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wildlife preserves instead of midnight.
    As Wallis continued to accelerate along the rough dirt road, he pulled an encrypted satellite cell phone out of his jacket pocket and activated a quick-dial number.
    “Alpha-Tango, this is Gecko-One.   Do you copy?”
    “Go ahead, Gecko-One.”
    “Alpha-Tango, be advised our ETA is approximately forty minutes.   Be prepared to … oh bloody hell!”
    A pair of bright headlights suddenly appeared in the road, nearly blinding Hateley and forcing Wallis to rip the now-useless night-vision goggles off his face.
    “Who are they?” Hateley demanded, but he already knew the answer.
    “Thai Rangers,” Wallis said calmly.   “You stay in the vehicle, sir.   Keep your goggles on and your head down.   I’ll handle them.”
    Wallis undid his safety belt, opened the door of the Land Rover, and calmly stepped out into the road, using one hand to shield his eyes from the glaring headlights.
    “Stay where you are, and keep your hands up!” one of the Rangers — the driver — yelled as he stepped out of an old, mud-encrusted Jeep Cherokee and aimed a short-barreled submachine gun directly at Wallis, who quickly noted the sergeant stripes on the man’s uniform sleeves.
    Two more uniformed Rangers — one with a pair of corporal stripes on his upper sleeve, and the other bearing a constable’s insignia — jumped out of the jeep’s rear doors with longer-barreled assault rifles up and ready. The fourth Ranger — younger than the sergeant, but clearly the leader of the four-man team, probably a lieutenant, Wallis guessed — stepped out of the front passenger seat with his right hand around the grip of his holstered pistol and a pack-set radio in his left hand.
    “What’s the meaning of this?” Wallis demanded, keeping his hands open and high in the air as he continued to approach the vehicle.   “We’re biologists on official assignment.   We have a permit from your government that specifically allows us to work at night in this sector of the Preserve.”
    “Why were you driving in the refuge without lights?” the team leader demanded.
    “We use infrared-filtered lights and night-vision gear out here so the animals can’t track our movements,” Wallis said patiently as he came to a stop a few feet away from the senior Ranger, and just past the cone of the jeep’s glaring headlights.
    Now he could see all four Rangers clearly, Wallis focused his attention on the shoulder patch on the team leader’s uniform, the sewn insignia clearly indicating a lieutenant in the Thai Forestry Police Division. The young commander had a suspicious expression on his face; the older sergeant looked tough and competent; and the corporal appeared ready to shoot the first thing that moved.   Only the young constable looked uneasy.   An unfortunate combination as far as Wallis was concerned.
    “It’s a necessary collection technique when you’re using short-range dart guns to tranquilize these creatures,” Wallis went on calmly.   “Your superiors are very much aware of our protocols, and we have already paid a great deal of money for the privilege of collecting the genetic samples in your Preserves.”
    The mention of genetic samples — or it might have been the great deal of money, Wallis wasn’t sure — seemed to make the Ranger lieutenant hesitate.
    “We heard a gunshot a few minutes ago.”
    “That was probably us; sometimes we have to use a high-velocity dart to get at some of the more skittish animals,” Wallis explained.   “The propane charges are extremely loud when they go off, and the sounds do echo considerably in these mountains, but —”
    “You’re not out here hunting?”
    Wallis managed to look offended.   “You mean actually killing things?   No, absolutely not; we’re simply capturing animals and collecting small bits of tissue — ideally from every mammalian species in the Preserve — to work out the DNA sequences.   Catch and release.   All we