“Once this fog clears, they’ll take off. Should be within the next two hours.”

But it wasn’t.

Though it was dry season, a storm moved in, drenching the camp for most of the early morning.

Finally, around noon the storm let up, and an hour later the helicopter landed. It took the eleven of them thirty minutes to carry the first load of supplies—tents, chairs, folding tables, snacks (two dozen jars of Nutella, huge stacks of tortillas, thirty bags of beef jerky, plus a large assortment of energy bars), ten cases of bottled water, portable generators, toilet paper, portable stoves, and emergency first aid kits—to base camp. Once they’d emptied the helicopter, it took off, hoping to make another round trip before the threatening clouds to the east blew in.

Andy grabbed one of the tents, then spent the next thirty minutes widening his campsite, setting up his tent, and hanging a clothesline. He changed into a nearly identical pair of khaki pants and a light-blue North Face long-sleeve shirt and hung his rain-dampened clothes to dry.

When he returned to the main camp, two large canopy tents—ten feet by ten feet and made from collapsible aluminum frames and a heavy white tarp—had been assembled. Several tables and chairs filled each of them.

Nathan Buxton and Jonathan Roth sat across from each other in two of the chairs, and the author was scribbling notes in a journal. From what Andy could overhear, it sounded like Buxton was doing deep background on the documentarian: where he grew up, his parents, high school, when he got into film.

“Let’s go already,” Farah demanded several times.

But it would be yet another two hours.

At 3:00 p.m. Holland rounded up everyone and said he and Rix would be leading a team to the ruins in thirty minutes.

Nearly fifty-five minutes later, Farah shouted, “This is crazy! T2 is just on the other side of the stream. Why do we need a freaking chaperone?”

Andy, Farah, Buxton, and the two Bolivians were standing at the bank of a small stream. It was fifteen feet across. On the other side was a muddy embankment that led into thick brush. According to the lidar scans, the closest of the six major archaeological sites—T2, or Target 2—was less than six hundred meters away.

Farah shook the Trimble GPS in her hand and said, “Why can’t we just go? It’s not like we’re going to get lost.”

“I read that GPS is pretty unreliable in the jungle,” said Andy.

Several variables caused this, but the two biggest factors were the thickness of the canopy and the position of the satellite in space. That’s why Holland had ordered each of them to carry a real compass.

“Oh, you read that, did you?” Farah said.