The door leading into the processing plant rested closed. Shannon ignored it and ran for the corner beams that arched to the ceiling. His luck so far had been good.

Maybe too good.

THE RANGER teams penetrated the jungle in a conventional three-pronged fork foray. Rick Parlier led his team up the center, stepping through the brush light-footed. A dozen insects droned around him, but only those honing in on his neck bothered him and then only after an hour of high-stepping through the valley and finding nothing. He would have preferred to move much faster— take the team in on the run. But three self-repeating facts kept tumbling through his mind.

One, they didn’t know the geography. This wasn’t like picking a point over a few sand dunes and racing on over. It was more like crawling through a thicket of thorns. At night.

Two, although they knew that the valley was occupied, they didn’t know precisely how many others hid beneath the canopy.

And three, the agent was still at large, running about these trees like some kind of maniac. Best they could figure, he’d laid Phil out cold back there a few hours ago. Nothing else made any sense.

Parlier slipped behind a large palm and slapped at his neck, thinking it was time to speed things up when Mark snatched his fist to the air behind him, motioning a full stop. He dropped to his knees and waited for Graham to reach them from the rear of the file.

Graham slid in beside Parlier. “We got a problem, sir. Uncle has ordered us back.”

Parlier stared at the communications man. “Are they nuts?”

“You got me. They refuse to give an explanation. Just get out and get out fast. We got five minutes to get back to the cliffs.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them that was impossible.”

Parlier stood and snatched the transmitter from Graham’s hand. “We’ve got some imbecile ordering us around! I’m—”

An explosion suddenly shattered the air no more than a hundred meters to their right. Parlier whirled toward the sound.

The jungle shrieked with the response of a thousand creatures. “That was Gamma!” Graham snatched the transmitter back. He fingered the mike and spoke quickly into it. “Come in, James. What was that?”

The radio hissed its silence.

Graham’s hand trembled, and he depressed the transmission lever again. “Gamma, Gamma, this is Alpha. Come in!”

The receiver shrieked to life. “Alpha, we got trouble here! We got a man down. Tony’s down. I repeat, we got a man down from some kind of mine!”

Parlier grabbed the microphone from Tim. “James, this is Parlier. Now listen carefully. Get your man and get back to the cliffs. Do not, I repeat, do not proceed forward. Do you copy?”

“Copy that. Retreating now.” The radio fell silent.

A land mine? To protect what? “Beta, you copy that last transmission?”