He paused, studied the patient, and exhaled a sigh of relief. The patient's breathing was stronger and more regular, his skin color vastly improved. A water collection system at the opposite end of the chest tube would keep the air draining from the patient's chest while insuring that no air was drawn back into it. To complete the procedure, the young doctor would suture the skin around the tube to preserve the seal.

A very long night still lay ahead, but Thibodeau would have something like a fighting chance as the doctors hustled him into the OR, opened him up, and got a look at the extent of the damage that had been done inside him.

SIX - CHAPARE REGION WESTERN BOLIVIA APRIL 18, 2001

SIX

CHAPARE REGION WESTERN BOLIVIA APRIL 18, 2001

A LOOK OF QUIET GRATIFICATION ON HIS FACE, HARLAN DeVane watched the line of three flatbed trucks roll along the hardpack at the eastern border of his ranch as they approached the airstrip and the waiting Beech Bonanza in a cloud of dust. Now, before midday, the sun was a firebrand hanging above the battered old camiones and the wide, flat pasture closer by, where he could see his cattle, prime heifers imported from Argentina, grazing indolently in the heat. There was no wind, and the ash and smoke from the forest fires seemed an inert smear above the horizon. Once the afternoon breezes stirred, however, it would rise and spread into a blanketing gray haze, dimming the sun so that one could look directly up into it with the unprotected eye. It was a price of development that DeVane found regrettable, but he was a man who dealt with realities as they presented themselves. The loggers bulldozed new roads, and the opportunistic peasant farmers and ranchers who came here to settle followed along those roads, and because the soil was quickly depleted in the Amazon basin--good for no more than three years' growing of crops--they would clear previously untouched tracts of forest as their fields dried up and grew fallow. The cycle was implacable yet unavoidable. Nothing in life came free of charge, and most often you paid as you went.

"It appears the plane soon will be on its way, Harlan," Rojas said, taking a sip of his chilled guapuru.

DeVane looked at him from under the brim of his white Panama hat. His skin was tightly stretched over his cheeks and almost colorless. His eyes were a frozen shade of blue set deep in their sockets. He wore a white double-breasted suit that had been custom-tailored from some lightweight fabric, probably in Europe. The collar points of his blue silk shirt were neatly buttoned down under blue-and-yellow pinstriped suspenders. Unbothered by the torrid weather, he seemed to occupy his own still pocket of space, putting Rojas in mind of the lion-fish that floated in the waters of the Carribean--so illusively delicate in appearance, so serenely poisonous.