Richard went to sleep with ease and then woke up a couple of hours later feeling bad that he had done so. After several days’ absence, the Furious Muses had hunted him down in this remote place and come after him with a vengeance. It made for a very crowded tent.
The jihadists might kill him in the morning. But it seemed unlikely. If that had been the agenda, they would have done it already and saved themselves all those zip ties.
If they weren’t going to kill him, then in the morning they would make him guide them up the old smugglers’ trail to Abandon Mountain and Prohibition Crick. In order for that to work, they’d have to remove the zip-tie hobbles. He would then have the option of trying to run away from them. It seemed likely that this would lead to pursuit, capture, and ceremonial decapitation.
So he was going to have to look for a place where he could get away from them suddenly, out of rifle shot range, in some manner that would make it difficult to track him.
A movie hero would have jumped off the cliff into American Falls yesterday. After a few tense moments, his head would have broken the surface of the river some distance downstream. Richard knew that this was not really a practical strategy. But there might be stretches of the river that he could conceivably use in a similar way, body-surfing through rapids.
The problem was that their route didn’t really follow this river. The river ran south and west. Their destination was more easterly, and so their plan today was to hike down the east bank for about a mile and then clamber up an endless slope until they broke out above the tree line and found themselves on a rocky spur thrown out from the mountain. From there they’d traverse a talus field that constituted the peak’s western slope and finally drop into the valley of Prohibition Crick. The only way Richard could make a quick getaway in that sort of country was to let gravity take him and skid or roll down a slope. Which might have been fun, or at least survivable, on a sand dune or a snowfield, but in this territory would just lead to slow death from broken bones and ruptured organs.
Still, he kept pondering it through the long hours of the night, since it was the only way to keep the F.M.s off his back. He readily agreed to their basic premise, which was that, since he was about to lead a band of heavily armed terrorists straight to the homestead where several of his close relatives were minding their own business, his own life was forfeit to begin with.
The obvious dodge was to lead them somewhere else instead. But there were limits to how far he could mislead them. Jones had quite obviously done his homework, interrogating Zula in considerable detail, poring over Richard’s Wikipedia article, printing out hard copies from Google Maps. He had a very clear idea of where they were going. As a matter of fact, Jones could easily find his way all the way to Pocatello from here with no help at all from Richard, which made Richard suspect that he was now being kept alive, not as a guide, but as a hostage and possible subject of a gruesome webcam execution. He could already picture the YouTube page, Dodge kneeling on a rug with a sack on his head, Jones behind him with the knife, and, underneath the little video pane, the first of many thousands of all-capital-letter comments sent in by all the world’s useless fuckwits.
No, at this point the only card he really had to play—the only way to help Jake and John and the others save themselves—was to warn them. Because until now Jones had shown no awareness whatsoever that the valley of Prohibition Crick was inhabited. He must have seen a few roofs peeking out of trees in the Google satellite photos, but he might have made the reasonable guess that these were just summer cabins for Spokane orthodontists, boarded up and quiet at this time of year. Even if he had known that people were living in them year-round, he couldn’t have guessed—could he?—that these were the most heavily armed civilians in the history of the world—gun nuts on a scale that made Pathans look like Quakers.
Even gun nuts could be taken in a surprise attack, but if Richard could somehow make them aware that they were in danger, then they would be able to give a very good account of themselves.
The plan he finally arrived at, then, just as the roof of his tent was beginning to shed a few stray photons into his wide-open eyes, was that he would proceed docilely until he was within audible gunshot range of Jake’s place, and then make a break for it. The jihadists would shoot at him, and probably hit him. But everyone in the valley would hear it.
And then all hell would break loose.
He actually dozed for a little while, maybe an hour or so, and woke up to see more light filtering through the tentcloth and to hear the hiss of a backpacking stove being lit up.
Something told him to get moving. He wriggled out of the sleeping bag, spun around on his butt, got his booted and hobbled feet out the door, and then inchwormed out onto the ground.
Only two of the nine jihadists were out here: the tall Somalian-Minnesotan named Erasto, and another guy whose name Richard could not seem to keep in his mind. An Egyptian with a dark, callused spot in the middle of his forehead, caused by contact with the ground during prayer. They were heating a pot of water, presumably to cook up some porridge. Richard waddled closer to the stove and held his zip-tied hands out near the pot to catch some of the warmth. Erasto was eating an energy bar, the Egyptian just staring off aimlessly into the distance.
Richard realized that he had to take a crap, and he had to take it now.
He stood up. Erasto watched him carefully. He looked over toward the crap-taking place, which was a hundred or so feet away at the base of the cliff they had yesterday descended with rope.
“You guys have any toilet paper?”
No response.
“Dude,” Richard said, “I really gotta go. No fooling.”
Erasto seemed incredulous-verging-on-disgusted that he was having to deal with such matters. “Jabari!” he said. This seemed to get the attention of the Egyptian. Richard seized on it as an opportunity to finally learn the guy’s name. Jabari. As in jabber. As in jabbing someone with a knife.
Erasto was asking some kind of question. Jabari bestirred himself and began to sort through a nearby pack, apparently looking for the bumwad supply.
Richard was hopping from foot to foot, as best he could when hobbled. It was very much open to question whether he was going to make it to a suitable place in time.
“I’m going to start hopping toward a suitable place to take a crap,” he announced. He was speaking as calmly as possible, since he didn’t want to shout and give non-English speakers such as Jabari the wrong idea. “You can follow me, you can shoot me in the back, whatever. But something’s got to give.” The sentence was punctuated with an impressive fart, which proved a much more effective communication than anything that had been escaping from Richard’s other end. Richard toddled around until his back was turned to Erasto and then began mincing across the campsite, moving away from the river and into the undergrowth that grew profusely between the bank and the base of the cliff. In about half a minute’s hopping, cursing, farting struggle through the shrubs—which grew densely here, watered by the mist drifting from the falls—he came to a clear place, dotted with turds and flecked with used bumwad, at the base of the cliff.
“Cliff” was too simple a word to denote the geological phenomenon rising above him. It was not a sudden vertical wall so much as a rapid increase in the slope of the ground that became fully vertical, and even developed into a bit of an overhang, twelve or fifteen feet above. And it was not a simple monolith, but a junk pile of boulders, tenacious vegetation, and packed soil that just happened to be really steep. Its top was out of view, but he knew it to be about fifty feet above. Anyway, it was now sheltered enough that he felt he could take a decent crap and so he hopped up and down several times, reversing his direction by degrees, and began to fumble with his belt.
A roll of toilet paper in a Ziploc bag struck him in the chest, underhanded by Jabari from perhaps twenty feet away, and bounced to the ground at his feet. “Thank you,” Richard said, stripping his trousers down. Jabari turned his back and retreated somewhat. Richard, looking at him through the tops of the shrubs as he squatted to obey nature’s call, saw the Egyptian raising both hands and waving cheerfully to someone back in the camp; apparently someone, probably Abdul-Wahaab, wanted to know what the hell was going on and needed to be reassured that all was well.
Richard was just in the middle of letting it all go when a dark object dropped out of the sky and thudded to the ground right in front of him. He assumed at first that it was a short bit of a stick that had tumbled out of a tree on the top of the cliff. But on a closer look he observed that it was neatly rectangular.
It was, he now saw, a pocket multitool—a Leatherman or similar—in its black nylon belt holster.
“THIS IS ALL about making a case,” Seamus said.
The automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d’Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer.
“I’m not sure how that phrase translates into Chinese or Hungarian,” he went on. “What I’m trying to say is this. We are going to see my boss, who happens to live on the other end of the country. We have to drive because I can’t get you guys on a plane without IDs. We happen to be in striking distance of a place where I think Jones might be crossing the border. Last time I logged into T’Rain—which was about half an hour ago—Egdod was still wandering across the desert, followed by a couple of hundred coup counters and curiosity seekers. Which supports my theory.”
“It does?” Yuxia asked.
“Okay, never mind the part about Egdod. You either believe it or you don’t. I happen to believe it. Anyway, I called this dude who has a chopper.” Seamus patted the brochure for the dude in question, which was sticking out of his back pocket. “He is willing to take me up there to fly over the area. I’ll only be gone for a couple of hours. We’ll be on the road by midafternoon. Chances are we can still make Missoula tonight. You guys can hang out here, see a movie, whatever. Just don’t get arrested or do anything that would call attention to your complex immigration status.”
“I want to come with you,” Yuxia said.
“There’s not enough room in the helicopter.”
“The brochure says it can carry up to four passengers,” Yuxia said, and pulled another copy of the same brochure out of her jacket pocket.
During the awkward silence that followed, Seamus happened to look up and see Csongor and Marlon gazing at him expectantly. The waffle seemed to have been forgotten.
“The big one can take four,” Seamus admitted. “I had my eye on the little one.”
“What is it exactly you think you’re going to be doing?” Csongor asked.
“Flying over the area I’m interested in. Taking pictures. Getting a feel for it.”
“How would our being in the helicopter prevent you from doing that?” Marlon wanted to know.
Seamus shrugged. “Maybe it wouldn’t.”
Yuxia asked, “Are you just lying to us?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
The waffle maker squealed again.
“You’re acting weird,” Yuxia said. “Are you expecting to, like, land the chopper and have combat with Jones?”
“No, I am not going to have combat with Jones. That is not what this is about.”
“Good,” Yuxia said, “because if that is your plan, you should warn the pilot.”
“YOUR WAFFLE IS DONE!” shouted a peevish breakfaster from across the room.
Yuxia elbowed Seamus out of the way, figured out how to open the waffle iron, and deposited its steaming load onto a plate. The squeal stopped.
Csongor wanted to try it now. He picked up a minicarafe of waffle batter and poured it into the appliance and watched broodingly as it infiltrated the valleys between the bumps.
“Of course,” Seamus said, “if I believed that there was any chance whatsoever of getting into a firefight with jihadists, it would behoove me to say so to the pilot.”
“Behoove it would!” Yuxia agreed.
“So it is totally safe,” Csongor said.
“As safe as flying around in a chopper can ever be,” Seamus agreed. He did not actually believe a word of this, but he had been cornered.
“Whereas if we stay here, there’s a chance that we’ll get into trouble,” Csongor pointed out. “You are responsible for us.”
“Alas, yes.”
“If the chopper has a breakdown, you get stuck up north, then we are here with no car keys, no hotel room, no ID…”
“Okay, okay,” Seamus said. “You can come with me and stare at trees from a great height all morning.”
RICHARD HAD SEEN that tool and its holster before. He was pretty sure it was the one Chet always wore on his belt.
It was about five feet in front of him. When he was finished emptying his bowels, he rolled forward onto his knees, then to all fours, stretched out, and coaxed it up off the ground with the tips of his fingers. Then he pushed himself back to a squat. He set the multitool down on the ground next to his foot, then picked up the Ziploc bag containing the roll of bumwad and pulled that open.
He could hear some of the other jihadists emerging from their tents in the campsite, a couple of hundred feet away. If they behaved true to form, they would begin the day by estimating the direction of Mecca, then kneeling on their camping pads and praying.
When he was finished using the toilet paper, he stuffed the roll back into the Ziploc bag. With one hand he wadded and rattled the bag, making noise that he hoped would cover the crackling sound of the Velcro on the Leatherman’s holster—for he was using his other hand to jerk that open. He pulled out the tool and turned it inside out, making it into a pair of pliers with built-in wire cutters. These would make short work of the zip ties while producing a characteristic sound—a crisp pop that Jabari would certainly recognize, if he heard it. The roar of the American Falls and the rapids downstream of it might cover some of that sound, but still Richard was careful to cut the zip ties with the bare minimum of force required, sort of worrying the cutters through the plastic instead of severing them explosively. He removed only the ties joining his ankles and the ones joining his wrists, leaving in place the ones serving as cuffs.
He then closed up the multitool and was about to pocket it when he realized that a knife might come in handy. The device had several external blades, files, rasps, and so forth. Richard found the one with the sharpest and most traditionally knifelike blade and opened that up until it snapped into the locked position.
He set it on the ground, rose to a half squat, pulled up his trousers, and fastened his belt. Remaining in a crouch, he picked up the knife and began to walk along the relatively clear space that ran along the base of the cliff. Until now he had not bothered to look up because he knew that all he would see was an overhang several feet above him. But as he moved along the cliff’s base he came into a zone only a short distance away where the overhang receded, and at that point he looked up, expecting to see Chet’s face gazing down at him.
Instead he saw a frizz of black hair exploding out from beneath a stocking cap.
It took him several moments to understand that the person he was staring at was Zula.
