Grigor scraped and clawed his way down the slope as the minifrag detonated behind him. He felt a searing, penetrating pain in his side. A slickness under his backpack and shirt. He knew he’d been shot, though he had barely realized when the bullet struck. It was almost as if someone had playfully slapped the pack. The round must have hit it low, drilled through its fabric and entered his body below the ribs. A few inches higher and it would have set off the remaining grenades in the backpack’s upper panel. Lit him up like a torch.

Still, the bullet had done enough damage. He thought it might have gone deep, buried itself inside him below the ribs. But he would have to wait to check it out.

He reached the base of the hill, crossed a narrow dirt strip to the pavement and turned right on Thirty-Ninth Avenue, hurrying toward the thoroughfare he’d scouted out days before. The avenue was packed with noisy rush-hour traffic, and the 115-decibel pop of the grenade had gone ignored or unnoticed by drivers and pedestrians. An engine backfire would have been louder.

When he came to the corner, he hooked right again and then abruptly merged into the thick crowd on Main Street. People were streaming around him in all directions, elbow to elbow. It was a world apart from the sleepy cul-de-sac only a block or so west. A mash-up of ethnic restaurants, small businesses and outdoor food markets. The store signs were in half a dozen different languages. Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and Vietnamese.

Grigor lost himself in the press of bodies, walking south. Glancing up at the sky, he saw an aircraft roughly overhead. Lower than any plane, higher than most helicopters. He estimated its height at two or three thousand feet. It had to be a rotorcraft. But he didn’t hear the distinctive whacking of copter blades. It made no noise at all. Or none that reached below.

He continued up Main Street, weaving through the crowd. The mass of pedestrians thickened as he hastened farther south. There were gyms and nail salons and banks and walk-in medical clinics, and people were flowing in and out of them. He pushed and bumped through the close press of bodies, wincing whenever anyone jostled his side. The wound wasn’t bleeding profusely—not yet—which was a sign the bullet had missed his major blood vessels. But it could easily have punctured an organ and done internal damage. The bleeding was certain to get worse unless he took care of it soon.

A dozen yards along he looked up again. The rotorcraft was still in a hovering pattern. Not stationary but steady and circular. He was positive it was either searching for him or had already spotted him. Which didn’t really matter. Both possibilities were about to become moot. He was about to lose the aircraft.