5
Tanya catapulted to the ground. With no helmet, she tucked and rolled. Bouncing over rib-bruising rocks, she finally slammed back-first against a particularly stout palm tree. Her NVGs flew aside and disappeared into the brush.
Too dazed to figure out what had happened, she lay still for a long moment. She’d been chasing someone. A ghost. A mirage.
La Capitana!
She tried not to groan as she rolled to her feet and fought her way through the thinning jungle to the top of the ridge—she’d lost any trace of the switchbacked track they’d been racing along. She’d been less than twenty meters behind the woman. With no way to free up a hand to shoot—not over such challenging terrain—she’d still have been close enough in another minute for Tanya to pull alongside la Capitana and simply ram her
