On April 28, 2012, the ten members of the expedition rendezvoused in Houston and flew as a group to the island of Roatán, in the Gulf of Honduras. Roatán is a world apart from the Honduran mainland; thirty miles long and about two miles wide, it is a tropical paradise of pearlescent sand beaches, turquoise waters, dazzling coral reefs, fishing villages, and luxury resorts—a major cruise ship and scuba dive destination. Because of its history as a British colony, English is the primary language.

Lovely as it was for a vacation spot, Elkins and Benenson had chosen Roatán, above all, because the island’s airport offered better security than the mainland for our plane and its classified payload. The State Department had issued a two-week permit for the plane to leave the country, but the permit required it to be kept in a high-security, nonpublic area with armed guards protecting it day and night. Elkins and Benenson hired the Honduran military to do the job.

Roatán, being in the northeastern part of the country, was also well situated with regard to Mosquitia: The three target areas were only about an hour’s flying time away. It had one drawback, however: The Roatán airport was forbidden to stock aviation gas. Because of narcotrafficking, avgas was tightly controlled in Honduras. Fuel tankers were routinely hijacked, the drivers killed and the fuel diverted for drug smuggling. The Cessna would have to touch down at the airport in La Ceiba, on the mainland, to refuel after every lidar flight before returning to Roatán.

At our headquarters, the Parrot Tree Plantation on the island’s south shore, the expedition team occupied a cluster of bungalows with red tile roofs, spreading along the shores of a turquoise lagoon, surrounded by white sand beaches, burbling fountains, and rustling palm trees. The suites sported marble bathrooms, kitchens with granite countertops, and bedrooms trimmed in polished tropical hardwoods. The complex was air-conditioned to frostbite levels. Behind the bungalows sprawled a huge freshwater pool, set among fake rocks, waterfalls, bridges, and dew-laden clusters of tropical flowers, with pergolas draped in snowy sheets, chiffon curtains billowing in the tropical breezes. At the adjacent marina, million-dollar yachts sat in their berths, lapped by Caribbean waters, their polished hulls blazing in the sun. The hills above were sprinkled with whitewashed villas.

“Why be uncomfortable?” Elkins said, as we gathered for a dinner of grilled lobster tails under a palapa on the beach, looking out over the lagoon, the night sky glittering with stars, the waves whispering along the strand.

These luxurious surroundings, however, only heightened the expedition’s anxious mood. On its journey down from Houston, the tiny Cessna had gotten stuck in the Florida Keys, grounded by a series of storms over the Gulf. It could be days before the weather cleared. Benenson and Elkins were paying thousands of dollars a day for everyone to sit around waiting. Nobody was happy.

NCALM had sent down three lidar engineers to run the mission: Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández Díaz, mission planner and chief lidar engineer; Michael Sartori, resident skeptic and data-mapping scientist; and Abhinav Singhania, lidar technician.

Fernández was, by happy coincidence, Honduran by birth. He had a PhD in Geosensing Systems Engineering from the University of Florida; he also held an MBA, summa cum laude, from the Catholic University of Honduras, and he was a Fulbright scholar. His familiarity with Honduran politics and culture, his fluency in Spanish, his knowledge of lidar, and his engaging personality would make him one of the most indispensable members of the expedition. The thirty-five-year-old engineer had a calm, matter-of-fact presence, behind which lay a brilliant scientific mind and a sly sense of humor. He was diplomatic, soft-spoken, and never ruffled when everything was going to hell around him, which happened frequently during the course of the expedition. Juan Carlos was delighted to be part of the project, and his involvement has since made him into a kind of national hero in Honduras. “It has to be the Monkey Gods,” he said with a laugh, “an amazing combination of luck, chance, and fate that I was in a position to help. If you’re from Honduras, you’re a mix of so many different things, Spanish and Indian. Even though my name is Spanish, I know there is some Indian in there.” He was hopeful about what the effort would mean for his country. “The people of Honduras don’t have a clear cultural identity. We have to start learning more about our past in order to create a brighter future.”

Sartori, by contrast, made no secret of his skepticism. “You’re really going to go down there in this huge wilderness, and you’re going to target these areas, but you don’t know what’s there? It just seems like such a crazy shot in the dark.” The absurd poshness of the resort, so unlike the usual penurious academic field expedition, added to his misgivings.

The expedition team also included a film crew, a still photographer, and Tom Weinberg, the film’s other coproducer and the expedition’s official chronicler. Weinberg was a man with an infectious laugh and a sweet, gentle personality, seventy-two years old, with a fringe of unruly gray hair and a beard. He had been working with Elkins since 1994 on the White City project. In his long career in film and television, he had earned several Emmy Awards and had become a legend in the Chicago film world. He cofounded the TVTV video collective in 1972, which produced “guerilla video” documentaries on progressive subjects in American culture and politics; later, he created the Media Burn Independent Archive, which, long before the Internet, stored thousands of hours of important documentary footage that might have been lost otherwise, including most of Studs Terkel’s interviews.