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awakened later he would have spotty memories of the two men at best.  Nick had a small sketch pad in his hands.  He occasionally showed the sketch to his prisoner and made small corrections when necessary. 
    When they were through with him, Dave gave him shot of liquid Valium to send him to sleep.  There was some concern for what this might do to his respiratory system, but it was considerably less hazardous than a .22 round into the frontal lobe of his brain, which was the alternative.
    “This is going to take longer than we thought,” Nick said. "We’re going to have to take out more personnel than I expected.  A regular P.O.W. snatch isn’t going to work here.”
    “No sense cryin’ about it.  We don’t have time to go back and get more troops, even if we had some.  We’ll just have to hit ‘em as hard as we can and make a run for it when we have the women.” 
    Dave seemed alright with the idea, but Nick had more experience in Peru, and he was not so sure.  He made a mental note that civilian ops were going to have to be planned and carried out like military ops if he was going to stay alive to cash the paychecks. At the moment, he wasn’t sure at all that he was going to be alive to cash the first one. 
    In spite of his reluctance, he knew Dave was right.  In an hour or two this patrol would be missed -- and when the bodies were found, the whole inside of the caldera would be crawling with Conde’s peasants.
    They gagged the prisoner and left him taped to the tree.  They made their way further down inside the wooded inner slope of the caldera.  Nick eased out his binoculars as did Dave, and they conducted a long, thorough, and exacting visual reconnaissance. 
    If it had not been for the babbling cooperation of their captive, they might well have missed the barracks.  It was marked only by a small building no larger than an outhouse.  It did not look like much, but it was covering a large cavern in the wall of the caldera.
    Their captive had indicated there were thirty men inside the cave barracks at any given time, while there always were fifteen more on guard duty outside. The women were not locked up inside the house as they had expected, and this was going to cause them the most difficulty.
    The barracks was actually going to be the easiest problem to solve.  The narrow doorway was the only way out.  One of them could toss several grenades through the opened door and empty a couple of magazines from the old M16-M203 combination inside and the barracks would be effectively compromised. 
    The other fifteen men (less the three they had taken out on patrol) would be scattered about the house and grounds. Nick and Dave both knew that their only solution was to get closer, and find out where the roving guards were located.  Just before their all-out assault they would take out as many as they could with the silenced .22s. The fly in the ointment was that they still had no knowledge of the building the women were housed in…their primary mission.
    * * * * *
    Nick hated the situation, but as Dave had pointed out, time was something they were all out of. With the decision made for him, he set out to make the most of it.
    When Nick felt he was about three hundred meters from their objective, he pointed out a large and distinctively shaped tree that was much taller than the surrounding trees, and drew an imaginary circle in the air above his head.  The hand signal was the one normally used by soldiers to designate a rally point, a place to come back to if things fouled up, or in this case, to come back to after the final reconnaissance. 
    The two men began to move slowly down the step wooded slope of the caldera. The last hundred and fifty meters before they got to the final wood line before the house, they moved on their bellies.
    As they had agreed to earlier, Dave scooted out on his belly to observe the barracks and Nick crawled closer to the house.  It was 0100 hours.
    They met under the