The spook needed no help attaching herself to the fast-rope apparatus. Royse had one second to look into her eyes before she stepped out and dropped away into the night. The woman did not look scared, but there was something haunting her eyes. Something in the back of the deep, clenched lines which made her face appear unusually long and drawn in the low-light amplification of the NVGs.

One brief nod.

A thumbs-up gesture, and she was gone, dropping down into the darkness.

*

Caitlin fast-roped down to the clearing floor, which squelched under the tread of her canvas-sided jungle boots. She scanned the tree line for any hint of enemy presence without expecting to find it. If they were going to be fired on, chances were she’d have seen the tracers arcing in while she was dangling, all but defenceless, in midair. Releasing the rope, she signalled to Staff Sergeant Royse that she was clear and hurried off to find cover as the chopper increased power and clawed up into the humid night.

A flick of the wrist revealed the time: 0126 hours.

She had four hours of movement before she would have to lay up for the day. It wouldn’t take her all the way to her objective but she planned to be well within observation range by the time the sun rose.

The Echelon field agent moved quickly away from the drop zone, heading north by north-east, following the track programmed into her mil-grade Navman GPS unit. The brush wrapped itself around her, slowing her down as soon as she’d passed under the first tree canopy. Night-vision goggles resolved the environment into a flat, eerily phosphorescent landscape of sinuous roots and vines, of fat, nodding leaves, thick snarls of creeper, of rot and genesis. The smell of decay and of new life growing over the top of older, worn-out vegetation was strong, almost cloying. Clusters of such flora dotted the grassland steppe behind her during this, the height of the South American summer. It combined the worst of all possible worlds: a main course of humidity with a side platter of wide-open kill zones, topped off with jungle-like collections of trees, brush and other plant life.

Caitlin was familiar with the fecund crush of the jungle. She’d spent a good year and a half tracking two targets through the old-growth forests of Sumatra and Aceh, long before the Disappearance, while posing as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to build schools. She knew the jungle. They had come to terms.

But the problem now was more than one of terrain – all in all, this was a tactical nightmare. She proceeded to the nearest point of cover and pushed further inside the forest.