“I told you I would do what you ask!” he said as Rapp brandished a pair of kitchen shears.

“All right then. Make me feel it, baby! Action!”

“As near as I can tell, it’s as Auma described,” Coleman said.

Rapp had his eye to a small magnifying glass designed to be slid along photographs. The eight-by-ten lying on the table depicted an image taken from a commercial chopper they’d rented. The resolution wasn’t bad, but it was not exactly the military quality he was accustomed to.

“You see the edge of the altar?”

“Could just be a rock,” Rapp said.

“It’s pretty rectangular. What about the guy in position A-six?”

Rapp moved the lens to that coordinate. “You mean the indistinct shadow?”

“You say tomato…”

Finally, Rapp leaned back in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes. Coleman’s core team was gathered around the table. Among them sat Nicholas Ward, freshly showered, and wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with the name of one of his companies.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I agree with Scott. This is the place Auma described. The altar seems to exist and the hill where he says there’s a cave is in the right place. But the canopy is dense as hell and if he’s good at anything, it’s keeping his followers hidden. Without a high-altitude surveillance plane, ultra-high-res video, and a bunch of professional analysts to go over it, we can’t be sure if the rest of his people are really there.”

“You think he might have pointed you to an old encampment he’s abandoned? Why?”

“It could be a decoy site,” Coleman said. “A place that any of his people who get captured would be trained to give up. Or worse, an ambush site. Auma might have people waiting there. They’d know to kill anyone who shows up.”

“Do you think he’s that smart?”

“Yes,” Rapp answered. “The question is whether he’s that cautious. It’s a lot of complexity, particularly with the illiterate child army he’s got backing him up.”

“Okay,” Wicker said. “Then this is easy. We took delivery of the armament for those Russian choppers the Ugandans lent us. Let’s go in there with guns and rockets blazing. Kill everything in a thousand-yard radius. Auma says the stuff you’re after is in the cave, right? That’ll protect them.”

Despite having all the hallmarks of an excellent plan, Ward started shaking his head. “I see two problems. The first is that those are government choppers and the Ugandans have been clear about not wanting to be seen performing military operations that close to DRC territory. It could provoke a war.”