“What happened? Why didn’t you do it?” Gina was trying to extract as much information out of him as possible. In the three days she’d been traveling with the men, she’d gathered little more than the fact neither Patrick nor Bill spoke a lick of Spanish.

“Too much training,” Bill said. “It would have been too much time off work.”

“Got to bill those hours.”

Bill chuckled.

Gina was set to probe a little further, to ask him where the bike race was located, when she saw it. There was a backpack lying on its side, and one of the zippers was open. Gina squinted, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. Poking out through a small opening was the half-inch long nub of an antenna.

A satellite phone.

“Let me listen to your lungs again,” Gina said, pulling the stethoscope from around her neck and putting it in her ears.

Bill nodded, and Gina placed the chest piece against the front of his shirt. “Take a deep breath,” Gina instructed, though she was hardly listening.

After two breaths, she moved behind him. The backpack was four feet away. She pressed the chest piece to his back with one hand, and stretching backward with her opposite hand, she fumbled for the phone. Her fingers scraped at the half-inch antenna on her first try, and she said, “Okay, two more big breaths.”

Holding the chest piece with the tips of her fingers and stretching back with her hand until it felt like the tendons in her fingers would snap, she was able to get two fingers around the small antenna.

“One more big breath,” she said, sliding the phone toward her body and slipping it into the waistband of her shorts.

“Your lungs sound good,” Gina said, moving around to his front. “Have someone come get me if you start having chest pains.” She gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and said, “And try to get some sleep.”

“Sure thing, doc,” he said with a glimmer of a smile.

Gina ducked out of the tent, holding her shirt in place with one hand to make sure it didn’t ride up on her back and expose the top of the phone. The soldier who’d summoned her from her tent was hovering near the entrance and escorted her back to her tent at the edge of the brush. Gina noticed that the other four soldiers were gathering wood for a fire. Patrick was nowhere to be seen.