Cielo was bemused that after so many years the old man would entrust him with such a secret. It was because the old man wanted his confidence, of course; the old man was thirsty for information—he’d wanted every detail no matter how trivial. How much was this dealer charging for Kalashnikovs? Couldn’t they have got a better price in Algiers? What was the exact range of the rocket launchers? How many rockets? Which model of flame thrower had been settled on? How much was being paid per thousand rounds of rifle ammunition? It all went into the ledger in the old man’s head. Cielo remembered thinking, You won’t make a profit on these transactions no matter how you bargain the prices down. But it was in the old man’s blood.

The Land Cruiser bumped painfully into the woods. The trail lifted them at a grinding deliberate pace toward the Cordillera—green peaks rising in a thin mist that the heat never quite seemed to dissipate. After a little while it dipped into a wide cañon and Vargas guided the wheels carefully up onto a vast shelf of rock that was tipped just enough off the horizontal to give Cielo a queasy feeling—one day, he thought, the Land Cruiser would tip right over on its side along this stretch.

Off to the right the tire-truck ruts resumed at the edge of the rock; in plain sight they stretched up into the woods toward the southeast. Julio and Vargas had spent half a day making that false trail.

Vargas put the Land Cruiser down the slope toward the creek that made its shallow way along the bottom of the rock slab. Driving slowly in the water with white froth birling off the hubcaps they spent a difficult five minutes pushing uphill in the streambed. This part always troubled Cielo because the rock supported no growth at all and this meant they would be visible from the air for the duration of this stretch. Ground trackers would lose them at this point but all it needed was one helicopter or a light plane passing over at the wrong moment.

Zigzagging from one side to another Vargas wrestled the Land Cruiser toward the head of the canyon. Eventually the bottom changed from solid rock to gravel; the walls began to narrow and the trees to press down; here Vargas and Cielo had to get out and unwind the cable from the winch. Hooking it to an enormous banyan they hauled the Land Cruiser up over a slumping shoulder of rock, after which Vargas reeled in the cable and they drove on through the trees.

This was the edge of El Yunque—the Luquillo Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rain forest on U.S. soil—the Puerto Rican mountain jungle. In his odd-job days as a tour guide in the late 1960s he had recited by rote that the El Yunque Forest covered nearly thirty thousand acres, climbed to an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet and absorbed an annual rainfall of more than one hundred billion gallons. The figures were impressive in the abstract; when you got down to a personal level what was more impressive was the sense of utter isolation that cloaked him every time he penetrated the jungle. Once inside the towering shade of El Yunque he no longer had any confidence he was on the same planet.

A paved road of narrow hairpin bends and frequent washouts bisected the forest to the east, going right over the central pass between the peaks of El Toro and El Yunque; that was the tourist route and if you were on it you could be back in the fleshpots of San Juan in less than an hour—it was only twenty-five miles away. But on these outer slopes there were no roads, no farms, no evidence that humans had ever passed this way.

Overhead the sun flickered like a moving signal lamp among the interlaced branches of sierras and tree ferns, colorados and palms, clumps of bamboo a hundred feet high, dotted bromiliads and orchids below; a rotting rich thickness of life.

Bugs buzzed. Parrots, macaws—flashes of color. And always the chirping of tiny coqui frogs like cicadas in the branches. The air was damp but not unpleasant; thinner here than at sea level and the smell was rain-clean.

Even to cut their basic primitive pioneer road they’d had to spend months chopping their way through coagulated undergrowth and laying stones across watercourses; at frequent intervals the rains washed these away and there was never a trip without having to stop and replace them. And still the pitch of the ground was so steep they had to use the winch several times each way.

It made for a long difficult trek despite the fact that the distance between the lowland farm where he’d left Stefano and the El Yunque camp was not more than seven miles as the buzzard flies and perhaps sixteen miles by pioneer track: They’d never done it in less than two and a half hours.

Twice after the rock slab they covered their trail again—made as if to strike out along false roads they’d prepared; then doubled back through water or rock.

A determined Indio tracker with dogs might find the camp eventually but he’d need to have a good idea where to look and he’d take so long about it that they’d have considerable warning of his approach. As added security they’d laid tripwires across the path on the high ridges nearing the camp. Driving in, Cielo had to dismount twice from the Land Cruiser to disconnect the wires while Vargas drove across them; then he hooked them up again and they rolled on into the camp. The tripwires were connected to cowbells in the cave—a rudimentary device but adequate.

The roadway entered the camp by way of a narrow gap—bamboo on one side, a sheer drop on the other: The path rode along this brief shelf and tipped down toward the camp of huts. Nothing short of a wrecking ball could make headway through the thickness of high bamboo that screened it. This was the only way in—easy to command, easy to defend; conceivably a man or two could deny passage to a battalion.

It wasn’t going to come to that. Cielo had no ambition to hold out heroically against an armed assault. Discovery here would mean surrender; he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice his men for nothing. The chief weapons in his arsenals were secrecy and concealment and deception.

There was a man on guard at the gap; there always was; this one waved his hand lazily and didn’t bother to unsling his submachine gun and Cielo reminded himself to have a talk with the man later—they all were slipping toward apathy, taking things for granted, depending on tripwired cowbells in place of vigilance.

Past the gap the road dipped toward the huts. It was a compact area with its back to the cliff, screened by thick growths of high bamboo and trees that soared to vertiginous heights; the cliff was a jagged upheaval of faults and abutments on top of which was a flat granite promontory, an open field beyond which another tier of jungle sloped up steeply toward the heights. The promontory overhung the camp and it was his plan to use it as a helicopter landing pad from which heavy equipment could be winched down and rolled into the cave behind the camp.

When he stepped out of the Land Cruiser he found Julio waiting for him.

“Did you bring me a few books?”

“I’m sorry, I forgot.”

“Damn.”

“Read the old ones again. What difference does it make? You can’t tell them apart.”

“The hell I can’t. A man gets bored up here. Did you give the girls a kiss from their uncle?”

“Sure—sure.”

Cielo went into the command hut with his brother; Vargas and Kruger drifted in and Cielo made his report to them—it contained no surprises except for the possibility that the man in the doorway had been spying on him. This disquieted Kruger more than the others; he was volatile and tended to fret about things. Kruger’s Spanish was even worse than his English, even after all the years, and in his presence they all tended to speak English although their conversation was peppered with common Spanish words and phrases. Kruger said, “If someone’s onto us, who?”