She extended one arm and pointed, drawing his attention to something on the ground behind him: Jabari, who was coming to investigate.
Richard looked back up and saw her waving frantically, telling him to move farther away along the base of the cliff. She herself had risen from a squat and was beginning to move that way, exhorting him with gestures to follow.
Until now he had moved slowly, to hide the fact that he had removed his hobbles. But Jabari was closing in on the place where Richard had been taking his dump and would see the cut zip ties soon enough. Richard broke into a run.
Within a few moments he understood that Jabari was coming after him.
It was difficult to run, to keep an eye on Jabari, and at the same time to keep casting glances upward toward Zula. But at some point he realized that she was holding both hands out, gesturing at him to stop.
Which didn’t make sense. Why would he want to stop?
He looked back and saw that Jabari was much closer than he’d expected. The Egyptian had drawn a semiautomatic pistol but not aimed it yet; he was still using both hands to flail away at undergrowth that was impeding his progress.
Richard looked up again and saw Zula at the very lip of the cliff with a bundle of sticks in her arms. She heaved it out into space.
Jabari stepped out of the undergrowth. He was perhaps ten feet from Richard, looking him up and down, amazed that he had gotten out of the zip ties.
Richard looked up again and saw a rickety construct unfolding in the space above them: two thin lines of parachute cord with sticks lashed between them at regular intervals.
A rope ladder.
Jabari had seen it too. He seemed only slightly more dumbfounded than Richard.
It had been all rolled up and was now falling and unrolling in a tangledy mess. The rung in the middle of the bundle was the longest and heaviest of them all, and its weight was helping to pull the whole roll downward and keep it straight. Richard understood that it was coming right at his head, and so he stepped back against the wall of the cliff, allowing it to fall down in front of him.
The ladder bounced to a stop, yawing and sashaying. Jabari was looking up toward the top, trying to see who had thrown it. He aimed his pistol nearly straight up in the air.
Richard couldn’t see what Jabari was aiming at. But he did now notice a curious fact, which was that the bottom rung of the ladder—the heavy thing that had made it all unroll—was a black pump-action shotgun.
While Jabari was preoccupied with trying to identify threats at the top of the cliff, Richard stepped forward, got the weapon in his hands, flipped off the safety, and pulled the forepiece back slightly so that he could see into its breech. A shell was already chambered.
Maneuvering the weapon was not made any easier by the rattletrap skein of parachute cord and tree branches from which it dangled, but, at a range of three yards, this wasn’t going to be a precision operation anyhow. He brought the stock up to his shoulder and drew a bead on Jabari.
The movement finally drew the Egyptian’s notice. He looked down at Richard. At the same time he was beginning to lower the pistol. Not fast enough to make a difference.
“Sorry,” Richard said, as they were making eye contact. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Jabari’s head off.
SEAMUS HAD DEVELOPED a set of instincts around timing and schedule that owed a lot to his upbringing in Boston and his postings in teeming Third World megacities such as Manila, which was to say that he always expected it would take hours to get anywhere. Those habits led him comically astray in Coeur d’Alene at six thirty in the morning. They reached the municipal airport in less time than it took the SUV’s windows to defog. The chopper place was just inside the entrance. Two helicopters, a big one and a small one, were parked on the apron outside a portable office. A pickup truck was parked in front of it, aimed at the big chopper, headlights on, providing supplementary illumination for a man in a navy blue nylon pilot’s jacket who was sprawled on his back under the instrument panel, legs dangling out onto the skid, messing with wires. “Never a good sign,” Seamus remarked, and parked in front of the portable office.
It was evident from the look and style of the place that it was not, first and foremost, an operation for making tourists happy. Their bread and butter was serving clients in the timber industry. When that flagged, they were happy to take people on joyrides. A hundred percent of their budget for that part of the operation had gone into the printing of the brochure. Which was a completely rational choice, since by the time their clients showed up here to discover what a bare-bones operation they were dealing with, the decision had already been made. No one, having come this far, was going to storm out simply because they weren’t serving lattes and scones in a tastefully decorated waiting area.
Yuxia was all for dragging the man in the blue jacket out by his ankles, but Seamus talked her around to the point of view that everything would go better in the long run if they left him alone to finish his work. It was surprisingly chilly. They sat in the car and let the motor run until it got warm. Eventually the man oozed out of the chopper and climbed to his feet, holding an electronic box with a connector dangling from it.
Seamus got out of the SUV and greeted him. “Morning, Jack.” Last names were not much in vogue around these parts.
“You’d be Seamus? I can tell from your accent.” Jack was probably ex-military, now with a neatly trimmed red-brown beard slung under a round, somewhat pudgy face.
“Sparky trouble?”
“I thought this’d be a quick fix and we’d be in the air by now,” Jack said, waving the box around, “but the connectors don’t match up.”
“Technology fails to work the way it’s supposed to. What a shock.”
“Anyway—how many you got?” Jack’s eyes flicked over to the SUV. “I was going to put you in the 300.” He half turned and jerked his head toward the smaller of the two choppers. “It’s a little less comfortable but if you don’t mind—”
“Not at all,” Seamus said. “But how many passengers will it carry?”
“Two. Maybe three in a pinch.”
“And the big one is definitely down.”
“The 500 ain’t flying today.”
“Give me a sec.”
Seamus got back into the SUV. “Change of plans,” he announced. “Big chopper is busted. Little chopper can only take two or three of us. One or two have to stay behind here and wait.”
“Obviously I cannot fit into that thing,” Csongor volunteered, looking incredulously at the 300. “I would not enjoy it anyway.”
Yuxia had taken to bouncing up and down in her seat, worried that she was about to be left behind. She looked as if she were about to jump out of the car, run over, and cling to the chopper’s skids. Marlon, observing this, looked at Seamus and said, “I will stay and use Wi-Fi.” For during the wait he had borrowed Seamus’s laptop, logged on to a guest account that Seamus had set up for him, and discovered an unsecured network emanating from the portable office.
Seamus twisted the SUV’s keys to the off position, killing the engine, then moved it to the accessory position so that the laptop could suck juice from the cigarette lighter jack. “No joyriding!” he warned them. Then he nodded at Yuxia, who jumped out onto the tarmac.
Before they departed, there was a discussion of flight plan and travel time. Jack estimated forty-five minutes each way to cover the eighty miles to the area that Seamus wanted to see, plus half an hour to forty-five minutes actually circling the area and looking around. It was now about quarter to seven. They should be back by nine, nine thirty at the latest.
The backseats of the 300 were decidedly short on legroom, and Seamus was glad Marlon had elected not to come. After a very cursory safety briefing, they crammed Yuxia into the back and Seamus took the copilot’s seat up front. This would not win any prizes either for spaciousness or comfort, but was no worse than situations that Seamus had to put up with all the time when pursuing his career.
Jack walked around the chopper going through some preflight checks. Csongor emerged from the SUV to watch the takeoff. Jack climbed in, handed beat-up but serviceable headsets to Seamus and to Yuxia, then donned a somewhat nicer one of his own. He got these plugged into the chopper’s intercom system and did a little sound check.
After a terse conversation with local air traffic control, Jack throttled the engine up and things got very windy and noisy for a few moments. Watching from not far away, Csongor hunched his shoulders and averted his gaze. The ground fell away below them. The 300 angled forward and began to pick up speed and altitude, headed north.
THERE WERE SOME nonobvious questions as to how Richard should manage ladder climbing while maintaining possession of the shotgun and the semiautomatic pistol—a Glock 27—that he had obtained from the dead Egyptian at the base of the cliff. Not the sort of challenge that would leave him scratching his head all day, but enough to slow him down a little. The Glock had no safety lever—the safety was built into the trigger. Theoretically it wouldn’t fire accidentally. Richard shoved it into his jacket pocket and then zipped the pocket shut, not wanting the weapon to fall out during the climb. At some point during the excitement, he had dropped the knife; he was reminded of this when he felt something hard under the sole of his boot. He moved his foot and pried the tool up out of the cold damp loam, then set about slashing through the two lengths of parachute cord that secured the shotgun to the bottom of the ladder. One of them was tied around the end of its barrel, just behind the little brass bead that served as the weapon’s sight, and the other around the narrowest part of its black plastic stock, near the safety. Dangling from the weapon was a complex of black nylon webbing that his overburdened mind processed and identified as some kind of tactical strap or harness. He did not have time to sort it out now and so he merely thrust one arm through it and confirmed that it wasn’t going to fall off. Then he raised a knee, reached up, and applied his weight to the rope ladder.
This struck him as dicey in the extreme, and something he would never have done had a pack of furious, heavily armed jihadists not been running toward him through the woods. Or at least he assumed they were doing so; the blast of the shotgun had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t gather much information by listening. The parachute cord was all of about an eighth of an inch thick. Its rated strength, he knew, would probably be high enough that two strands of it would support his weight—somewhere north of 250 pounds—in theory. But if it had been damaged, or if Zula’s knots didn’t hold—
Never mind. He started climbing. Or rather, he started to pull rungs down toward him. The cord was stretchy and would not bear his weight at first. But after a couple of tries the rungs began to push back against his feet and to pull back against his fingers and he noted that the cliff face was moving downward. Once he had gained about ten feet of altitude, he was tempted to swivel his head around and look out over the space between here and the river to judge the progress of the jihadists, whom he assumed must have started running in this direction when they had heard the boom of the shotgun. But he didn’t think it would do him any practical good and so tried to focus on climbing. He scaled a few more rungs and then risked a look up. The top of the cliff was dishearteningly far away. He had lost sight of Zula. But then something moved up there and he realized he’d been looking at her all along; she was lying on her belly with just her head sticking out at the ladder’s top, lost in the visual noise of the forest towering over her head. Light gleamed in the lenses of her eyeglasses. She was looking out over the territory below and behind Richard, and what she saw was making her nervous.
“Throw me the handgun!” she called.
Richard stopped, leaned against the damp rock of the cliff face, patted his flank until he felt the hard heavy shape of the gun in his pocket, then unzipped it, pulled out the weapon, and lobbed it, swinging his arm as far outward as he could and putting a lot of oomph into the throw. He didn’t want to see the thing clattering back down past him a moment later. Zula’s face elevated as she tracked it, and then she was up on hands and knees and she disappeared from his view.
Until now Richard had been held against the cliff face—which was not completely vertical—by gravity. Now he arrived at a concavity, created by a heavy brow of rock that protruded slightly, perhaps fifteen feet above him. Climbing the rope ladder became much more difficult as his feet thrust forward into the empty space, causing his whole body to lean back, hanging from nearly straight arms. His progress slowed considerably, and he found himself escalating into something that approached panic, so eager was he to get past this part of the climb and get over that brow, where he fancied he might be sheltered from anyone shooting upward from the cliff’s base. His movements became jerky and he started to swing. He saw too late that the strand of cord on the left side was being sawed at by a sharp edge of rock on the prominence above him.
The rock was nearly within his reach, about two rungs above him, when the left cord snapped. The ladder collapsed into a single strand of parachute cord with a series of sticks dangling from it. He swung to the right and his entire body rotated helplessly, causing the world to spin around him and giving him a view of the riverbank below: undergrowth thrashing madly all over the place as jihadists sprinted through it, calling out the name of Jabari. Farther distant he could see a tall figure clambering up onto a huge fallen log to gain some altitude and get a better view of the proceedings. It was Jones. His gaze went right to the bright spray of blood where Jabari had fallen, then traveled up the rope ladder until he locked eyes with Richard.
Richard was not one to back away from a staredown, but he had other concerns at the moment and so he kicked his legs to get turned around, then flailed them until he had trapped a fallen rung between his ankles, and straightened his knees while pulling as hard as he could with both arms. He hand-over-handed his grip to a higher position, raised his knees, reestablished the ankle grip, and repeated the procedure.
Something whined past him and in the same instant made a sharp whacking noise against the rock back in the little concavity. Then it happened a couple more times, and he heard the reports of a gun from down below. There was no rational reason why this should make him stop climbing. On the contrary. But he couldn’t help freezing up for a few moments.
A series of bangs sounded from closer, up above him. He looked up to see flashes of light spurting from the barrel of the Glock, just at the top of the ladder.
Another leg thrust, another hand-over-hand, and a desperate adrenaline-fueled reach gained him enough altitude to grip the first rung above the rope break. He got both hands on it, performed a chin-up, did more desperate pawing and kicking, finally got to a place where he could get his feet planted against the rock prominence. Then he covered a few rungs very fast.
