Session Alignment

The Colonel

The insurgents are already vectoring in from the east when the flag goes up .

By the time the Colonel ’s back in the game—processed the intel , found a vantage point , grabbed the nearest network specialist out of bed and plunked her down at the board—they ’ve got the compound surrounded .

Rainforest hides them from baseline vision but the Colonel ’s borrowed eyes see well into the infrared .

From half a world away , he tracks each fuzzy heatprint filtering up through the impoverished canopy .

One of the few good things about the decimation of Ecuador ’s wildlife : not much chance , these days , of mistaking a guerrilla for a jaguar .

“I make thirteen ,” the Lieutenant says , tallying blobs of false color on the display .

A welter of tanks and towers in the middle of a clear - cut .

A massive umbilical , studded with paired lifting surfaces along its length , sags gently into the sky from the pump station at its heart .

Eight kilometers further west—and twenty more , straight up—an aerostat wallows at the end of the line like a great bloated tick , vomiting sulfates into the stratosphere .

There ’s a fence around the compound of course , old - fashioned chain - link with razorwire frosting , not so much a barrier as a nostalgic reminder of simpler times .