Sam watched her bring her arm up to rest in the chink in the wall and begin to think through aiming her pistol. He had seen her do that before at competitions. Sam had been a respectable shot since the days when a member of a highly secret force had spent a month at a covert base instructing him in close-range shooting and sniper techniques. But Remi was in a different league. She had been shooting competitively since she was twelve, a champion for whom the term “nail driving” was not a figure of speech.

Sam stood below her and spoke quietly. “Get down, and stay there until you hear shooting.”

Sam moved to the entryway, climbed over the barrier he’d built, sidestepped along the ten-foot overlap in the walls, and ran to the nearest stand of trees. He moved through the trees beside the level strip, getting closer to the space where the men would pass if they approached the walled pool. As he went, he studied the places he passed, aware that soon he would be running past them in the other direction. He took a position in the thick brush within an arm’s length of the strip but outside the causeway, where the plants had grown in fully.

The men came at a run, carrying their rifles across their chests. They ran like they were chasing game, not like men who were about to meet an armed adversary.

Sam crouched and waited. He had estimated fifteen men, but he could see only twelve. They wore khaki pants and short-sleeved civilian shirts and T-shirts. A few of them carried bolt-action hunting rifles with scopes—probably 4 power, because, in these thick jungles, long shots across open space had to be rare. There were two men carrying shotguns, a weapon that probably put food in their bellies. Two had pistols in holsters, and the others carried assault rifles that Sam identified as American AR-15s, probably weapons that had found their way here during the civil war.

The man closest to Sam carried a hunting rifle. He raised it and took aim at the top of the wall around the pool. Sam was sure the man couldn’t see Remi, but he was getting ready for her to stick her head up.

A man who carried only a pistol stood by a tree and shouted in English, “We know you’re in there. Come out now and we’ll make it easier for you.”

Sam turned his head away from the men and called into the hills, “We mean you no harm. Go away.”

Three of the men half turned to see if someone had gotten behind them, and one turned around entirely, his gun ready.

The spokesman said, “We’ll never go away. Come out and we’ll let you go away.”