JAKE LAY IN the thick grass and waited. Darkness came early that night, ushered into the valley by dense clouds and heavy rain. By ten p.m., the men in camp doused the work lights and retired for the night, leaving only those on guard duty outside. There were two men in the machine gun nest, four patrolling the outside walls, and four walking the interior.

The generator was finally shut down a little after midnight.

Jake assembled a small pack of gear and crawled down the muddy ridge through waist-high grass until he was a hundred feet from camp. The remaining distance to the wall was bare—conspicuously so—as if it had been clear-cut and burned out.

Like a minefield.

Jake was far from an expert on land mines. In fact, he knew a single salient fact about them—and it was that they could maim him horribly. It was enough. He lowered himself to the ground and waited. The guards came and went, patrolling the exterior fence line but never venturing into the clear-cut zone.

It was nearly an hour later when a greater kudu wandered into view.

The five-hundred-pound antelope was alert, walking with its head up and its ears twitching in the rain as it followed a rivulet of water past the camp and down to the riverbank. Jake marveled at its muscular body, long legs, and sharp horns that spiraled into the sky.

It was a magnificent beast.

But more importantly, it wasn’t a gooey mess, blown to pieces by a land mine.

The kudu jumped down to the riverbed. The heavy rains had begun to refill it and what was a trickling stream just two days ago was now ten feet wide and flowing steadily. The kudu bounded across in a single leap.

The jumping antelope provoked no reaction from the guards. Whether they’d grown to ignore such crossings or simply hadn’t seen it, Jake couldn’t know, but the strong winds and the first rain in two years were providing plenty of distractions in the valley. Depressions flooded, trees toppled over, and mudslides crashed through the hills. The hard, dusty ground simply couldn’t absorb all the moisture.

Distant thunder rumbled in the valley as Jake switched on his night vision goggles. The four exterior guards were each pacing up and down one side of the rectangular camp, carrying rifles under their plastic ponchos. The interior sentries had been doing the same when Jake had last seen them from the hills. Carefully timing his moves to avoid them, he waded into the river and followed it to the camp’s long northern wall.