed they had gone white.

“The first one?”

“No. The second.”

Juan called out to his men, “Numero dos,” and held up two fingers in case Trono’s Spanish was as bad as he said.

It took ten minutes to find the plutonium power cell. It was a silver rectangular object, a foot and a half long and about as wide and thick as a dictionary. Its surface was made of some mysterious alloy that Murph might know about but was outside Juan’s purview or interest. All he cared about was that they had it and, for the moment, the Argentines didn’t. He marveled, though, that for all the abuse it had just endured there was only a minute dimple on one side. Murph ran the gamma detector over every square inch of it.

“It’s clean, Juan,” he pronounced. “No radiation above what it’s been giving off all along.”

“That’s a relief,” Pulaski said. “I might want to have more kids someday. Hate for the little buggers to have tentacles and flippers and such.” He turned to Cabrillo. “So now what?”

Juan scratched at the stubble covering his jaw. Down at the base camp, he could see pandemonium had erupted. The “accident” had been plain for everyone to see, and the reserve Ninth Brigade soldiers were scrambling to get up the mountain in order to help the wounded. Loggers, too, were racing for vehicles to lend a hand.

A sly smile crossed Cabrillo’s handsome face. The three greatest assets in combat—and it doesn’t matter if it’s two men squaring off or whole armies meeting on the field of battle—are numbers, surprise, and confusion. He didn’t have the first, the second had already been sprung, and now the third reigned over his adversaries. Jerry had wrestled the power cell into the carrying harness and stood with it strapped to his back. The others wore his same questioning expression.

“Mike, how many hours do you have with Gomez?” Juan asked. George “Gomez” Adams was the pilot of the MD-520N helicopter hangared below the Oregon’s aft hold.

“Hold on a minute,” Mike Trono protested. “We’ve only been working together a couple of months. I’ve only soloed twice. And they didn’t go so well. I bent a landing strut on one and nearly clipped the ship’s rail my second time.”