Dan glanced around carefully and listened to the increasing drone. He looked up and studied a bumpy blue-green limb well overhead. This limb was located so that a spy unit on it would cover most of the place where the boat had been. Dan carefully gauged the speed with which the droning was coming closer, then went by the mataform to the pile of goods he had transferred, came back with a long tube, and sighted at the overhead limb. There was a whoosh and a small colorless blob with a tiny bump in the center spread out on the limb. The blob gradually turned blue-gray, matching the limb, and then the spy unit was indistinguishable from the limb's other bumps and irregularities.
The droning noise was now quite loud.
Dan went by the mataform to his new camp and put on the helmet he used to control the glider.
An instant later, the glider gave a whir and jerked forward. The knot came untied, and the glider, carrying the mataform unit and a length of dark-green string, flitted out of sight amid the big tree trunks.
Dan, his hand on a knob at the side of the helmet, shifted his vision rapidly back and forth from the glider to the spy unit over the spot where the boat had been.
There now came into view, in the place where the boat had been, something that looked like a cross between an oversize bloodhound and a tiger. Right behind this came a man with a rifle. Then another man, and another. The angle of vision did not let Dan see exactly where the men came from, but he supposed there was a jetcopter just overhead.
The tiger-like animal snuffled around, pawed at the ground, made trips into the jungle on all sides, and finally ran back toward the shore. The men followed close behind.
Dan, shifting his attention back and forth from this scene to the glider, landed the glider nearby, just as the last of the men left the place where the boat had been. Dan quickly went to each of the three places near cities where he had landed the mataform transceivers, and moved each of them by glider well away from the places where they had landed. He left behind in each place a small spy unit.
He had just finished doing this when several loads of heavily armed men in jetcopters came down in all three places. The men, Dan noticed, wore no uniforms, and the copters were unmarked.