outside the cave, one of the two soldiers left to watch the team’s vehicles looked down the hill. Several minutes earlier, he had thought he heard distant engines, but the waterfall’s never-ending rumble made it difficult to be sure. He had dismissed the sound as nothing more than local traffic picking its way along the winding road – but now he was certain he had heard it again, and closer. He stared down the weaving trail of flattened vegetation made by the off-roaders, but saw nothing except greenery.
His companion, leaning against the Jeep, stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Why would anyone come up here? Nobody’s even supposed to know about this place except those archaeologists.’
‘Someone might have seen our tracks going off the road.’ The reassuring weight of his Kalashnikov AKM rifle hung from one shoulder; he considered unslinging it and heading downhill to investigate. But there was nothing moving amongst the trees except birds, and the noise had stopped. ‘I don’t know. But I’m sure I heard a truck.’
He expected a sarcastic retort, but no answer came. Assuming the other soldier was busy lighting yet another cigarette, he continued, ‘And I know you’re going to say that we almost ran into plenty of trucks on the way here, but I meant it was nearer than the road.’ He turned to await a response—
A man in dirty, ragged jungle camouflage was behind his comrade, one hand clamped over his mouth – and the other driving a knife deep into his throat, spraying blood over the Jeep’s windscreen.
The soldier grabbed his AKM—
A loud, flat thump came from the undergrowth, and he fell, hit in the back by a bullet. He writhed in pain, trying to scream, but only managed a choked gurgle, blood from a shredded lung frothing in his throat and mouth.
The shooter stepped from the bushes. He was short, barrel-chested . . . and wearing a blood-red beret.
Arcani Pachac.
‘Any sign of the rest?’ the Maoist leader asked as his scout pulled the knife from the second soldier’s neck and let the twitching corpse drop to the ground.
‘No, Inkarrí,’ the camouflaged man replied. ‘Their tracks go to the waterfall, but there’s nobody there. They must be behind it.’
Pachac nodded, then almost as an afterthought raised his weapon again. The automatic had been modified with a makeshift silencer, a two-litre plastic soda bottle stuffed with shredded newspaper and polythene bags taped to his pistol’s barrel. Smoke coiled from the hole in the end of the bottle where the bullet had seared through; the torn-up scraps inside had caught fire. He pulled the trigger, a second round smashing into the back of the wounded soldier’s skull. The shot was still loud, the improvised suppressor too crude to do more than muffle it – but, crucially, it didn’t sound like the sharp crack of gunfire. To anyone outside the immediate vicinity, it could be mistaken for a falling branch or other similar natural event. And the waterfall’s thunder masked it still further.
He pulled the smouldering bottle from the gun, then unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt. ‘The way is clear. Move up.’
The luckless soldier had heard engines. Before long, three off-road vehicles came into sight, following the archaeological team’s path. Two were old, battered and unassuming 4×4s - a rusting Ford F-150 pickup with a cargo bed full of rebels, and a long-past-its-prime Toyota Land Cruiser with sagging suspension. Leading the parade, however, was something much newer and more expensive: a bright yellow Hummer H3. Pachac was perversely proud of the vehicle, which his group had obtained by the simple expedient of murdering its owner; the oversized, cartoonish 4×4 was a perfect symbol of the kind of capitalist excess he was aiming to destroy, and it gave him a certain satisfaction to use it against them.
He also got a kick out of driving the huge, opulent vehicle, but kept that to himself.
The crowded trucks stopped behind the expedition’s vehicles, and Pachac’s men emerged. Like him, all were dirty, their clothes grubby and crumpled from a life spent in the rough and on the run. And like him, all were killers. Though they called themselves revolutionaries, to the Peruvian government the True Red Way were terrorists, and hunted as such.
But this time they were not working alone. Pachac ordered his men to head for the falls, then went to the Hummer. Inside was a high-tech field radio. He took the handset and spoke into it. ‘This is Pachac. We’re at the waterfall.’ He wasn’t concerned