Just as Zack Sinclair reached a small ridge, a soft breeze carried an urgent sound on its breath, a sound that didn't belong in the desert.

It was his third day in the hot Sonoran Desert after Mickey had sent him on this damned wild goose chase. He'd wandered all over hell on the hard sun baked ground, which offered little shade, and gone shooting a few doves just to make it look good, but all the time he was looking for something that wasn't there. Now at last, where are you?

He wore the well-worn camouflage clothes of a hunter. They almost matched his rugged tanned features. He appeared every bit the recreational bird hunter.

Well-ingrained life-saving instincts jumped into play. He quickly moved into the heavy shadow of a mesquite tree and then rapidly scanned the immediate vicinity. The sounds he had heard were angry voices that didn't fit into this isolated area.

He opened the breach of the superposed twelve-gauge Browning shotgun, pulled out the two 7 1/2 shot birdshot shells, and replaced them with the heavy double ought buckshot rounds that could knock down almost anything. He was all business now as he cocked his ear to pick up any sounds that might indicate the direction and distance of the sound.

Ah, there it is again, he thought as he directed his vision in the direction of the sound's source.

He was in his element now. He smiled to himself as his ice blue gaze raked across the desert to determine his next move. It was time for the stalk. God, how he loved the stalk.

He knew the stalk well; he'd been doing it as long as he could remember. His first instructor had been a grizzled old poacher Zack followed into the Minnesota woods early one day when he was ten years old. He had wanted to see where the old man went in his homemade camouflage hunting clothes that were a work of art of burlap tatters and fabric fragments sewed into a shaggy ensemble. The neighbors called it his Raggedy Ann outfit.

Trying not to be seen, Zack had followed the old man through brush and forest, sometimes so thick the sunlight never touched the ground. The old man had eased around a bush and disappeared right before his eyes, and as Zack had hurried ahead to search for him, he had heard the old man say, "Whatcha lookin' fer, Zack?"

Zack had whirled around to find a smiling weatherworn grizzled old face that was cracked like a county road map. Around his eyes, the deep squint lines contained the dust of decades, and a perpetual tobacco stain hung from the left side of his mouth like a brown Cheetah teardrop. The old geezer's pencil-thin frame was standing ten feet behind him.

"Gee whiz, Mike. How'd you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Disappear like that."

"Din't disppear, Zack. Just blended in," he had said in his slow woodsy drawl as his crinkly eyes squinted at Zack from his well-worn face.

"Boy! Show me how to do that, will ya, huh?" Zack had pleaded.

The ultimate stalk in the North Woods was to sneak up and touch a deer. It had taken Zack two years to do it and that was only after he had learned the most valuable lesson of his life: the stalk.

"Ya gotta learn the animal your huntin' first," the old man had lectured. "Ya gotta learn his habits, how he moves and thinks. Ya gotta unerstan his capabilities, ya know, his strengths and weakness. His little nuances, I think ya call it. When ya do that, well hell, you can stalk anything, man or beast."

The old man had died three years later but not without teaching Zack everything he could about the woods, the animals, and the stalk.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in economics, Zack had known what he wanted to do. He wanted to hunt—hunt anything—so he had signed up in the army as a recon candidate. His marksmanship and skill in the field hadn't gone unnoticed by the sergeant, who had called him over after completing his basic and said, "Young man, I think you should go to graduate school."

His inherent stalking ability virtually made him invisible in the sniper ghillie suit, which was a dramatic improvement over the Raggedy Ann outfit he had used in Minnesota. He had enjoyed disappearing around the new lieutenant when they were on exercises and had driven him nuts until he was reported for insubordination. The day before he was to see the captain, two men in civilian clothes had shown up to talk to him about his shooting skills and disappearing antics.

They had talked to the commanding officer, and instead of a reprimand, he suddenly had a new boss: the Central Intelligence Agency. They had sent him to a base in Texas for training with the special forces. There he had trained in hand-to-hand combat and sniper school. They had left nothing out. Just when he had thought he was really getting good at something, they had moved him to another type of training.

When the pros were done with him, he was a chameleon—a deadly chameleon.

Zack knew he was right above the ongoing argument now. The slope to the ravine below him rolled in such a way that he couldn't see the bottom or the men in the heated discussion.

His sixth sense told him there were more than just the two antagonists; he just couldn't see them.

He worked his way slowly down the slope from one bush to another before moving under a mesquite tree and slowly standing up among the branches. He could see the top of an automobile. This is a long way from the roadway, he thought. This could be what I'm looking for.

A young Hispanic male wearing black slacks and red golf shirt stood in front of the car Zack had seen from farther up the slope. The Ram Charger was covered in red desert dust. The young man was lean and probably in his thirties. He was yelling at an older Hispanic gentleman who appeared to be in his sixties. The older man was dressed in dark blue slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt. Neither of them belonged in the desert. They were city boys.

