With a cigar in his mouth, the old codger did ten jumping jacks. “Good as new,” he’d said.

Andy wasn’t sure if he’d been faking his limp for the past three days or what, but he appeared to be fine.

Vern had traded in his duct-taped rucksack for someone else’s large pack and said, “Let’s get moving.”

And so they had. Andy, Vern, and Darnell moved at a brisk pace through the trampled-down jungle foliage. Luckily, they weren’t only navigating by broken branches and fallen leaves. When Thomas, Rix, and Diego had departed earlier that morning, Holland had insisted the trio attach orange GPS beacons to their packs.

Four hours later, when Andy had been getting ready to depart, Holland handed him the military-grade iPad and said, “The signal goes in and out, but this should help you find them.”

According to the signal, which had been strong at the time, Thomas and his crew were five miles ahead of them.

For the next several hours, Andy’s group made good time. When they made camp for the evening, only three and a half miles separated them from Thomas and the others.

That night, sleeping in a hammock, the weight of what Andy had decided to do hit him with full force. He was voluntarily going after a man who was searching for a ruthless tribe known to cut off its victims’ heads and consume their bodies.

He felt a panic attack coming on. The whistles, croaks, hoots, and buzzing of the jungle grew into a pulsating orchestra of his impending death. The dam was about to burst, and Andy was fumbling for his pills when he realized he hadn’t packed them. He was in the middle of the jungle, without Holland and the camp as a safety net, and he hadn’t packed his pills.

What had he been thinking?

He was on the verge of hyperventilating. He forced his brain to think of Libby.

He ran the clip back in his head of walking past the waiting Farah and toward Libby. Libby’s eyes widening as she realized he was headed right toward her. Andy leaning forward and kissing her. Really kissing her. A manly, going-off-to-war kiss.

A few moments later, Andy’s panic attack subsided.

The three of them woke up before the rising sun and headed through the jungle for the first hour with their headlamps on. They had closed the gap to less than three miles when the three red dots disappeared.

The iPad had a good signal, two out of four bars, which meant Thomas, Diego, and Rix’s GPS beacons had lost their signal.