The ladder had begun to jerk and dance madly, and he realized that someone at the base of the cliff was either climbing it, or else yanking on it trying to break the rope. He paused in his climbing long enough to pull out the knife and sever the remaining cord just beneath the rung that was supporting his feet. The ladder sprang out away from the cliff and fell from view. Watching this was a mistake, since it gave him vertigo. He saw muzzle flashes from below. But at the same time he drew courage from the fact that many of the sight lines connecting him to the flat ground between here and the river were blocked by the dense foliage of evergreen trees. Most of the jihadists were shooting blindly, or trying to draw beads on him through small gaps between branches, or running around trying to find a position from which they could do so.
It would not be accurate to say that a man of his age and weight could scamper, but he felt as if he scampered the last ten rungs and finally hurled himself on his belly at the top. Zula withdrew from her perch almost in unison with him and they ran for a hundred or more feet into the forest, side by side, before stopping. As if the bullets could chase them over the lip of the cliff and hunt them through the woods. But they couldn’t, of course. Only Jones and his men could do that. And as Richard had understood the moment he’d seen it, the ladder had given them a long head start on the jihadists.
Then Zula got in front of him and pulled a sharp U-turn and body-slammed him and wrapped her arms around his torso and ratcheted them down like enormous zip ties. Her face was in his chest and she was sobbing. Which Richard almost felt was his prerogative, since she had saved him; but he wasn’t about to make an issue of it. He was still so astonished by all that had happened in the few minutes that had elapsed since he had hopped away from the campsite to answer the call of nature that he could do very little but stand there dumbfounded and await the cardiac arrest that seemed as though it ought to be inevitable. He got the back of Zula’s head in the crook of his elbow and pulled it firmly in against his chest, planted his feet wide, and breathed.
IT WAS SHE who recovered first. He heard muffled noises and realized that she was trying to talk. He relaxed his grip on her, saw her face turn up toward him. A miracle. Every time he saw that face for the rest of his life he would call it a miracle.
Her lips were moving.
“What?” he said.
“Chet’s up above the falls,” she said. “He’s hurt badly.”
“Crap,” Richard said. “You know we have to get over to Prohibition Crick and warn Jake.”
“Yes,” Zula said, “I do know that. But I’m just saying.” In her tone was a kind of incipient, Furious Muse—like shock that Dodge would even consider not going back to check in on Chet.
“Did those fuckers shoot him?” Richard asked, jerking his head back the way they had come.
“Different fuckers,” she said. “But all part of the same group, as you may have guessed.” She added, “I’m not even sure if Chet is still alive, frankly. He was looking pretty bad.”
“Do you think you can find your way to Jake’s from here?”
This set her back on her heels for a second. “You’re saying we should split up? That I should run ahead to Jake’s while you circle back and see how Chet is doing?”
“Just a thought. I know a shortcut; I can get back to where Chet is in no time.”
“I think it’s the only way,” she admitted, looking like she was going to start crying again. A whole different kind of crying. The last jag had been letting go of terrible pent-up emotions. The coming one was sadness that she would have to go out on her own again so soon.
“The only thing is,” Zula said, and stopped, looking embarrassed at what she’d been about to utter.
“I have to get word back to the re-u.”
“Yeah.”
“I have to tell the story that you survived Xiamen, you survived whatever the hell you’ve been through the last couple of weeks, and you went on alone to warn the others.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Which means you have to survive.”
“I have to survive,” he corrected her, “if you don’t.”
“That’s true,” she said, as if he had made some cogent point during a business meeting.
“The flip side is—”
“I have to survive if you don’t,” she said. “But you will. You always do.”
“No one does always,” he corrected her. “But I will try very hard to do so, knowing that only by surviving will I have the joy and privilege of telling your story to the world.”
“It’s not that great of a story,” she said shyly.
“Bullshit. Hey, look. Chet’s dying. The fucking terrorists are headed for Jake’s. We have to put this plan into execution. Even if that is a miserable fact that would never obtain in a good and fair world. Agreed?”
“Yeah.” She held up one gloved hand, palm out.
He met it with his hand. They clasped them tight for a few moments. “You’ve always been a sort of herolike figure to me,” he told her.
“You’ve always been my … uncle,” she answered.
“Honored.”
“See you.”
“Haul ass,” he said. “And remember, if you just get close and then empty that clip into the air, that’ll be enough to put Jake and his fellow wack jobs on red alert. Because it doesn’t take much.”
“Noted.” And she turned her back on him and began to walk away. After a few steps, she broke into a run.
“This must be kind of obvious by now,” he called after her, “but I love you.”
She turned her head and gave him a shy look over her shoulder, then bent to her work.
CHET WAS VISIBLE from half a mile away, sprawled on a boulder like a skydiver whose chute had failed to open. A stream of blood was running down the side of the rock. Something ungainly dangled from one hand. As Richard trudged up the mountain—a procedure that seemed to take forever—he resolved it as a pair of binoculars.
All that time on the elliptical trainer was paying off. Any other portly man of his age would have dropped dead a long time ago. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been panting and sweating.
He had quite satisfied himself that Chet was dead when the arm moved, the body sat up, the binoculars rose to his face. Richard came very close to screaming, just as anyone would who saw a dead man taking action. It almost made him not want to come any closer. But the agonizing slowness of travel on talus gave him plenty of time to get his primitive emotions under control as he got closer.
“Hey, Chet,” he said, when he was close enough to be heard. Chet had lain down again and not moved in a while.
“Dodge. You came.”
“You say that like you’re surprised.”
“I know you’re busy. Got a ton of stuff on your mind.”
“There’s always time for you, Chet. I’ve always tried to be clear about that.”
“It’s true. Appreciate it. Always have.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Aw, Dodge, you know I’m a dead man.”
“But you were a dead man once before—in the cornfield. Remember?”
“No. Had amnesia. Remember?” Chet laughed, and Richard grinned at him.
“That was when understanding came to me,” Chet went on, “about the parallels and the meridians. The fact that we live in curved space. Parallels run straight. Meridians bend toward each other and at their beginnings and their ends they are all one. When the Nautilus—the first nuclear sub—reached the North Pole, it transmitted a message. You know what the message was?”
“No,” Richard lied, even though he had heard Chet tell this story a hundred times to dumbfounded members of the Septentrion Paladins.
“‘Latitude ninety degrees north,’” Chet said. “See, they couldn’t specify their longitude, because there, all the meridians are one. They were on all the meridians, and so they were on none of them. It’s a singularity.”
Richard nodded.
“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.”
Richard kept nodding. He was afraid his voice wouldn’t work.
“Do you realize where we are?” Chet asked him.
“Somewhere pretty damned close to the border,” Richard finally got out.
“Not just close. Look!” Chet said, extending an arm in one direction, then swinging it over his head like the blade of a paper cutter to point exactly the opposite way. Following it, Richard noticed a line of widely spaced surveyor’s monuments tracking across the landscape.
“We’re on the forty-ninth parallel,” Chet said. “My feet are in the U. S. of A. and my head is in Canada.” The look on his face said that this was enormously profound to him, so Richard only nodded and tried to maintain a straight face. “I’m barring the path. Their meridians are going to end here.”
“Who are you talking about?”
Chet gestured vaguely to the north and then offered Richard the binoculars. Richard picked them up, adjusted them, planted his elbows on the border, and aimed them north toward the talus slopes angling down from the ridgeline. Gazing over them with his naked eyes, he was able to pick out a pair of human figures, spaced about a hundred feet apart, picking their way down over the rocks. With the aid of the binoculars he saw them clearly as armed men with dark hair, answering generally to the stereotypical image of jihadists. The one in the lead was burly and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The one trailing behind was wiry and had a longer rifle slung diagonally across his back. A sniper.
“The rear guard,” Chet said. “Trying to catch up with the main group.” He chuckled and coughed wetly. Richard had a pretty good idea of what he was coughing up and so he avoided looking. Chet continued, “They’re so focused on catching up they haven’t bothered to look behind them.”
Richard drew back from the binoculars in surprise, and his aging eyes struggled to pull focus on Chet. Chet was nodding at him, casting suggestive glances upward. He had coughed a thin mist of blood out onto his chin, where it had caught in the gray stubble. Richard found the jihadists again and then tracked higher up the slope until he saw something in motion. Difficult to make out because its coloration blended in with the tawny hue of the weathered rock. Moving like a drop of glycerin oozing from one boulder to the next. Maintaining a fixed gaze on this target, he raised the binoculars and inserted them in his line of sight. With a bit of searching he was able to focus on the thing and see it distinctly as a mountain lion making its way down from the ridgeline. Its eyes glowed like phosphorus in the light of the rising sun. Those eyes were fixed upon the two men struggling down the slope below it.
“Holy crap,” Richard said. Chet went into another laughing/coughing fit. “These guys are so out of their element. Let’s hope it catches up with them soon.”
“It already did,” Chet answered. “Zula told me that it already took down one of their stragglers.”
“Huh. Man-eater.”
“They’re afraid of humans. Don’t bother them, and they won’t bother you,” Chet said, mocking what a sanctimonious tree hugger would say. Cougars attacked humans all the time in these parts, and the obstinate refusal of nature lovers to accept the fact that, in the eyes of a predator, there was no distinction between humans and other forms of meat had become the subject of bitter hilarity around the bar at the Schloss.
In this Richard now perceived an opening. “Well, shit, Chet, that settles it. I can’t just leave you here. That thing has probably smelled you already.”
“Do I stink that bad?”
“You know what I mean. I can’t just leave you here defenseless. If the jihadists don’t get you, that mountain lion will.”
“I ain’t defenseless,” Chet said. He unzipped his motorcycle jacket, which fell away to reveal a ghastly and peculiar state of affairs. His bottom-most garment was a thermal underwear top, now soaked with blood all along one side, and lumpy, either from bandages or from swelling. He had thrown his leather jacket on over this. But in between those two layers, he had affixed a large object to his chest: a thick metal plate, slightly convex, lashed to his body and suspended around his neck by a crazy and irregular web of parachute cord. Words were stenciled on the plate in Cyrillic.
“I think it says something like ‘This side toward enemy,’” Chet said. Then, seeing incomprehension still written on Richard’s face, he added, “It’s a Russian claymore mine.”
Richard had nothing to say for a few moments.
“If they can do it,” Chet said, “so can I.”
“You mean, blow yourself up?”
“Yeah.”
“I never really saw you as a suicide bomber.”
“It’s not suicide,” Chet said, “when you’re already a dead man.”
Richard could think of nothing to say to this.
“Now listen,” Chet said. “It’s time for you to get the hell out of here. You’re already in range of that one with the rifle. Get you gone. Your meridian isn’t finished yet, you’ve got a ways to go south yet. Me, I’m curving under to the pole. I can see it before my eyes. Those guys up there, they’re going to reach it at the same time as I do.”
“I’ll see you there” was all Richard could get out.
“Looking forward to it.”
Richard hugged Chet, trying to be gentle, but Chet hooked one arm around the nape of his neck and pulled him in tight, hard enough to press the claymore mine against his chest and scrape Richard’s face with his bloody whiskers. Then he let him go. Richard spun away and began to move south. His vision was fogged by tears, and he practically had to go on hands and knees to avoid turning an ankle on the strewn rocks.
He knew that Chet was correct about the range of the sniper’s rifle, and so his first instinct was to get out of the line of sight and of fire. This was easily enough done by taking advantage of the ruggedness of the terrain and occasional clusters of desperate trees. He wouldn’t be able to move freely, though, until he reached the edge of the woods, which was about half a mile down the slope. On his way up to Chet’s position, he had trudged and scrambled wearily up the broken and boulder-strewn terrain, various muscles screaming at him the whole way, since they had already taken enough abuse during the previous days’ hiking. He had taken a somewhat meandering course between areas of melting snow. Now it seemed to him that those snowfields would afford him a quick way down. Quick, and a little dangerous. But now that he had said good-bye to Chet, he was feeling an almost panicky imperative to work south and warn Jake, perhaps reconnecting with Zula en route. So he crab-walked to the edge of a large area of snow that sloped down all the way into the woods. His feet lost traction immediately. Rather than letting himself fall on his ass, though, he leaned forward carefully and allowed himself to skid down the slope on the soles of his boots, a procedure known as a standing glissade. Essentially he was skiing without skis. It was a common enough practice, when slope and conditions allowed it, and his involvement in the cat skiing industry had given him many opportunities to practice. He covered the distance to the tree line in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to pick his way down from rock to rock. En route he fell three times. The last fall was a deliberate plunge into a snowbank to kill his velocity before he slammed into the trees.
The snowbank was soft, and now sported a Richard-shaped depression that cradled his tired and battered body in a way that was extremely comfortable. The cold had not yet begun to soak through his clothing. He swiveled his head around and verified that the jihadists with the guns could not see him.
