He sat up slowly in his nest of bubblepak, then climbed out the open back double doors into simmering, eye-hurting, late-morning sunlight. The Troupers had left the highway and worked their way up a scarcely used dirt track to the top of a low flat hill. The hill was one of the limestone rises typical of the region, a bush-spattered bump in the landscape that had tried and failed to become a mesa.