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After a mere five minutes of walking, his feet tingling with little starbursts of pain, he came upon a boulder field. A pile of giant boulders, one on top of another, formed a cleft between them that was a sort of cave. He peered into this space to make sure it wasn’t already a home to, say, a porcupine. Animals loved caves. This one seemed to be unoccupied. But it was too shallow to serve as shelter, maybe four feet long by a few feet wide.

The old skills were starting to come back now. He looked around for something that could serve as a pole and found a long dead tree branch that was perfect. When leaned against a ridge in the top boulder, it made an excellent tent pole. Over the next ten minutes, he dragged smaller dead tree branches and limbs to the site and leaned them against the tent pole. As the sky grew deep orange and the sun dipped below the horizon, he created a rudimentary tent whose porous walls were made of sticks and branches and dead leaves and pine boughs. A sort of wolf’s den. He then laid down pine boughs as a kind of bed, but mostly as insulation from the cold ground.

He clambered inside. He had no sleeping bag— a sleeping bag is a body bag , his father used to say, meaning that a sleeping bag would trap you, immobilize your arms, if someone or something came after you. A sleeping bag is a bear’s taco . Instead, he’d brought along what Stan Brightman called a ranger roll: a fleece blanket rolled up with a poncho, a poncho liner, and a tarpaulin. He laid down the poncho liner to use as ground cover and then covered himself with the ranger roll. He remembered that he also had, in the go-bag, a space blanket, an emergency Mylar blanket in a foil pouch. He laid the space blanket over the ranger roll.

For a long time, he lay there just listening to the sounds of the woods, to the rustle of leaves in the wind, to a distant owl’s hoot, to water flowing somewhere nearby.

But there were no human sounds, as far as he could ascertain. No footfalls, no crackling of human feet on dry leaves and twigs, no voices.

He was exhausted. The snap of a twig jolted him several times. He froze, listened with ferocious intensity, but each time, it was a false alarm. Not somebody close by. Just the nocturnal sounds of the forest.

It puzzled him that he still hadn’t heard the sounds of his pursuers. Did that mean they hadn’t bothered to come after him in the woods? Or had they gone in the wrong direction? Not for a second did he believe the Russians had given up searching for him. But if so, where the hell were they? Were they moving through the night, using flashlights because they didn’t care if they were detected? If so, they might be just minutes away.

The thought did not allow him to relax. Once, in front of Paul’s mother, his father had used the expression “asshole-puckering” to describe the terror he had sometimes felt in Nam. Paul’s mother had objected to the language. But to Paul, it was evocative.

The ground was frigid, the cold radiating from the boulders’ surfaces. His butt was frozen. He felt a stone or pebble underneath the tarpaulin ground cover, fished around to remove it.

It took a few hours, but eventually he did drift off to sleep, reminding himself that it must be only a brief nap.

Suddenly, he was jolted awake. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he’d been asleep for three hours, far longer than he had wanted. What woke him was an electronic sound, like nothing found in nature. A jumble of electronic beeps, text message sounds. He knew what it was: electronic devices hitting a pocket of signal and suddenly coming online. When you’re climbing over peaks, after a long period of no phone reception, you sometimes randomly hit signals coming out of cell towers—and suddenly, all your devices come to life.

Not his. He hadn’t moved.

He felt a sudden chill as he realized the sound had to have come from some other electronic devices nearby, maybe devices belonging to his pursuers. He went still, listened. He didn’t know how far electronic sounds traveled in the forest. But he knew that whoever it was must be close by. How close, he didn’t know.

All that mattered was that he was about to be discovered.

The pucker factor was high.

He had no choice but to remain in place, to keep as still as humanly possible. Not knowing how far away this person or persons might be, he couldn’t risk getting up and contending with the branches that served as his tent walls, the noise they’d make. He remembered giving his phone number to his friend in Lincoln, Lou Westing. What if Lou were to call him back, the ringing sound filling the forest? He reassured himself that he’d turned the burner phone off.

When he constructed it, he had thought his lean-to of twigs and dead branches looked like a natural structure and would probably attract no attention. But now he was having second thoughts. Would it really, though? Would it look like a deadfall, a natural pileup of forest debris—or like something constructed by a human and, therefore, worthy of a closer look?

If the shelter did pass muster, he would be okay so long as he remained silent, didn’t cough or sneeze.

He willed himself not to cough, which of course only made his throat tickle.

Then he heard the crunch of shoes on dead leaves.

They were nearby.