Sam made a ninety-degree arc around the sounds, then stopped and waited. He knew Remi would already be in position. Her sure-footed fencer’s body could move through vegetation better than his. And he knew that when he moved in, he could initiate the most frightening close-in attack while Remi, the pistol champion, could do much more damage from a moderate distance. He took the pistol from his belly and began to crawl toward the voices. It sounded to him like six men and they seemed to be close, arranged in a circle. Maybe they were sitting around a fire—no, he would have smelled a fire. Around a circle anyway. What were they doing way out here?

And then he saw them. There were actually five men in their twenties, unshaven and wearing jeans, khakis, bits of old military uniforms, T-shirts. On the ground in the center of their circle they had laid out an olive drab plastic tarp. Spread on it were Tim Carmichael’s belongings—his satellite phone, all three sets of earphones, the maps from the helicopter, his wallet, his keys, pocketknife, sunglasses.

Set on the ground beside each of the five men was a Belgian FN FAL 7.62mm military rifle. Sam moved closer, searching for some sign of what had happened to Tim Carmichael, and then he saw him. Tim was a few feet off, at the edge of the thicker vegetation.

Carmichael was standing, his hands tied behind his back, his ankles tied. He had a noose around his neck, the rope thrown over a thick limb of the tree above him and then securely tied to the trunk. If he got tired, he still had to stand. If he leaned, the noose tightened around his neck. His left eye was black and swollen, he had scrapes on his face and grass stains on his clothes, and his hair was stuck together on top of his head from drying blood from a blow to the skull.

Sam worked his way around the clearing at a distance, trying hard to avoid discovery. When he was directly behind Carmichael, he slowly crawled to him through the thick jungle vegetation. Staying hidden by the trees and Carmichael’s body, Sam reached out with his knife and sawed through the rope at Carmichael’s wrists, then his ankles. He took out his second pistol, switched off the safety, and placed it in Carmichael’s right hand. Then he crawled a few feet farther and cut the rope from Tim’s noose where it was secured to the tree trunk. He tucked an inch of the rope end into the remaining loop of rope behind the tree so it would look the same.