At the end of that slope, more than a mile away and nearly half that far below him, a valley floor spread out. Part of it was bare rock and gravel, with a dry river-bed slashing through it. The rest was covered with patches of scrubby bushes and stunted trees. Above the valley floor, steep slopes of jagged blue-gray rock sloped upward to even more jagged ridge lines. Beyond those ridge lines, even higher peaks rose dark against the blue sky except where their tops shone with snow caps. In the blazing sunlight and the clear air, Blade could follow the course of the valley for several miles as it wound away into the distance.

One of his missions as an agent had taken Blade to Iran, so he recognized the type of terrain. He was well up in the foothills of a mountain range, and except for flash floods from melting snow in the spring, rugged, hot by day and cold by night. An ugly, lonely place for a naked man to survive by himself. And a place where a broken leg would have been a death sentence.

Blade put the gloomy might-have-beens behind him and stood up. Down in the valley, the trees would at least provide some shelter from the winds that could easily scour these high, exposed slopes. His eyes roamed over the slope, picking out the easiest route. Then he bent down and snapped a branch from one of the bushes behind him. It would be useless as a weapon. But it might serve to probe the slope ahead of him for loose rocks. The pain in his head had subsided to a dull ache. He picked the first few yards of his path, and started down.

Thousands of centuries of dry baking heat and freezing cold had done their work on the rock, splitting and cracking it insanely and making it treacherous footing. More than once Blade's probing staff sent apparently secure rocks the size of his head leaping out of place and down the slope. And once an entire slab of rock, ten feet on a side, moved under his foot as his weight came down on it. He had just time to jerk himself backward and cling to the firmer rock above. The slab went grinding and crashing down in a cloud of dust, dislodging more and more rocks as it went, until a small avalanche finally crashed down onto the valley floor.