“The General is very upset,” Maxine said, linking her arms though those of the young officers. The inside of the house was airy and cool, with a painting of Philippe Espinoza wearing the colonel uniform he had sported two decades earlier dominating one wall. “He is like a stallion denied the mare. You will find him in the gun room.”

Jorge saw three men conversing in one corner of the entry hall. One turned when they entered. He was Asian. In his fifties. He was a man Espinoza didn’t recognize. Lieutenant Jimenez made to follow his Major, but Maxine would not relinquish his arm. “The General wishes to see him alone.”

The gun room was at the back of the house, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the yard, with its stream and waterfall. Hunting trophies hung from the walls. The head of a giant boar had the place of honor above the fieldstone fireplace. There were three separate glass-fronted gun cabinets and one locked safe where the General kept his automatic weapons. The floor was Mexican tile covered with Andean rugs.

This was the room where punishment had been meted out when Jorge was growing up, and over the smell of leather furniture and gun oil he detected the scent of his own fear that had lingered over the decades.

General Philippe Espinoza stood just under six feet, with a shaved head and shoulders as broad as a hangman’s gallows. His nose had been broken when he was a cadet and never fixed, giving his face a masculine asymmetry that made it difficult to focus on his eyes. Being able to stare down others was just one of the tools he had used to thrive during the dictatorships of the 1970s and ’80s.

“General Espinoza,” Jorge said, coming to attention. “Major Jorge Espinoza reporting as ordered.”

His father was standing behind his desk, leaning over, as he studied a map. It looked like the Antarctic Peninsula, but Jorge couldn’t be sure.

“Do you have anything to add to the report I’ve read?” the General asked without looking up. His voice was clipped, abrupt.

“The Americans have yet to cross the border, at least not in their RHIB. Patrols have turned up no sign of it on either bank of the river. We suspect they sank it and extracted overland.”

“Continue.”

“The helicopter pilot they kidnapped says the team leader was named Juan, another called Miguel. The leader spoke Spanish with a BA accent.”

“But you are certain they are American?”

“I saw the man myself. He might speak Spanish like us, but he”—Espinoza paused, trying to find the right words—“had that American look.”

The senior Espinoza finally looked up. “I attended their special School of the Americas, same as Galtieri, only years later. The instructors at Fort Benning all had that look. Go on.”