“You want this?” Rink showed me my damaged SIG.

I took it from him. It was an old friend, and you never left a friend behind. “I’ll fix it.”

Rink went out the window first and covered while I negotiated the space. I didn’t want to feel like a hindrance, and when he offered me his elbow, I showed him I was okay by lifting my H&K to cover the opposite direction. Life in the old dog yet.

Harvey clambered out and we pepper-potted back toward the cleft in the cliff. Nunez scrambled down the rocks and then dropped to a knee, covering our retreat. Above him, Charles also covered us, his adrenaline-pale face looking as solid as the boulders surrounding him.

It was tough scaling the rocks up to the cleft. My right hand was alternating between numb and screaming in pain. I couldn’t decide which I preferred. When it was hurting I could at least use it. In the end, Rink swarmed past me, grabbed hold of the back of my jacket and dragged me up and past Charles. Harvey followed, and then Nunez came up as fleet as a cat.

The cleft was no place to linger. Not because there were sentries up on the cliffs anymore: Rink and Harvey wouldn’t have joined me without finishing them first. Anyone—with the exception of Luke Rickard—who’d seen any of us was now dead. However, no one down at Cesar Calle’s house was aware of our presence and it was better to keep things that way.

We hurried through the cleft, climbed down at the far end and got back on the trail, where we followed the river upstream. We didn’t slow down for a mile. Then Rink called a halt. He was concerned about me.

“Keep going, guys. I’m not so bad now that I’ve shaken off the effects of the explosion.” I caught glances from the Jungla troopers. Neither one of them was party to how close I’d come to being shredded by the frag grenade. Now they were studying me like I was a walking miracle. Maybe I was.

Nunez handed me a flask. “Drink.”

It wasn’t in me to say no. I swallowed noisily. The bottle contained distilled water, glucose, electrolytes. I needed them all.

No one followed us from the valley.

We were pretty sure, but Charles fell back to keep rear guard while Nunez went ahead. As we moved along the trail, I brought Rink and Harvey up to speed with all that had gone down and what I’d overheard.

“The woman was behind all this? She ordered the hits on Bryce’s team?” Rink shook his head. “Goddamn . . .”

“I couldn’t save her.”