He was tempted to just lie there and take a nap. He stuffed a handful of snow into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. His heart had been beating very fast during the glissade, and he saw no harm in relaxing in this safe place for a few moments, pacing himself, giving his body a little rest, letting his pulse drop to a more moderate level.
Which it didn’t seem to be doing. He could feel a steady whomping in his chest and wondered if he was finally succumbing to some sort of cardiac arrhythmia.
But this seemed to be the opposite of that, since it had nothing but rhythm. Almost mechanical in its perfection. He pressed a hand to his chest under his left nipple and observed that this beating sensation had nothing to do with his heart.
It was coming from outside his body.
It was in the air all around him.
It was a helicopter.
He rolled up to his feet and staggered out into the open, waving his arms.
THE MOUNTAINS THAT now filled the windscreen, rising up from the flat valley to an altitude somewhere above their heads, looked familiar to Seamus. Not because he’d ever been here before; he hadn’t. But he had been in mountain ranges like these all over the world. These were the sorts of mountains that insurgents loved to hang out in.
Insurgents did not care for spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges. Snow impeded movement and implied harsh cold. “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance,” and insurgents did not like being seen. Insurgents liked mountain ranges that sprawled over large reaches of territory. That crossed national borders. That were high and rugged enough to discourage casual visitors and impede the operations of police and of military forces, but not so high as to be devoid of tree cover or bitterly cold all the time. Many of the features that tourists liked, insurgents found positively undesirable—most of all, the presence of tourists. But Seamus could see at a glance that tourists would not choose to visit these mountains when the Rockies were a few hours’ drive to the east and the Cascades an equal distance to the west. These were low, forgettable mountains, no good for skiing, carved up by logging roads, partly deforested in a way that provided employment to the locals but was considered unsightly by tourists.
No wonder all the right-wing wack jobs came here. No wonder smugglers loved it.
Seamus felt weird. It wasn’t hard to understand why. He always felt this way when he was riding a chopper into mountains like this. Because it usually meant going into combat. He had to keep reminding himself that all the adrenaline flooding into his system was going to be wasted. That if it weren’t wasted—if something actually did happen—it would be a very bad thing given that the people he was with were not geared, physically or mentally, for combat.
Assuming, reasonably enough, that these tourists would want to see the highest mountains, the pilot carved a long sweeping turn up a valley with a white thread snaking down its bottom: a river violent with snowmelt. After a few minutes, this frayed into several tributaries draining a few miles of high Selkirk crest. All the mountains along the crest proper were above the tree line and presented a bleak prospect of barren rocky snags and crags reaching high above vast talus fields where nothing would grow except the occasional freak tree. They burned a lot of fuel in a short time gaining altitude and thudded over a low saddle between peaks, suddenly giving them a view of many more insurgent-friendly mountains beyond, stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by a long north-south lake in the middle distance. Turning north again, the pilot made for the border, following the slow curve of the ridgeline, passing some especially prominent peaks. But during the last few miles to the border, the ridgeline lost a couple of thousand feet of altitude and plunged back below the tree line again. One bald peak jutted out of it a few miles south of the border—Abandon Mountain, the pilot called it—but other than that, it was scrub trees, patchy snowfields, and talus ranging northward well into Canada. In the far distance, the Selkirks leaped upward and became a truly magnificent range, but that was in British Columbia, where, plainly enough, everything was bigger and better.
Seamus, though, had eyes only for the dark valleys that wriggled through the lower country below. This was out-and-out wilderness. A few old roads wandered through it, connecting to widely spaced mineheads or logging camps. But it was as wild and as untouched by humans as anything you could expect to see in the Lower Forty-Eight. And as the pilot, responding to Seamus’s directions, slowed the chopper down and allowed it to shed altitude, those valleys began to take on depth that he hadn’t noticed from farther above. As if he had just put on a pair of 3D glasses at a movie theater, he saw into the gorges of the rivers now and understood the steepness of the terrain. The fury of the rivers told the same story.
“What would you like to see?” the pilot asked him. For they had just been hovering there for a couple of minutes, admiring a jewel-like waterfall set in a deep misty bowl.
Seamus had been looking for paths. The spoor of insurgents sneaking along secret ways through the forest.
“The border,” he answered.
“You’re looking at it,” said the pilot, pointing northward. “I don’t want to cross it, but I’ll take you right up to it if you want.”
“Sure.”
They passed over a partially forested slope rising up from the waterfall toward a wildly uneven plateau of boulders and snowfields and clustered trees. Above that rose a much broader and higher talus slope that, according to the pilot, was a mile or two north of the border and roughly parallel to it. The rock wall rising out of that was pierced in one place by a man-made opening, evidently the adit of an old mine.
“Someone painted the rock,” Yuxia observed.
“Where?” Seamus asked.
“Right below us,” Yuxia said.
Seamus’s gaze had been directed horizontally and north, but he now looked straight down and saw that Yuxia was right. What he had identified, a few moments ago, as a gnarled tree, branches covered with brilliant green sprigs of new leaves, was, on closer examination, a snarl of acid-green spray paint on a rock. Like graffiti. Except impossible to make sense of.
He could see now the faint traces of a trail, leading down to the graffiti from the north, coming from the approximate direction of that old mine tunnel. On the talus it was nearly imperceptible, but from place to place he saw tufts of fresh litter, and in one location it was absolutely clear that someone had glissaded down a snowfield, carving two parallel tracks, still crisp at the edges, not yet blurred by a day’s, or even an hour’s, exposure to the warmth of the sun.
He followed the track upward and was shocked to see, some distance above it, a dead man spread-eagled on a rock.
“Holy shit,” the pilot said, seeing it too.
“Let’s get a better look at that,” Seamus said, feeling that weird sensation again: the adrenaline coming back into his system. The chopper pointed its nose down and accelerated north.
They were passing over that grooved snowfield when Yuxia let out a gasp that was almost a scream. “He’s waving at us!” she called.
“Who’s waving at us?” Seamus returned skeptically. For the man on the boulder definitely wasn’t doing any waving, and that was the only man Seamus could see.
“I think it’s Zula’s uncle,” Yuxia answered. “I saw him on Wikipedia.”
A crack, explosively loud, sounded from above them. Then two more.
“What the hell?” said the pilot in the weird silence that followed. Silence being, in general, a bad thing in a helicopter.
“We’re being shot at,” Seamus said. For he had heard similar noises before. In general, military choppers stood up to the treatment a little better than this one had. “They have taken out the engine. Bite down.” He twisted around so that Yuxia could see his face, opened his mouth, inserted the helicopter company brochure, and bit down on it, keeping his lips peeled back grotesquely so that she could see his jaws clenched together.
Staring at him fixedly, she reached up with one hand, bit down on the end of her camouflage mitten, then pulled her naked hand out of it.
“Brace for impact,” the pilot said. But halfway through this utterance, Seamus stopped hearing his voice in the headphones, because another round seemed to have gone through the middle of the instrument panel and fucked up the electrical system.
The pilot, to his great credit, knew what to do: he manipulated the controls in such a way as to make the chopper autorotate, converting some of the energy of its fall into passive spinning of the rotors that broke the descent marginally. That, and the fact that they landed at an angle on the snowfield, saved them. Even so, the impact was so sharp that Seamus felt his teeth jumping in their sockets. Because he was biting down, they didn’t slam together and they didn’t bite his tongue off and he hoped that the same was true of the others.
The chopper planted its nose in the snow and began to skid downhill like a big out-of-control toboggan. Directly in front of them were trees. Standing in front of the trees was—just as Yuxia had been trying to tell him—Richard Forthrast. A.k.a. Dodge.
He dodged.
The trees didn’t.
THE TEN OR fifteen seconds between the appearance of the chopper in the sky above him and its coming to rest in the trees, only a few yards away from where he had thrown himself to the ground, presented Richard with an unbroken chain of never-before-experienced sensations that, in other times, he’d have spent several weeks sifting through and making sense of. There was something in the modern mind that would not stop saying, If only I had caught that on video, or This is going to make the coolest blog entry ever! Barring which, he at least wanted to just lie there for a few moments asking himself whether that had really just happened.
People were stirring behind the cracked and spalled windshield of the chopper. At a glance he guessed two. On further consideration, three: there was a small person, a woman, in the back. The pilot seemed unconscious or at least unwilling to move. The passenger next to him was a lanky man with strawberry-blond hair and a beard, and he was flailing around like a spider in a bathtub, trying to get free of several entanglements while being belabored from the rear by the backseat person, who couldn’t get out until he did. And she—the voice, speaking what he guessed was Chinese, was clearly that of a female—very much wanted to get out. The man was dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, which suggested that he had flown up here to get in some hunting. Wrong season for it, but perhaps he was a poacher who had come to this area specifically to get away from game wardens.
Richard looked up the slope, just to see whether the jihadist with the sniper rifle had come into view yet. Either he hadn’t, or he was taking sniperlike care not to be seen. Anyway, they’d be in his sights soon enough, and Richard wanted to make the newcomers aware of that fact and get them free of the chopper. He staggered to his feet and sloshed through snow and undergrowth toward the downed machine’s right side—only to be greeted by the muzzle of a semiautomatic pistol, which had appeared by some sleight of hand in the passenger’s right hand and was now aimed right at him.
“Okay,” Richard said, letting his hands be seen, “if I’d just been through that, I’d be a little jumpy too.”
“It’s not so much that,” said the passenger. “It’s the Mossberg 500 on the tactical sling.” He nodded at said weapon, which was dangling from Richard’s shoulder.
“Fair enough,” Richard conceded.
“You’re Richard Forthrast,” said the passenger, and dropped the pistol’s muzzle. Then he was distracted by a series of vicious kicks directed against the back of his seat.
“T’Rain player?” Dodge asked.
“Yeah, actually. But there’s more going on here than just a random fan encounter. We have information about your niece. Or rather she does.” He nodded toward the back. “I have never met her, but I hear she is a fine young lady.”
“I just saw her an hour ago.”
The kicking and thrashing stopped. A face peeked out from behind the rear seat.
“She’s alive?” the young Asian woman asked.
GETTING OUT OF the chopper required some knife work, since parts of the instrument panel had been crushed upward, and sharp sheet-metal edges were catching on seat belts and on camouflage clothing. But eventually the man, who gave his name as Seamus, and the woman, Yuxia, extricated themselves and went around to the other side to look in on the pilot. He was awake now. Richard, conditioned by long exposure to Hollywood, was wondering when the chopper was going to burst into flames, but this seemed less and less likely as time went on. The fuel tank was not leaking, and there were no sources of ignition that Richard could see.
The pilot was reporting, rather calmly, that all parts of his body from his navel on down felt as though they had gone to sleep. Not in the sense of being totally numb, for he could move them and feel sensations, but in the sense of tingling like crazy. His spinal column, obviously enough, had been jammed by the force of the impact and perhaps suffered some vertebral damage that was messing with his spinal cord. He wasn’t paralyzed. But he might be if they tried to move him around “like a bunch of fucking do-gooder shit-for-brains” as Seamus put it.
Yuxia and Seamus both seemed to have come through the crash with little trauma other than a good deal of hard banging around that would leave them stiff and bruised tomorrow. Adrenaline seemed to be taking care of the rest. That, and, in Yuxia’s case, what looked like a serious endorphin rush generated by the awareness that Zula was alive—or at least had been an hour ago. While Seamus interviewed the pilot and tried to figure out what to do, Yuxia focused on Richard. “Your niece honors you very much.”
“I just figured out who you are,” Richard said. “She wrote about you on a paper towel.”
Once he had made up his mind that the chopper was not going to explode, and taken into consideration the fact that they now had two firearms between them, he had begun to feel quite optimistic—as if it were all over now except for rounding up the bad guys and buying people plane tickets home.
“Are others on the way?” he asked Seamus.
“Other what? What are you talking about?”
“Like … reinforcements?”
“We’re on our own,” Seamus said.
“But you knew I was here … that the jihadists were here.”
“If we’d known they were here, we would have showed up with the entire fucking Idaho National Guard. And once we got here, we would not have hovered in a place where we could get shot down by one asshole with a rifle.”
Richard just stared at him.
“I’m doing this on my own,” Seamus said. “Checking out a hypothesis. No one else believes me. I had only a vague suspicion Jones might have come this way until rounds started going through our engine block.”
“Were you able to send out a distress call or—” Then Richard shut up, realizing he was making an ass of himself. He had seen the shoot-down. They had not had time to send out a distress call. “Okay, but at some point someone is going to notice that the chopper hasn’t come back.”
“It is a one-man operation. It might take hours. By then, it’s all going to be over.”
“What’s all going to be over?”
“Whatever is going to happen now,” Seamus said. “Where the hell is Jones, by the way?”
“The guys who just shot you down are the rear guard. Jones is farther south. I’m happy to show you the way. But first may I suggest that we think about the ones who are actually shooting at us?”
As Richard was saying this, Seamus’s eyes wandered up the slope in the general direction of the bad guys in question. Then they snagged on something. “It looks like someone else is already on that particular case,” he pointed out. “Dead man walking.”
THE HIKE SOUTH to the border had involved a number of events that Ershut might have accounted disappointments, hardships, and setbacks had he grown up in an effete Western democracy. As it was, he could hardly be bothered to notice them. The only thing that had really disturbed him had been what had happened to poor Sayed. A long bloody trail through the woods had led to a small tree where Sayed’s body had been dragged up three meters off the ground and stuffed in a fork between two branches. His head lolled forward, nose pressed against breastbone, since all the structure had been removed from the back of his neck. A neat hole had been carved in the front of his abdomen and his liver removed. The very weirdness of the spectacle had made it much more troubling to him than the body of Zakir, who had expired in a way that was extremely bloody but much more conventional.
From there, they had hiked back to their campsite, staying always on the path to prevent the man on the motorcycle from turning around and escaping from the valley. Ershut and Jahandar had taken turns: one guarding the path so that the other could trudge to the campsite above and gather all the things that he would need to complete the final phase of the journey. Then they had hiked up the valley, following the track of the motorcycle, dotted with occasional drips of blood. This had been the source of great satisfaction to Jahandar, who had been convinced that he had gotten one good clear shot off at the motorcyclist.
The trip through the ridge had not gone well, since the way through the tunnels had been barred by a motorcycle lock on the gate, and Jahandar’s attempts to shoot it off had been unavailing. But only a soft and corrupt infidel would imagine that this would really prove an obstacle to two men such as Ershut and Jahandar. They had withdrawn from the mine and simply climbed over the top of the ridge, camping near the summit, where they could get a clear view in all directions, and then proceeding south as soon as it had become light. Ershut had slept poorly, remembering Sayed up in that tree, and wondering who or what had carried out the atrocity. Ershut was burly and abnormally strong, and yet he doubted that he could have carried the limp burden of Sayed that far up a tree that was lacking in convenient side branches. Its bark had been marked with deep gouges made by four parallel claws, causing Ershut to form the opinion that this had been the work of a predatory beast, stashing its kill in the tree fork to keep it up away from jackals or whatever jackal-like beasts might inhabit these mountains. Jahandar scoffed at the theory. He was convinced that this had been the work of a human, trying to put a scare into them by mutilating Sayed’s body and leaving it up where they could not help but notice it.
In any case, they had slept lightly and kept their weapons near to hand. During his watch, Ershut was convinced he sensed something prowling around their camp, and once, sweeping his flashlight beam around him, he was certain that he saw, for a fraction of a second, a pair of gleaming eyes shining out of the darkness. But when he swept the beam back, they had already disappeared.
It might have made sense, then, for them to have kept a sharp eye behind them as they descended the ridgeline in the light of the early morning. But two things fixed their attention forward. One, a fusillade of gunshots that echoed from valley walls all around shortly after they began their hike. And two, a man lurking on a boulder down below them, occasionally visible for a few moments when he came awake and peeked over the top with binoculars. Jahandar occasionally drew a bead on this fellow through the telescopic sight of his rifle and reported that he did not seem to be armed. He was drunk or otherwise impaired, lying still for long periods of time and then moving about unsteadily. Jahandar might have set himself up in a sniper’s perch and then waited for a good shot to come along and gotten rid of this man before they came anywhere near him, but the man seemed so helpless that there did not seem to be a compelling reason to do so. Perhaps they could get some information out of him when they descended to his altitude.
That discussion, anyway, was cut short by the approach of the helicopter and all that happened after Jahandar fired upon it. To their considerable frustration, it slid out of direct view, and so it was not possible for them to see if any had survived, or to fire upon them. First they would have to shed a good deal of altitude. They began to do so as quickly as they could manage, throwing off their packs to give themselves greater freedom of movement and hopping from rock to rock, occasionally surfing on small avalanches that they touched off in steep patches of finer-grained scree. Their general plan was that Jahandar would hang back and try to work around into a position where he could cover the downed helicopter; Ershut, who was carrying a submachine gun that would be effective only at much shorter ranges, would get down closer until he had reached a point where he could shoot from another direction. Once Ershut opened fire, the survivors—again, assuming that there were any—would naturally move into positions of cover, hiding behind rocks or trees, and Jahandar would be able to pick them off from his place of concealment high in the rocks. It was difficult to judge the direction from which sniper fire was arriving, so it was likely that they would all be dead long before they could figure out where Jahandar was—or even come to the understanding that they were being shot at from another direction.
So intent was Ershut on executing his part of the plan that he quite forgot about the strange loiterer with the binoculars until he had descended to near the bloodstained boulder where the man had been hanging out. But he was not there now. What had seemed from high above like a single piece of rock was actually an outcropping of stone that had been shivered into a number of huge slab-sided chunks that had tumbled onto the slope below, forming a little debris trail. Ershut recognized this as a convenient place for him to make his way down the slope without exposing himself to view from below, and he traversed over to it.
And that was when he realized that the man in the black leather clothing had not gone down the hill to investigate the chopper crash but merely concealed himself in a space between two of the boulders. The man came out as Ershut approached, holding his hands up above his head to show that he was unarmed.
He looked almost more horrible than Sayed. Sayed, at least, had been dead, and therefore in a state of repose. There had been no worries that Sayed was going to climb down out of his tree and advance upon them. But this man was staggering toward Ershut with a huge grin on his face. One side of him was all bloody, and his skin would have seemed white had Ershut not been seeing it against a background of snow; instead his flesh looked gray.
The man was saying something in English, which Ershut barely spoke at all. As he raved, he staggered forward, one unsteady pace at a time, closing the distance. Ershut was not especially troubled by this since the man was still a few meters away, and still keeping his hands up, and Ershut was covering him with the barrel of the submachine gun. He rather wished that the man would stop, however, simply because there was something disturbing about his color and the look on his face and the way he was talking.
Ershut glanced down the slope, trying to get a view of the crashed chopper. He could see the bent-back tips of rotor blades dangling above the end of the long skid mark in the snow. People were definitely moving around down there, looking up at him.
The gray man said something about America.
Ershut looked up and noticed that the gray man was gripping, in one hand, the end of a piece of string that disappeared into the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket. He straightened his arm, jerking at the string.
IT WAS A good thing that Olivia enjoyed looking at Sokolov, because his reactions had given her a lot to enjoy since their arrival at Jake’s cabin. Clearly he had never even imagined that there were people in the world like this, living out in the middle of nowhere, disconnected by choice from the grid, surrounded by weapons, and living each day as if it might be civilization’s last. During the bicycle ride from Bourne’s Ford, she had tried to explain what they were getting into. Sokolov had nodded occasionally and even made eye contact from time to time. She had sensed, though, that he was only doing so to be polite. He did not really believe until he saw a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress with a shoulder holster strapped over the bodice carrying a semiautomatic pistol and two extra clips. From that point on, his reaction to everything was fascination and bemusement. Noting this, and choosing to interpret it in a favorable way, Jake gave him a quick tour of the place, showing off the water purification system, the ammo reloading bench, the stockpiles of food and antibiotics and gas mask filters, and the safe room—a reinforced-concrete bunker—under six feet of earth in the backyard. Sokolov watched Jake carefully, and Olivia watched Sokolov, and John, the elder brother, stomping along a few paces behind them on his artificial legs, watched Olivia watching Sokolov, occasionally sharing a wry look with her. Sokolov began to notice these exchanges of looks and to share in them, and so by the time they had gone inside, sat down around the table, held hands to say Grace, and tucked into a simple but generous and nutritionally balanced dinner, they all seemed to have arrived at a wordless understanding. Jake was a true believer. Elizabeth perhaps even more so. But Jake understood that not everyone saw the world as he did—not even his own brothers, with whom he was nonetheless quite close. This did not especially trouble him. In fact, he was even capable of making little self-deprecating jokes and drawing humorous comparisons between this part of the world and Afghanistan. John, for his part, seemed to have developed a facility for shutting his ears off whenever Jake began to talk what he deemed nonsense. If Jake needed to change the oil in his generator or fish wire through a wall to hook up a new electrical outlet, then John was right there with him, helping him get it done. And he had unlimited time and patience for Jake’s sons, who clearly loved him. Olivia suspected that John was making a conscious effort to tell the boys, without explicitly saying anything, that if, when they grew older, they decided they wanted to rejoin the civilization that their parents believed to be utterly corrupt and doomed, they would always be welcome in his house.
In any case, John’s ability to relate easily to these people without actually believing in any of what they believed provided a sort of template that Olivia was able to use in order to maintain cordial and even warm relations with them during the evening and through breakfast the following day. Because in most of their social interactions they were like any other basically happy and stable family.
Olivia provided a vague explanation of why she and Sokolov were here. Anywhere else, it would not have gone over very well. But Jake, no great respecter of borders and laws, readily agreed to show them the way to the Canadian border in the morning. The first few miles, he explained, could be a bit tricky, even if they had a GPS. As a matter of fact, the GPS could actually be more trouble than it was worth in that it would induce them to go in directions that would turn out to be dead ends. As a man who enjoyed hiking anyway, he was more than happy to guide them to a point along the flank of Abandon Mountain from which they would be able to see all the way to the border. They could do much of the journey on their mountain bikes. In places, they would have to carry them, which would be tedious work, but it would pay off later when they crossed over and made it through the old mine and found themselves on a nicely groomed trail leading all the way into Elphinstone. “On foot it’s a three-day hike,” he said. “With your bikes you can be sipping your lattes in downtown Elphinstone tonight.”
Jake had a sturdy, unspectacular mountain bike of his own. So in the morning, after they had risen, showered, eaten a huge pancake breakfast, and packed their things, they set out in a caravan of four: Olivia, Sokolov, and Jake on their bicycles and John trundling along behind them on a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. The ATV carried the baggage at first, which made for rapid going during the first hour as they switchbacked up a trail that took them out of the valley of Prohibition Crick. This petered out as it reached the tree line. Jake began to lead them along a circuitous and, as advertised, completely nonobvious route on terrain that rapidly became almost impossible. Soon they had to traverse a long steep talus bank that was impassable for any wheeled vehicle, so at that point John shut off the ATV’s motor and helped them load their gear onto the mountain bikes. John then switched off the engine, made himself comfortable on the ATV’s saddle, and enjoyed a little snack while Jake led Olivia and Sokolov across the traverse, sometimes pushing the bikes, sometimes carrying them, but never riding them. They were clearly making for a spur of cream-colored granite thrust out westward from the summit of Abandon Mountain. Perhaps a thousand feet below them, in the lee of that spur, were the remains of what Olivia took to be an abandoned mine: a roadhead, some old shacks devastated by weather, some rusted-out trucks and abandoned equipment. She understood Jake’s warning now: if they’d had a GPS, they probably would have made for that site. But the road leading away from it went in the wrong direction and would take them miles out of their way. They only way to get past it was this arduous traversal of the slope high above. The spur seemed to bar their way, and she wondered how they would ever get past it, but Jake assured her that it was not as forbidding as it looked. And indeed as they struggled closer, Olivia was able to make out a series of natural ramps and ledges that seemed as though they would give much better footing than the loose talus. Seen from a distance, the spur had been foreshortened in a way that made it look very steep—almost a vertical cliff. But as they drew closer, she perceived that this had just been a trick of the eyes and that its slope was actually quite manageable.
This pleasing prospect only made the trip to it seem that much longer. But in due time they reached a place where they could finally stand on hard and reasonably level ground. Olivia was all for stopping there and having a little snack, but Jake talked her into clambering up over the spur. This they did easily, even riding the bicycles for part of the way, and finally attained the flattish top of the great outcropping, from which they could look back the way they’d come and see John still sitting on the red ATV a couple of miles behind them, as well as enjoy a previously hidden vista to the north.
Several miles away, their path was barred by a high ridge running approximately east-west that Jake assured them was north of the border. Far below them, and a little closer, was a dark green kettle in the terrain, producing a dim roaring noise and partly shrouded in humidity. This, Jake said, was American Falls, which, as the name implied, was just south of the border. Between those two landmarks, and making use of a compass, it was easy to envision the east-west line of the forty-ninth parallel running between them.
All they had to do was get there; and that, Jake said, was straightforward from here on out. He had printed out some maps of the area and added hand-drawn notations showing them useful landmarks and telling them what to avoid.
