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and Carla had a subcompact Glock 27 that she’d produced from somewhere—where was one of the questions Richie suspected he’d be better off not asking. Still, it was an interesting problem because they’d all been checked on arrival as being unarmed. Richie had pre-buried his GPS and satellite gear in the jungle, carefully crossing then recrossing the mined perimeter before they’d come into the camp so that he could retrieve them once the team had been accepted.
    The two guards at the main gate were half-awake when they stumbled to their feet. They went back down fast and Richie and Duane now had AK-47s as well. Chad stripped them of a pair of Makarov handguns, tossing one to Richie that he caught midair.
    There was an old Jeep parked by the gate, but neither of the guards had a key. It was probably back in the open, on Rolando’s body. Chad started hot-wiring it while the rest of them stood watch.
    Then Richie heard it. Distant at first, but building fast. The four-engine gut-thumping roar of a loaded 747.
    â€œCome on, Chad,” Carla pleaded. “Get us out of here.”
    The Jeep’s engine roared to life and they piled in.
    Duane tossed his AK-47 to Chad and dove into the driver’s seat—he was the best driver they had. He’d been working up the sprint-car circuit toward NASCAR when he’d taken his detour into the military.
    Kyle and Richie dropped two more armed guards who came rushing from the huts, half-dressed and scared awake.
    Duane raced the Jeep out of camp along the road, praying for no booby traps.
    Then the largest tanker plane in the world descended and began its run.
    The 747, converted for firefighting, had been put into deep storage in the Tucson desert when its owners went out of business. The CIA had found another use for the massive plane, which now began its dump of twenty thousand gallons—over eighty tons—of defoliant across the exact coordinates that Richie had sent to them just six hours ago.
    His Delta team had been to twelve coca farms in the last six months. And the 747 tanker had visited each in turn. Twelve farms that wouldn’t produce a single leaf of coca anytime soon.
    â€œDown,” Chad shouted.
    They all ducked and hung on as Duane rammed the heavy wooden outer barrier at thirty miles an hour. It blew apart. A four-by-four shattered the windshield and Carla knocked the remains of the glass clear with the butt of a Chinese QBB machine gun she’d acquired somewhere along the way before turning it around to shoot a guard who’d been standing well clear of the gate.
    Richie kept an eye out to the rear, but no one was following. If they were, they’d have a long way to go. The team had been pulled out of Bolivia. They were being tasked to a new assignment.
    That was fine.
    After six months training together and another six in the field, it was the last line of the message that had worried them all.
    Proceed to Maracaibo, Venezuela. Acquire new team member.
    * * *
    Colonel Gibson led Melissa and her team down the dark central corridor of the hostage rescue training building. She could still hear the amazed voices of the newest class as they attempted to reconstruct the shoot-room attack.
    The building had six doors along this concrete hallway—six doors of hell.
    The doors had started out as a bewildering array of challenges that she would never understand. Over the last six months she’d been sent through each one of the six so many times that it no longer mattered which one they entered, with how little preparation; there would be no surprises that she couldn’t take in stride.
    An airliner, a cave-and-tunnel system, an elaborate multistory shoot-house in which the walls and stairs were never in the same place twice, even the one where Gibson was now leading them, the bridge of a ship. Through the last door on the right stood an airplane-hangar-sized space with the upper three stories of an oceangoing