the water pouch slung on her back.
And then it was just switchbacks and switchbacks, seemingly forever. She struggled, every second, with the desire to slow down, to stop and take a rest, reminding herself over and over that the men behind her were used to scampering around Afghanistan like mountain goats. For all she knew, Jones was putting guns to their heads to force them to go faster. So she tried to remember what that was like—Jones putting a gun to her head—and to use that to eke out a little more speed. As much as fear told her to keep looking down, her brain told her to keep looking up, trying to make out the next leg of the switchback on the slope above her. For sometimes these things were designed as much for erosion control as for hiking efficiency, and there might be places where she could dash straight up the slope for, say, fifty feet and thereby cut off hundreds of feet of a switchback’s apex. She perceived a few such opportunities and took them, arms flailing and legs scrambling as some part of her mind told her,
Which, if true, must mean that they were getting widely spread out on the trail below her. She wouldn’t have to contend with all of them at once.
Thank God Jahandar had stayed behind. But she’d been taking a silent inventory of their weapons and seen other guns perfectly capable of killing at long range.
She had no concept of time’s passage and had forgotten to count switchbacks. But she had the clear sense that the canopy overhead was thinning out, the light growing brighter, the switchbacks becoming less acute as the slope abated.
She got to a point where she simply could not run anymore, so she permitted herself to drop into a brisk walk while she drank more water—she hadn’t been drinking enough, the CamelBak was only half empty—and ate another couple of bars. She was now on something that almost felt like a proper hike through the woods. Still gaining altitude but no longer with the sense of clinging to a cliff face. Gazing ahead and up-slope through increasingly common gaps between trees, she saw the high terrain that she had both longed for and dreaded all through the ascent, and towering above it the bare scarp of Abandon Mountain, which had nothing to recommend it as a tourist attraction unless you were a big fan of bleak. It looked like a science-fiction magazine cover, a mountain on some dead moon of Jupiter.
It was during this little respite that she heard the sound of a helicopter somewhere and debated whether she ought to run out into the open and flag it down. But it was hopeless; the chopper was a good distance away and the sight lines obscured by trees.
If only she had saved some of those bright pastel garments so that she could wave them in the air.
Speaking of which, the air was now bitingly cold on her shoulders. She bolted the last of her energy bar and forced herself to accelerate into a trot, then slowly build that up into a run.
She was just hitting her stride when she heard a sharp cracking boom. Because of the way it echoed around all the neighboring slopes, she found it difficult to judge direction. She was fairly certain, though, that it had sounded out of the direction from which she had just come. Miles away.
There was no one moment, no one place when she made the decision to go for it. The trees became thinner and thinner, the sight lines became clearer and longer, the ground angled more and more steeply under her feet. Minutes ago, she had been running across nearly level ground. But now she noticed that she was scrambling, almost on all fours, up a talus slope; looking back and down to judge her progress, she saw a good quarter of a mile of perfectly open ground behind and below her, terminated in the distance by a fringe of scrubby undergrowth that shortly developed into proper forest.
Down in that forest she could see movement. At least one man, possibly two of them. They were at most five minutes behind her: a sufficient head start to keep her alive in the dense forest down below, but, up here, just enough to make it a challenging shot.
She snapped her head back around to scan the slope above her, hoping she might see a place to take cover.
In most ways, this place could not have been worse. During her geoengineering studies, she had learned all about the angle of repose, which was the slope that a heap of particulate matter naturally adopted over time; it explained the shape of an anthill, a mound of sugar, a pile of gravel, or a mountain of scree. The angle was different for each type of material. Its exact value was not important here. What was important was that the angle was everywhere the same, and so slopes made of such materials tended to be ruler straight. There were no mounds or bulges to hide behind.
And—as she kept being reminded—they were inherently unstable. As long as she remained on areas of larger rocks, her weight was not sufficient to break anything loose, but when she strayed into sandy or gravely areas she set off little avalanches. Nothing big enough to be dangerous, either to her or (unfortunately) those below her, but enough to give her the impression that she was climbing on a treadmill, burning energy but, like Sisyphus, going nowhere.
She had made it about two-thirds of the way up this sharpshooter’s paradise when she began to hear guns firing from below. At first, a loose and irregular string of four or five pops, probably shots from a pistol. One of them whanged off a football-sized rock perhaps ten feet away from her and dislodged it. It went tumbling down the slope, neither picking up speed nor slowing down, occasionally loosening smaller stones but not setting off anything like a proper avalanche. So the shooter had missed her by a mile, which was to be expected with that sort of a weapon at this distance; but the mere fact of being shot at and of seeing bullets hit things nearby had frozen her in a low crouch for several moments—moments that, she knew, the slower members of Jones’s crew were using to make up for lost time. She forced herself to keep scrambling, heading for a patch about twenty feet above her that seemed to include a few larger rocks—perhaps just enough that she could flatten herself behind them. This worked for all of about three seconds, until a hellish racket started up from below, so startling her that she planted a foot wrong, lost her footing, and fell hard, banging one elbow and nearly planting her face. The air around her was full of sharp dust and zinging fragments of rock. Someone down there had opened up with a fully automatic weapon. She hazarded a look down and saw, through a cloud of kicked-up rock dust, one of the jihadists planted there with a submachine gun braced on his hip. Not one of the bigger assault rifles, which fired high-velocity rifle rounds. This would be loaded with pistol rounds. Still perfectly capable of tearing up her body, of course, but intended for short- range work. Urban combat. Mowing down commuters on buses.
The shooter’s companion—the one who had been firing the pistol a few moments earlier—shouted some advice at him, and he sullenly raised the weapon from his hip to his shoulder. Yes, he was actually going to try aiming it this time.
Zula got up and scrambled as hard as she could.
More shouted debate from below. The man with the submachine gun had been persuaded that he would get better results if he deployed its collapsible stock and braced it against his shoulder.
While this was being done Zula was putting everything she had into a frantic series of leaps and pounces. When frantic pawing didn’t work, she paused, breathed, planted feet and hands on big rocks, and hurled her body upward.
The noise began again and then stopped; a hail of rock splinters peppered her back. Another burst then struck the slope above her, sending a few stones tumbling down, forcing her to dodge sideways for a couple of yards. Something tugged at the loose fabric of her cargo trousers, behind her thigh, and she dared not believe that a bullet had passed through it. A brief silence, and then several rounds chattered against a mosaic of bigger rocks, perhaps watermelon sized, just ahead of her: the shooter had figured out where she was going and was trying to drive her back. But she had already launched herself and could not have changed her course even if she’d had second thoughts. Something whacked her in the mouth. She landed on her belly and flattened herself on the upper side of this tiny collection of larger stones. She could not see the shooter; that was good. Rounds struck near her feet. She kicked wildly, bashing a few protuberant rocks out of the way, enabling her to settle her legs and her feet just a few inches lower. Important inches.
She was choking on something that was cold and sharp and hard, and hot and sticky and wet at the same time. She hocked and spat and felt the hard thing leave her mouth, sending a jolt of pain up into her skull.
Actually it was two hard things, borne on a spate of blood and saliva: a chip of rock, about the size of a
