Cabrillo froze, windmilling his arms to prevent himself from taking a final step under the empty timber hauler’s massive tires. The stakes used to contain the logs the big rig hauled down to the river flashed inches from his face, and the vortex they cut through the soggy air threatened to suck him into the hurtling steel.

And then it was past in a cloud of dust. Juan took what could have been his last step and exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Training then bypassed the fear and shock, and he dove flat onto the deeply rutted road on the off chance the driver glanced at his rearview mirror. Cabrillo lay prone until the truck rumbled out of sight, then dodged back undercover.

“Close one,” Murph remarked unnecessarily.

Juan knew his subordinate was teasing him but didn’t rise to the bait.

When they were sure no more trucks would roar out of nowhere, the team dashed across the road in a tight pack, with Mike Trono trailing a hastily cut branch to obscure their boot prints.

Safely hidden on the other side, Juan withdrew the gamma detector from his pack. The piece of electronics was military grade, meaning it was as simple as the builders could get it. The machine itself was a matte-black box about the size of an old tape recorder. There was a simple on/off switch, one red light, and a clear panel that showed a single needle. When the red lamp came on, the machine was detecting gamma rays, and by sweeping it through three hundred and sixty degrees and watching the needle the user would learn in which direction the source lay.

Juan turned it on. The detector chirped once to tell him it was working, but the indicator light remained dark. They were still too far from the downed power cell to detect the trace amounts of gamma rays it emitted.

They started slogging higher into the hills, crossing and recrossing the same haul road as it switchbacked up the mountain. The smell of smoke was no longer an ethereal wisp carried on the breeze. The air was slowly filling with it, and white clouds clung to depressions in the land like noxious gas from a chemical attack.

Mark suggested flagging down the next truck they saw to ask for a lift and was only half joking. Juan knew the men were getting tapped out and decided that once they had the NASA cell in the shielded harness, they would find someplace to lay up for the night and make their way down to the boat and the hell out of Argentina the next morning.

It was noon when they reached the crest of the mountain. They approached it cautiously, on their bellies, so as not to show movement to anyone in the valley beyond. What greeted them was a scene out of hell.

What had once been a lush primeval forest was now a barren wasteland of mud and brush many miles across. Burn piles as tall as haystacks gave off towering pyres of smoke and fire while yellow excavators lumbered across the landscape, whole trees caught in their mechanical jaws. Amid the chaos, like ants, were men, moving from grove to grove, their saws keening, then straining, as they bit through timber that had taken generations to grow.