into the chest of one of the Amhara, knocking him off his horse. By this time, the other Amhara had had time to wheel around. He'd drawn a handgun-an old but deadly 9mm PM Makarov-and was aiming it at Bourne.
A shot rang out, lifting the Amhara from his blanket saddle. Bourne turned to see Zaim rising up, a gun in his hand. He waved his free hand, and they headed as fast as they could for the outlying stand of firs.
Another shot snipped off branches above their heads as they galloped into the forest. The Amharan whom Bourne had kicked off his horse had remounted and was coming after them.
Zaim threaded them through the fir trees. It had turned markedly colder and wetter. Even here, in the shelter of the forest, the icy wind cut through them, shaking periodic snowfalls from the upper branches. Bourne, thinking of their pursuer, could not rid himself of the itching along his spine, but he kept going in the brown horse's wake.
The ground began to fall away, at first gradually, then more steeply. The horses put their heads down, snorting, as if to more carefully feel the buried stones, their curved surfaces slick with ice, which made the footing alarmingly treacherous.
Bourne heard a cracking behind them, and he urged the gray on. He wanted to ask Zaim where they were headed and how close they were to it, but raising his voice would only serve to reveal their location in the maze of the forest. Just as he was thinking this, he glimpsed a clearing through the trees, then the heavy glitter of a sheet of ice. They were coming to a river that wound steeply from the edge of one alpine meadow to a lower one.
At that moment he heard a shot; an instant later Zaim's horse collapsed from under him. Zaim went tumbling. Urging the gray on, Bourne reached down, dragging Zaim up behind him.
They were almost at the bank of the frozen river. Another shot, snapping nearby branches.
"Your gun!" Bourne said.
"I lost it when my horse was shot," Zaim replied unhappily.
"We'll be picked off like wooden ducks."
Bourne handed Zaim down to the snowpack, then slid off the gray. A smart slap to its rump sent it crashing through the forest on a more or less parallel course to the river.
"Now what?" Zaim slapped his bum leg. "With this, we'll be helpless out here."
"Let's go." Grabbing him by his thick wool jacket, Bourne began to run down the bank to the river.
"What are you doing?" Zaim's eyes were wide with fear.
Bourne half lifted him off his feet an instant before they hit the ice on the run. Compensating for the other man's weight, Bourne began the long back-and-forth strides of an ice skater. Using the blades embedded in his boot soles as skates, he built up speed with the natural downward slope of the river.
He took the snaking turns expertly, but he had almost no control over his speed, and he was racing along faster and faster as the rivercourse steepened.
They flashed around another bend and Zaim uttered an inarticulate cry. A moment later Bourne saw why. Not a thousand meters away the river broke sharply downward into a waterfall, now frozen in place like a stop-motion photo.
"How high," Bourne called over the howling of the wind in his face.
"Too high," Zaim moaned in terror. "Oh, too, too high!"
Chapter Nine
BOURNE TRIED to veer to the left or right, but he couldn't. He was flying along a fold in the ice that would not allow him to change direction. At any rate, it was too late now. The ruffled top of the waterfall was upon them, so he did the only thing he could think of: He steered for the exact center, where the water was deepest and the ice thinnest.
They hit it at speed, which combined with their weight to shatter the thin crust of ice that had formed over the streaming water. Into the waterfall they plunged, tumbling down and down, the icy water taking their breath away, freezing them from their limbs inward.
As he fell from the heights, Bourne struggled against becoming disoriented, which was his primary concern. If he lost his sense of direction, he'd either freeze to death or drown before he could break through the ice at the base of the waterfall. There was another concern: If he allowed himself to get too far from the base area, the ice would quickly thicken into a layer