This chopper wasn’t equipped with a door gun, but they had pulled the weapon from the one damaged in the explosion and concocted a makeshift mount using straps threaded through eyelets in the ceiling. Jimenez stood behind it now, watching the RHIB grow larger and clearer in his sights. Just a few seconds more and he’d tear away the back of the boat. While one of the thieves drove, the other watched the approaching helo with a machine pistol tucked up hard against his shoulder. The third man was flat on the deck, either dead or wounded. Either way, he didn’t appear to be moving.

Ever since his boyhood, Raul Jimenez had loved to hunt. He’d made his first slingshot out of tubing and a forked piece of wood, and killed birds by the hundreds around his family’s farm. With his first rifle, a gift on his tenth birthday, he went after larger and larger prey until taking a jaguar from a hunting blind with a nearly seven-hundred-yard shot his companions said couldn’t be made.

But on the day he killed his first man, a deserter who then-Captain Espinoza had told him to track, Jimenez knew he would never find satisfaction hunting mere animals again. He had stalked the deserter for five days through some of the toughest jungle Argentina has to offer. The deserter had been wily, and made the hunt the best of Jimenez’s life, but in the end nothing could keep him from his prey, and the man had died despite his cunning.

Jimenez felt that same sense of satisfaction as he lined up the sights on the black RHIB. Just as he squeezed the Browning’s trigger, the nimble boat cut sharply, and the heavy .30 caliber rounds peppered the water, turning it into a constellation of tiny white fountains.

He cursed, lined up, and fired again. It was as if the driver fifty feet below was reading his mind because the bullets arrowed into the river off the RHIB’s port flank. He was certain the boat would dodge left this time and let loose a hammering string of tracers. And like before, the driver outwitted him by veering farther right, going under the helicopter and emerging on its blind side.

“Spin around,” Jimenez shouted into his headset. “Give me an angle.”

The pilot pushed hard on the rudder, pivoting the Eurocopter on its axes as it continued to race up the river. It was flying almost sideways, crabbing across the sky, but more than able to keep up with the speeding RHIB.

In the three seconds Jimenez had lost sight of the boat, the man he thought was injured had gotten to one knee. Behind him was an open space in the deck that had been a covered storage locker. On the man’s shoulder sat an ominous dark tube pointed straight at the chopper. The range was less than two hundred feet.