Going with the current, it took them less time to reach the main river than when they’d come upstream earlier in the day. The men were drained by the events of the past twenty-four hours, yet they remained vigilant as they started northward. Mike stood facing aft, his eyes scanning the sky for pursuit, while Juan and Mark studied the river and its banks for anything out of the ordinary.

They saw nothing for an hour, but then Mark Murphy tapped Juan on the shoulder, handed him a small pair of binoculars, and pointed a few points off their bow.

Juan needed only a second to recognize two Boston Whalers coming at them at full speed. He didn’t need to see details of the occupants to know they were armed to the teeth.

“Mike,” he yelled over his shoulder. “We’ve got company.”

“No kidding,” Trono called back. “There’s a chopper crawling up our six.”

Cabrillo didn’t bother looking back. The Whalers were coming too fast for him to worry about the helicopter. With a combined closing speed of nearly ninety knots, the pair of boats would pass the RHIB in seconds.

Juddering lights winked at them from both craft. The Argentines had opened fire well before they were in effective range. Tiny splashes sprinkled the river well away from the charging RHIB.

Juan waited until the two boats were less than fifty yards off, ignoring the lead that was filling the air. He could see three men on each; the driver, and two riflemen lying in the bow. With the Whalers skipping across the water, none of the shooters could aim accurately. The little boats were just too unsteady.

Of course, Mark couldn’t get off a meaningful shot with the RHIB bouncing along either.

“Hold on!” Juan shouted.

He cut both throttles and used his palm to crank the wheel over to its lock. Despite the deflated cells of the buoyancy ring, the assault boat did a perfect one-eighty, shouldering aside a wall of white water and coming to an almost complete stop.

Having practiced the maneuver countless times and knowing it was coming, Trono and Murph reacted instantly. Now that the RHIB was wallowing, they could anticipate her movements and compensate for them with their machine guns. They opened fire as the two Whalers flashed by less than a hundred feet away. The two drivers standing in the open cockpits took the worst of it. One was stitched from thigh to shoulder, the kinetic impact of the 9mm rounds hurling his body over the gunwale. The other took two to the head and slumped over the console.

With its engines still pouring out full power, the Whaler started to veer off course because of the weight of the dead driver on the wheel. The centripetal force pushed the body in the opposite direction, and he slipped from the cockpit, his hand still tangled in the wheel’s spokes. The Whaler turned sharply, caught part of the wave that had been generated by the RHIB, and flipped over. It augered into the water and vanished under the surface only to float up again, its keel pointing skyward.