“How about One Lucky Girl: My Life With Sam Fargo?”

She laughed, then climbed harder to get ahead of him. As they climbed higher and higher, she realized that the bulges in the rocky wall and the curve of the road made it impossible to see their car below them. On second thought, it also meant that while they were up here they were not visible from the road. Anyone on the road looking up would see only the rocks.

After more climbing, Sam walked along near the crest for a few hundred feet. Then he took his shovel and began to dig.

“I hope what I’m doing is undermining this boulder. If it rolls straight down the hillside, as round heavy things tend to do, then we’ll have a fairly impressive landslide, block Bako’s road to Hungary, and be on our merry way.”

“Merry? Are you sure?”

“If it works, we will be merry. It just will take an enormous amount of work done in a hurry and a massive helping of luck.” He turned his attention to shoveling away the dirt and small stones that seemed to be holding the four-foot boulder in place a hundred fifty feet above the road. Remi stood on the other side of the boulder and shoveled too.

They reached a moment when the boulder seemed to have emerged from the dirt of the hillside. They had freed more than half of its bulk, and its bottom was undermined. Sam walked a few yards to a sapling, selected a dead limb about ten feet long and two and a half inches thick. He then rolled a nearby rock in front of the boulder to use as a fulcrum.

“Okay, Remi. Go along the ridge until you can see what’s coming from a distance. When it’s safe to drop the hill on the road, give me a wave.”

“I’m off.” She trotted along the ridge, sometimes stopping to jump a gap in the rocks or avoid obstacles. Finally she stood far above the road a distance from Sam, raised her arm, and waved.

Sam set his lever horizontally against the fulcrum and pushed. He was ten feet to the side of the rock so he could use his entire lever. He pushed again and there was something behind the rock that began to groan as the boulder moved.

The first try failed to dislodge the boulder, so Sam set his limb again against the rock. He looked up and saw Remi waving her arms frantically. He waited.