This, in other words, was where they would be parting company. Olivia thanked him, and even hugged him, hoping that she was not trespassing on any moral/religious boundaries by doing so. Sokolov shook his hand and thanked him politely but, as she thought, a trifle coldly. Later, maybe, she could find out what he really thought of Jake and his people. But maybe she was misreading the situation; perhaps the Russian’s coolness, his evident haste to be finished with the pleasantries, was just him being focused on the mission (he would probably think of it as a mission) at hand: getting out of this country and figuring out what was going to come next. And for a man in that state of mind, being able to look out and see the border engendered a powerful urge to get moving and get it behind him.
So Jake turned back and coasted on his bicycle down the side of the spur to a place where it became positively dangerous and then hopped off it and resumed the arduous trudge back across the talus slope. Olivia, who had been known to harbor slight feelings of resentment when she found herself obligated to give a friend a lift to Heathrow, felt ashamed by comparison.
But she was with a man who had little time or patience for such ruminations, so they were on their way as soon as they could down a few swallows of water and finish their candy bars. The north side of the spur was a different proposition from the one they had just climbed, being flatter, smoother, and easier to move on at first. They were pushing and sometimes carrying the bicycles, picking their way down among huge shivered boulders, headed for a stretch of talus that would take them down into the tree line a couple of hundred meters below.
Olivia had been hearing a dim whacka-whacka-whacka noise for a few moments.
“Helicopter,” Sokolov said, and drew into the shadow of a boulder, indicating with a look at Olivia that she might want to do the same. They laid the bikes on their sides and then squatted down.
A minute later, a small helicopter, moving at a leisurely pace, traversed across the broad valley to the west of them, headed generally north. It slowed and descended as it drew closer to the falls and hovered there for a couple of minutes. Then its tail elevated, and it began to head north.
“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Olivia asked. “They’re not cops.”
Sokolov seemed to have been thinking quite hard about the same question. He shrugged. “It is not how I would do it,” he said. “But someone is looking for something. It is better that we not be seen.”
“In a few more minutes, we’ll be down in the trees,” she pointed out, tapping a notation on Jake’s map.
“Then let us go that way while they are looking at something else,” Sokolov suggested, and rose to his feet and picked up his bicycle.
The chopper, flying quite close to the ground now, had disappeared from view among the convolutions of the ridges and valleys. Sokolov now set a pace that Olivia was barely able to keep up with. He was too much the gentleman to leave her far behind, but she did not want to make him stop and wait any more than was strictly necessary. They soon emerged from the boulder field and began to pick their way straight down the talus slope toward the trees.
The footing was treacherous and demanded all her attention. So she almost rear-ended him. He had pulled up short and was holding out a hand for silence.
“What?” she asked. She had veered to the left to avoid a collision and now found herself nearly abreast of him.
“Shooting, maybe,” he said.
They stood absolutely silent for a minute, then two, then three. Finally Sokolov began to breathe more deeply and to show interest in things around them. He hitched his bottom up onto the seat of his bicycle, got a foot on a pedal, and eyed the slope below. Wondering if he could take it on wheels. Olivia was praying he wouldn’t.
“Interesting that there is no more helicopter,” he pointed out.
“Maybe they landed.”
“Blades would still be moving, I think.”
His sentence was punctuated by a sharp bang, impressively loud even though it was at a great distance. Echoes continued to reach them, reflecting from various slopes, for what seemed like a full sixty seconds afterward.
Sokolov’s eyes met Olivia’s. He saw the uncertainty on her face. Read her mind, perhaps, as she got ready to put forth the theory that it was a big tree branch snapping, or a stick of dynamite going off in a mining operation.
“Ordnance,” Sokolov said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We are in some kind of little war.” Then, seeing a look of incomprehension or disbelief on her face: “Jones is here.”
SEAMUS DID NOT have a direct line of sight to what happened above, but his eyes saw a sort of blood comet hurtling upward just a moment before his eardrums were all but staved in. The comet expanded and faded to a bank of pink fog that, mercifully, was blown in another direction by the light breeze coming up out of the valley.
Yuxia was standing next to the helicopter, where she had been bantering with the pilot, trying to get his mind off his troubles. She had belatedly clapped her hands over the side of her head and was standing there with her mouth in an O, eyes darting around uncertainly. Richard Forthrast seemed to have been taken by a dizzy spell and sat down roughly on the ground and hugged his knees, staring in an unfocused way in the general direction of the explosion. Seamus noted with approval and interest that, even as Richard had been semicollapsing to the ground, he had taken care to manage the shotgun hanging from his shoulder, making sure that its barrel did not dig into the ground and get jammed with dirt.
“Care to fill me in on anything?” Seamus asked, when he felt as though he had some chance of being able to hear the answer.
“That was my friend Chet,” Richard answered.
“The casualty on the rock?”
Richard nodded. “He had a claymore mine strapped to his chest. He was going to use it on those guys, if he got an opportunity.”
“Well, I guess an opportunity presented itself,” Seamus said. It was not an exquisitely sensitive thing to say. Richard’s eyes jumped quickly toward his face, checking for signs of archness. But Seamus had said it, and meant it, quite seriously. Richard broke eye contact and squinted up the slope.
“The question is how many did he get?”
“There were two jihadists?”
“And one man-eating cougar.”
Now it was Seamus’s turn to look at Richard for signs of sarcasm. But the latter had deadpanned it.
“If the jihadists had a lick of sense,” Seamus said, “they wouldn’t have been standing right next to each other. We had better assume that at least one of them is still alive. And it is safest to assume that he is the sniper.”
“And here we are with a shotgun and a pistol,” Richard pointed out.
“What is that thing loaded with? Slugs or—”
“Buckshot,” Richard said. “Four shells remaining.”
“What are these words?” Yuxia asked.
“All the guns we have,” Richard explained, “can only hit things that are close. Up above us, we think is a man with a gun who can hit things from far away.”
Seamus considered it. “If there’s anything to your Wikipedia entry, you know the way from here.”
“That much of it is actually true,” Richard said.
“If the three of us go together, the following will happen,” Seamus said. “The sniper will come down here and—” He nodded toward the chopper and flicked his thumb across his throat, indicating the likely fate of the crippled pilot. “Then he will track us down the valley and try to pick us off one by one. So that’s not what we’re going to do.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Richard asked him.
“A man in his element. Here’s how this is going to go. I am going to find a blind where I can hang out. You two, Richard and Yuxia, are going to get out of here and try to find your way to safety. If the sniper comes here, I will kill him. If he follows you, then I will follow him. That’s good for the pilot”—he nodded toward the chopper—“because he’s got enough warm clothes and water and stuff to stay alive here for a little while as long as fucking jihadist snipers aren’t coming after him.”
“What about the man-eating lion?” Yuxia put in.
“Fuck!” Seamus said, and then immediately felt bad since it made Yuxia flinch. “I don’t know. I’ll warn the pilot. Tell him to keep the door closed.”
A moment passed.
“What are you guys waiting for?” Seamus asked.
JUST BEFORE AWAKENING, she had dreamed of the flight from Eritrea, the six-month barefoot march into the Sudan and the quest for a refugee camp willing to take her group. The faces had faded from her memory, but the landscape, the vegetation, the feel of the march had stayed with her and become the continuo line underlying many of her dreams. Usually it was northern Eritrea, which they had marched through during the first days of the journey, when her mind had been fully open to the new sights and impressions that, once they hiked free of the caves in which she had spent her earliest years, seemed to present themselves to her every moment. The terrain was endless brown hills separated by the arroyos of seasonal streams and barely misted with scrubby vegetation. Nothing like the terrain she was running through now, densely grown with huge cedars and carpeted with ferns. But she knew that if she gained enough altitude, she would find herself in territory like what she and Chet had traveled through yesterday: steep, wide-open country where you could see for miles. And going there was not optional. If she stayed to the low moist valley of the river that flowed south from American Falls, it would lead her off in the wrong direction, taking her down into the basin of a major lake system that drained southward. It might be two days’ hiking down into those lakes before she could reach a place where she could summon help. To reach Uncle Jake’s, she would have to climb out of the valley and above the tree line to the lower reaches of Abandon Mountain, which she would have to traverse for several miles until she came to the headwaters of Prohibition Crick. That bit, she already knew, was going to be the desperate part: that was where she’d have to summon whatever it was the leaders of her refugee group had summoned on the worst days of their trek, when they were tired, short on food and water, and being pursued by men with guns.
The only thing that was going to make it possible was that she had a head start. The jihadists would have to climb farther out of the valley than she would. Even so, it was a long climb; and she feared that they would be able to narrow the gap, or even catch up with her, before she broke out above the tree line and into country where it would be impossible to hide.
So there was only one thing for it, and that was to run like hell and not stop for anything. She had grabbed all the water she had—the CamelBak pilfered from the Schloss, about three-quarters full—and as many energy bars as she could stuff into her pockets, and then simply lit out in the direction Richard had indicated. Down below, the jihadists were making it easy for her by shouting to one another and communicating on loud walkie-talkies.
Her first objective—which she achieved perhaps half an hour after parting from Richard—was to make contact with a trail that switchbacked up out of the gorge. The idea of following a marked trail was ridiculous in a way, since the jihadists would use the same route, and therefore be on her tail the entire way. But the terrain left no choice; the slope seemed nearly vertical when viewed from below, and it was a wildly uneven jumble of fallen, rotting logs. To bushwhack to the top would have taken days, if it were possible at all. Switchbacking up the trail, Richard had assured her, could be done in hours by a man carrying heavy cargo on his back.
She didn’t reckon she had hours.
She slammed to a halt when the trail came into view, then retreated several paces and squatted in ferns to listen and think for a moment. While she was doing that, she sucked water out of the tube of the CamelBak and forced herself to eat a food bar. The sounds being made by the jihadists had become fainter during her run, which was of course better than the alternative, but still no reason to relax. If they knew what was good for them, they were talking less and running more, working their way down the bank of the river and looking for the head of this trail, just a few hundred yards below where she was now perched.
She had been peeling off layers as she ran, tying them around her waist, and was now dressed in a black tank top and cargo pants with the legs rolled up to expose her calves. She understood now that she would have to discard the outer layers. They would do nothing but slow her down. And they were bright pastel colors that could be seen for miles. The Girl Scout in her was screaming that it was a bad idea, that she’d become hypothermic the moment she stopped running.
But if she stopped running, she would be dead much sooner from other causes. So she dropped all those layers of fleece that Jones had bought for her at various Walmarts, stuffing them under a rotten log where men running up the trail would be unlikely to notice them, and went on with nothing except the clothes on her body and the water pouch slung on her back.
And then it was just switchbacks and switchbacks, seemingly forever. She struggled, every second, with the desire to slow down, to stop and take a rest, reminding herself over and over that the men behind her were used to scampering around Afghanistan like mountain goats. For all she knew, Jones was putting guns to their heads to force them to go faster. So she tried to remember what that was like—Jones putting a gun to her head—and to use that to eke out a little more speed. As much as fear told her to keep looking down, her brain told her to keep looking up, trying to make out the next leg of the switchback on the slope above her. For sometimes these things were designed as much for erosion control as for hiking efficiency, and there might be places where she could dash straight up the slope for, say, fifty feet and thereby cut off hundreds of feet of a switchback’s apex. She perceived a few such opportunities and took them, arms flailing and legs scrambling as some part of her mind told her, If I had only stayed on the trail, I’d already be long past this point! Listening to that voice, then, she ignored a couple of such opportunities and then heard another voice saying, If you had taken the shortcut, you’d be way ahead. There was no getting away from those voices, so she tried to take each opportunity that looked worth it. The jihadists, she knew, didn’t have to make such choices; they could split up and send half the group one way and half the other, let the best men win.
Which, if true, must mean that they were getting widely spread out on the trail below her. She wouldn’t have to contend with all of them at once.
Thank God Jahandar had stayed behind. But she’d been taking a silent inventory of their weapons and seen other guns perfectly capable of killing at long range.
She had no concept of time’s passage and had forgotten to count switchbacks. But she had the clear sense that the canopy overhead was thinning out, the light growing brighter, the switchbacks becoming less acute as the slope abated.
She got to a point where she simply could not run anymore, so she permitted herself to drop into a brisk walk while she drank more water—she hadn’t been drinking enough, the CamelBak was only half empty—and ate another couple of bars. She was now on something that almost felt like a proper hike through the woods. Still gaining altitude but no longer with the sense of clinging to a cliff face. Gazing ahead and up-slope through increasingly common gaps between trees, she saw the high terrain that she had both longed for and dreaded all through the ascent, and towering above it the bare scarp of Abandon Mountain, which had nothing to recommend it as a tourist attraction unless you were a big fan of bleak. It looked like a science-fiction magazine cover, a mountain on some dead moon of Jupiter.
