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    The snow rose above his ankles. Shuffling through it, his legs kept threatening to give way, but he refused to let them surrender. I have to get the film out of here, he urged himself. The air dimmed, the snow becoming gray, his vision narrowing, his thoughts blurring. When he stumbled into a fir tree, its icy needles stinging his face, he realized that he must have been walking half-asleep. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. If he didn’t find shelter, he was going to freeze to death. Sinking to his hands and knees, he crawled weakly beneath the drooping boughs of the snow-laden fir tree. In the space under them, he reached ground that was bare except for fallen needles, and he had just enough room to slump with his back against the trunk. The bark smelled sharply of resin. Except for that, in the gathering darkness, hearing the wind outside, he had the sensation of being in a tent.
    He passed out.
     
4
     
    A SMOTHERING BLACKNESS SURROUNDED HIM, so absolute that he feared he’d gone blind or was in hell. Immediately his pain jerked him fully awake. Muffled, the shrieking wind seemed far away. It was night. The dense blanket of snow on the needled branches made the air around him feel heavy, compressed. He licked his dry, cracked lips. Completely disoriented, racked with pain, he feared he was going to die in here.
    He took off his right glove and mustered the strength to reach under the left side of his jacket. There, his sweater and his thermal underwear were soaked with a warm sticky liquid. His gentle touch made him shudder. The wound seemed as long as his hand, as wide as a finger. The deflected bullet had gouged a furrow along his side. And kept going? he wondered. Or was it still inside him? Had it hit only fat, or ruptured the abdominal wall?
    He had never felt so powerless and alone. His feeling of isolation increased when he reached for the comfort of a camera and recalled that he had started out with four of them and not one of them remained. But I had the fourth camera with me on the cliff. Didn’t I take it off the strap and cram it into a pocket? In dismay, he pawed at the jacket but didn’t feel the camera. What he did feel were three cylinders of film. The fourth camera and, more important, the film inside it were lost to him.
    He fought to rouse his spirit. Hey, I saved the other three rolls. That’s still a lot. If I can get them out of here . . .
    The sentence didn’t want to be completed.
    Yes? he asked himself. If I can get them out of here?
    Are those photographs worth dying for?
    This time, he didn’t hesitate. Are you kidding me? The UN inspection team is desperate to get its hands on evidence like this. The film will prove that the atrocities committed here were much worse than anyone imagined. That bastard Ilkovic will finally have to pay for what he did.
    Maybe.
    Coltrane felt uneasy. I don’t understand.
    Oh, the photos you took are shocking enough to get Ilkovic convicted, all right. But what if the politicians become involved and declare an amnesty for the sake of peace in the region? What if nothing changes? Are your pictures worth getting killed for?
    Coltrane didn’t have an answer. Again, he groped for the reassuring touch of a camera. A homicide detective friend of his had once joked that Coltrane felt about cameras the way police officers did about backup guns — naked without one. “Come to think of it,” the detective had continued joking, “cameras and guns both shoot people, don’t they?” But it wasn’t the same at all, Coltrane insisted. His kind of shooting didn’t kill people. It was supposed to make them immortal. That was the reason he had become a photographer. When he had been twelve, he had found a trove of photographs of his dead mother and had fantasized that they kept her alive.
    Those pictures of his mother had been beautiful.
    As shivers seized him and his consciousness faded into a place that was despairingly even darker, he