“LZ coordinates coming up,” Mike said. If the prospect of landing the unfamiliar Eurocopter bothered him, it didn’t come through in his voice. “What the . . . ? I’ll be damned. Murph, how did you know?”

A quarter mile from waypoint Echo—the decaying wreckage of the blimp—was an area large enough to land the helicopter where the jungle vegetation was no more than a few feet high and composed mostly of immature shrubs and ground cover.

“When the Flying Dutchman crashed,” Mark shouted back, “its rubber gasbag would have landed nearby. As it lay across the jungle canopy, it would have shaded the plants under it until they died. Nothing would grow there until the envelope decomposed, forty or fifty years later. Voilà, instant landing zone.”

“Pretty slick,” the Chairman told Mark with more than a little pride. “Even for you.”

“Strap in,” Mike warned.

Hemmed in by thick jungle that rose a hundred or more feet into the air, the clearing was coming up fast. Trono slowed the Eurocopter on his final approach, skewing the aircraft to the left, then too far right, before centering over the nearly open area. He eased off the power, and the chopper slowly lowered itself earthward. When a sudden gust threatened to push the main rotor toward the wall of trees, he chopped the throttle a little too much, and the four-million-dollar aircraft hit with a bone-jarring impact. He immediately killed the engines. The turbines wound down, but the rotor continued to whip the grass into a frenzy and caused the trees to sway as if caught in a gale.

“Everybody out,” Juan commanded. “That other chopper will be back any second.”

Mike unbuckled his harness, and Murph went to work on Jerry’s.

“Forget it. I ain’t going anywhere,” the big Pole muttered. His chin was covered with blood. He held up an object for the others to see. Somehow, he had managed to pull a wad of Semtex plastique explosives and a pencil detonator from the thigh pocket of his combat fatigues. “Give me one last shot.”

“Ski?” Mike’s eyes were pleading.

“Not this time, bud. I don’t have it in me.”

“Damn it, Jerry,” Juan cursed. “I can carry you. The boat’s only a couple miles away.”

The sound of an approaching helicopter echoed across their little glen.

“I suck at good-byes,” Pulaski said. “Just go.”

“I’ll make sure your family’s taken care of.” Juan tried to look his friend in the eye but couldn’t. He shouldered his way into the seventy-pound harness for the power cell and jumped from the chopper. He took a moment to drag the unconscious pilot into the shrubs and found cover a short distance away, his machine pistol raised in the direction of the approaching Argentines.

“Give ’em hell, Jerr,” Mark said.

“You, too, kid.”

Tears welled unashamedly in Mike Trono’s eyes.

“Good-bye,” he said, and leapt from the Eurocopter.

Using Cabrillo’s GPS, the three men started off toward the RHIB. The plutonium was half the burden to Juan as the guilt he felt leaving Jerry behind. They had fought side by side for half a dozen years and had had drinks in every seedy harborside bar from Shanghai to Istanbul. Never could he have imagined abandoning Jerry Pulaski in a godforsaken jungle so he could blow himself up and give the rest of the team a chance of escape.