John and Randy climb out of the Humvee to the sound of gunfire. Artificial light radiates upwards from a slot neatly dissected out of the jungle nearby. Humidity and clouds of insects make light a nearly solid and palpable thing here. John Cantrell leads Randy across the perfectly sterile parking-slab and into a screened and fenced tunnel that has been stabbed into the black vegetation. Underfoot is some kind of black plastic grid that keeps the nude soil from becoming a glue-trap. They walk down the tunnel, until twenty or thirty paces later it opens up into an extremely long, narrow clearing: the source of the light. At the far end of it, the ground rises abruptly in a sort of berm, partly natural, Randy thinks, and partly enhanced with fill dirt excavated from the house’s foundation. Two large paper targets in the shape of human silhouettes are clipped to a rack there. At the near end, two men with ear protectors pulled down around their necks are examining a gun. One of these men is Tom Howard. Randy is struck but not really astonished by the fact that the other one is Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, evidently fresh in from Manila. The gun looks like exactly the same model that some of the black-hatted and bandanna-masked posse were carrying yesterday in Los Altos: a long pipe with a sickle-shaped clip curving away from one side, and a very simple stock made of a few bare metal parts bolted together.