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We eased inside and closed the door. I turned the lock. “El jefe’s office,” I said. “The boss of this place. Probably it’s the bald guy out there with the soldiers. I wonder who the hell he is. Damn, I don’t even see a phone. They must communicate by radio.”

Laura was already behind the huge Louis XIV desk, going through the papers. Behind her was a large glass window looking out over a small walled-in, English-type garden filled with tropical flowers and plants. “Damn, it’s all in Spanish and I can’t read it,” she said. “Quick, come here, Mac.”

Someone tried to turn the handle on the door.

I heard shouts. More pounding. A gun butt smashed against one of the doors, then another. The expensive wood splintered.

No time. I prayed and grabbed Laura’s left hand. We took a running start, crossed our arms in front of our faces, and crashed through the huge glass window behind the Louis XIV desk.

We thankfully landed on grass, rolled, and came up instantly into a run. We were in a private flower garden, perfectly manicured and maintained, and I, who loved flowers, didn’t give a shit.

Ain’t nothing easy, I thought, as I smashed the butt of my weapon against a small gate in the far corner of the garden. The aging wood splintered and fell outward. We were out of the compound, only to stop cold. There was absolutely nothing in front of us except jungle and a three- or four-foot-wide moat of sorts, probably to keep the jungle from encroaching into the compound every few days. It was filled with brackish water that looked like it could kill anything that even got close to it.

I took her hand again, and we jumped the moat. We heard shouting behind us. Guns were fired over our heads. Good, they hadn’t forgotten el jefe had told them to keep us alive.

We ran into a dense green wall of vegetation that blocked out the sun within a couple of minutes. It was going to be a race, us against a dozen men native to this place.

I’d never been in a jungle before. The floor wasn’t a thicket of plants and trees and bushes as I’d expected. We didn’t need a machete like the movies I’d seen had portrayed. It was nearly bare, only a single layer of leaves covering the ground. But even that single layer was rotten. Everything around us was alive and green or rotting.

It got darker as we ran, the green over our heads forming an opaque canopy. Only the thinnest slivers of sunlight managed to get through. No wonder everything rotted so quickly—there was no sunlight to dry anything out. People would rot too, I thought, and there were a lot of creatures to help them. This was not a good place to be.

We ran another twenty feet into the jungle and came to a dead stop. We couldn’t go farther without a machete after all. It was impossible to pull away the branches and vines that were in front of us, an impenetrable wall of green. I’d never imagined anything like this. We stopped and listened. For a few moments, we didn’t hear anything, then I heard a man shout. It was in very fast Spanish and I couldn’t make it out. I heard men crashing through the dense foliage, not paying any attention to where they stepped, just coming toward us.

“It’s time to try to hide,” I said. We went exactly ten big steps to the right, careful not to leave any signs of our tracks to this spot, and hunkered down behind a tree. I looked up and saw a frog staring me right in the eye. At least this little guy wouldn’t try to eat us. He looked like he belonged on that old Bud commercial.

We were ill equipped, just our clothes and guns. There was no way we could survive for any time at all in this alien place. I didn’t want to think about it. I had no intention of staying here any longer than necessary.

The men were close now, not more than twenty feet away from us. Two of them were arguing about which direction to take. Ants were crawling over my feet. Laura swatted the back of her hand. A coral snake, its beautiful bright bands announcing that it could kill you fast, slithered by not six feet from Laura’s foot. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders.