“That’s her!?”

Sokolov pulled his face away from the rifle’s sight and turned to give her a certain look that was very male, and very Russian.

“Okay,” she said, “but what about the guy with the pistol?”

“Zula is going to kill him,” Sokolov said.

“Seriously?”

The look again. “Seriously. But then. Only a short time—what do you call it—a window of opportunity—when she can run to safer place. I will fire suppression.”

ALL THE CHINESE people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was. This was made evident by the fact that he was always seeing her face. Because she was always ahead of him and frequently turned around to see what was taking him so long.

He was afraid that she was going to ask him whether he needed any help.

On one of those occasions, only a couple of minutes after they started running, she got an awed look on her face. Richard already felt as though he knew Yuxia, partly because of Zula’s description of her in the paper towel note. Her face was expressive and handsome, but not given to unguarded moments. Much of the time she had a keen and interested look about her, and frequently she flashed a knowing grin, as if enjoying a private joke. Frank astonishment was not something she would allow herself to manifest unless it was a really big deal. So Richard faltered and turned around, taking a couple of backward steps in an amazed, staggering gait. A mushroom cloud of yellow fire was turning inside out as it sprang into the air above the site of the chopper crash.

“I’m sure it’s okay,” he blurted out, turning back around and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder, encouraging her to get turned around and moving again. She recoiled, and not in a stop-harassing-me-you-dirty-old-man way. She had taken more damage in the chopper crash than she wanted to let on. When she did turn around, she did so stiffly, and Richard understood that the spryness he had been envying her for was at least partly an act, a willed refusal to show pain. Because she didn’t want men covering for her. Because chivalry sometimes came with a price.

“I didn’t get to know Seamus very well during the five minutes I spent watching the chopper crash and so forth,” Richard said, lengthening his stride and trying to draw the suddenly indecisive Yuxia along in his wake, “but he struck me as a smart guy who knows what he’s doing, and I don’t think that he would just hang around next to something that was getting ready to explode.”

She had started moving again, perhaps a little stung to see that a lumbering old man had gained several meters on her. He saw the stiffness in her neck now, the preoccupied look of someone who was working on a major headache.

“Listen,” he said, after a minute, “there’s no telling how long we are going to be running around in these mountains being chased by jihadists, and so I would like to introduce you to our new friend and traveling companion, Mr. Mossberg.”

Yuxia looked around theatrically, doing most of it with her eyes since the neck didn’t like to move. “I don’t see him,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” Richard said, and displayed the shotgun. Some part of him was aghast at the possible consequences of supplying Yuxia with a pump-action shotgun and the knowledge of how to use it, but, in general, this all felt right. “Have you seen these things in movies?”

“And video games,” she said. “You pull back on the slider.”

“Yeah. It’s called a forearm, for some reason. With this kind, sometimes you have to pull back hard—a soft pull doesn’t work.”

“It’s okay, I’m strong,” she said.

“Red, you’re dead,” he said, showing her the safety and flicking it back and forth a couple of times, alternately hiding and exposing the red dot. “Here, you try it. Just remember to keep your finger like this.” He showed her how he was keeping his index finger pointed forward along the side of the stock, not allowing it to touch the trigger.

“Oopsy daisy,” she said, nodding.

They had slowed to a brisk walk, but he deemed it a reasonable risk; it was important for her to know how to work this thing. He got the harness untangled from his clothing and handed her the gun, noting with approval that her index finger went naturally to the right place. “Pull the forearm back a little and you can see that there is a shell ready to fire,” he said.

“Shell equals bullet.”

“Shell is a word we use to mean a piece of ammunition, but here it’s not a bullet. It’s a lot of little balls.” He used his hands to pantomime them spraying outward. “Very powerful. But you have to be close, or the balls will spread out and miss the guy.”

“How close?”

“Twenty meters or less. And it helps if you aim it.”

She looked at him, not sure if he was being sarcastic. “I’m serious,” he said. “Put it to your shoulder, keep your cheek on the stock—the handle—and look down the barrel. Both eyes open.”

Yuxia came to a stop so that she could practice this, taking aim at a tree about ten yards away. “I want to shoot it,” she remarked, finding it funny and fascinating that she wanted this.

“Someday you can come to my family reunion and do all the shooting you want,” he promised her. “Not now. We only have four shells. And we don’t want Jahandar to hear us.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll give it back to you,” she said, sounding quite sullen. He looked sharply at her, and she flashed a grin. Fooled you!

“Probably a good idea,” he said. “He’ll shoot the one with the weapon first. Then you have to take it from me, and hide, and wait for him to come close.”

This remark seemed to take all the joy out of the situation, so they picked up the pace now and devoted all their attention to covering ground. He was surprised by the apparent speed with which they made it back to the spot where he had parted company with Zula earlier. This seemed like a natural place to take a break, or at least slow down, and take stock of their situation.

“I am glad I had so many free waffles,” Yuxia remarked, eyeing Richard.

“I’m running on fumes,” he confessed.

Yuxia didn’t seem to find this very reassuring. Richard straightened up and patted his belly. “Fortunately, I have a lot of stored energy.”

Yuxia gazed clinically at his gas tank.

“In another half an hour or so, we’ll be at a trail. A long climb up many switchbacks.”

“Switchbacks?”

“Zigzags. At that point, you should probably go on ahead. I’m just going to slow you down.”

“Who gets the gun?” she asked.

He thought about this question for a few moments. His brain was tired and working slow.

Then he understood that the question wasn’t meant to be answered. It was an impossible choice. They had to stay together.

Which meant that he needed to get off his ass.

“Thank you,” he said, and forced one foot to pass in front of the other.

“Is this where Zula went?” she asked him.

“I hope so. But Jones and the others probably followed her.”

“And now we are following them.”

“And Jahandar is following us.”

“If that is true,” Yuxia said, “I hope Seamus is following Jahandar.”

She seemed enormously comforted by that idea, so Richard held his tongue rather than speculate about the mountain lion that might be serving as the death train’s caboose.

“I am sooo glad Zula is alive,” Yuxia said, a few minutes later. Richard got the clear idea that she was trying to get his mind off how exhausted and sore he was. “I thought she was dead. I cried so hard.”

“So did I.”

“I asked her questions about her family,” Yuxia said, “but she did not answer very much. Now I get it; she didn’t want the others to hear such information.”

“Smart girl. She didn’t want them to know about me.”

“We found out about you later,” Yuxia said. “Big game man.”

“Yes. I am a big game man.” Being stalked by a big game hunter.

“Tell me about your family,” Richard suggested.

“Aiyaa, my family! My family is sad. Sad, and maybe in trouble.”

“Because of what happened to you?”

“Because of what I did,” she corrected him. “It didn’t all happen to me.”

“When the story comes out,” he said, “it will all be fine.”

“If we don’t get killed,” she corrected him, and picked up her pace so dramatically that he lost her in undergrowth—her camouflage outfit was very effective—and had to break into a jog for a few paces.

“Look, someone left clothes!” she announced a long sweaty while later and tugged on a loose sleeve that was peeking out from beneath a fallen log.

“Zula’s,” he said, catching up with her and recognizing the garment. “She ditched all the stuff she didn’t need. Getting ready for the climb.”

“The climb is next for us?”

“It starts now,” he said, and stepped past Yuxia, bushwhacking through a few more yards of undergrowth until he broke in upon the switchback trail.

During his sporadic, Furious Muse–driven efforts to lose weight, he had been forcefully reminded of a basic fact of human physiology, which was that fat-burning metabolism just plain didn’t work as well as carbo-burning metabolism. It left you tired and slow and confused and dim-witted. It was only when he was really stupid and irritable—and, therefore, incapable of doing his job or enjoying his life—that he could be certain he was actually losing weight. So it was in that state that he began to shamble up the switchback trail. But even in his flabbergasted condition, he was soon able to pick up on a basic fact of switchback geometry that was about to become important. Two hikers who might be a mile apart from each other on the trail might nonetheless find themselves separated by only a hundred yards of straight-line distance as one zigged and the other zagged. Assuming that Jahandar was chasing them—which was what they had to assume—they might have started out with an excellent head start. And he hoped that they had preserved that head start by moving as fast as they were able. And yet the moment might come, a minute or an hour from now, when they might look down, and Jahandar might look up, and they might lock eyes on each other from a range that was easily within rifle, and maybe even within shotgun, distance.

Richard wished he could have bullshitted himself into believing that Jahandar would not be aware of this fact. But Jahandar looked like a man who had spent his whole life on switchbacks, and who well understood their properties.

He saw, then, how it was all going to work out. And he understood that his confusion, his laggardliness, his irritability, were not all due to the fact that he was hungry. This was his brain trying to tell him something.

And if there was one thing he had learned in his ramshackle career, it was to pay close attention to his brain at such times.

His brain was telling him that their plan was fucked.

Their plan was fucked because Jahandar was going to catch up with them—had probably been doing so the entire time—and was going to reach the place where he could shoot up the slope from another switchback. Hell, he could just set up a sniper’s perch, get his gun propped up on something nice and solid, make himself comfortable, and wait for Richard and Yuxia to pass back and forth above him, zigging and zagging up the mountain like a pair of lame ducks in a shooting gallery.

I love you, but I’m tired of being the girlfriend of the sacred monster. This had been the last thing that Alice, one of his ex-girlfriends, had said to him before ascending into the pantheon of the Furious Muses. It had taken him a while to decode it—Alice hadn’t been in a mood to wax discursive—but he’d eventually figured out that this, in the end, was the reason that Corporation 9592 had no choice but to keep him around. Every other thing that he had done for the company—networking with money launderers, stringing Ethernet cable, recruiting fantasy authors, managing Pluto—could be done better and more cheaply by someone who could be recruited by a state-of-the-art head-hunting firm. His role, in the end, had been reduced to this one thing: sitting in the corner of meeting rooms or lurking on corporate email lists, seeming not to pay attention, growing ever more restless and surly until he blurted something out that offended a lot of people and caused the company to change course. Only later did they see the shoals on which they would have run aground if not for Richard’s startling and grumpy intervention.

This was one of those times.

The only thing that made any sense at all was to stop, look for cover, wait for Jahandar to catch up with them, hold fire until he came within twenty yards, and try to take him down with the shotgun before he could shoot back.

“Stop,” he said quietly.

“You okay, big guy?” Yuxia asked.

“Fantastic,” he assured her. “But here is where we have to stand and fight.”

“I am so in favor of that,” she said. “Do I get to shoot one of these motherfuckers?”

“Only if I die first.”

CSONGOR ABRUPTLY SHIFTED the SUV into gear, punched the gas, and rumbled out of the parking lot. He had been running the motor to feed juice into Marlon’s laptop.

“What the—?” Marlon asked, as he watched his Wi-Fi connection disappear. Csongor couldn’t tell whether Marlon had cribbed this phrase from comic book word bubbles or was making an arch reference to Chinese nerds who naively picked up snatches of English dialog in this way. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Marlon.

“Something is wrong,” Csongor said.

“I thought you said you couldn’t drive this thing.”

“I can’t drive it legally,” Csongor said.

“Oh.”

“But I can make it go, as you see.”

“I was transferring money,” Marlon said. Not in a whiny, complaining way. Just making sure Csongor knew that his important work had been interrupted.

“You’ve been transferring money for three hours,” Csongor pointed out, “while I have been looking at the clock and the map.” He rattled an Idaho road map that Seamus had bought at a gas station yesterday. “There is no way that those guys should still be gone. The da G shou can wait for their money; they’ve waited this long.”

Because he had been studying the map, Csongor knew how to get them out of Coeur d’Alene and on the road north to Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. He followed the route, scrupulously observing all the traffic laws to minimize his chances of being pulled over. He did not think that a Hungarian driver’s license would pass muster in these parts.

“Maybe they just found something interesting to look at.”

“That’s not the point,” Csongor said. “A helicopter can only carry so much gas—it can only stay in the air for a certain amount of time.”

He sensed Marlon looking at him incredulously.

“I googled it,” Csongor explained, “when you went out to urinate.”

“Okay…”

“I know what you are going to say next: maybe they had mechanical trouble and had to land. But in that case they should have called us and told us that they would be late.”

“How late are they?”

“Very late.”

Marlon was still looking at him expectantly.

“Mathematically,” Csongor said, “the helicopter is out of gas.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

“Maybe we should call—”

“Call who?” Csongor asked, with a kind of cruel satisfaction. For he had gone down the same road in his mind and found only dead ends. He waited for Marlon to work his way to the same nonconclusion.

They blew through what seemed to be an important road junction at the extreme limit of the greater Coeur d’Alene metropolitan area and went bombing north on a nice straight open highway. It was turning into a beautiful day.

“So what are you going to do?”

“We are going to go to Bourne’s Ford, which is only a few miles from where they were flying, and go to the Boundary County Airport, and ask the people there if they know anything about a missing helicopter.”

About half an hour later they found themselves crossing a long causeway over a lake. Before them was the town of Sandpoint. Csongor noticed Marlon craning his neck to get a sidelong view of the speedometer. Glancing down, he saw that he was going ninety.

“It is not kilometers per hour,” Marlon informed him. “In the metric system, you are going at something like five thousand.”

“Not quite that fast,” Csongor said, but he did relent and drop down to eighty.

A minute later, he explained, “I believe Seamus went up there to find Jones. This was his real plan. But he could not say this out loud. Then Yuxia asked why she could not go along, if it was only a sightseeing trip. Seamus was trapped.”

“Yuxia is good at such things.”

“What do you think of her?” Csongor asked. “Is she your girlfriend?”

“For a while I was thinking maybe,” Marlon admitted, “but then I decided she was my sister.”

“Huh.”

“China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.”

Csongor nodded. “It is a much better system,” he said, “than the one we use in Hungary.”

“Why?”

Csongor looked across at Marlon. “Because you get to choose.”

Marlon smiled. “Ah.”

Csongor turned his attention back to the road.

“Your brother in California,” Marlon said.

“What about him?”

“Are you going to go and visit him?”

“Do you want to see California?”

He could hear Marlon beaming. “Yes.”

“It is probably a better place for you,” Csongor said, “than for me. If I go, I will take you. You can be the star. I will be your—”

“Bodyguard?”

“Fuck that. I was thinking entourage.”

“California, here we come!” Marlon exclaimed.

Csongor thrust a stubby finger out the window at a road sign that said CANADA 50 MI/80 KM. “We are going wrong way,” he pointed out. “Before California, we have to get into trouble. Then out of it.”

Marlon shrugged. “But that is what we do.”

Csongor nodded. “That is what we do.”

BY THE TIME Csongor had finished slowing down from highway speed, they were halfway through Bourne’s Ford and in danger of blowing past it altogether. As a way of giving them some time to get their bearings, Csongor pulled into a gas station. Using some American cash from his wallet—for Seamus had passed out a bit of spending money—he fronted the cashier $40, then strolled back to the SUV and began to pump fuel into it. The way that the gas pump worked was slightly unfamiliar and made him feel inept and conspicuous. But eventually he figured out how to latch the nozzle in the on position, and then he leaned back against the side of the vehicle and crossed his arms to wait for its enormous tank to fill. Marlon had made a quick toilet run and was already ensconced back in the passenger seat, scanning the airwaves for open Wi-Fi connections.

A blue Subaru station wagon turned in off the highway and pulled up on the opposite side of the pump island. Its front was thickly speckled with the dried corpses of insects. Bundles of stuff had been lashed and bungeed down to its roof rack. Since it was so clearly not from around here, Csongor glanced at its license plate. It was from Pennsylvania.

It sat there for a while with its engine running, and Csongor could just barely hear the muffled sounds of a discussion going on inside of it. The tail end, he suspected, of a long-running argument among tourists who had been cooped up together in this small vehicle for far too long.

Then the driver’s door swung open and a man climbed out: a Middle Eastern fellow with a close-cropped beard and dark wraparound sunglasses. He went to the cashier and gave him some paper money, then returned to the Subaru and began to pump gas into it.

Another man, an African with a slender angular look that reminded him of Zula, got out of the backseat, went inside, and used the toilet. When he emerged, he was carrying a large-format paperback with a red cover, which he had apparently just purchased: Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer.

Noting movement in the corner of his eye, Csongor looked up the SUV’s flank to the passenger-side rearview mirror, which Marlon had adjusted so that he could use it to stare Csongor in the eye. The look on his face said: Can this really be happening!?

Csongor looked off in some other direction and responded with a nod.

He had decided that he wanted to be the last vehicle out of this gas station, so when he was finished pumping the gas, he went back inside as if he intended to use the W.C. Instead of which he lurked in the back of its little convenience store area, pretending to be unable to make up his mind as to which selection he ought to make from its dizzying variety of jerky and keeping an eye on the blue Subaru.

“Selkirk Loop,” said the clerk wonderingly, gazing out at the same thing. “Brings in all kinda people.”

The driver removed the nozzle from the side of his car. Csongor advanced to the cash register, spilled out some bags of jerky and two water bottles, and yanked an Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer out of the rack for good measure.

“Those are hot sellers today,” the clerk remarked.

Csongor said nothing. The clerk had pegged him as an American, and he saw no reason to call that into question by opening his big mouth.

Now the Subaru’s driver came in to use the toilet, and Csongor had no choice but to go outside, get into the SUV, and start it up. He pulled out onto the road, went about half a block down a commercial strip, and entered the parking lot of a fast-food place. This turned out to have a drive-through, and so, on an impulse, he drove into it and placed an order for a couple of hamburgers. He drove around the back in a big U and paid at the window. The SUV was now pointed back out toward the street.

While the man at the window was stuffing their order into a bag, Marlon said, “There!” and Csongor glanced out to see the blue Subaru cruising past them at a safe and legal velocity.

He was a bit anxious that they might have lost their quarry as a result of the fast-food gambit, but a few moments later, when he gunned the SUV back out onto the street, sucking deeply from a bucket-sized serving of Mountain Dew, he was able to see it clearly a few hundred meters ahead, making its way peaceably through a series of stoplights.

The next bit felt touch-and-go, since, depending on the lights, they sometimes seemed to fall far behind and other times drew uncomfortably close. But it had become obvious that these men were heading north out of town. Marlon used these minutes to flip through the Atlas and Gazetteer and find the relevant map.

“North of here, a few kilometers, is an intersection,” Marlon announced. “If they go straight, then they are headed for Canada, and it means nothing. But if they go left, across the river, then they are trying to reach the place where Seamus and Yuxia were flying to this morning.”

“Is there some other way we can cross that river?” Csongor asked. “So we won’t be following them so obviously?”

“Yes. Turn around here.”

And thus they turned back, dropping away from direct pursuit of the Subaru, and went back into the middle of the town and crossed over a different bridge. A few minutes later they were headed west, seemingly direct into the mountains; but just before the terrain became really steep, Marlon directed Csongor to make a right turn onto a gravel road that ran due north, heading generally parallel to the river. During his three hours of intense boredom at the flight center, Csongor had flipped through the vehicle’s manual enough to learn how it could be shifted into four-wheel drive, so he took a moment to do this, and then went blasting up the road at an insane pace for some miles. He did not think that there were any cops around here to pull him over; and if they did, he would simply claim that there were terrorists in the area, driving a blue Subaru.

Come to think of it, they should have done that before leaving Bourne’s Ford. But their own illegal status had put them in an awkward frame of mind, never knowing when to hide from the authorities and when to call out for their help. They didn’t know that those men were terrorists. They might have been innocent tourists. When Marlon had said, a few minutes earlier, that they might go straight at the intersection and head north into Canada, presumably to enjoy the Selkirk Loop, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to Csongor and he had wondered at his foolishness for harboring this racist stereotype that the men were terrorists.

And now he was here in the middle of nowhere cursing himself for his failure to recognize the obvious.

They crested a minor rise in the highway in time for Marlon to pick out the blue Subaru crossing the bridge. It had made the left turn and was headed into the mountains.

Marlon opened his mouth to say something, but Csongor had caught it too. “Fuck!” he said.

“This is the part where we get into trouble?”

“Evidently. Make sure you don’t lose sight of it,” Csongor said, and then devoted all his attention and energy to keeping the SUV from drifting off the road. For its suspension was being thrashed so hard at the moment that it was a rare moment when all four of its wheels were actually touching the ground.

“Here,” Marlon said, a minute later. They were approaching a fork, a smaller gravel road headed up a valley to the left.

“This is where you saw them turn?”

“I didn’t see them,” Marlon said.

“Then how can you be sure?”

“Because they left a trail in the air,” Marlon said, “like a jet.”

And indeed, Csongor now saw that the air above the little side road was milky with dust that had been churned up by the Subaru’s tires a minute earlier. Whereas, when he looked north along the riverside road, the air was clear.

A sign, rusted and snowplow-bashed and riddled with shotgun pellets, stood at the junction. PROHIBITION CREEK ROAD, it said.

“Here goes,” said Csongor. He swung the steering wheel and gunned the motor.

ZULA’S RISING TO a crouch and sudden scramble toward the base of the rock elicited several bursts of gunfire from down below, each of which was answered by a crisp rifle shot from the top of the rock above. The shooters below, who she imagined were firing from a standing position after sprinting up the last few switchbacks, did not really have time to situate themselves and draw a proper bead on her; she thought she might have heard a few of the insane-bumblebee noises that apparently signaled the near approach of high-velocity rounds. But the going here was much easier than below, partly because of the gentler slope and partly because the footing was better—more hard rock and less random boulder pile. She forced herself to cover at least a hundred feet before risking a look back. The tree line was no longer visible. She experimented with rising out of her crouch and saw it slowly peek back over the horizon, then dropped her head before anyone could draw a bead and pull a trigger. She ran now in a hunched-over posture, headed for that frantically waving T-shirt, and covered another couple of hundred yards before looking back again. She was now able to stand all the way upright without exposing herself. Winded and banged up, the cold dry air sending an ice pick into the root of her shattered tooth with each breath, she permitted herself to quick-walk the last bit, and finally came within conversational distance of the T-shirt waver.

She had hoped, in a completely irrational way, that this might be Qian Yuxia, but she had known this was not the case from a hundred yards out. The voice that greeted her now spoke in an English accent: “Is that Zula?”

Zula, not trusting herself to speak, just nodded her head and grimaced. The English woman came out to greet her and met her with a handshake at the base of the huge rock. “My name’s Olivia. I’m so sorry about your lip; is that as painful as it looks?”

Zula rolled her eyes and nodded.

“I wish I could tell you we had an ambulance—a helicopter—something—but there’s none of that, I’m afraid. We’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us. Do you feel up to it?”

“Who’s we?”

“The man up there,” Olivia said, momentarily shifting her gaze to the top of the rock, “is known to you, I believe. Name of Sokolov.”

“Someone needs to get that guy a first name,” Zula lisped.

“I know, it seems a bit gruff to go round calling him that.”

“What the hell is Sokolov doing here? Other than the obvious, I guess.”

“I believe he feels he owes you something.”

“You could say that.” Zula was following Olivia’s lead now, as they climbed up along the side of the big outcropping. The slope here had become steep again, and Zula could see the skid marks in the gravel where this Olivia person had sledded down.

“There’s a bit coming up,” Olivia said, pointing up the slope, “where we’ll need to keep our heads down. Coming back in view of the fellas down below.”

Zula looked back and nodded.

“He never intended for things to get quite so fouled up,” Olivia said, returning to the topic of Sokolov. “Was keeping an eye on you. Didn’t want you hurt.”

“I had sort of gotten that vibe, but it was hard to tell.”

“Then, when Jones entered the picture, I’m afraid our man Sokolov took it quite personally. In other words, I don’t think it’s about you anymore.”

“I’m perfectly happy for it not to be about me.”

“All right then, are you ready?”

“I guess so,” Zula said, though in truth she could hardly have been more exhausted.

“One good push over the top.” And Olivia began churning her feet in the scree, setting off little avalanches that Zula had to hop over. Their progress through this last exposed bit was probably not as nimble or as quick as Olivia had pictured, and Zula, becoming stuck at one point, risked a look back and verified that they were now in view of the tree line again. But the distance was so great that the shot would have been impossible without a scoped rifle, and the shooters down there seemed to have become thoroughly demoralized by Sokolov’s policy of firing high-velocity rounds down into their muzzle flashes. The next time Zula glanced back, all she could see was rocks, and then she and Olivia enjoyed a fairly easy scramble up a little chute and out onto the broad and generally flat top of this giant outcropping.

Until now Zula had had only a vague idea of where she was on the larger map, which had been fine since she’d had very little leisure to think about grand strategy. But from here the whole thing became plain. Abandon Mountain was at her back. Looking outward and down over the territory from which she had just ascended, she was facing generally west. Off to the right, a few miles away, was the ridge through which she and Chet had passed yesterday via the old mining tunnels. To her left, a long, gently curving talus slope spanned a distance of a couple of miles to a long ridge thrown out southward from the mountain. She knew from Richard’s description that if she traversed that slope and popped up over that ridge she would descend into the valley of Prohibition Crick and find Jake’s place.

She collected all these impressions while following Olivia, at an exhausted, shambling pace, across the top of the rock toward the precipitous edge from which Sokolov had been shooting at the jihadists. The farther Olivia went, the more she tended to hunch over, then crouch, then crawl. Deeply tired of such inefficient forms of locomotion, Zula balked at going farther. She advanced slowly to the point where she would have to begin crawling on hands and knees, then stopped and squatted on her haunches, stretching out her wrecked thigh muscles and her calves. About thirty feet away she could see the soles of Sokolov’s boots, heels up and toes down, as he lay prone at the cliff edge, peering through the scope of a tricked-out AR-15 rifle that looked oddly similar to the one Peter had kept in his safe. Olivia was lying on her side next to him, talking into his ear, and he was nodding and making little remarks back to her. Something in Olivia’s body language—the almost total relaxation with which she lay next to him—told Zula that she was watching a sort of intimate moment, which made her feel awkward. But after a few moments, Olivia began to inchworm back from the precipice, and Sokolov turned his head and gazed back at Zula with his blue eyes. An American would have made some sentimental gesture here, made it mawkish, but Sokolov contented himself with the tiniest nod and a suggestion of a wink. Zula responded by raising her hand and twitching her fingers in a suggestion of a wave. This was plenty for Sokolov, who snapped his head back around and returned to his occupation.

Olivia led her to a place where she and Sokolov had stashed a couple of mountain bikes. These were loaded with gear, much of which was now irrelevant—or perhaps of greater use to Sokolov than to them. All of this Olivia stripped off and left lying on the ground. They had come well supplied with water and food, a good deal of which went into Zula’s mouth while Olivia was sorting through the rest. A first aid kit contained some over-the-counter painkillers, which Zula consumed at greater than the recommended dosage. Olivia helped Zula adjust the height of her seat post—she was apparently going to use what had been Sokolov’s bicycle—and led her on a short ride up this outflung spur of rock toward the summit of the mountain. In a minute or so they came to a place where they could ramp down onto the faintest trace of a trail that tracked horizontally across the talus slope in the direction they wanted to go.

Their traversal of this seemed endless. It was enlivened at the beginning by some shots fired, apparently at them, from far below. It seemed that the jihadists were probing southward, trying to avoid or to outflank Sokolov’s position by moving through the woods. An abandoned mining camp down at the bottom of the slope looked like it would provide lots of cover for the jihadists, if they could only reach it. But Olivia and Zula were far out of range, and Sokolov was continuing his policy of trying to pick off anyone who took shots at them, and so within a few minutes Zula had stopped worrying about gunmen and turned all her attentions to the project of just making it through the next hour or two. Part of the time they were able to ride the bicycles in their lowest gear, which was very low indeed, but for the most part it was more efficient to push or even carry the machines. Olivia insisted it was worth it, that the bicycles would come in very handy once they got through this part of the journey. Zula did not respond and hardly cared; she had descended into some numb and semicomatose state where all that was going on around her seemed to have been shone dimly onto a screen by a failing projector with a bad sound system.

But in time they made it to a place from which they could look down a clear and reasonably well-defined trail into a valley lined with dark green forest, and Zula remembered Uncle Richard’s story about how he had long ago happened upon Prohibition Crick after a miserable, hot slog across an exposed and sun-blasted slope. She felt she knew the way down out of some family instinct, and she ignored Olivia’s solicitous questions and polite suggestions that they stop for water and food. She threw a leg over the saddle of her bicycle and let gravity begin pulling her down into that valley, squeezing the brakes every second or two, making sure she didn’t run out of control. She could hear Olivia following her in like style. This trail had lots of switchbacks too, but downhill switchbacks on a bicycle were, of course, pure ecstasy compared to uphill on foot, and so she did nothing but enjoy the ride and feel her spirits rise and her energy return for the first few minutes. Then Olivia’s voice intruded on her awareness, warning her of something. She skidded to a halt and listened. Below them, an engine was snarling: not a chainsaw, but some sort of vehicle, a dirt bike or four-wheeler.

“That might be your uncles,” Olivia said. Probably the wrong advice for Zula, who responded by releasing the brakes and letting the bike run downhill at a speed that was on the edge of being out of control. She managed to slow it down just enough to avoid spinning out at the next switchback, got it fishtailed around, built up speed again, and then had to slam the brakes hard to avoid a head-on collision with a camo-painted four-wheel ATV coming up the other way.

Uncle Jake was driving and Uncle John was riding on the jump seat in back, and both of them were carrying rifles and wearing preoccupied expressions. The transformation that came over their faces when they discovered Zula blocking their path was, she hoped, something she would remember for the rest of her life and tell people about at the re-u.

RICHARD HAD, OF course, packed for the trip hastily, Jones following him around the Schloss aiming a pistol at him and telling him to go faster. There’d been no shortage of warm clothes to choose from. All of it had been skiwear; the Schloss was not about hunting. He was now wearing a yellow parka and red snow pants, with white gloves and a blue hat. Underneath were a green flannel shirt and blue jeans. So he could make himself slightly less conspicuous by shedding the outerwear, at the cost of freezing to death.

Qian Yuxia was wearing just what the doctor ordered for this sort of affair: head-to-toe camouflage. When Richard pointed out the disparity, more out of black humor than anything else, she immediately offered to swap with him. But this would have taken a lot of time; her clothes wouldn’t have covered much of his body; and it would have left her either freezing to death in her underwear or else a blaze of primary colors in Jahandar’s telescopic sight.

She then offered to take the gun, find a good place to hide, and blow Jahandar away when he happened by. Which Richard would not have taken seriously had it been proposed by certain other women of Yuxia’s age and stature. In her case, he found it entirely believable. But it would have been the first time she had ever fired a gun. She would only have one chance. She would have to wait until he came very close; if she misjudged the distance and fired too soon, she’d miss him, or just wound him lightly, and then he would tear her apart with high-velocity rounds while Richard watched helplessly from a hiding place. Not really the way Richard wanted to spend his last few minutes on earth.

They were running out of time, talking too much. Yuxia was becoming sort of a problem in that she simply would not be satisfied with anything less than an active role in the death of Jahandar. Faint rustling noises were sounding from down the slope, which could be explained in many different ways, but it was most prudent to assume that this was the approaching sniper.

They settled it like this: Richard moved downhill off their current switchback and crouched behind the root-ball of a huge tree that had toppled straight down the slope. The root-ball was at least twelve feet in diameter, a scraggly sunburst of enormous but shallow roots, interstices caulked with brown mud and with moss. It rose above him as an almost vertical wall. He could not have been more totally shielded from view; Jahandar could peer up the slope all he wanted, he could ascend the switchback that ran about ten yards below where Richard was crouching and never get any suggestion that Richard was there. By the same token, however, Richard couldn’t see Jahandar.

Yuxia meanwhile maneuvered to a place directly uphill of Richard where she could squat in some undergrowth and peer out, almost impossible to see from below. She had a panoramic view of the slope beneath her and could look Richard in the eye from a distance of perhaps fifty feet. She would wait and watch for Jahandar to pass just below Richard, and raise both hands in the air at the moment when the sniper was immediately below the root-ball, moving laterally along the switchback below it.

Richard waited, watching Yuxia’s face and listening to the sounds of the forest.

Ten minutes passed of what was very close to bliss, as far as Richard was concerned.

Zula was alive. He had seen her. But that didn’t explain the bliss. After all, Chet was dead. Moreover, there was a seriously injured chopper pilot awaiting rescue up on the ridge. Any happiness he felt for Zula ought to have been outweighed by sadness for them.

So that wasn’t it.

He was in beautiful wilderness that he had known for almost forty years, just sitting and waiting, alert and alive, banged up, half in shock, but probably soaked in endorphins and adrenaline for just that reason. And no one could reach him via phone or email, Twitter or Facebook, and bother him. His whole mind, his whole attention was focused on one thing for the first time that he could remember.

Occasional bangs sounded from higher up: people shooting at each other, he reckoned. Most of it sounded tentative, exploratory. What did John call it? Reconnaissance by fire. But then came a prolonged exchange, scores of rounds being fired, some from semiautomatic and others from fully automatic weapons, and he had the sense that it had come to a head somehow.

He knew that one side of this small war had to be Jones and his jihadists, but who was on the other side? Had the cops finally arrived? If so, why didn’t they have helicopters?

These ruminations caused his attention to waver for some time, while also making it difficult to hear more subtle noises emanating from the trail below.

He became aware that Yuxia was gesticulating furiously. Which gave him a pang of guilt, since he got the idea that she had been signaling to him in a more discreet way for some time and that he had failed to notice it and forced her to make herself obvious.

She got a stricken look on her face and dropped from view.

A mighty crack sounded from what seemed like just over Richard’s shoulder, and mud and moss exploded from the slope just behind where Yuxia’s head had been a moment earlier.

Jahandar must have come up the trail behind Richard and passed all the way behind him, then looked uphill and seen Yuxia waving her arms.

He heard the bolt of the rifle being worked, ejecting the spent casing, chambering a new round. Then the rustle of clothing. Then the sound, amazingly crisp and distinct in the clear, quiet air, of a revolver’s hammer being pulled back and cocked.

Why was Jahandar switching to a handgun?

Because he’d seen Yuxia gesturing, trying to get someone’s attention down below. From that, he knew someone had to be down here, hiding. Waiting for him. And the obvious place to hide was the root-ball only a few yards away from where Jahandar was standing. The sniper rifle was not going to do him any good in that sort of a fight.

Slow, subtle rustling now as Jahandar stepped off the path, into the foliage, looking for a way to come around Richard’s flank.

Richard had checked the shotgun a hundred times to verify that a shell was chambered, and forced himself not to do so again, since doing so would make a noise. He looked down and inspected the safety lever to make sure that the red dot was showing. It was ready to fire.

He had nestled himself back into a hollow among the dead tree’s roots, which might not be the best situation since it was constraining his field of view, limiting his arm swing. He was considering how to improve this state of affairs without getting killed when his glance fell on a round stone, about the size of a baseball, that hundreds of years ago had gotten caught up in the root system of this tree and was now sticking out of the clotted mud down by his knee. Remembering a trick he had played as a boy, stalking and being stalked by John in the ravine of the farm crick, he acted now without thinking. Until this point he had been mired in a kind of psychological cold molasses. But now he just reached down with his left hand, found the rock, pulled it free from its mud matrix, and underhanded it into some shrubs about five yards off to his right. It flew soundlessly and probably invisibly, then rustled through the bushes and struck the ground with shocking and sudden noise. Jahandar responded immediately, firing a round at it, recocking. This gave away his position: too far off to the right for Richard to get a clear shot without moving farther away from the root-ball. Reckoning that it was now or never, Richard shoved off against the roots with his butt, pivoting around his planted right foot as his left swung around like the leg of a compass tracing a ninety-degree arc. At the same time he was bringing the shotgun up, getting the barrel and the bead aligned with the pupil of his eye, wondering when the hell Jahandar was going to swim into his sight picture. Finally he saw Jahandar in his peripheral vision and realized he had not pivoted far enough; he gave his hips an extra twitch. His left foot was coming down, a bit sooner than he’d have liked; he tried to raise the knee, delay the footfall, give himself some extra rotation, but the result was that the toe hooked on a root and torqued badly. He was falling to his left now, balance lost, still lacking a solid plant for the left foot, which came down hard and uncontrolled on whatever happened to be there. Whatever it was, it was slippery and uneven and made his foot twist around in a way that it wasn’t supposed to. He felt no pain, yet. He had glanced away from Jahandar for just a fraction of a second. He now returned his attention to the sights. Jahandar was gone. He had executed some sort of dive-and-roll back onto the trail. Richard was tempted to fire blindly but held his finger away from the trigger, mindful of the limited number of shells in the magazine. Reconnaissance by fire wasn’t going to work for him.

Getting low seemed to be a good idea and so he let himself drop, which was already happening anyway: his ankle was badly messed up, and the first spike of pain had just made it up his leg to his brain. He took his left hand off the shotgun’s forearm and let its barrel go vertical for a few moments as he tumbled back onto his ass, using his left hand to break the fall just a bit.

Then he looked up to see Jahandar staring at him through a gap between dangling roots, no more than ten feet away. Jahandar was just in the act of bringing his revolver up to bear on Richard.

Richard, who had been so much at gravity’s mercy an instant ago, now found it too weak and slow to bring the shotgun’s barrel down as fast as he would like. Rather than wait here to get shot, he twitched his body sideways, flinging himself down onto his back and then his side, rolling away. A younger man on better terrain might have rolled all the way over and come back up firing, but Richard bogged down in rocks and tree roots about halfway through this maneuver and found himself in the worst possible situation of having to get up on hands and knees with his ass pointed squarely in Jahandar’s direction and the shotgun down in the mud. How could anything go so badly wrong? It was just like John’s Vietnam stories, the ones he told when he was drunk and weeping. A pistol was banging, banging, banging. Richard wasn’t dead yet. His mind had registered something odd about that banging, but he hadn’t had time to think about it yet. An eternity later he fell heavily onto his ass, finally facing toward the enemy, finally with the shotgun up where he wanted it. He expected to see Jahandar still aiming the revolver his way, fire spurting from the barrel and all but scorching Richard’s nylon parka, but the jihadist had turned to look downhill and had crouched down so that only the curve of his back was showing.

The banging hadn’t come from Jahandar’s pistol. It must be Seamus, firing from farther way.

Richard, taking advantage of the slope, rolled up onto his feet, got a clear view of Jahandar’s center of mass, aimed the shotgun, and fired. He then collapsed facefirst into the root-ball as his ankle gave way beneath his weight. A broken-off root jabbed him in the eye. His hand came up involuntarily, and the shotgun tumbled into his lap. He heard himself letting out a brief scream.

In the silence that followed, a gentle footfall, very nearby. He looked up with his one operant eye and saw nothing but the forest moving alongside him. The shotgun slid out of his lap as if moving under its own power.

Qian Yuxia jerked the forearm back. Sharply. A spent shell flew out and bounced off Richard’s head. She rammed it home, then raised it to her shoulder. Someone said, in a gurgling voice, “Allahu akbar,” but the final syllable was buried in the shotgun’s muzzle blast.

“Nice,” pronounced a voice. The voice of Seamus. “But don’t stand so fucking close to him next time. I almost nailed you.”

“Dream on,” said Qian Yuxia.

SOKOLOV WATCHED THE departure of Olivia and Zula with a vast sense of relief: an emotion that he would, of course, never be able to share, or even hint at, with those two estimable females. By this point he had seen enough of them to know that they were cooler under pressure, and better to be with in a tight spot, than 999 out of 1,000 women. But their presence obliged him to divert a significant fraction of his attention into being considerate of their needs, responding to their inquiries, and keeping them alive. In most other circumstances it would have been no trouble at all, and more than repaid by the pleasure of their company. But this business now was going to be formidable trouble, and he needed to think of it to the exclusion of all else.

The environment was, on the whole, markedly Afghanistan-like. The jihadists would feel at home here, would instinctively know how to move, where to seek cover, how to react. Sokolov, of course, had done his time in Afghanistan. But that was long ago, and most of his work since then had been of a decidedly urban character. Advantage Jones.

There were more of them. Sokolov was alone, at least until such time as Zula and Olivia could get back to the compound where the fanatics—those American Taliban—lived with all their guns and their stockpiles of ammunition and materiel. Even then, it was not clear to what extent those people could form themselves up into an effective force on short notice. It was clear that Zula’s relatives were well armed and that they had the marksmanship part of the curriculum well covered. But military recruits spent only a small portion of their time actually shooting at targets; other forms of training were ultimately more important. Even supposing that they did come out from their bunkers with their assault rifles and their expensive knives, they might be more hazard than help to Sokolov. He had no way of communicating with them. They were as likely to identify him as foe than as friend. Soon he might have not just one but two groups of well-armed mountain men trying to kill him. Advantage Jones.

Sokolov was operating completely alone, which, while it technically placed him at a numerical disadvantage, conferred another sort of benefit in that he did not have to coordinate his actions with anyone else. No communication meant no foul-ups. The tiniest bit of cover could be used to advantage. Advantage Sokolov, provided he kept his distance and avoided getting surrounded.

So that—not getting surrounded—was what the Americans called the Name of the Game. Zula’s startling emergence from the wilderness had obliged him to give away his position. Had it not been for that, he’d have waited for all the jihadists to expose themselves on the slope below and then spent the morning picking them off.

According to Olivia—who had obtained the information from Zula—the size of Jones’s contingent had been nine this morning. One of them had somehow been killed hours ago. During the action just concluded, Sokolov and Zula had each accounted for one. That left six unaccounted for. It was possible that Sokolov’s suppressing fire had hit someone down in the trees, but he doubted it.

Another detail: Zula reported that a rear guard of unknown size—quite likely no more than two men—was an hour or two behind Jones’s main group. But one of them was a sniper.

Which raised the question of whether any of the men down below Sokolov might be so equipped. He had engaged in several exchanges of fire with them so far, but with so many opponents, all concealed in the forest, spraying rounds at him from different directions, it had been difficult for him to take a census of their weapons. From sound alone it was obvious that most of them had submachine guns or assault rifles. But the infrequent firing of a bolt-action sniper rifle could easily have gotten lost in all that noise. Some of them might have been packing scopes in their bags, and for all he knew they were down there right now mounting better optics on the weapons that he knew about. Sokolov’s gun was pretty and expensive, with a nice scope on it, but its barrel and its ammunition imposed certain inherent limitations on its effective range. In a sniping duel against a man armed with a proper long-range weapon, he would lose.

Earlier, Olivia had assisted him by bringing a sleeping bag, food, and water right up to the edge of the rock where he had made his little nest. It had become comfortable to a degree that was actively endangering his life; he was reluctant to move from this location that had already been made known to the enemy. As a first step toward abandoning it, he wriggled back to a spot from which he could not be seen from below, then devoted a few minutes to teasing a sleeping bag out of its nylon sack and loosely restuffing it into his parka. He pulled the hood up and made sure that it was packed tight enough to keep it round, then poked his sunglasses into it and wrapped a scarf around the lower part of its “face.” The whole time he was doing this he was feeling a moderate sense of embarrassment at playing such a cheap trick. But he had read all the old propaganda stories about the snipers of Stalingrad and knew that they had achieved much with a repertoire of simple gambits such as this one. When it was complete, he crawled forward, pushing the effigy before him so that its head would pop into view over the edge of the rock long before Sokolov himself became exposed.

A mirror would have been nice to have at this point, but he lacked one. He had to use his ears. The result of the experiment was a fusillade of reports from perhaps four different weapons, most of them firing multiple rounds in semiautomatic mode, which was to say that they were shooting one bullet per trigger pull rather than simply opening up with bursts. They were, in other words, aiming. Perhaps Jones had finally made it to the top of the trail and imposed some discipline. Rounds cracked into the rock near the effigy, others whined overhead. Sokolov closed his eyes and listened for the slow, heavy cadence of a bolt-action rifle firing high-powered rounds. A jerk ran down his arm as the effigy took a bullet in the head, and he heard a plasticky clatter as the sunglasses fell out and bounced down the cliff face below.

So at least one person down there was a good shot with a properly zeroed assault rifle. But if they had a sniper’s weapon per se, they had decided not to use it; and that was, in these circumstances, an odd decision. Zula had told Olivia that there was a sniper in the rear guard. Perhaps he had all the good stuff with him.

Or perhaps a fantastically good long-range weapon was aimed at his location at this very moment and its operator, having detected Sokolov’s pathetic masquerade through his excellent telescopic scope, had elected not to show his hand.

Taking only what he thought he’d need to survive the next few hours, Sokolov pulled back from the edge of the rock. Jones’s vanguard might have been idiots, but Darwinian selection had now removed them from the battle, and the only people left down there were the smart and cautious remainder, probably being led personally by Jones. They’d not expose themselves to his fire again. If they were feeling extraordinarily feisty, they might look for a way to outflank his position and get him in a cross fire, but this would take half the day, and they must know they didn’t have that long. The tree line stretched south all the way to—well, to wherever the hell these men needed to go. Moving through the forest was slow and awkward, but preferable to being shot at from above. That, Sokolov was quite sure, was what they would do. They would only post some sort of rear guard to keep an eye out for him and make sure he didn’t fall on them from behind.

His understanding of the local geography was not perfect, but he had the general sense that, on their way out to the open highways of the United States, they would pass near to the compounds of the American Taliban. Had it not been for the fact that Olivia and Zula were headed for one of those compounds right now, Sokolov might have been tempted to set up a blind and wait for the stragglers Zula had warned him of. The American survivalists, after all, could take care of themselves, and Sokolov was not above feeling a certain “plague on both your houses” attitude toward these groups.

But as it was, he felt obliged to pursue these men. They would already have a considerable head start. He ought to be able to erase this, however, by moving through open territory and proceeding generally downslope.

He ran over the top of the big rock, following roughly in the tracks that Zula and Olivia had made a bit earlier, and then began working his way judiciously down the talus slope. Below he could see the abandoned mining facility. He had not examined this carefully when he and Olivia had passed above it a few hours ago. Now he confirmed his vague memory that the place was overgrown with scrub trees and high weeds. For it was situated right at the edge of the zone where it was possible for vegetation to survive. Beyond it was the mature forest through which the jihadists were moving, or would be soon.

He was exposed on this slope, but it offered enough scraps of cover that—being that he was a lone operative, not a platoon—he could move from one to the next, throwing himself down when he reached them and making little stops to listen and observe. For about the first half of his progress down the talus field, he neither saw nor heard a thing. The jihadists—assuming they were coming this way—had been forced to work their way around a lobe of the mountain, traveling two kilometers to cover one kilometer of straight-line distance. Sokolov was just hurtling somewhat recklessly down the southern face of that landform, so it was to be expected that he would not see them at first. The seventeen-year-old buck private in him just wanted to sprint all the way to the bottom and take cover in the old mine buildings strewn invitingly around the base of the slope. The veteran wanted to creep on his belly from one cover to the next, never rising to his feet, never exposing himself. In the early going, the buck private won the argument, but as he lost more and more altitude, the verge of the forest began to seem more and more fraught with hazards and the veteran’s approach began to take over. He was lower down now, more on a level with any possible attackers, and this made it easier to find cover.

He came to a point where he could definitely hear the jihadists making their way through the trees, and then it became a matter of calibration: he didn’t have as far to travel now, but he had to do it more carefully. They did not appear to think that he was nearby. Perhaps they believed that, in shooting the effigy atop the rock, they had killed Sokolov. Perhaps they had become confused as to geography. In any case, they did not know that he had come around from another direction to engage them, and as long as they remained in that state of ignorance he had a huge advantage that could be lost in an instant if he behaved indiscreetly. And so the last part of Sokolov’s journey was a reenactment of the very worst moments of his special forces training: he spent the whole time crawling on his belly, at first over sharp rocks and then over sopping ice-cold mud overgrown with thorny and poky vegetation.

But this got him, at last, into the precincts of the mining camp, which was a generally flat bottomland at forest’s edge, really a kind of sump that had accepted more snowmelt in the last few weeks than it could absorb. It extended perhaps fifty meters from the base of the slope to the edge of the true forest and several hundred meters in the direction parallel to the slope, and it was scattered with abandoned trucks, trailers, shacks, and one structure that seemed to be an actual log cabin. Sokolov gravitated to the latter. Its cedar-shake roof had long since fallen in to cover its floor, and windblown pine needles and other such debris had collected in the lee of its walls, almost a meter deep. Sokolov burrowed into the needle pile, then reached around him and arranged the stuff to form a mound of camouflage, nothing showing except for the snout of his Makarov.

Then he relaxed and sipped from his CamelBak tube. Ten minutes later, he was listening as Jones, probably standing no more than twenty meters away, gave orders to his men. Sokolov’s Arabic was rusty. Even without the half-remembered vocabulary he had managed to retain, he could guess what Jones was saying, simply based upon the tactical realities of the situation. He was telling some of his men—probably no more than two of them—to find suitable cover in this mining camp and keep an eye on the slope above. Anyone trying to make his way down that slope should be tracked until he was close enough to make for easy shooting, then shot. Anyone taking the high road should be harassed with long-range fire, which might not hit the target but would at least give him something to think about while warning Jones and the others that they were being shadowed from the commanding heights.

Jones then moved on with the main group.

The ones he’d left behind talked to each other in low tones for a minute and then began to explore the camp, looking for places where they could take cover and wait. Sokolov was now convinced that there were exactly two of them.

One of them walked straight into the cabin. He was a tall slender East African man, quite young. Sokolov shot him twice in the chest and then, while the boy was standing there wondering if this was really happening, once in the head.

Having had plenty of time to inventory the escape routes from this structure, he exploded from under the pile of pine needles, got a leg up on an old table, and vaulted through a vacant window opening. He was fairly certain that this placed most of the log cabin between him and the other jihadist, who was out familiarizing himself with an abandoned truck. Moving around to a location from which he could see said truck, he unslung the rifle, brought it up, and fired four rounds through its sheet metal, distributed through the part of the cab where a terrified man would be likely to throw himself down.

Answering fire came out of weeds ten meters from the truck and forced him to drop into a lower crouch. Looking back up a moment later, he saw a man in full sprint toward an outhouse. Getting a moving target centered in his sights, at this distance, that fast, was impossible. Instead he drew a solid bead on the outhouse and fired four more rounds through it. The bullets would pass all the way through the structure and out the other side, probably not hitting anything but keeping the runner honest.

He then embarked on a retreat toward the edge of the woods. The fight had begun too soon: less than a minute since Jones and the main group had departed. They would come back, they would figure out where he was, and they would surround him. Given more time, Sokolov would have won the duel with the man hiding behind the outhouse. As it was, he had no choice but to make himself scarce in the most excellent hiding place he could find, and wait for them to move on.

On cue the other four jihadists came running back out of the woods firing undisciplined bursts. The man behind the outhouse called for a cease-fire and then stood up, exposing himself in a manner that verged on insolent. This man was both good and brave: he was daring Sokolov to take a shot at him and give away his position. Sokolov, inching out of the mining camp on his back, was tempted. But he was making an obvious track in the mud that they would soon find and follow. His only purpose for the next quarter of an hour was to get into the woods and run and hide. If he survived that, the jihadists would begin moving again, and his pursuit of them could resume.

THE SUV BOTTOMED out in a dip, angled sharply upward, and vaulted a sharp rise, nearly jumping into the air. In the same instant, they came in view of a wide spot, just ahead, where a smaller road forked off to the left and strayed up into the mountains. Two vehicles had taken advantage of this to pull over to the side of the road. One was the Subaru wagon they’d been tailing. The other was a dust-caked Camry. Both vehicles’ doors were hanging open, in perfect position for them to be sheared off by the bumper of the onrushing SUV. Men had emerged from both cars and were holding an impromptu conference around the back of the Camry. Some were looking at maps spread out on its rear window. One had a laptop open on the Subaru’s hood and was pointing something out to another. A man was pacing up and down the shoulder of the road, talking into a very large phone. No, on second thought that thing was a walkie-talkie. Most of them were smoking. There were at least eight of them—more than could be counted at a glance. All their heads turned to look in alarm at the SUV, which fishtailed wildly at the top of the rise as Csongor twitched the steering wheel. For a moment, nearly airborne, the big vehicle had practically no grip on the road. Then it slammed back down onto its suspension.

“Left!” Marlon shouted. “Go left!”

Csongor gunned it up the little road that forked off to the left. As they blew past the parked vehicles, Marlon gave them a cheerful grin and a friendly wave. These pleasantries were not returned. Csongor felt the tires losing traction for a moment as he shifted course, and all the muscles in his neck and back went hard as he imagined bullets coming in through the tailgate. But then they were on their way up the little side road, going considerably slower now as this one was even steeper, windier, and rougher than the one they’d just turned off of. “Just keep going,” Marlon said.

“I get it.”

“They have guns.”

Csongor turned to look at him. “You saw guns?”

“No. But when we came over the hill, their hands moved.” He pantomimed a jerk of the elbow, a reach of grasping fingers toward a concealed weapon.

“Crap. So now there’s, what, eight of them?”

“At least.”

“Where was that Toyota from?”

“Some place with a lot of dirt.”

Csongor had been gradually tapering the SUV’s speed down to little more than a walking pace. They had rapidly gained altitude and now found themselves creeping along the edge of a slope so steep that some might accuse it of being a cliff. In any case, it was too steep for trees to grow on, so Marlon now had an excellent view down toward the river and the main road that snaked along its bank. “Okay, they are moving again,” he announced, from this Olympian perspective.

“We must have spooked them.”

“We should turn around and go back,” Marlon said, “because this road goes friggin’ nowhere.”

But Csongor, lacking Marlon’s view to the side, had been scanning the territory ahead and begged to differ. “These roads are for the men who cut down the trees,” he said. He was unsure of the English term for that occupation, and even if he had known it, Marlon might not have recognized it. “They go all over the place.” And indeed, in another few hundred meters—once they had gotten clear of an out-thrust lobe of mountain that accounted for the steep slope—the road forked again, the left fork winding up a valley into the mountains, the right plunging downhill. Csongor took the latter. A few seconds later they passed through another such intersection and found themselves on a short spur that dropped straight down to rejoin the road along the river. Once again they were following a dust trail. But it was so dense now that they could not see more than a hundred or so meters into it; the Subaru and the Camry might be just ahead of them, easily close enough that they could shoot back out their windows and hit the SUV. Csongor had to steady his nerves by reminding himself that the dust was even thicker in the wake of those vehicles; they could peer back out their rear windows all they wanted, but they wouldn’t be able to see anything, not even a vehicle as big as this one.

Along a curve of the river they caught sight of the lead vehicle—the Camry—just a short distance ahead of them, and Marlon exhorted him to drop back a little bit, lest they be spotted.

“What the hell are we going to do when we get to the end of the road?” Csongor asked.

The question elicited a slack-jawed, distracted expression from Marlon. It occurred to Csongor that Marlon, born and raised in a colossal, densely packed city, had no instincts that were useful for being out in the middle of fucking nowhere.

“Hide,” Marlon said, “and wait for them to come back out. Then we follow them out. When we get to that town, we stop and call the cops.”

“We could just do that here.”

“There’s no place to hide here.” Marlon spoke an evident truth; the road was a narrow graveled ledge trapped between a mountain and a river.

But Marlon’s rejoinders had been coming more and more slowly, and after this one he went silent for a while.

“We should start looking for a place to hide,” Csongor offered, just trying to be agreeable. “Maybe there will be something up here.” For the valley was now broadening, as if the river were about to divide into tributaries. The distance between the road and the riverbank grew rapidly, and soon their view of the stream was blocked by dense coniferous forest, brightened here and there by the fresh shoots and buds of deciduous trees. The general trend was uphill, but the terrain was flatter than what they had passed through minutes before; they seemed to have found their way into some high, broad valley among the mountains. Until seeing this, Csongor had supposed that they had ventured beyond the limit of civilization and entered into wilderness, but now he understood that they had merely been driving through a natural bottleneck. Cleared land, livestock, mailboxes, and houses began to complicate their view.

“We should keep going,” Csongor said. “Maybe there is a town or something.”

“There is no town on the map,” Marlon said, fixated upon the Atlas and Gazetteer. “Just a mountain, name of Abandon. Then Canada.”

“Then maybe we should just pull into one of these places and ask for help,” Csongor said. He slowed down and took the next right, turning into a driveway that ran into the woods for a few meters—just enough to accommodate a stopped vehicle—before terminating in a gate.

“TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT,” Marlon said, reading words spray-painted in foot-high letters on a sheet of plywood that covered most of the gate. “What is a trespasser? Some kind of animal?”

“It’s us,” Csongor said, throwing the SUV into reverse and gunning it backward onto the road.

They proceeded without further discussion for a kilometer or so, then slowed down as they approached a whorl of dust filling the whole road cut, from tree line to tree line. Csongor took his foot off the accelerator and let the SUV idle forward. The windshield was a dusty mess, so he motored his window down and leaned out to get a clear view.

This made it possible for him to see that a big vehicle—a pickup truck, red—was stopped in the oncoming lane, pointed toward them. No silhouette was visible behind its steering wheel. This struck Csongor as deeply wrong.

A figure emerged from the dust, walking up along the driver’s side of the truck. Behind him was a second man, moving in the same way. The first of them reached the driver’s door and pulled at the handle but found it to be locked. He then reached in through the window, which was apparently open, and got it unlocked. This was accompanied by some strange pawing gestures that caused little cascades of sparkly bits to tumble out of the window frame and scatter on the ground.

“Broken glass,” Marlon said.

The man hauled the door open and then backed away, as if aghast at what he was seeing there. He paused for a moment, pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, and said something into it. Then he reholstered the radio and nodded to his companion. The two of them bent forward as one and reached into the truck’s cab, then hauled back.

What they dragged out of the cab was clearly recognizable as a limp human form even though its head had been blown apart into a soggy mushroomlike thing trailing gray stuff that had to be brains. The feet came out last; clad in a pair of high-topped work boots, they bounced off the truck’s running board and then hit the ground heels first.

“Shit, Csongor. Csongor! CSONGOR!” Marlon was calling.

Csongor was so transfixed by the sight of the body that he had stopped paying attention to the two living men who were dragging it by the arms. He now noticed, dully, that those men were staring directly up into his face from no more than about ten meters away.

Then he felt something come down hard on his knee and sensed the steering wheel moving free of his hands. The SUV surged forward, veered left, then right, then left again. The corpse-dragging men were filling the windshield; then they disappeared beneath the edge of its hood and the vehicle thumped and bucked as it smashed them back into the pavement and rolled over them.

Csongor looked down to see Marlon’s left hand on his knee, shoving his foot down into the gas, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Marlon had flung himself sideways across the SUV’s cab and was practically in Csongor’s lap.

“I got this,” Csongor said. “I got it! Fine!” Marlon relented and wriggled back into the passenger seat.

“Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested.

“That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing. He allowed the gas pedal to come up off the floor for a moment.

Then Marlon hollered as the rear end of the Subaru became visible just ahead of them. Men were standing around it, looking up in alarm. Csongor twisted the wheel to avoid them. Then remembered that these were the guys they wanted to run over. Tried to correct the error. Felt the vehicle tilt beneath them as it went up on two wheels.

In his peripheral vision, something was coming at him. He looked out Marlon’s window to see that it was the road, hinging straight up into the glass. Marlon was spinning away from it, bringing his hands up to protect his face.

That they had rolled over was obvious enough. What didn’t become obvious for several moments was that they had rolled over all the way and ended up sitting upright on all four wheels, sideways on the road, rocking gently from side to side on the suspension.

Csongor looked out his open window and saw jihadists (it was time to start calling them that) reaching into their garments, just as Marlon had pantomimed a few minutes ago.

He swung the wheel. “Get down!” he said.

Glass was breaking all around him. His door had been sprung off its hinges during the rollover. He pushed it open to provide some space for him to lean sideways. Looking straight down at the road, using its edge as a guide, he got the SUV pointed in what he hoped was the correct direction and punched the accelerator.

A few moments later he sat up straight, just in time to see that he was making for a head-on collision with a fat man riding down the middle of the road on an all-terrain vehicle, a rifle in his lap. Some mutual swerving occurred, and they just avoided hitting each other.

He looked over to see that Marlon was, at least, moving. He had banged his head on something during the rollover and was bleeding from a laceration, stanching it with a wad of Gazetteer.

The road went into a gentle leftward curve. Rustic houses went by them, mostly on the right.

Some of them began to look familiar, and he understood that he was driving in circles. The road had terminated in a big loop. There was nowhere he could go from here.

Except, possibly, up a driveway? He had to do something because the jihadists would be coming soon—might be running laps on the same loop already—and they had him bottled up here, at the head of the valley. He paused at the entrance to one driveway, saw a white man coming down it holding an assault rifle. An assault rifle! He gunned it forward to the next driveway, but this one was blocked, just off the road, by a gate. No place to hide from vengeful jihadists.

The driveway after that seemed to wind off into the woods for some distance. Csongor, reacting without thinking, turned down it, praying that the move wasn’t being observed by any of the people who were pursuing them. Because this not was a decision he could take back; he couldn’t assume that there was a handy infinite loop at the end of this road.

It went around a single bend and terminated in a massive timber gate. Csongor crunched it to a stop, then took advantage of a little wide spot that had been cleared, just in front of this barrier, to make it possible for wayward vehicles to turn around. Even so, getting the SUV reversed in such a tight spot required many back-and-forths. During a few of these, he found himself gazing curiously out his window at a panoply of documents that had been laminated in weatherproof plastic and stapled to the wood. None of them seemed to be direct threats to kill him. They were more in the way of legal filings and political/religious manifestos.

A word passed in front of his eyes that took a moment to sink in. When it did, he stomped the brake. Reversed the vehicle’s direction. Then crept back the way he’d come, as slowly as he could make the vehicle move. Scanning the documents on the gate, unwilling to believe he’d actually seen it.

“What is up, bro?” Marlon demanded. Then he called out “Aiyaa!” as Csongor stomped the brake again, jerking the vehicle, and him, and his aching head.

“I think I get it now,” Csongor said.

“Get what?”

“What’s happening.”

He was staring at a document—a sort of open letter—signed at the bottom. The signature was so neat that you could actually read it. It said, JACOB FORTHRAST.

UNCLE JOHN DROVE the all-terrain vehicle back toward Jake’s cabin with Zula sitting on the luggage rack behind him. Jake rode her bicycle. Olivia and Jake chivalrously suggested that those two ride on ahead as fast as possible, the bicyclists catching up as soon as they could. John, though, was averse to any plan that involved splitting up; and the intensity of his reaction as much as proved that he was recollecting something that had not worked out very well in Vietnam. The journey back was therefore carried out in a tortoise-and-hare mode, the ATV running forward for a few hundred yards and then idling along while Jake and Olivia caught up with them.

During these pauses, John would try to communicate with persons not present. The people who lived around Prohibition Crick had gone there specifically to get off the grid, and so excellent phone reception was not among their priorities. They were not the sort to look benignly on phone company technicians crawling around the neighborhood hiding cables under the ground and setting up mysterious antennas to bathe every cubic inch of their living space with encoded emanations. In spite of which, you could sometimes get one bar if you stood in a high, exposed place in just the right posture. But they were in some combination of too far from the down-valley cell towers and too deeply trapped in the folds of Abandon Mountain’s lower slopes for this to work.

John also had a walkie-talkie, which Jake and members of his family tended to take along with them as a safety measure when they ventured into the wilderness on hunting and huckleberry-picking expeditions. This was of a common brand, pocket-sized, and notoriously fickle when used in the convoluted landscape of the Selkirks; sometimes they could reach people from twenty miles away, sometimes they were no better than shouting at each other. John’s first few efforts to reach Elizabeth back at the cabin were unavailing.

After that, Zula took the device from him and hit on the idea of trying some of the other channels. The device was capable of using twenty-two of them. John had left it set on channel 11, which was the one that the Forthrast family was in the habit of using. Zula hit the Down button and indexed this all the way to 1, pausing on each channel for a few moments to listen for traffic. Then she worked her way back up to 11 and attempted to hail Elizabeth a few more times, with no results. Then up to 12. Nothing. Then she moved up to 13. A barrage of noise came out of the thing’s tiny speaker, and she had to turn the volume down. Several people were trying to transmit on the same channel all at once, and all of them were shouting.

“Why is channel 13 special?” she called back to Jake, who was jogging along about fifty feet behind the ATV.

“Community emergency channel,” he said. “Why?”

“I think there’s an emergency.”

“That’s why Elizabeth hasn’t answered,” John suggested. “She must have switched over to 13.” He gunned the ATV ahead and gave Zula a few hundred yards’ rough ride to a spot where the trail swung around a root of the mountain and gave them a view—albeit distant, dusty, and cluttered by trees—down into the valley. Sporadic gunfire and sounds of roaring engines were spiraling up from below.

The voices on channel 13 were a bit clearer now, but still fragmentary as different transmissions stepped on each other. A man kept breaking in to insist on the need for radio discipline. “Cut the chatter!” “Copy.” “Pennsylvania plates…” “Come again?” “Multiple vehicles…” “Black SUV, two subjects…” “Frank is dead, repeat, they ambushed him in his truck…” “Camry…” “Full auto…”

It required a minute or two for Zula to absorb this. She assumed at first that word of Jones’s approach had preceded him into the valley and that she was listening to the sounds of the community preparing to be invaded from out of the north. But this could not be reconciled with all that she was hearing about vehicles—vehicles that had to be coming up out of the south.

“He must have friends,” she concluded, “come up here to meet him.”

