"Sort of." Blancanales tried to sit up, groaned, lay back. "Ohhhh, do I hurt." He closed his eyes, then very slowly sat up. "Something went wrong, didn't it?"

Flames lit the sky. "Yeah, and now we know what they had in those boxes, don't we?" smiled Lyons. "I've heard of high-powered dope, but this is ridiculous."

Blancanales glanced over the top of the embankment and surveyed the scene. "We get one good break, and now it's back to zero."

"Don't knock our luck, Rosario. At least you're alive."

An FBI helicopter shuttled them back to the ocean-front motel on the outskirts of a small town, hovering for a moment while Lyons and Blancanales carefully jumped the few feet to the sand on the dark beach. Then the chopper roared up and away, returning to the scene of the blast where teams of Federal agents searched the ashes.

They crossed the deserted beach to Mitch Anders' improvised office. His Emergency Task Force had commandeered the motel's twenty rooms.

"What happened out there?" Anders asked sternly. At two-thirty in the morning, he was freshly shaved and cologned and wore a three-piece suit.

Mud from the inlet's banks caked both Lyons and Blancanales. The blood from Blancanales' forehead ran down his face, mixing with the mud. They didn't answer immediately. Lyons eased himself into the cushions of the motel-modern chair, closed his eyes. He hadn't slept in three days.

"Well, I don't really know," Lyons said. "One second these four men were there, and the next, they weren't."

Anders looked to Blancanales. "What's the truth?"

"That was it. One of them was in the boathouse. He called the other one in. Then it was all over." Blancanales went to the room's sink and put his head under the faucet.