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This struck him as dicey in the extreme, and something he would never have done had a pack of furious, heavily armed jihadists not been running toward him through the woods. Or at least he assumed they were doing so; the blast of the shotgun had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t gather much information by listening. The parachute cord was all of about an eighth of an inch thick. Its rated strength, he knew, would probably be high enough that two strands of it would support his weight — somewhere north of 250 pounds — in theory. But if it had been damaged, or if Zula’s knots didn’t hold —

Never mind. He started climbing. Or rather, he started to pull rungs down toward him. The cord was stretchy and would not bear his weight at first. But after a couple of tries the rungs began to push back against his feet and to pull back against his fingers and he noted that the cliff face was moving downward. Once he had gained about ten feet of altitude, he was tempted to swivel his head around and look out over the space between here and the river to judge the progress of the jihadists, whom he assumed must have started running in this direction when they had heard the boom of the shotgun. But he didn’t think it would do him any practical good and so tried to focus on climbing. He scaled a few more rungs and then risked a look up. The top of the cliff was dishearteningly far away. He had lost sight of Zula. But then something moved up there and he realized he’d been looking at her all along; she was lying on her belly with just her head sticking out at the ladder’s top, lost in the visual noise of the forest towering over her head. Light gleamed in the lenses of her eyeglasses. She was looking out over the territory below and behind Richard, and what she saw was making her nervous.

“Throw me the handgun!” she called.

Richard stopped, leaned against the damp rock of the cliff face, patted his flank until he felt the hard heavy shape of the gun in his pocket, then unzipped it, pulled out the weapon, and lobbed it, swinging his arm as far outward as he could and putting a lot of oomph into the throw. He didn’t want to see the thing clattering back down past him a moment later. Zula’s face elevated as she tracked it, and then she was up on hands and knees and she disappeared from his view.

Until now Richard had been held against the cliff face — which was not completely vertical — by gravity. Now he arrived at a concavity, created by a heavy brow of rock that protruded slightly, perhaps fifteen feet above him. Climbing the rope ladder became much more difficult as his feet thrust forward into the empty space, causing his whole body to lean back, hanging from nearly straight arms. His progress slowed considerably, and he found himself escalating into something that approached panic, so eager was he to get past this part of the climb and get over that brow, where he fancied he might be sheltered from anyone shooting upward from the cliff’s base. His movements became jerky and he started to swing. He saw too late that the strand of cord on the left side was being sawed at by a sharp edge of rock on the prominence above him.

The rock was nearly within his reach, about two rungs above him, when the left cord snapped. The ladder collapsed into a single strand of parachute cord with a series of sticks dangling from it. He swung to the right and his entire body rotated helplessly, causing the world to spin around him and giving him a view of the riverbank below: undergrowth thrashing madly all over the place as jihadists sprinted through it, calling out the name of Jabari. Farther distant he could see a tall figure clambering up onto a huge fallen log to gain some altitude and get a better view of the proceedings. It was Jones. His gaze went right to the bright spray of blood where Jabari had fallen, then traveled up the rope ladder until he locked eyes with Richard.

Richard was not one to back away from a staredown, but he had other concerns at the moment and so he kicked his legs to get turned around, then flailed them until he had trapped a fallen rung between his ankles, and straightened his knees while pulling as hard as he could with both arms. He hand-over-handed his grip to a higher position, raised his knees, reestablished the ankle grip, and repeated the procedure.

Something whined past him and in the same instant made a sharp whacking noise against the rock back in the little concavity. Then it happened a couple more times, and he heard the reports of a gun from down below. There was no rational reason why this should make him stop climbing. On the contrary. But he couldn’t help freezing up for a few moments.

A series of bangs sounded from closer, up above him. He looked up to see flashes of light spurting from the barrel of the Glock, just at the top of the ladder.

Another leg thrust, another hand-over-hand, and a desperate adrenaline-fueled reach gained him enough altitude to grip the first rung above the rope break. He got both hands on it, performed a chin-up, did more desperate pawing and kicking, finally got to a place where he could get his feet planted against the rock prominence. Then he covered a few rungs very fast.

The ladder had begun to jerk and dance madly, and he realized that someone at the base of the cliff was either climbing it, or else yanking on it trying to break the rope. He paused in his climbing long enough to pull out the knife and sever the remaining cord just beneath the rung that was supporting his feet. The ladder sprang out away from the cliff and fell from view. Watching this was a mistake, since it gave him vertigo. He saw muzzle flashes from below. But at the same time he drew courage from the fact that many of the sight lines connecting him to the flat ground between here and the river were blocked by the dense foliage of evergreen trees. Most of the jihadists were shooting blindly, or trying to draw beads on him through small gaps between branches, or running around trying to find a position from which they could do so.

It would not be accurate to say that a man of his age and weight could scamper, but he felt as if he scampered the last ten rungs and finally hurled himself on his belly at the top. Zula withdrew from her perch almost in unison with him and they ran for a hundred or more feet into the forest, side by side, before stopping. As if the bullets could chase them over the lip of the cliff and hunt them through the woods. But they couldn’t, of course. Only Jones and his men could do that. And as Richard had understood the moment he’d seen it, the ladder had given them a long head start on the jihadists.

Then Zula got in front of him and pulled a sharp U-turn and body-slammed him and wrapped her arms around his torso and ratcheted them down like enormous zip ties. Her face was in his chest and she was sobbing. Which Richard almost felt was his prerogative, since she had saved him; but he wasn’t about to make an issue of it. He was still so astonished by all that had happened in the few minutes that had elapsed since he had hopped away from the campsite to answer the call of nature that he could do very little but stand there dumbfounded and await the cardiac arrest that seemed as though it ought to be inevitable. He got the back of Zula’s head in the crook of his elbow and pulled it firmly in against his chest, planted his feet wide, and breathed.

IT WAS SHE who recovered first. He heard muffled noises and realized that she was trying to talk. He relaxed his grip on her, saw her face turn up toward him. A miracle. Every time he saw that face for the rest of his life he would call it a miracle.

Her lips were moving.

“What?” he said.

“Chet’s up above the falls,” she said. “He’s hurt badly.”

“Crap,” Richard said. “You know we have to get over to Prohibition Crick and warn Jake.”

“Yes,” Zula said, “I do know that. But I’m just saying.” In her tone was a kind of incipient, Furious Muse — like shock that Dodge would even consider not going back to check in on Chet.

“Did those fuckers shoot him?” Richard asked, jerking his head back the way they had come.

“Different fuckers,” she said. “But all part of the same group, as you may have guessed.” She added, “I’m not even sure if Chet is still alive, frankly. He was looking pretty bad.”

“Do you think you can find your way to Jake’s from here?”

This set her back on her heels for a second. “You’re saying we should split up? That I should run ahead to Jake’s while you circle back and see how Chet is doing?”

“Just a thought. I know a shortcut; I can get back to where Chet is in no time.”

“I think it’s the only way,” she admitted, looking like she was going to start crying again. A whole different kind of crying. The last jag had been letting go of terrible pent-up emotions. The coming one was sadness that she would have to go out on her own again so soon.

“The only thing is,” Zula said, and stopped, looking embarrassed at what she’d been about to utter.

“I have to get word back to the re-u.”

“Yeah.”

“I have to tell the story that you survived Xiamen, you survived whatever the hell you’ve been through the last couple of weeks, and you went on alone to warn the others.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Which means you have to survive.”

“I have to survive,” he corrected her, “if you don’t.”

“That’s true,” she said, as if he had made some cogent point during a business meeting.

“The flip side is — ”

“I have to survive if you don’t,” she said. “But you will. You always do.”