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.

The second Whaler continued racing down the river, no one sure if there was anyone aboard still alive.

Juan spun the RHIB around again and slammed the outboards to their stops. The bow rose up in an instant, the deep V hull coming onto plane faster than about any boat afloat.

RAUL JIMENEZ IGNORED the wind buffeting him as he stood in the helicopter’s open door, incredulous that the first Boston Whaler had barrel-rolled and then sunk. The second border-patrol boat continued downstream behind them. At first he thought the cowards were running away, but then the Whaler slammed straight into the riverbank. It folded like an aluminum can. Its outboards tore from the transom and vaulted into the underbrush while the three men were tossed like mannequins. Jimenez neither noted nor cared if any of them was alive. All his attention was focused on the fleeing boat below.

He recognized the black craft as an RHIB, the type favored by the United States Special Forces, though it was also available on the commercial market and could easily be operated by a group of mercenaries. He needed just one of them alive. He wanted the others alive, too, but when he was finished with them they would be in no condition to be paraded in front of television cameras.