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both out. My orders are to kill the son of a bitch, and I intend to do just that.”
    “Right away, sir.”
    “And somebody get me Virginia. The boss is going to want to hear about this.”

9
    Holliday and Eddie pulled a stunned Rafi from the chewed-up, splintered wreck of the wheelhouse, and then they began a frantic search for survivors. Thankfully Peggy was unharmed, having been in the big old claw-foot bathtub in their cabin trying to cool off when the bullets began to fly and having stayed put for the duration.
    The majority of the porters who set up housekeeping on the main deck between the side rails and the superstructure of the riverboat hadn’t been so lucky. Most of them had been cooking their breakfasts on tiny portable stoves when the attack began, and more than a dozen had been killed outright and just as many wounded.
    The SS
Amador
hadn’t fared much better. Rafi had managed to run her aground on a mud bar close to the right bank, but as the seconds passed the current swung the stern of the ship downstream, giving the machine guns on the water bomber the chance for a raking broadside that ripped through the sternwheeler and the hull, destroying both boilers and mangling the steering mechanism. It was repairable, but it would require days of labor.
    “This isn’t going to work,” said Holliday, climbing up the metal companionway from the engine room to the deck.
    “Why not,
compadre
?” Eddie asked. “We have the tools and I have the experience. It would simply take a few days’ work.”
    “That’s time we don’t have,” said Holliday. “They must have planted a transponder on the boat when we picked her up in São João Joaquin. It’s probably still here, and they’ll be coming back as soon as they figure out their Firebreaker flying boat isn’t. We’ve got to get everything and everybody off the ship, pronto, before they get here.”
    Of the nine twenty-foot Zodiac Pros and their two-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower outboards, only four were undamaged. The porters who’d survived the attack quit on the spot, and two of the Zodiacs were given to them to take the wounded back to São João.
    In return for the boats, Eddie insisted the healthy porters transfer as much of the supplies as they could to the remaining Zodiacs. If Sinclair’s people were behind this, they’d most likely be using Super Tucanos. If so they had two hours, three at the most, to get the hell away from the riverboat before one or more of the waspish little fighter planes arrived to do their damnedest to blow them all to hell.
    “We head upstream slowly,” said Holliday as they prepared to climb into the Zodiacs. “The planes will be looking for us, so we’ll keep close to the bank of the river. If we move too fast we’ll leave a muddy wake a blind man could follow. We hear the planes, we get ourselves into the undergrowth that hangs over the water and hope like hell they don’t see us.”
    They had barely moved three hundred yards upstream from the wreck of the sternwheeler when they again heard the drone of approaching aircraft. Holliday guided the first Zodiac into the overhanging jungle of the starboard bank, and Eddie, piloting the second inflatable, was right behind him.
    Holliday prayed they were both well enough hidden and far enough away from the riverboat. He looked over his shoulder; there was a faint muddy turbulence from the prop wash of the Evinrude, but it would be hard to see from the air.
    As Holliday had suspected, the planes were Super Tucanos like the ones Blackhawk Security had used in Cuba. These two were dressed up in Colombian Air Force livery with sharks’ mouths painted onto the nose and the blue, gold and red roundels of the Colombian flag.
    They flew in a simple one-forward, one-back-and-above formation, and they came in low. As the first plane tilted its nose slightly, it released a pair of Shrike missiles from the hard points beneath its wings, both of which howled off toward the