“They’ve got the satellite,” Murph said. “I can tell it’s on the move.”

Juan nodded, sipping from his canteen. He hadn’t dared take a drink since first coming across the Argentine Special Forces. “They’re hiking it back to the trailhead, and then they’ll drive it down to camp and fly out on the helos.”

“And we’re . . . ?” Mark arched one Goth-plucked eyebrow.

“Going to stop them.”

Coming down the mountain in two parallel groups, the soldiers and the Corporation team were converging on a leveled-off section of hillside at least two acres across that the loggers had cleared to set up some equipment. There was an excavator with a grapple for loading logs onto the semis and a machine called a cable yarder. The tracked yarder had a tall mast supporting wires that ran two miles down the hillside to a mobile spar that was anchored by guylines at the base camp. From this long loop of cable dangled choker lines that the axmen could slip around the dressed trunks of felled trees. The logs were then hauled upslope to where they were placed on the tractor trailers, and the choker send down again for the next load.

The men who worked at this upper site had arrived from the base in the pickup trucks Raul Jimenez planned on procuring.

Juan was confident his four-man team could beat the larger Argentine group until they came across a cleft in the earth, the result of an earthquake that had split the land in two and caused part of the mountain to subside. Because of the jungle, it was impossible to know how far the fissure ran, so they had no choice but to treat it as an obstacle to be surmounted, not circumvented. In the geologic timescale, the tembler had struck just a short while ago—twelve thousand years, in fact. Enough time had elapsed that the sides of the fissure had eroded to a manageable slope, but they had to descend fifty feet and scramble up the other side using fingers and knees, brute strength, and muttered curses.

They were all winded by the time they reached the top, and, by Juan’s watch, they had lost fifteen precious minutes. They ran on, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Juan had known since accepting the assignment from Langston Overholt that he hadn’t had the time to put together an appropriate plan and that was now coming to haunt him. They were facing two squads of Argentina’s best-trained troops with nothing more than four machine pistols and the element of surprise. The odds of getting the power cell without engaging the soldiers were zero, and getting the cell and escaping back to Paraguay he put at no better than twenty/ eighty.

SIX

BY THE TIME JUAN AND THE OTHERS REACHED THE EDGE of the upper logging site, the soldiers of the Ninth Brigade had loaded their prize into the back of a pickup and were hopping into the truck with it. Half of them took a second truck. The vehicles’ owner knew not to protest.