“I was just kidding, Doc. Don’t try to find one. She’d be deep within the colony. Before you got to her, you’d be hamburger.”

Joey tipped his hat, waved good-bye with his heavily bandaged hand, and was gone. Lou listened until Joey’s footfalls had disappeared into the dense woods. Finally, when the only sound in the still afternoon was the continuous scraping and scratching from the bellicosus termites, he powered up the radar machine.

Despite the bug repellent he had swathed on himself, he wondered at what distance the insects would sense the presence of live flesh, and organize themselves for an attack.

The ground radar system whirred softly as it came to life. The cart’s handlebars vibrated, causing Lou’s forearms to tingle. The display screen went from deep gray to varying lighter shades. The background colors were of no interest to him. They represented natural soils, not the organized, hyperbolic reflections of air tunnels within the ground, which were black.

Lou maneuvered the radar closer to the tower, fearing that the ground beneath him might cave in. The first subsurface ventilation shaft came into clear focus a foot from the conical structure. The markings on the radar’s display screen looked like flickering, serpentine shapes—black, projected onto a gray background. As Lou moved the antenna away from the ventilation shaft, the change in reception altered the subsurface reflection, causing the curved shape to disappear from the screen. By trial and error, he learned that so long as he had the black patterns on his radar display, he was standing over one of the ventilation shafts.

Using a pad and pencil, Lou mapped a number of the largest shafts, keeping a careful log of the orientation and length of each on graph paper Humphries had provided. Each of the tunnels led to a small hole in the surface topography along with a baseball-sized depression in the soil that contributed ventilation to the remarkably constructed tower.

Sweaty and aching, Lou mapped the entire area until one quadrant, which he had labeled SE—southeast—caught his attention. It contained a thicker, curved black shadow than the others—a dark snake that went to the edge of the screen and did not seem to have an end. Lou wheeled his apparatus ahead and followed the winding shape on his display as it led him away from the huge structure and deeper into the forest.

One hundred yards … two hundred … three …

The shaft was still beneath his feet, running parallel to the surface, about two feet deep.

Eventually, Lou emerged into a broad clearing about the size of a football field, with a single-story, windowless brick structure at the far west end. There was a narrow unpaved access road just opposite from where he stood, which opened into a small dirt parking area. There was a single empty car standing in the lot—a large black Mercedes four-door with Virginia plates.