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Rodrigo still awakened some nights in a cold sweat, his nightmares turning around the scene that day when those two leviathans – he had since learned they were the battlecruiser Invincible and the battleship Hercules – had duelled with the batteries guarding the Golden Gate while a tide of Marines had swept ashore…

The ‘Battle of the Bay’ had shaken the Junta in México City, and ended the real fighting inside a month. The politicians had taken fright; terrified that the English would invade the west coast south of Baha California and invade the heartland.

In those days there had been no Triple Alliance, and on land and sea and in the air, his country’s armed forces had been technologically backward, outgunned and in the end, effortlessly out-matched by an enemy who had absolute command of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain and could roam at will his homeland’s Pacific coast, putting ashore raiding parties to terrorise innocent civilians and bombarding ports and cities up to twenty miles inland with impunity.

Those days were gone.

People believed it was because the Germans had given the Triple Alliance new weapons but that was only half the story; the indignity of the unequal armistice of the 1960s had been an iniquity which had galvanised the nation. The old military stranglehold over the government had been discredited: this war was a people’s war; a war to restore the pride and sovereignty of the whole Mexican nation over its God-given lands in the north.

Now Rodrigo had finally returned to the deserts of his youth.

He ought to have felt at least a trace of residual guilt at having pulled so many strings to be allowed to lead this expedition.

It was hardly Rodrigo’s fault that the Chief of Staff of the Army had once been a subaltern under his command, or that at the end of 1976, his old friend and tutor, Hernando de Soto, had swapped the Presidency of the University of Cuernavaca for the Los Pinos de Oro – the Pines of Gold – Palace, the official residence of the President of the Republic buried deep in the Chapultepec Woods in the heart of the capital, México City.

Il Presidente tried, as a rule, not to interfere with the machinations of the political parties or of the competing military factions but he had never been adverse, behind the scenes, to getting his hands dirty. To most Mexicans he was a gracious, grey-haired figurehead, dignified in his strict impartiality, the grandfather of the nation who had healed the dreadful wounds, still bleeding in the national psyche after the country’s humiliation in the last war with the English.

Rodrigo had little doubt that no other man in New Spain could have united the military and the feuding Nationalist, Liberal and Country Parties who together, had formed and unholy alliance with Cuban, Hispaniola and Santo Domingo which in the last few days had carried all before it.

He knew his old friend mistrusted the theocratic fervour of México’s allies; but Hernando de Soto was nothing if not a man who understood that sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If México was ever to grown into a prosperous modern democracy it needed to throw off the shackles of its imperial past, and stand alone in the arena of the Great Powers. History decreed that it was his country’s destiny to demand, by war, to be treated as an equal by the Commonwealth of New England and its English masters.

‘The die is cast, my friend,’ Hernando had told him. ‘We cannot hold back the forces at play in our country. Yes, I am the people’s leader; yet no matter my misgivings about the coming war, I must follow the people where they lead. All things being equal, a wiser man than I would agree that we should delay another few months, perhaps a year, while expeditions such as yours unravel the mysteries of the deserts of Northern Sonora, but,’ the old man had shrugged, and spread his hands, ‘although I give you my blessing to undertake your mission, I cannot forestall the forces already in motion any more than that old rascal Canute, could hold back the tide…’

Several of the Navajo scouts sitting on the ponies around Rodrigo were the sons of men he had known three decades ago; most of the troopers jumping down from their mounts to start setting up camp for the night had never been born the last time he visited this land.

The English had arrived soon after the last war ended in the mid-1960s. They had driven the native peoples off the plateau, beyond the mountains to the west, ‘resettling’ them in barren mountain passes and valleys bereft of game, and when warriors had attempted to return to their ancestral grounds they had been rounded up, left to rot in prison camps hundreds of miles away, or simply hunted down and killed, their bones left to rot in the desert.   Until recently, there had been a great military camp, covering tens of square miles about two days ride north of El Ojo del Diablo.