In her residency, Gina had been replacing the spring on a stethoscope—it snapped around the ear tubes on both sides—when she’d cut her finger. The circular metal snaps had surprisingly sharp corners.

Gina snapped the binaural spring off and touched the edge with her thumb. It would do the trick. Gina crawled to the back panel of the tent and pressed the corner into the nylon. It took a couple of tries, but finally she made a small tear. It was louder than Gina would have liked, but under the noise of the jungle, she doubted anyone would hear. The job would have taken twenty seconds with a good knife, but it took close to five minutes with the edge of the metal spring, making half-inch, sometimes quarter-inch, tears in the nylon. When she had finally cut a fifteen-by-fifteen-inch flap at the bottom of the panel, she wriggled through.

It was dusk, and Gina army-crawled through the relative darkness to the nearby brush. She was mostly hidden by her tent, but there would be a few seconds where she would be exposed. She didn’t dare look back over her shoulder as she closed the distance to the brush. Four feet. Two feet. She slipped through a tangled thicket of vines, crawled for several more feet, then pushed herself up.

She’d made it.

The dim light was fading fast, making it difficult to navigate through the vegetation. Gina pulled the phone out of her pocket and turned it on. It didn’t have an LCD screen like a cellphone, but it did have a two-inch screen that lit up, offering just enough light to see in front of her.

After she’d gone another hundred feet, she checked the phone’s signal.

Still nothing.

“Damn.”

She needed to get out from under the thick canopy. The only open area was where the small hut was located.

It took Gina ten minutes to work her way through the forest. As she drew closer to the drug lab, she could smell the wafting aroma of chemicals. At the edge of the brush, she glanced back at the four tents and the small fire fifty feet away. It was now pitch dark and the whipping flames of the fire were too far away to illuminate her as she dipped under the sagging tarp roof and into the hut.

She glanced down at the phone.

There was a signal.

She made her way to the far back corner of the hut, where there were two pieces of plywood arranged on top of several large plastic drums. A six-inch chunk of flaky ivory paste centered the table.

Drugs.

Gina hit the call button, the phone automatically calling the last number she’d dialed. Even with a strong signal, she was nervous the tarp would interfere with the connection. Thankfully, it didn’t, and the phone began to ring. It rang once, twice, three times, then his voice came on: