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gathered his parachute at the rendezvous point. Rodriguez and the Canadian, Captain Peterson, were the officers. He was immediately aware of the damp, rain-forest warmth and the rich, almost overpowering smell of the ferns and vines and wildflowers and shrubs surrounding them. There was the furtive rustle around him of large insects and the screeches from above of night birds. Hunter borrowed a folding spade from one of the American non-coms and buried his parachute, counting the men in the darkness as he dug. This task of attempting an accurate estimate of their company strength successfully alleviated the tedium of digging. He had not heard a word spoken by his new comrades in arms. But Hunter supposed that most of them would be from the rural southern states, from Mississippi and Tennessee. They were country boys, he thought, men comfortable with the habit of stealth. They had spent their
boyhoods pursuing prey through the swamps for the dinner table. You didn’t kill in such circumstances, and you didn’t eat. It was a harsh fact of poor rural life. Not for the first time, he envied the American soldiers their easy intimacy with the weapons they carried. These men had cradled rifles and shotguns almost from the moment they left their own cradles as infant boys. And it showed. Around him they formed a watchful, silent perimeter. There were eight of them, he thought. He had counted only five, but the Americans liked even numbers. Rodriguez commanded eight men for this operation. He did not command Peterson. He did not command Hunter, either. There would likely be no departure from consensus. Expertise in the matter of fighting and killing generally bred cooperation.
    He finished the job of consigning his parachute to its tomb and cleaned the blade of the spade with a moist handful of undergrowth, giving it back to its owner with a nod of appreciation. There was enough starlight to see by. There was no moon. But a landing in foliage of this density in total darkness would have risked serious injury. There was sufficient ambient light, and his eyes were fully adjusting to it. Rodriguez, ethnically distinct from the men he commanded, dark where they were pale, came forward and murmured a greeting and flashed a white smile. He was whipcord lean and his handshake was firm. Hunter liked him instantly. He felt a paddle-sized hand judder jovially against his shoulder blade and turned, and he knew it was the Canadian, Peterson. The grinning Canuck was built like a championship-class light-heavyweight about to step on to the scales. Hunter felt relief settle through him, forcing out the acid corrosion of adrenaline, slowing his heart, obliging him to smile back at his new companions. He would be all right with these two. They were good men. Something solid settled in him and he suspected it was nothing more really than honest relief.
He had never experienced combat as a married man prior to this. He did not wish to make a widow, he realised, of his new wife.
    ‘That was a nice landing,’ Rodriguez murmured in his ear. You did not whisper. The sibilant hiss of a whisper carried.
    Peterson chuckled, but it was a very discreet expression of mirth.
    ‘You know how hard a night drop can be on the knees,’ Hunter said. His pack and personal weapons and their ammunition added fifty kilos to his weight. The knees could only take so much.
    ‘Not to mention the balls, if you have the bad luck to land straddling a tree branch,’ Peterson said. ‘And I speak from bitter personal experience.’
    Hunter squatted beside his pack, on the ground where he had placed it before beginning to dig. From a side pocket, he took a clip for the assault rifle strapped across his chest. He did not insert the clip, because the sound would carry. Instead, he put the clip in the webbing on his pack straps before levering the pack on to his back. It would be handy enough there in a firefight. In the webbing on the strap to the right of his chest, the clip