“Good. Now, get your asses down here. I’m going to need you to bail me out.”

Juan reached the front of the trailer. The road ahead continued straight for nearly a mile before it twisted back on itself through another hairpin. The pickups were just a dust cloud halfway there. To Juan’s right was a two-hundred-foot drop, at the bottom of which ran the next loop of the switchback road.

Looking down over the front of the trailer, he could see the tops of the semi’s eight spinning drive wheels and, through the skeletal frame of the chassis, the graveled blur of the roadbed. A misstep would land him under twenty tons of exotic hardwoods.

Rather than leap, he climbed down the butt ends of the logs and stepped lightly onto the truck’s chassis. He could see the driver’s head through the cab’s rear window, and if the man happened to glance at his rearview mirror he would see the Chairman. Juan stepped right onto a diamond-plate fuel tank as big around as a barrel. He clutched the handhold screwed into the cab directly behind the driver’s door in his right hand and placed his other on the door handle. The driver’s bearded face filled the big wing mirror in front of him.

The Argentine’s eyes drifted left, and in the second it took his brain to register what he was seeing Juan threw open the door and grabbed the man by the collar. The door rebounded into Juan’s arm but didn’t have enough pressure to even slow the Chairman, as he yanked the hapless man from his seat and flung him far enough away from the semi that he wouldn’t be caught under the wheels.

Juan pulled his machine pistol from around his back and leapt into the seat, noting that even with both windows wide open the cab smelled of stale sweat, spicy food, and a hint of cannabis. He had his foot on the gas before the rig had slowed more than a mile or two per hour. He checked his mirror to see the driver slowly getting to his feet. He was dazed, for sure, but didn’t look permanently injured.

Now came the tough part, Cabrillo thought grimly. Glancing up at the road above, he could see a feathery plume that would be his men coming after him in hot pursuit. Down the slope, the road was still clear. The Ninth Brigade soldiers were probably just now entering the next hairpin on the long descent. Juan carefully steered the semi so its outside tires rode closer and closer to the edge of the road and the precipitous drop beyond. The ground was much less firm this far from the main ruts packed down over countless hundreds of passages. Gravel hissed from under the wheels and pattered down the stump-strewn slope.

There!

The height advantage of being on the upper section of the haul road let Juan see the oncoming pickups below. They weren’t going nearly as fast as he expected them to, and he wondered if they had a little trouble negotiating the last corner. The thought gave him a newfound respect for the men who drove up and down the mountain a dozen times a day.