Off across the valley, Juan spied some sort of construction site or excavation. He tugged his headscarf tighter around his face and started for the footpath leading to the camp below. He stayed close to the man in front of him so no one could get a look at his eyes and made sure to walk in a slight stoop to hide the fact that he was taller than most of the others.
He didn’t know if the men sent out to sabotage the downed airliner were stationed in the same barracks, but it stood to reason. He had watched them work, and while not as disciplined as professional soldiers they had a cohesiveness that came from working and training together in a tight group. Once they reached their billet, Juan knew his life would be measured in seconds.
The path wound along the edge of a steep ravine, its flank crisscrossed with countless intersecting gullies and wadis and covered with loose rock and sand. There was a shelf halfway down that sat atop a vertical cliff at least thirty feet high. Juan was judging the odds of his making it to the bottom alive as slim to nil when the team leader at the head of the little column turned around and started collecting their kaffiyehs.
The majority of the men knew this was coming and had already unwound their kaffiyehs from around their heads. Juan glanced down again at the camp to his left. No one had his head covered. It was a bonding tool, he knew. Only to outsiders would they be anonymous. Safe here at their camp and among their brothers, they showed themselves openly.
The odds no longer mattered.
He rammed the heels of his hands into the back of the man in front of him and snarled, “Watch yourself.”
The man whirled, his eyes fierce. “What did you do that for?”
“You elbowed me in the stomach,” Juan retorted. “I should kill you for the insult.”
“What’s going on back there?”
“This son of a pig pushed me,” Juan shouted.
“Who is that?” the leader called. “Show yourself.”
“Only when he apologizes.”
“I will not. You hit me in the back first.”
Juan swung at the Arab’s face, a lazy roundhouse lacking a tenth of Juan’s strength. The man saw it coming a mile away, ducked instinctively inside Juan’s reach, and fired two quick punches into Juan’s stomach. It was the excuse Juan needed. He yanked off the other man’s headscarf, turning him so Juan’s back was toward the rest of the men and no one could see his face.
“I don’t know you!” Juan cried in mock surprise. “This man is an impostor, an infiltrator.”
“Are you mad? I’ve been here for seven months.”
“Liar,” Cabrillo seethed.
The man went to push Juan. Rather than resist, Cabrillo grabbed his wrists and stepped back off the trail. His feet immediately began to slide. The gradient was gradual at first but quickly steepened. They started gaining speed, and when they reached a tipping point Juan fell backward, flipping the hapless terrorist over his head without relinquishing his grip, so the momentum tumbled him onto the man’s chest like an acrobat. It was now the terrorist’s body grinding against the sharp rocks, as they slid down the ravine with Juan lying on top.
They crashed into the first gully, and Cabrillo heard bones breaking against the hiss of gravel avalanching down the hill with them. The Libyan screamed in Juan’s ear as their speed careened them into the gully. They went down like bobsledders, only the terrorist was the sled. All around them, more and more rocks were loosened by the pair’s passage until, from above, the two must have been completely obscured by dust. Both of the man’s legs were broken below the knee and flopped sickeningly, as he and Juan whooshed down the defile, swaying up and down the sides according to the vagaries of the terrain.
Cabrillo used his artificial leg as a sort of rudder to keep them in the center of the gully as best he could. Each time he extended the limb, it was like a sledgehammer blow against his stump, but without Juan bracing them they would have started to tumble uncontrollably.
More gravel and sand was building up around them, and then suddenly they were on top of the avalanche they had created. The friction of the terrorist’s battered body scratching against the ground vanished without warning, and their speed seemed to double. Juan could no longer control their slide. When the gully began to twist to the left, the sheer volume of material rocketing down the hillside could no longer be contained and burst from its banks like a river in flood, bearing Juan and the Arab with it. They caught air as the ground dropped sharply away. When they came down, the terrorist was no longer screaming, and they had gained a few precious yards on the wall of gravel now in pursuit.
This new valley was wider and deeper than the first but twisted more often. Again, the avalanche caught up to them and again Juan rode the man as though he were straddling a tree trunk in a logging flume. Just ahead, he could see the debris cascading off the shelf he’d spotted from the top. He chanced a look up the slope. Behind the shifting thrust of gravel and sand, boulders tumbled in the avalanche, succumbing to the forces of gravity and the weight of dirt from above. It was like looking into the grinding mouth of an industrial wood chipper. The boulders banged and rattled against one another, pulverizing themselves as they fell.
He looked back downslope. The avalanche arced ten feet through space beyond the cliff before cascading to earth. Had it been water, Juan would have gone over the falls and had a good chance of swimming away at the bottom. But not here.
Cabrillo dug his prosthesis into the gravel, forcing it down into the avalanche until he felt solid ground beneath. Seconds before he and the Arab were carried over the precipice, he pushed off with everything he had, launching himself off the terrorist’s corpse in an awkward lurch that carried him right to the edge of the avalanche.
He scrambled onto all fours and started clawing his way upward, fighting the remorseless downward plummet of the gravel under him. It was like crawling against a treadmill set on maximum. There was no way he could gain any ground. The avalanche was much too fast. He only hoped to buy himself a few precious seconds as he angled himself farther up the side of the gully, driving himself to get out of the landslide’s grasp before it carried him over the cliff.
With ten feet to go, he was still mired in the fringes of avalanche. His bloodied fingers dug into it with machinelike tenacity, and his legs pistoned, kicking up dirt with each thrust. But it wasn’t enough. He was too far from the slide’s boundary to haul himself clear.
