Nor was it a place where the niceties of sovereign border control were observed. A jeep took him directly from the plane to the compound along the western shore. His team would already be assembling in the olive drab Quonset hut, a structure of ribbed aluminum over a frame of arched steel ribs. The floor and foundation were concrete, the interior pressed wood. A small prefab warehouse adjoined it. The Liberty Foundation had a low-profile regional office in Rangoon, and so was able to move advance men in place to ensure that the rendezvous sites were in order.

Little had changed since Janson had last used it as a base of operations. The Quonset hut he would borrow was one of many on the island, originally erected by the Indian military and now abandoned or commandeered for commercial interests.

Theo Katsaris had already arrived when Janson pulled up, and the two men embraced warmly. Katsaris, a Greek national, had been a protégé of Janson’s and was probably the most skilled operative he had ever worked with. The only thing that disturbed Janson about him, in fact, was his tolerance—indeed, appetite—for risk. Janson had known plenty of daredevils from his SEAL days and knew the profile: they typically came from depressed Rust Belt towns, where their friends and parents had led dead-end lives. They were up for anything that saved them from punching the clock at the rivet factory—including another tour of duty in VC-controlled territories. But Katsaris had everything to live for, including a stunningly beautiful wife. Impossible to dislike, he had a charmed life, and yet set little store by it. His very presence would raise morale; people enjoyed being around him: he had the sunny aura of a man to whom nothing bad would ever happen.

Manuel Honwana had been in the nearby hangar but made his way back when he learned of Janson’s arrival. He was a former colonel in the Mozambican air force, Russian-trained and unequaled at ground-hugging flight over hilly tropical terrain. Cheerfully apolitical, he had extensive experience with combating dug-in, entrenched guerrillas. And it was very much a point in his favor that he had flown numerous sorties in the fixed-wing rattletraps that were all his poor country could get its hands on. Most American flyboys were PlayStation graduates, used to being surrounded by millions of dollars in digital avionics. Instinct tended to atrophy as a result: they were mere custodians of the machine, less pilots than information-system technicians. But this job would require a pilot. Honwana could reassemble a MiG engine with a Swiss Army knife and his bare hands, because he’d had to. If he had instruments, so much the better; if he did not, he was unfazed. And if an emergency nonstandard landing was required, Honwana would be right at home: on the missions he’d both flown and directed, a proper airstrip was the exception, not the rule.