Autobursts ripped through the brush. High-velocity slugs zipped into the distance. Ricochets hummed past. They heard the clang-popof more 40mm grenades. A grenade rushed over them, exploded twenty yards away. Bits of steel showered them.

"They're just shooting wild, it's just dumb shit recon-by-fire. Wait until the flare..."

Darkness returned. Horton ran again, keeping his back below the level of the gully walls. He heard Butterfield stumbling behind him.

Shotgun blast! Horton threw himself flat as another flare burst above him. He looked back to see Butterfield crawling over a tangle of rocks and windblown creosote branches.

He knew what had happened. Butterfield had fallen and hit his shotgun on a rock. Ithacas do not have a dependable safety. Cocked and with a round in the chamber, the weapon had discharged.

Horton pumped his weapon to chamber the first shotshell. Now they would fight. Because of Butterfield's stumbling and the accidental discharge, they would fight. Two men with .38 pistols and shotguns against a squad of paramilitary gunmen with automatic weapons and grenades and illumination. Horton thought of abandoning Butterfield to die alone. No. Never.

Never leave your wounded, never leave your men to the enemy. Horton could not disobey his Airborne discipline, no matter how many years ago the Fort Ord instructors had screamed the words into his head. He could not leave a man he had worked with for months, who had covered him, who had faced death in the doorways and alleys of the drug world with him. Bursts of high-velocity slugs ripped over them. Twigs fell, rocks clattered. A grenade popped only a few feet away, the shrapnel tearing through the brush above them. But the gully sheltered them.

Horton attempted a joke. "Get with it, partner. This is the shoot-out. Make them eat lead."