For perhaps the tenth time, he lifted the door slightly higher onto his shoulders so it would skip over the mound of debris accumulating at its base as he was dragging it along. Juan decided to shift position, lowering the door so that it glided easier across the sand but more than doubling the strain on his arms, legs, and back. His teeth ached from clenching his jaw so tightly, but he somehow managed to quicken his pace.

Sensing that his quarry was escaping after all, the sniper fired off a wild volley of shots on the fly, triggering his semiautomatic as fast as he could cycle it. Several rounds hit the door, but most peppered the ground to either side of the Chairman.

Like any race, the last leg was the hardest fought, and both men were pushing with their all. Cabrillo gave a primal shout as he towed the heavy door, his legs pistoning against the stony ground. He looked again and saw the prow of the fishing boat was a tantalizing five yards away.

He let the door drop to the ground and started sprinting. The sniper was forty yards back and running flat out and was caught off guard by Cabrillo’s sudden change in tactics. He didn’t have the time to bring his rifle up, so he fired from the hip just as Juan lunged out of view around the boat’s bow.

Juan felt a wasp sting of pain on his neck as the hastily fired shot hit the steel hull just as he crossed around it, and he was stung by flecks of dislodged metal. The truck was just a dozen paces away.

He launched himself over the UAZ’s hood just seconds before the sniper reached the boat and fired at him again. The driver’s-side window shattered. Juan hit the ground on the far side of the truck, rolled to his feet, and reached through the open passenger window, his eyes now on the gunman for the first time since the battle began. The man wore khakis from head to toe, but not the clothes of a native Uzbek or Kazakh. He looked like he’d stepped from a Beretta clothing catalog.

The man stopped less than twenty feet away and started swinging his rifle up to his shoulder for the kill shot.

Cabrillo’s hand found the familiar shape of Yusuf’s old AK-47, the weapon he insisted they bring along because smugglers used the old seabed to carry contraband into and out of the country. He pulled it out of the passenger footwell enough so that he could swing the barrel toward the sniper.