He ran on. Thirty feet, forty, fifty. Suddenly he stopped short. There was nothing before him but impenetrable rain forest, all of it thick as a carpet. He turned around. There was nowhere to go but back the way he had come.

He’d covered less than half the distance to the main trail when he heard them coming. They were moving hard and fast and jabbering in Spanish.

Abruptly their talking stopped and the sounds of them moving died out. The monkeys and birds stopped, too. So did Marten. Except for the rain, the jungle was silent. He held his breath. They were close and listening. He inched backward, his eyes locked on the foliage in front of him, feeling his way over the sodden ground. Then he heard someone shout, and the place where he had turned off the trail exploded with rushing men. They had found his track.

Marten whirled and raced through the tangle of growth in front of him. The rain came down harder, all but drowning out the shouts of his pursuers. He clambered over a rotting log, jerked apart a curtain of low-hanging vines, and slipped through it. The pounding of his heart roared over everything else. He didn’t have a chance and he knew it. God help him when they got him.

The rain and mud made footing next to impossible. He slid and started to fall, then recovered and looked back. He could see the first ones clearly. There were three of them. Forty feet behind him at best. Big, powerful black men in jungle camouflage uniforms. Razor-sharp machetes flailing the thick growth before them. Then one of them saw him and they locked eyes.