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was only inches from his reaching fingers.
    Rodriguez made a hand signal to his men. Hunter sensed rather than saw them change formation, a concentration of craft and menace spreading to his front and rear and flanking him. They began to move towards their target, two miles away, a mile or so in the thick forestation that spread almost impenetrably north from the small and isolated settlement of Magdalena. The terrain was very similar to Belize and Hunter’s recent training assignment there. But the climate was cooler and less humid, the air slightly thinner. And something else was different. Belize had been an exercise. You could never rid an exercise of
its staged and somehow futile atmosphere of dress rehearsal. An exercise, however exotic the location, was essentially a chore. This was real. And the contrast could not have been greater. It was there in the silent, purposeful progress of the men as they fanned out and edged forward towards whatever challenge awaited their formidable fighting skills. There would come a day when Mark Hunter would no longer enjoy this, he knew. There would come a day. He had seen men burned out and unmanned, their nerves broken and their will to fight exhausted. But it had not happened to him. And at that confident moment, he could never imagine that it ever would.
    They stopped about a mile north of the settlement that was their target. They gathered in the cover of a deep, steep-sided gully. Vines and creepers grew thick and verdant on the vertical banks of stone, insulating sound. The men took out ration packs and ate breakfast. Because what slight wind there was blew gently from the south, they were able to risk brewing coffee. The coffee was hot and strong and Rodriguez briefed Hunter as they squatted on the ground and drank.
    ‘We’ve got a cluster of tin-roofed buildings made of wood,’ he said. ‘They are located like the points of a star around a circular construction at their centre.’
    Hunter frowned. ‘It doesn’t sound much like a processing facility.’
    ‘I don’t think it is,’ Rodriguez said.
    ‘Why do you say construction, and not building?’
    Peterson had walked across to them. He dropped to his haunches and sipped coffee from a steel mug. ‘We think it is canvas,’ he said. He looked at Rodriguez, who nodded. ‘There are dogs, Rottweiler attack dogs, so we haven’t been able to get too close. But we think the central structure is a marquee of some kind. It’s a rigid construction, framed but not permanent.’
    ‘Unusual for cartel activity,’ Hunter said. ‘You sure the circus hasn’t come to town, Major?’
    ‘They have guns as well as dogs,’ Rodriguez said. ‘They’ve strung a fenced perimeter with razor wire. It could be a parley. It could be a conference of some kind.’
    ‘It could be innocent,’ Hunter said. ‘Relatively speaking, I mean. For all your scant intelligence, they might be environmental activists planning their next attempt to save the planet.’
    Peterson chuckled. ‘Three weeks ago a party of four ecotourists went missing in this region. They just disappeared, Captain.’
    ‘Such tragedies can occur naturally of course,’ Rodriguez said. ‘This is hostile country. But these people were not beginners in the terrain. They were experienced, hardy. And they had with them a professional guide with excellent jungle skills and plenty of experience.’
    ‘No distress call?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Peterson said. ‘They just vanished off the face of the earth.’
    ‘Have you theorised?’
    Rodriguez looked at Peterson and then turned back to Hunter. ‘We hit the ground about ten hours before you did. One of my guys is good around dogs. I asked him to volunteer to get in as close as he could on a one-man scouting patrol. He’s a boy from the boondocks, like all of them, a kid from the swamps of North Carolina. He got close enough to one of their people to see the garrotte looped around his belt. There was a heavy calibre automatic