The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

"You are an Argentine, Capitan?" Duffy interrupted.

"No. But thank you, mi comandante, for your error. I have worked hard on the Porteno accent."

"Well, you could have fooled me," Duffy said.

We all fooled you, Duffy, Castillo thought.

And thank God for that!

I don't know what the hell I would have done if you had stormed out of here in a rage right after you came in.

"If I may continue?" D'Elia asked politely, then went on: "If we are to take prisoners and seize drugs, etcetera, the fact that Lieutenant Lorimer has told us these places are accessible only by one road works in our favor."

Duffy's face was expressionless.

"If there's only one way in," D'Elia explained, "there's only one way out."

Duffy nodded knowingly.

"That's where your men will come in, Comandante," D'Elia continued. "At the moment the assault begins-we call that 'boots on the ground'-the road will have to be cut. Not a moment before, which would alert them, nor a moment after, as it has been my experience that an amazing number of rats can get through even a very small hole in a very short period of time when they are frightened. And we intend to do our very best to badly frighten them."

Duffy again nodded his understanding.

Castillo looked at Munz, who very discreetly gave him a thumbs-up signal.

Castillo smiled at him, but thought, Why am I waiting for the other shoe to drop?

[TWO]

Above San Carlos de Bariloche

Rio Negro Province, Argentina 1755 10 September 2005 "There it is," Alfredo Munz said, pointing.

Castillo, in the pilot seat of the Aero Commander 680, looked where Munz was pointing out the copilot side window, then banked the high-winged airplane to the right so that he could get a better view below.

Darkness was rising, but there was still enough light to see a red-tile-roofed collection of buildings-the Llao Llao Resort Hotel-sitting on a mountainside sticking into and several hundred feet above the startling blue waters of a lake.

Lakes, Castillo corrected himself. Lake Moreno and Lake Nahuel Huapi.

Well, it looks like we cheated death again. The airport is only twenty-six clicks from here.

And I'm only half kidding.

He straightened the wings, then put his hand, palm upward, over his shoulder.

"Let me have the magic black box, navigator," he said.

Corporal Lester Bradley very carefully laid a small laptop computer in his hand, and Castillo very carefully lowered it into his lap.

He was navigating using a prototype AFC Global Positioning System device connected to the laptop. Aloysius Francis Casey himself had warned him that it was a prototype, its database incomplete, and he really shouldn't rely on it.

"It'll take me three, four days to come up with a good data chip for Argentina and that part of the world, Charley," Casey had told him in Las Vegas. "You got somebody down there I can FedEx it to?"

Since Aloysius Francis Casey was a man of his word, presumably the data chip was on its way-or shortly would be-to Mr. Anthony Santini, Assistant Legal Attache, Embassy of the United States of America, Colombia 4300, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

But the bottom line was that it hadn't arrived.

Still, what Castillo had-the prototype-looked a helluva lot better to him than the navigation system he'd found in the cockpit of the Aero Commander when they'd gone to Jorge Newbery.