“Does it really matter?” Juan asked back.

“No, I guess it doesn’t,” Max said.

Juan blew a loud breath. “I tell you, buddy, I’m having a real hard time getting my mind around this.”

“Why don’t you and I take off for a few days when you get back? We’ll fly down to Rio, plant our butts on the beach, and ogle a bunch of hard bodies in string bikinis.”

Time off sounded good, though Cabrillo didn’t particularly relish the idea of leering at women half his age. And he knew that after three failed marriages, Max wasn’t really on the prowl either. Then Juan remembered the crashed blimp and Mark’s suggestion to give closure to the families of men who’d perished on her. That was what his soul needed. Not staring at pretty girls but offering a bunch of strangers a little peace of mind after fifty years of wondering.

“I like the concept,” Juan said, “but we need to work on the execution. We’ll talk about arrangements when we get back to the ship. Also, you might as well go into my office. In the file cabinet should be Jerry’s last will. Let’s get that ball rolling right away. He didn’t have too much love for his ex-wife, but he did have a child.”

“A daughter,” Max replied. “I helped him set up a trust for her, and he made me the trustee.”

“Thanks. I owe you. We should be home by dawn tomorrow.”

“I’ll have the coffee waiting.”

Juan replaced the phone into its pouch and sat back against the tree, feeling like he was feeding every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius.

“Hey, Chairman,” Mark called a few minutes later. “Check this out.”

“What have you got,” Juan crawled over to where Mark sat with his legs bent like pretzels.

“You see this here and here?” He pointed to two tiny indentations on the glossy metal surface.

“Yeah.”

“These correspond with two matching holes in the nylon carrying harness. They’re bullet strikes fired up at us from when we took off in the chopper.”

“Those were nine-millimeter from point-blank range,” Juan said. “Barely made a mark. That thing is as tough as NASA boasted.”

“Okay, but look at this.” Mark struggled to turn the seventy-pound cell over so the top was facing up and then pointed at an even deeper pit gouged into the satellite fragment.

Juan gave his weapons expert a questioning look.

“Nothing matches it on the harness. That was put there before we got our hands on it.”

“Something the Argentines did to it?”

Mark shook his head. “We watched them dig it up, and it was out of our sight for only a few minutes before they loaded it into the pickup. I don’t recall hearing a shot. You?”

“No. Could it have happened when the logs slammed into the truck?”