Juan took the truck even closer to the edge. The front tires were digging ruts out of the very lip of the shoulder while the outside drive tires and the outside tires on the right side of the trailer hung in space. At a closing speed of sixty miles per hour, but separated by two hundred vertical feet, the three vehicles raced toward one another.

Without taking his eyes off the road, Juan felt for the door handle and made sure it hadn’t latched. It was all down to the timing. Too soon, they would stop. Too late, and he would miss.

Juan judged it as finely as he could. He cranked the wheel to the right and threw himself from the cab, landing hard on the road but tumbling across his shoulder like an acrobat, and came up on his feet.

The eighteen-wheeler teetered on the brink for another second before rolling off the road. It hit square on its side, its momentum plowing the grille though the churned-up ground until it smashed into the stump of a tree that must have stood for a hundred years before greed sealed its fate. Steam gushed from the ruptured radiator, and the windshield was punched out in two solid sheets that exploded into mounds of glittering glass chips.

At the violent impact, the trailer bucked and threw its load. There were thirty logs on it, most the width and length of telephone poles while others were monsters that weighed three tons apiece. They stayed in a tight bundle for the first few yards as they rolled down the hill, but once they started bouncing off stumps, all semblance of order vanished. Some bounced off stump after stump, changing directions as they fell. A few were upended by the impact and hurtled down the hillside like ballistic projectiles.

The driver of the lead pickup never saw the deliberate accident above his truck, and it wasn’t until he heard cries of alarm from the men in back that he knew something was wrong. He studied the dirt track ahead and saw nothing amiss. The steepness of the hill above them prevented him from having the proper angle to look up and see the avalanche moments away from sweeping the truck off the road.

“Hector!” screamed his passenger, staring wide-eyed up the hill. “Stop! For the love of the Virgin, stop!”

The driver, Hector, stood on the brakes, holding the wheel steady against the truck’s desire to fishtail. Then came a jarring impact as the second truck, driven by Raul Jimenez, slammed into their rear bumper. Hector had been wearing a seat belt, a habit drilled into him as a child, and no amount of macho grandstanding would get him to change.

The passenger—the team’s Sergeant—had never worn a seat belt in his life. He was catapulted through the windshield, leaving a man-sized hole ringed in blood from where the glass sliced his face and arms. He landed a good fifteen feet from the front of the truck. Hector had no idea if the Sarge was alive or dead when a log as thick around as a man’s chest rolled over him, crushing the man’s body into the hard earth.