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without visible smoke. It was more or less a bed of embers that they continually fed sticks to. One of the men was cooking a lump of meat over it. These four seemed intent on keeping their attention off of the torture, their conversation—Travis couldn’t pin down the language—serving as their own white noise to mask the woman’s muffled screams.
    The remaining two hostiles were seated facing the torture table as if it were a matinee screen.
    Travis crouched, tensed to move. It would happen any time now. He’d made the trip from the overlook in twenty minutes, hoping like hell with every step that he hadn’t misjudged the speed of the water drip, or the resistance force of the rifle’s trigger.
    Now it didn’t matter. He was ready.
    He thought he’d take the four at the campfire first. He might get them in one burst, depending on how much they separated when they turned away. After that he’d switch from full-auto to single shot—his thumb already rested on the selector—and be more precise with the other three, who were closer to the captives. By that time his rush would put him inside the camp, firing almost point-blank.
    Breathing steady. Hands dry. Any second now.
    And then the older man tied to the tree said, “Stop.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

    String Mustache switched off the thing in his hand, though he kept it inside the woman’s arm. With the buzzing stopped, the only sound in the clearing was her soft crying, and the occasional pop of something in the fire.
    Travis couldn’t see her eyes, but the man facing her—it had to be her father—looked more wretched than ever. He whispered what looked like, “I’m sorry,” and then, “I love you,” repeating the latter at least three times as his eyes ran over.
    Finally he turned to her tormentor.
    “Tell,” String Mustache said.
    The bound man spoke, his voice wasted and all but dead. “The forward-most lavatory—bathroom—right behind the cockpit. Remove the fan cover in the ceiling, reach above and to the right. It’s there.”
    String Mustache had his back to Travis, but Travis could picture the man’s eyes narrowing, calculating. Then he turned and spoke in his own language to two of the men at the fire. They got to their feet and went quickly to the ATVs that were parked at the edge of the encampment. Their own rifles slung on their shoulders, they mounted two of the four machines and raced away along the valley floor, in the direction of the crash site.
    String Mustache watched them go, then turned to the father, who was still whispering something to the young woman on the table.
    “Hope what you told me is true,” String Mustache said in his rough English. “I keep going until I know.”
    Then he switched the handheld device back on, and the woman and her father screamed at the same time.
    The two remaining at the fire averted their eyes. The two that comprised the peanut gallery smiled. Travis was just processing his own reaction—rage, beyond what he’d already felt—when automatic rifle fire shredded the air above the camp.
    String Mustache dropped his device and threw himself flat—no rifle anywhere near his reach. The other four did as Travis had hoped: they took cover, and they got it exactly backward. He broke from the pines as the masking roar of the staged M16 continued. Fifty feet from the encampment, now forty, thirty. The four armed hostiles crouched behind their trees, looking the other way, backs exposed to him like hay bale targets.
    String Mustache was still on the ground, with neither cover nor weapon in hand—his hands, in fact, were covering his ears.
    Twenty feet. Travis arrested his forward speed, his feet sliding on the loose soil, and shouldered his rifle. He thumbed the selector switch to single shot—the targets were too widely spaced for a sweep—and brought it up to sight on the leftmost of the armed men.
    In that moment the staged gun on the ledge ran dry, the instant silence far more jarring than the gunfire