It was during this little respite that she heard the sound of a helicopter somewhere and debated whether she ought to run out into the open and flag it down. But it was hopeless; the chopper was a good distance away and the sight lines obscured by trees.
If only she had saved some of those bright pastel garments so that she could wave them in the air.
Speaking of which, the air was now bitingly cold on her shoulders. She bolted the last of her energy bar and forced herself to accelerate into a trot, then slowly build that up into a run.
She was just hitting her stride when she heard a sharp cracking boom. Because of the way it echoed around all the neighboring slopes, she found it difficult to judge direction. She was fairly certain, though, that it had sounded out of the direction from which she had just come. Miles away.
There was no one moment, no one place when she made the decision to go for it. The trees became thinner and thinner, the sight lines became clearer and longer, the ground angled more and more steeply under her feet. Minutes ago, she had been running across nearly level ground. But now she noticed that she was scrambling, almost on all fours, up a talus slope; looking back and down to judge her progress, she saw a good quarter of a mile of perfectly open ground behind and below her, terminated in the distance by a fringe of scrubby undergrowth that shortly developed into proper forest.
Down in that forest she could see movement. At least one man, possibly two of them. They were at most five minutes behind her: a sufficient head start to keep her alive in the dense forest down below, but, up here, just enough to make it a challenging shot.
She snapped her head back around to scan the slope above her, hoping she might see a place to take cover.
In most ways, this place could not have been worse. During her geoengineering studies, she had learned all about the angle of repose, which was the slope that a heap of particulate matter naturally adopted over time; it explained the shape of an anthill, a mound of sugar, a pile of gravel, or a mountain of scree. The angle was different for each type of material. Its exact value was not important here. What was important was that the angle was everywhere the same, and so slopes made of such materials tended to be ruler straight. There were no mounds or bulges to hide behind.
And—as she kept being reminded—they were inherently unstable. As long as she remained on areas of larger rocks, her weight was not sufficient to break anything loose, but when she strayed into sandy or gravely areas she set off little avalanches. Nothing big enough to be dangerous, either to her or (unfortunately) those below her, but enough to give her the impression that she was climbing on a treadmill, burning energy but, like Sisyphus, going nowhere.
She had made it about two-thirds of the way up this sharpshooter’s paradise when she began to hear guns firing from below. At first, a loose and irregular string of four or five pops, probably shots from a pistol. One of them whanged off a football-sized rock perhaps ten feet away from her and dislodged it. It went tumbling down the slope, neither picking up speed nor slowing down, occasionally loosening smaller stones but not setting off anything like a proper avalanche. So the shooter had missed her by a mile, which was to be expected with that sort of a weapon at this distance; but the mere fact of being shot at and of seeing bullets hit things nearby had frozen her in a low crouch for several moments—moments that, she knew, the slower members of Jones’s crew were using to make up for lost time. She forced herself to keep scrambling, heading for a patch about twenty feet above her that seemed to include a few larger rocks—perhaps just enough that she could flatten herself behind them. This worked for all of about three seconds, until a hellish racket started up from below, so startling her that she planted a foot wrong, lost her footing, and fell hard, banging one elbow and nearly planting her face. The air around her was full of sharp dust and zinging fragments of rock. Someone down there had opened up with a fully automatic weapon. She hazarded a look down and saw, through a cloud of kicked-up rock dust, one of the jihadists planted there with a submachine gun braced on his hip. Not one of the bigger assault rifles, which fired high-velocity rifle rounds. This would be loaded with pistol rounds. Still perfectly capable of tearing up her body, of course, but intended for short-range work. Urban combat. Mowing down commuters on buses.
The shooter’s companion—the one who had been firing the pistol a few moments earlier—shouted some advice at him, and he sullenly raised the weapon from his hip to his shoulder. Yes, he was actually going to try aiming it this time.
Zula got up and scrambled as hard as she could.
More shouted debate from below. The man with the submachine gun had been persuaded that he would get better results if he deployed its collapsible stock and braced it against his shoulder.
While this was being done Zula was putting everything she had into a frantic series of leaps and pounces. When frantic pawing didn’t work, she paused, breathed, planted feet and hands on big rocks, and hurled her body upward.
The noise began again and then stopped; a hail of rock splinters peppered her back. Another burst then struck the slope above her, sending a few stones tumbling down, forcing her to dodge sideways for a couple of yards. Something tugged at the loose fabric of her cargo trousers, behind her thigh, and she dared not believe that a bullet had passed through it. A brief silence, and then several rounds chattered against a mosaic of bigger rocks, perhaps watermelon sized, just ahead of her: the shooter had figured out where she was going and was trying to drive her back. But she had already launched herself and could not have changed her course even if she’d had second thoughts. Something whacked her in the mouth. She landed on her belly and flattened herself on the upper side of this tiny collection of larger stones. She could not see the shooter; that was good. Rounds struck near her feet. She kicked wildly, bashing a few protuberant rocks out of the way, enabling her to settle her legs and her feet just a few inches lower. Important inches.
She was choking on something that was cold and sharp and hard, and hot and sticky and wet at the same time. She hocked and spat and felt the hard thing leave her mouth, sending a jolt of pain up into her skull.
Actually it was two hard things, borne on a spate of blood and saliva: a chip of rock, about the size of a chickpea, but angular and sharp. And a tooth that it had apparently sheared off at its root when the rock chip had flown into her mouth, which had been open and gasping for air. Feeling with her tongue, she found a seeping hole where her right canine ought to have been. In front of that her upper lip was numb and felt huge. It was going to hurt soon, if she lived that long.
A few more bursts of fire swept across the tiny bulwark of stones behind which she was hiding, but to no effect, other than psychological. She could hear the men talking down below. Shouting, actually, since they had deafened themselves by playing with loud toys.
What would she do in their situation? Leave the one with the submachine gun below to keep her pinned in place with occasional bursts of fire. Meanwhile the one with the pistol could scramble up the slope and find an angle from which to shoot at her.
She said good-bye to her tooth, wiped her bloody hand on her shirt, then groped down the side of her body until she found the Glock in the cargo pocket of her trousers. This she pulled out and brought up in front of her face. She had no idea how many rounds it contained. Since she seemed to have some time, she ejected its clip and rotated the back of it into the sunlight so that she could see through the little holes in its back and count the bullets. This was a seventeen-round magazine that contained nine rounds at the moment; a tenth was already chambered. She shoved the clip back into the pistol’s grip, made sure it was firmly seated, and slipped her finger carefully over the trigger, which was in its forward position: her weapon was cocked and ready to fire.
YUXIA ABOUT-FACED AND hurled herself down into the forest with Richard mounting the hottest pursuit of which he was capable. Seamus was very close to having his feelings hurt by the decisiveness with which the young lady had embraced, and acted upon, his plan. He had been assuming that there would be a lengthy and tedious transitional phase during which he would be obliged to convince her, against all of her soft womanly emotions, to leave him behind in this mortally dangerous situation: semiexposed, facing an enemy with a vastly longer-range weapon, yet unable to maneuver freely because of the requirement not to abandon Jack the chopper pilot.
In the minutes after she and Richard departed, Seamus had to keep himself busy moving about the area in a very specific manner, trying to situate himself so that the sniper above would (preferably) not be able to see him, or (barring that) not be able to get a good shot off at him. His camouflage clothing, ironically, was doing him very little good. The helicopter had come to a halt in a small and sparse collection of trees surrounded on three sides by a field of blindingly white snow. Unless he wanted to expose himself on that snow like a cockroach in a bathtub, he only had one way out, which was to move downhill into a little draw, lined with shrubs and scrubby little coniferous trees, that drained this part of the slope and eventually turned into a tributary of the river that plunged over the American Falls. This was the route that Yuxia and Richard had taken. There was little doubt in Seamus’s mind that those two were safe, at least for the time being. He was hoping that the sniper would see the disturbance that they made in the low foliage as they hustled through it, hear them crashing through dry undergrowth and snapping branches with their feet, and decide to chase after them, which would bring him directly across Seamus’s field of fire. The sniper couldn’t possibly know how many surviving people were in this party, and he couldn’t know how many had just run down the draw; with luck he would assume that they had all run off and feel no inhibitions about giving chase openly.
Seamus found a place that suited him, where he was able to settle himself into a little depression in the ground and peer uphill between tree trunks. He had pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head and cinched its drawstring tight, covering his hair and as much as possible of the oval of his face. This interfered with hearing and peripheral vision but seemed preferable to giving the sniper a nice round flesh-colored target. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He settled in to wait.
The thing with Yuxia meant nothing, he convinced himself. It wasn’t like she had been living in normal circumstances for the last couple of weeks. Even before recent events, she had been decisive and strong-minded, probably to the point where people in her village considered her a little weird. He could see that much. All this stuff with the Russians, with Jones, the Philippine excursion, the chopper crash—it had just made her more so. She just wanted to get out of this alive.
Having satisfied himself as to that, he began questioning his judgment in re the matter of Jack the pilot. If the only objective was to keep Jack’s spine stabilized until medical help could be brought in, then leaving him tightly strapped into his seat was probably a good move. But in these circumstances, leaving him there, exposed to observation and to fire from above, seemed downright ghoulish.
Jack was moving his arms. It wasn’t clear why. Trying to actually do something? Or just flailing around in agony? A lot of times, trauma did not actually hurt. The pain came later. Maybe this was happening to him now. It was difficult to see what was going on in there. The chopper’s windscreen was a casserole of cracks and shards.
“Seamus,” Jack called, “I need to get out of here.”
“Fuck!” Seamus said under his breath.
“Seamus! Help me, man! I’m in a lot of pain!”
Seamus was biting his tongue. He wanted to tell Jack to shut up, but he had no idea how close the sniper might be, whether he could hear anything that Seamus might say.
But Jack was already making it pretty obvious that someone else was down here with him and that his name was Seamus.
He heard the distinctive and never-to-be-forgotten sound of a high-velocity round passing through the vicinity, and a sharp pop/tinkle from the direction of the chopper, and, on its heels, the crack of a rifle shot from up the slope.
The temptation here, of course, was to engage in sudden movement, which was exactly what the sniper would be looking for. Seamus contented himself with swiveling his eyeballs to examine the chopper. It was such a wreck that it was difficult to see clear evidence of its having been newly shot. But as he was watching, he heard the bullet sound again and saw another round impact the fuselage, behind the cabin, below the engine. Searching its vicinity, he now saw the previous bullet hole, just a hand’s breadth away.
Another hole appeared, between the first two.
The fucker was using the chopper as a target to zero his sights.
No, wait. What was that smell?
“Gasoline!” Jack cried. “The tank is ruptured, I’m getting the hell out of here, Seamus!” And Seamus saw Jack lurch free as he undid his harness. The sudden movement caused him to scream. Seamus, like anyone else who was not a complete sociopath, felt sympathy for Jack and wanted to help him, or at least to call out some encouraging words. But those lovely altruistic instincts were completely suppressed, at the moment, by tactical calculations. Jack was actually doing the right thing, without any help, or even encouragement, from Seamus. If Seamus were to move or to call out now, he’d be giving the sniper exactly what the sniper wanted, and he wouldn’t be doing Jack any good at all.
Because—if Seamus were reading the situation correctly—the sniper suspected that there was another person down here, another person who was named Seamus and who was assumed to be able-bodied. That much he could have guessed from overhearing Jack. His plan had been to draw Seamus out of cover by creating an implicit threat to cremate the helpless pilot.
Now that Jack was moving, though, the sniper had to shoot at him directly in order to create a threat. And this was difficult since much of the helicopter was between him and the target. Jack had tumbled out the chopper’s side door and collapsed to the ground in a manner that could not have been pleasant for him. He was now dragging himself downhill, headed for the draw, albeit very slowly, his fear of the burning gasoline overriding the pain in his back.
The gasoline was ice cold and would be more difficult to ignite than usual. Merely shooting at it from a distance might not do the trick and would waste bullets. Seamus, a connoisseur of high-speed gun photography, knew that a plume of still-burning gunpowder and hot gas would erupt from the barrel of his Sig when he fired a round and probably set fire to the fuel—if he could get close enough.
Unfortunately, he was something like twenty feet away from the chopper.
Jack was moving commendably for a man with a serious spinal injury, dragging himself down the slope on his elbows.
