The soldier in front of Andy had his automatic rifle out and swiveled it back and forth. When they’d first started their trek up the jungle river forty-five minutes earlier, Andy had asked the soldier what they were looking for.

To which the soldier replied, “Caiman.”

This wasn’t frightening at first, as the river was only a foot deep, but as they progressed, the water got both deeper and murkier.

Andy positioned himself in the middle of the pack, figuring that if a caiman did pick one of them off, it would be someone from the front or back. Andy glanced behind him. Alejándro Cala was the slowest walker of the bunch and took up the rear. Just a few feet ahead of Cala were Buxton, Sean, two Bolivian soldiers, and Farah.

It wasn’t like the gung-ho Farah to be at the back of the group, but Andy guessed it was because Roth was up front, leading the way. From what Andy had observed throughout the morning, the two were keeping their distance. After being caught in their tryst the previous evening, they seemed to be trying to give the appearance that they were nothing more than colleagues.

Andy knew better.

They were lovers.

Two gunshots rang out.

He froze.

A small caiman had been swimming not far from them, and one of the soldiers sent a few warning shots into the water to scare it away. It worked: the five-foot caiman swished its armored body to shore and disappeared into the weeds.

Continuing on the river would take them within twenty meters of T3, but it was decided the now thigh-deep water was too dangerous, and everyone made their way to the river’s muddy banks.

“It should only be another few hundred meters through the jungle,” Roth said, turning and winking at the camera recording him.

Fifteen minutes later, Roth checked his GPS. “This is the edge of the site. It sits just above the floodplain of the river. The lidar indicates a small pyramid-shaped formation ten feet ahea—”

Roth froze when he realized what was directly in front of the group.

It was cloaked in five hundred years’ worth of vegetation—moss, climbing vines, ferns—and plenty of earth, but there was no mistaking it.

It was a stone pyramid.

≈

After the initial shock wore off, the team attacked the stone pyramid like an angry pack of piranhas.

Andy wriggled halfway up the pyramid—which was fifty feet square and rose more than twenty feet—and stood on a large jutting stone. With his seven-inch bowie knife, he hacked through the vegetation cloaking the stone above him, cutting away a two-foot section of tan vines, then tossing them down.

Andy was aiming for the ground directly below him, but he’d never been accurate with his throwing, and the vines landed inches from Alejándro Cala.

“Sorry,” Andy yelled down. “Almost hit you there.”