The subject of the discussion was an aluminum valise on the hood of the Ram Charger. It was open and full of white plastic packets. The argument was about the payment for the valise.

Between the two men was an open duffel bag that had bundles of dollars and peso notes falling out of it and onto the ground. This was apparently the source of the argument.

From what Zack could understand, the payment was in dollars and pesos. This was the result of the banks of Mexico restricting the acceptance of US dollars for deposit or exchange in an effort to control drug trafficking.

Dollars were hard to come by, and part of the payment was in pesos. Whatever the currency was to be used for, pesos apparently wouldn't satisfy the seller.

Behind the older man, a black Lincoln Town car was parked on the same desert trail. It was facing the Ram, so it had entered the desert from the opposite direction. Zack could see a man behind the wheel of the Lincoln, and his instincts told him there were others in the immediate vicinity; he just couldn't see them from this vantage point.

His instructions were clear: don't be discovered, get photos if possible, get information if possible, and for god's sake, don't create any problems. The big boss, whoever in hell he was, had made that clear. There was to be no international incident.

Just as Zack started to take photos of the area and the two men, the driver of the town car emerged. He was a swarthy, powerfully built, balding man in his mid-thirties. He wore a blue sport coat and white shirt that was opened deeply in the front, exposing a heavy chest. Dark sunglasses hung on his expressionless face. This was a man of action.

Without hesitation, the man reached into his sport coat and produced an automatic handgun. It was a no-nonsense gun, a large 1911 Colt .45 automatic. He held it with both hands, raised it straight in front of him, and lowered his head so that his gaze met the sighting plane along the top of the gun, all in one smooth conditioned movement. He held the gun between the door and the car itself and took careful aim at one of the antagonists. His deliberate motions gave the unmistakable impression that he was going to shoot some one, and right now.

Another man's head, covered in a baseball cap, appeared at Zack's lower right, facing the driver. The man was about fifty feet away, and he raised his hand and pointed it at the driver of the Lincoln. He was holding something that looked like a black crackerjack box with a small pipe sticking out of the end. Zack recognized it as one of the foreign-made machine pistols that had made their way to the West.

Everyone and everything was moving rapidly now as Zack clicked away, but the unexpected, unreal aspect of the event gave Zack the feeling he was watching a movie in slow motion. He stood transfixed and wouldn't have moved if he hadn't been jarred out of his intrigue as an observer by the rapid explosions that suddenly took place. It was like a crack of lightning followed by a turbulent desert monsoon.

The older man turned with a panicked look on his face, and with his thick legs churning, he ran for the Lincoln.

The younger Mexican jerked a gun out the waistband of the back of his trousers and fired point-blank into the back of the retreating runner. The impact propelled the man forward, and he dropped without moving. The driver of the Lincoln fired the big gun almost in the same instant as the man in the red shirt fired, but he was too late to save the runner. The .45 roared, and the big automatic jumped with each shot.

The first round slammed into the red-shirted Mexican, slamming him against the Ram Charger. The second explosion followed so closely that its impact almost lifted him onto the top of the hood, shattering and spraying the windshield crimson. He slid off the hood, leaving a red smear after him, and crumpled to the ground.

While Zack was watching the driver in fascination, clicking away, the windshield of the Lincoln exploded, a headlight popped, and pieces of paint and debris jumped off the hood of the big car. The driver's shirt erupted with several red spots, which didn't appear to affect him in the slightest as he continued to hammer away with the big gun. He had changed targets after dropping the man in the red shirt; he had moved to the man with the crackerjack box gun, whose amateur shooting continued hammering and spraying the area in a rapid staccato, trying to tear the Lincoln and the driver to pieces.

The crackerjack shooter was slammed backward by shots from the driver's heavy gun and disappeared from view. All hell had broken loose that quiet afternoon. The Ram's windows exploded in a hail of bullets that came from out of sight to Zack's left, somewhere in front of crackerjack. Close to this gun were two other different sounds of muzzle blasts.

There was a lot of lead in the air at one time, all generated in the space of a few seconds, and Zack had the feeling that bullets were flying everywhere without apparent control or design. The trees around the area were dropping small branches and twigs as the bullets crashed and whined through the air. It all started so fast, and he was so mesmerized as an onlooker that it took a few seconds for his instincts to kick in. Finally, he dropped to the ground, hoping a stray bullet wouldn't hit him.

The shooting was easing. Men were yelling and swearing in English, Spanish, and another language Zack didn't understand as they screamed or grunted in pain. In any language, Zack knew what that was about. He had heard those same cries many times in a jungle near a stinking, rat-infested and sluggish river many years ago. Zack hugged the hard desert surface while the shooting and shouting eased. It seemed to go on forever, but it actually only lasted fifteen to twenty seconds, enough time for several hundred rounds to be fired.

Then it stopped as suddenly as it started. The silence was deafening. It was as if everyone and everything was in awe at the noise and destruction that had exploded in this quiet ravine. The only sound was that of the unrelenting soft sigh of the afternoon breeze as it slipped through the trees.

Zack waited and counted the minutes. Damn, he was back in the game. The duffel was still there with the money, and the bodies were still in place. It was quiet—deathly quiet.

His mind was made up. He quietly eased down the slope and covered the ground between his cover and the carnage.

He stopped two feet short of the dry river bed, or arroyo. To his right was crackerjack and a companion, crumpled on the ground, covered in blood, and two more to his left, all unmoving and silent.

Just as Zack was about to step into the sandy wash, his heart jumped in his chest as he heard a wheezy cough to his left. He froze, looking for the source, afraid to move a muscle. His body broke into a cold sweat, and he could feel the little rivulets of sweat start running down his neck and back.

An immense black man started to move in the wash to Zack's left. He was gagging and spitting as he struggled to his knees, searching for a gun. He picked up a large-caliber revolver, which looked puny in his huge hand, and slowly staggered to his feet. His small waist accentuated the tremendous width of his shoulders and the girth of his chest. His huge frame was topped off by a head that was bald and shiny and so small compared to his bear-like body that it appeared like it belonged to a small boy. The man was facing the other way after retrieving the gun and reloading. Zack took advantage of the short time to duck back and hide as best he could by squatting behind a small bush. The cover was terrible, and he was sure he would be seen. If he was seen, he would probably have to shoot the big man.

The giant's yellow golf shirt was so bloody that it seemed impossible he could be alive. When he coughed, bubbles foamed out of the back of his shirt with an ugly hissing noise. He turned slowly and looked around the entire area. He seemed to see the others on the ground, and his gaze actually passed over Zack. For an instant, it seemed they had actually made eye contact.

Zack tracked the man carefully with the barrels of his shotgun, keeping the safety off, thinking that perhaps the man had actually seen him and was just waiting to get into a better shooting position. The giant laboriously made his way out of the wash toward the cars, which were about fifteen feet away from him, parked slightly higher than the arroyo bed.

Wheezing loudly, the large man made his way to the two men lying between the cars. With a grunt, he kicked each of them not too gently in the head to see if he would get a reaction. Staggering with difficulty to the Lincoln, he looked inside, and with a voice that matched the size of his big body, he said with a growl, "Get out, bitch."

Zack was shocked to hear the man talking to someone apparently still alive after the carnage. How could anyone have remained so quiet all this time or even survived this bloodbath?

A whimper came from of the backseat of the Lincoln. A small female voice said in English, "Please, Mongol, don't hurt me." Mongol put the hand with which he was holding the gun on top of the Lincoln and with his other hand reached inside to haul a woman out of the backseat like a rag doll. It was impossible to see her face, as it was shielded by reddish-blond hair that covered her head and shoulders. She was young, slim, and wearing a light blue spandex type mini dress and high heels. He dragged her out of the car and pushed her, stumbling, onto the hood of the car, where he roughly slammed her facedown. She was crying the whole time and begging for Mongol not to hurt her as he was calling her a bitch.

Zack was amazed at the strength the seriously wounded man demonstrated. He pushed the woman around as if she put up no resistance at all. "You fancy bitch, you make one move and I'll kill you on the spot," he said as he staggered over to the Ram Charger. He looked inside and then walked over to the crackerjack box man and his companion.

There was nothing between Mongol and Zack at this point. They were in clear view of one another, and less than twenty feet separated them. If he glanced in Zack's direction, he would easily see Zack and would sure as hell shoot.

Zack covered Mongol's slow progress with the superposed barrels of his shotgun. He was wet with perspiration, and his heart hammered away in his chest. I've been out of this too long, he thought as the short walk seemed to take Mongol forever.

He finally reached the two men and kicked each one in the head. With a grunt he turned and started back toward the Lincoln.

Zack froze as Mongol turned his head slowly to face him. They were looking at each other, now less than twenty feet apart. Mongol had the meanest sneer Zack had ever seen, and it turned into a mean, angry snarl.

"Howdy, Mongol."

The girl was stone quiet.

Mongol snapped his head the rest of the way and stared at the muzzle of the shotgun. Then he slowly and deliberately raised his coal-black eyes and looked directly into Zack's eyes. This was a bad man.

The big man said, "Well, well, what have we here? A sightseer?"

"Drop the gun, Mongol, and turn around real slow or I'll kill you where you stand."