Germ

Just outside Pedro Juan Caballero, the dirt road became an obstacle course of deep furrows and gaping pits—all filled with opaque water and banked with slippery mud. They were traveling in the oddest vehicle Julia had ever seen: it was a flatbed pickup of sorts, with a boxy front end, high cab, and bumpers that jutted out at least three feet from both ends; they looked like guardrails welded to horizontal posts. The seat was a wooden bench, the dash an unsanded wood plank. Strangest of all was the section of school lockers mounted to the bed behind the cab and rising above the roofline like a submarine's conning tower. The thing alternately roared with unnecessary gusto and then wheezed, ticking and coughing, on the verge of death. She couldn't decide if the Mercedes-Benz symbol on the ravaged grill was authentic or a joke.

At first, she was happy to discover the heater worked. Then, when her toes started feeling like boiling sausages and perspiration streaked her face, Tate informed them that the heater was stuck—and lowering the fan speed would cause it to overheat and break for good. He cracked the window to counter the heat, which chilled her face without helping her suffering feet one bit.

They sat in grim silence, staring through two recently cleaned spots in the bug-spattered windshield at the road's torturous topography. Tate flicked on the radio, and a stream of staticky polka music emitted from a small speaker. Barely into what Tate described as a circuitous thirty-mile, five-hour trip—the last eight miles on foot—her rear end already hurt. On top of the constant jostling on the hard bench, she suspected that a toothpick-sized splinter had embedded itself down there, but she decided the discomfort was better than the indignity of removing it. Every time Tate slammed the gearshift into the lower section of its H-shaped pattern, she had to push her knees to the right, into Stephen's thighs, to avoid getting them cracked by its long metal rod.

After nearly two hours, Tate said, "Now then."

She jumped a bit at his voice and was certain Stephen's head had hit the metal roof.

"The compound is under an old military airstrip in the heart of Paraguay's only jungle region."

"Under?" She'd never considered a subterranean complex.

He explained the slow process of discovering this fact through interviews with suppliers and Paraguayan officials looking for graft, and through personal reconnaissance.

"And this isn't even a jungle, really. Not in the way most people think of jungle—with a high triple canopy that keeps the sunlight out, heavy vines, fronds as thick as blankets. It's not quite that dense, despite being part of the rain forest that spreads down from the Amazon Basin. Think of very congestive woods and you'll get the idea."

"So we can reach the air base through the woods?" Stephen asked.

"I didn't say that. Nana-ykua has provided for himself what nature did not: an impenetrable fortress. Radiating out from the compound are tree-mounted cameras, microphones, microwave motion detectors, electric fences, booby traps, mines. We learned the hard way about these devices."

"Then what are we doing?" Julia asked. She looked at Stephen. Was he pale or was it just the way the moonlight washed over him? She squeezed his hand reassuringly.

Tate smiled. Leaning toward them, he mock-whispered, "I found a secret."

She waited for him to elaborate.

"An old mine. The Spaniards who settled this land didn't find the gold and silver they had in Central America or the northern part of South America, but they sure did look for it. The thinnest vein got them digging, tunneling until the thing petered out." He glanced at them, his smile broadening. "There's one that runs right into the compound."

"The opening is accessible?"

"It starts way outside, so far outside that it goes under almost all of Litt's perimeter security."

She nodded. Could the tide really be turning in their favor finally? "And Litt's people don't know about it?"

"Used to, I think," Tate answered. "They tapped into it when they moved in, far as I can tell. They put in a big steel door, an emergency exit, I think. Looks like they forgot about it. When I stumbled onto the mine, the entrance was completely overgrown with foliage; there were cobwebs as thick as ropes, spiderwebs, bats, other critters."

"They must have it secured."