It does not, however, have any seats, at least in the cabin. They’ve all been ripped out, so we squeeze down onto the iron floor. A few seconds after we are all piled in, the old Cessna takes off with a hacking roar and banks sharply. Then it zooms away, flying just a few hundred feet above the treetops.

Peering down through the cabin’s windows, I can see the colonel’s fenced compound, built near a wide river. Virgin rain forest starts on the far side of that river and stretches away as far as my eyes can see.

We are flying so low that we seem in danger of dipping into the rippling sea of forest green. Every now and then streaks of color flame up at us as flocks of brightly plumed birds take wing together and burst from the trees toward the clouds.

I think of Gisco—what would he have made of my cell mates and their sad stories? And what would he think of this mysterious flight in an airborne junk heap?

Coward though he is, I’ve gotten used to facing danger with the big dog. It feels lonely to be going it alone. I hope I was right, and the guards were just taking him to another wing of the prison. Something tells me there is a more sinister explanation for why he was dragged away.

Minutes stretch to hours but the scenery below remains unbroken. The rain forest reaches from horizon to horizon, an untouched and seemingly untouchable world. It looks so vast and unsullied that it’s hard to believe the shadow of mankind could fall on it.

Ernesto is sitting near me on the iron floor, peering down at the green vista. “You made it sound endangered,” I whisper to him. “We could never cut all this down.”

He glances at the nearest guard, who is dozing off. “An area the size of France has already vanished, chopped down or burned,” he whispers back. “In thirty years it will all be gone. Every animal. Every tree. And the people …”

His eyes settle for a moment on an old Indian man who was brought along on this mysterious expedition. The little man is sitting with his legs and arms folded, his body slumping in on itself, as if the weight of the world is very slowly crushing him.

But his glittering black eyes are alive, and as we fly over the rain forest in this airplane that must be so strange for him, I can see him watching the world he knows so well, drinking it in, as his gaze flits from treetop to treetop, from a flock of parrots to a winding silver river.