Nobody in this book does anything wrong. That is what the book is about.
Five men go onto a shoulder above a trail junction to count what crosses it, and the count is the smallest thing that happens to them.
The junction works at night and stands empty by day. The first report goes up off the only rock on the hill that transmits, and what comes back is not a thank-you but a heavier task: not how much, but where it goes and what it is. The mission stops being a quantity and becomes a duration — and duration is made of water, of batteries, and of the number of days five men can lie in a hole without one of them making the single small mistake that ends it.
Then the weather gets inside the objective glass, and a patrol that cannot identify a load from a safe distance has to close the distance.