Seamus stood up. He just stood straight up and gazed directly up the slope for perhaps two seconds and got an excellent view of the sniper, who was ensconced on a rock in the seated position, rifle at the ready, but gazing over the top of his scope, taking in a general view of the scene. The sniper reacted quickly, raising the weapon and getting his eye socketed into the scope, trying to find Seamus with it. But as Seamus knew perfectly well, these things took time. Seamus had a pretty good idea of how long they took. The transition from normal vision to the world as seen through the scope was jarring and confusing to the visual system no matter how many times you practiced it; the scope was never aimed in exactly the right direction, you had to swing the barrel around to bring the target into view, and there was a tendency to overmove it when you were hurrying to catch up with something that was moving rapidly.
And Seamus was definitely doing that. Having fixed an image of the sniper in his mind, he spun and ran toward the chopper, not in a straight line but in a series of zigzagging lunges, like Nate Robinson driving through a zone defense, and when he reached a place where he could see the side of the chopper wet with streaming gasoline, he aimed his Sig right at it, hurled himself forward, planted his feet for a quick reversal, and pulled the trigger three times as fast as his finger would move. Without pausing to observe the results, he spun away and shoved off with all the force he could muster in both legs, gaining himself an immediate distance of maybe six or eight feet. He dove to his belly and skidded across a stew of melting snow and icy mud that was suddenly growing bright, as though Venetian blinds had been opened to let the rays of the sun invade this little copse of trees. A couple of downhill somersaults got him clear of the burning wreck while (he hoped) putting out any fires that might have started on his back. Then he crawled into the draw, following the rut that Jack had made a few moments before.
He caught up with the stricken pilot in a location that was actually rather good: a water-worn cleft, forming a bottleneck in the draw, overgrown with vegetation, difficult to see or to shoot into. They were only a stone’s throw downhill from the chopper but, tactically, it was a whole different world.
Seamus motioned for Jack to stop and make himself comfortable. He did not aim his Sig at the pilot, but he certainly made no secret of the fact that it was right there in his hand, ready to fire. “If you make another fucking sound, I’ll shoot you dead,” he said. “Sorry, but those are the rules. Do you understand the rules?”
Jack nodded.
“Sniper has a predicament,” Seamus said. “He suspects we are still alive. This makes him want to stay behind and take care of us. But he knows that we sent other people on ahead of us. He needs to catch up with them and kill them. I am betting that the psychological impact of what just happened will be that he says, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to go look for the other guys.’ He will bypass this draw, which looks scary to him because it equalizes the odds—his long gun doesn’t do him any good, he has to get close, within range of this.” Seamus gave the Sig a little flick of the wrist. “He’ll go past us. I’ll follow him. You’ll stay here. If you want, you can make your way back to the chopper after it stops exploding, and throw some sticks on the fire and warm yourself up.”
Jack nodded again.
“Now, I can’t see shit from here, so I have to crawl up out of this hole and look around. We’ll get you help as soon as we can. Got that?”
Jack nodded.
“Good luck. I hope you never again have a day that sucks as hard as this one.” Seamus safetied his pistol, holstered it under his arm, and began to crawl up out of the draw on elbows and knees. When he reached a place where he could lie still, he burrowed as best he could into dry leaves and pine needles, and waited, motionless. But he didn’t have to wait long before he saw the sniper walk past, tromping and skidding awkwardly in the snow, moving parallel to the tree line, just far enough away that hitting him with a pistol would have been a miracle shot. He was looking nervously into the trees as he went. He knew, or at least suspected, that he was in view of someone who had every intention of following him. But Seamus had guessed right: the sniper simply couldn’t wait any longer. He had pressing business down-valley.
The obvious trick would be for the sniper to hike out of sight, stop, conceal himself, and wait until Seamus blundered into his sights. Seamus, accordingly, took his time and moved, when he did decide to move, in the cover of the foliage that lined the draw. Beyond the bottleneck where Jack was hiding, it broadened steadily until it developed into a valley, snow-free and heavily forested. Over the next quarter of an hour, Seamus, without exposing himself, was able to track the sniper’s footprints in the snow. But eventually the trail led down into the forest, forcing Seamus to up his game a little bit and begin tracking the sharpshooter like wild game. Before he made his plunge into the valley, he paused for a few moments to take a good look around, get his surroundings fixed in his head, make sure that he wasn’t missing anything that could be important later. Such as another contingent of jihadists bringing up the rear. It would be embarrassing to fail to notice such a thing.
He did not see another contingent of jihadists. But he was troubled by the feeling that he had seen something moving across the snow, roughly following the path that the sniper had taken. He saw nothing. He swept his gaze up and down the length of the trail that the sniper had left and convinced himself that nothing was on it. From place to place, though, it passed over a patch of khaki-colored rock that had been left exposed by the melting sun, and it had to be admitted that such places were excellent for the concealment of anything that happened to be light brown in color. After a while, with some hard looking and almost as hard thinking, he convinced himself that something might be crouching up on one of those patches, looking back at him, waiting for him to take his gaze away so that it could go back into motion.
Which might be for real, or just his imagination. But if it were for real, he could sit here all day staring at it and nothing would ever happen. So he turned his back on it and stalked into the forest.
DURING HER TIME among the jihadists, Zula had often been bemused by the slapdash and informal way that they went about certain activities. In this she recognized some of her own heritage: a mind-set and a collection of habits that had eventually been drilled out of her by Iowans. It had something to do with the way that such people assessed risk. Some might call it fatalism born of religious doctrine; others might point out that persons growing up in regions where war, disease, and famine were chronic conditions would naturally have a different set of instincts and reactions where danger was concerned.
And so when the pistol-carrying jihadist strolled out into the open and began to hike up the open slope directly toward Zula, she was not quite as dumbfounded as she might have been, had she never been around people who manifested the Third World attitude toward risk.
It could be that the man simply did not understand that Zula was armed. She had not fired the weapon recently, certainly had not showed it to them. He imagined that he would simply be able to walk up the slope, get close to her, and shoot her.
Or perhaps the plan was to take her prisoner again?
It didn’t matter. The result was the same: a moment was approaching in which Zula—lying prone, and reasonably well sheltered behind rocks—would place this man’s center of mass in her sights and pull the trigger. The closer she let him get, the easier the shot would be. As the Girl Scout in her might have predicted, she was getting cold, and her hands were beginning to shake. So she had to fight the temptation to shoot early. Better to wait for him to grow larger in the sights of the gun. But if she let him get too close, he might see the pistol in her hands.
She was lying on her side, having plastered her body into a tiny depression. It was awkward and uncomfortable. But the man below, sweeping the area with submachine-gun fire, had not been able to hit her with anything other than rock fragments, and that argued for not moving. Some little shift in position that might feel inconsequential to her could have the result of exposing some part of her body to fire.
Still—it was tempting. Her view of the man with the pistol was blocked by the pattern of the rubble. If she jackknifed, moved forward just a bit, she’d be able to see him clearly, brace her arms on a sort of flat tablet of rock a few feet away, get off the shot from a greater, and safer, distance.
Those were her thoughts while she waited and grew cold and shivery and stiff. She wondered what had caused the huge explosion she had heard earlier. Chet setting off the Claymore mine seemed like the obvious explanation. She wondered what that implied about the fate of Chet, and about Richard who had gone to look for him. She wondered what the story was on the helicopter, and whether it would be coming back.
Her meditations were interrupted by new movement, seen in the corner of her eye. She had been looking directly at the jihadist with the pistol, visible only from the shoulders up, struggling up the same scree slope she had climbed a little while ago. She now turned her head to see that the man with the submachine gun had been moving too, trying to get a new angle.
His eyes locked with hers for a moment. He looked excited and raised the weapon to his shoulder, taking aim.
She wriggled forward, moving to the new position a couple of yards ahead. The man with the pistol was startlingly close. He was flailing his arms, trying to maintain his balance. She stretched out her arms on the rock and lined up the front and rear sights, then swung them onto the dark form of the climber.
A single loud noise sounded from above her. Her ears suggested as much. The climber’s face proved it. For his immediate reaction was to freeze and look up the slope.
She pulled the trigger, felt the pistol jerk as its action cycled, saw the shell casing tinkle onto the rocks nearby.
The man was just standing there with a sort of Oh shit look on his face, and she thought for a moment that she must have missed him. But then he tried to sit down, which wasn’t going to work when facing up a steep slope. His legs flew up in the air before his ass had even touched the ground, and he began to turn back-somersaults down the mountain, gathering speed as he went.
She twitched her head around to look at the man with the submachine gun. But he was gone. Raising her head carefully, she found him at the base of the slope, lying spread-eagled.
The edge of the wood now lit up with muzzle flashes from two different weapons: freshly arrived jihadists who had witnessed all of this. But if they were firing at Zula, they were missing by a mile.
Answering fire now came from above: single shots, fired deliberately. These seemed to discourage the shooters below. Zula rolled on her back, rested her head on that flat rock, tried to figure out where it was coming from. The obvious answer was a large mass of solid stone, about the size of a city block, that jutted out from the ramp of talus. She inferred that it had a flattish top and that someone was up on top of it with a long gun.
Then her eye was drawn to movement. Along the side of that outcropping, someone was waving a piece of cloth. A T-shirt. Zula turned to look at this and, after a few moments, waved back.
A person emerged into view and began to make huge beckoning motions toward Zula. Run to me.
Zula had no idea who it was. She got up and began running anyway. She was tired of being cold and she was tired of being alone, and she was willing to try anything. Even if some risk was involved. Call it fatalism. But the piercing bangs that sounded overhead—high-powered rifle rounds lancing down into the tree line from the top of the rock—seemed to give the men below second thoughts about coming out to shoot at her.
SOKOLOV’S IMMEDIATE REACTION to the loud bang was to shed his backpack, open it up, and begin assembling the assault rifle that Igor had taken from Peter and that he had taken from Igor. The logic of this move was far from obvious to Olivia. They were only a couple of miles away from a country in which possession of this gun would be spectacularly illegal. They had not seen another living soul today, other than the Forthrasts. But Sokolov was firm in his conviction that what they had heard was not a mining blast but the detonation of a tactical military device and that they were now in a state of open war with unseen and unknown enemies.
Olivia saw, then, how it all made sense. She had known it all along, really, but had suppressed it out of a sort of bureaucratic instinct: the fear that she would never be able to sell the idea in a meeting. Of course Jones would interrogate Zula, read Richard’s Wikipedia entry, learn about the smuggling, go to his place near Elphinstone, use Zula as leverage to make Richard guide him across the border. And of course the explosion at the border crossing yesterday had just been a diversion.
He was here, now.
How long had Sokolov known it? Until the moment of the blast he had betrayed no suspicions that they might be hiking into a free-fire zone with a gang of heavily armed jihadists. But she saw now that he had been expecting this all along.
Had he been playing her?
It was more complicated than that, she suspected. He had been playing the odds. There were good reasons for Olivia and Sokolov to cross the border. They could have done it anywhere. Sokolov had favored the crossing point that was most likely to produce a meeting with Jones.
They spent a quarter of an hour—though it seemed much longer—staging a tactical retreat back up the slope, through the boulder field, to the top of the rocky spur where they had parted company with Jake.
Inside Sokolov’s pack was a smaller bag, just a thin nylon stuff sack, made to hold a wadded-up sleeping bag. Once Sokolov had found a convenient place to lie prone on the top of the rock, he pulled this out by its drawstring and set it down on the rock. It clattered. It was full, she realized, of hard, heavy objects with corners. Once he had finished assembling the rifle, Sokolov zipped the bag’s drawstring open and dumped it out on the rock. It contained half a dozen curved plastic boxes: ammunition clips for the rifle. From their weight it was obvious that they were loaded.
Sokolov had gotten to Bourne’s Ford before her, made the rounds of local gun stores, bought all of this stuff, and loaded the clips. Just to be ready.
Okay, so he had been playing her. She found that it didn’t really bother her. Because, in a sense, she’d been playing him too. Hoping that something like this would happen.
In any case, there was little time for these metaphysical considerations. Sokolov—who had belly-crawled to the edge of the big flat rock—called her forward and got her to see what was going on below them: a young woman, brown-skinned, black-haired, in a tank top and cargo pants, scrambling up the slope in obvious fear for her life. Bursts of submachine-gun fire from a location that, at first, they were unable to see. By the time they had repositioned themselves to a place where Sokolov could get the man with the submachine gun in his sights, that man had stopped firing and was biding his time while a companion flailed and scrabbled up the slope with a pistol in one hand.
“Go down,” Sokolov commanded her, “and get Zula.”
This—more than the helicopter, the sudden appearance of the assault rifle, the shocking blasts of the submachine gun—snapped Olivia’s head around.