John knew who he was, and approximately what he was doing, because Zula had been giving him an update during the ride. He considered it and shrugged. “It’s not like he was going to hitchhike around the U.S. He’d have to have confederates. I guess they’re here.” He thought about it some more, gazing back at Olivia and Jake who were huffing and puffing along in their wake. “I wonder what they were expecting. Probably just empty logging roads. Jake’s community doesn’t have a name, doesn’t show up on maps. Still, it’s odd that they would come in shooting.”

Jake had not heard the radio traffic, but the gunfire coming up out of the valley was clear enough, and he had a look in his eye that Zula hoped she’d never again see on a loved one’s face. He was up here, and his wife and children were down there, where the fighting was.

John saw it too. “They know what to do,” he reminded his kid brother. “You can be sure that they’re bunkered down and they’re fine.”

“I have to get down there,” Jake said.

Without a word John hopped off the ATV, turning it over to Jake. Zula rolled off the back and came up on her feet, a little unsteady but feeling much better.

Jake turned off the trail and began plunging down the slope, cutting across switchbacks wherever he could.

“It’s about one click from here,” John said. “Descending steep slopes is not my strong suit. I suggest you healthy young ladies proceed together and I’ll bring up the rear.” Slung over his back had been a hunting rifle of the old school, with a brown wooden stock and a telescopic sight. Zula knew he had carried it along only in case he needed it to deal with an enraged bear. He now stripped this weapon off his shoulder and held it out to Zula. “Pump action,” he said. “Thirty ought six, four rounds in the magazine.”

Some part of Zula—the small-town upbringing—wanted to say, Oh no I couldn’t possibly, but she stifled it; the look on the face of her uncle—who, for all practical purposes, had been her father for the last fifteen years—said that he would not brook any argument. She remembered, just for an instant, the day that the meth heads had come to the farm to steal their anhydrous ammonia.

So she only uttered a single word, which was “Thanks.”

OLIVIA TURNED OUT to be pretty spry—more than a match, anyway, for Zula in her current condition. They hewed mostly to the trail and occasionally crossed tracks that had been carved across it by Jake in his impetuous plunge. Zula’s expectation that Jake would soon get far ahead of them turned out to be wrong. When the ATV moved, it moved faster than they could run, but he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hung up on obstacles or working his way around slopes too steep for it to negotiate. Its sound was always there, just a bit ahead of them, occasionally drowned out by gunfire. Some sort of weird, inappropriate family-competitive instinct made Zula want to catch and surpass it. But before this happened, they came in view of the cabin itself, its green sheet-metal roof nestled among the peaks of the surrounding trees, and then it became all about getting there as fast and as directly as possible.

Jake and his family had gone through the forest within a hundred-meter radius of the cabin and removed all small scrubby undergrowth and pruned away the dead, ladderlike branches that tended to project from the trunks of mature conifers. This was supposedly an anti-forest-fire measure; it would prevent blazes from storming through the dry understory and consuming the house. It had the side effect of vastly increasing visibility. In the natural woods of these parts, you couldn’t see farther than a few dozen yards because of all that clutter, but from the windows of Jake’s cabin you could see all the way to the edge of the zone they had cleared. Which made Zula suspect that it was also a tactical measure, making it more difficult for people to sneak up on them through the woods. Whatever its purpose, the upshot was that when Olivia and Zula burst into that zone, they suddenly had a clear view all the way to the back of the cabin, where Jake had just finished jumping off the ATV. He made straight for the cellar door, a pair of heavy-gauge steel hatches mounted on an angled frame of reinforced concrete. Zula watched as those doors opened and Elizabeth, strapped with a shotgun in addition to her usual Glock semiautomatic, came out to throw her arms around her husband and give him a kiss.

But it was not a long, fond sort of reunion, for her next act was to grab Jake’s face between her hands and tell him something that looked very important. As she spoke, she turned her head significantly toward the front side of the cabin.

Jake nodded, gave Elizabeth a peck, and stepped back. Elizabeth backed down the steps and hauled the doors closed on top of herself. Zula, now sprinting through the trees no more than fifty paces away, had an impulse to call, No, wait for us! But she was too out of breath to make any sounds other than gasping, and—on second thought—being trapped in a bomb shelter with Elizabeth and the boys did not actually sound that appealing.

Jake meanwhile had unslung his rifle and chambered a round and gone into a style of movement that he must have learned by attending a tactical rifle combat seminar or else by watching DVDs of action films. The gist of it was that he kept the rifle aimed in the same direction as he was looking, and he tended to go very cautiously around corners.

Zula managed to call out, “Coming at you from behind, Uncle Jake!” since there was something in his body language that suggested he might not take kindly to being surprised.

He turned back and made a shushing gesture, then ventured around the corner of the building and disappeared from their view.

Zula was trying to make sense of it. Lots and lots of armed bad men in front of the cabin would call for Jake to go down below with his family and to gather Zula and Olivia with him. So whatever was in front couldn’t be that bad.

“I want to see what is there,” Zula said, breaking stride, and making a lateral move, swinging wide around the same side of the cabin up which Jake was creeping. “I might be able to help.” She swept the rifle down off her shoulder.

“May I join you?” Olivia said between gasps for air.

“Of course.” Olivia seemed to be joining her in any case.

The ground was uneven, the sight lines interrupted not only by tree trunks but by piles of firewood and outbuildings. They were moving in a wide swing around the property while Jake advanced in a straight line up the side of the cabin. So an anxious and confused minute passed as they tried to get Jake back in view without exposing themselves to whomever might be coming up the driveway. They ran afoul of chicken-wire enclosures that the Forthrasts had erected to keep rabbits away from their vegetables, coyotes and lynx away from their chickens, wolves and cougars away from their goats. But finally Zula swung into position where she was able to see Jake from the waist up, standing in his driveway, leveling his rifle at a target nearby, and shouting.

Zula stood up cautiously. Two heads came into view, down at the level of Jake’s waist. Were they kneeling? Both of them had their hands on tops of their heads, fingers laced together.

One of them looked awfully familiar. But what she was thinking could not be real. Checking to make sure that the safety was engaged, she raised the rifle and used its telescopic sight to peer at the one on the right. A big man, not much shorter than Jake even on his knees. Burly. Close-cropped copper hair and a sunburned neck.

“OMFG,” she said.

“Two men are coming in through the gate,” Olivia said, “and I don’t much like their looks.”

Zula panned the rifle down the length of the driveway until the crosshairs found the big timber gate. This was ajar. A half-wrecked SUV was partly visible through it, blocking the road. And just as Olivia had said, two men had just circumvented the vehicle and were now coming around the edge of the gate. They perfectly matched the profile of the jihadists Zula had been hanging around with for the last three weeks. One of them had a pistol drawn, the other had a carbine, which he now raised to his shoulder, apparently drawing a bead on Jake: the most obvious target. And the most vulnerable.

Zula got the crosshairs on the latter and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Look out!” Olivia screamed.

Zula flicked the safety off and tried it again. The shot apparently missed; she was breathing hard and she hadn’t really braced herself properly. But it had a remarkable effect on the two jihadists, who jumped back around behind what they perceived as the shelter of the gate and threw themselves down on the ground.

Shouting now from the driveway. She clearly recognized Csongor’s voice, and she understood his tone: Are you crazy? We’re the good guys!

“The Asian gentleman,” said Olivia, “I recognize from his hoops career in Xiamen. Marlon, it must be. And may I assume that the big lad is the famous Csongor?”

Lady, who the fuck are you? was what Zula wanted to say. Instead, what came out was: “Uncle Jake!” Zula came into the open, calling, “Let them in! It’s okay!”

Two heads—Marlon’s and Csongor’s—turned around to look in her direction. They seemed astonished. Especially Csongor.

“Go! Go!” Jake said, pivoting to face the gate. Moving somewhat uncertainly, Csongor and Marlon took their hands off their heads and clambered to their feet. They began moving toward the cabin. Jake went the other way, getting well clear of them and raising his AR-15 to his shoulder. He was aiming it straight down the driveway toward the gate. He fired a spread of several rounds, then began backing up, keeping his sights centered on the gate while closing the distance between himself and his house. Zula meanwhile had braced herself against a tree and obtained a clear view of the same target, ready to fire again if either of the two jihadists should show themselves. But nothing happened. Nothing moved.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Richard Forthrast’s ankle was clearly a sprain, not a break. He could hop and hobble, but not walk. This created an interesting situation for Seamus. Not that the situation hitherto had been devoid of fascinating qualities. According to Richard, they were only a few minutes’ walk (for an able-bodied person, anyway) from breaking out into an open space where they would be able to move south, traversing the western face of the mountain, and drop down into a valley where Richard’s brother lived in a cabin. Richard wanted Seamus to leave him behind and move in that direction as fast as possible, because he was worried that Jones’s main group was about to attack the place.

Which Seamus was more than willing to do. He was suffering a bit of survivor’s guilt, having left Jack the chopper pilot behind earlier in the day, and getting ready, now, to abandon the lamed Richard. This was made a lot easier by Richard’s insistence that he should just get on with it, and that he, Richard, could take care of himself in the meantime.

Yuxia was a different matter. Seamus had sort of imagined that she would be a good girl and hang around to look after Richard and keep him company. That being in a chopper crash and being chased through the American wilderness by a fanatical sniper might have sated her taste for adventure, at least for one morning. Barring that, that the heavy psychological aftermath of having just killed a man with a shotgun blast from point-blank range might have left her with a need to sit in a quiet place for a while and think about what it all meant.

But no, everything in her face and body language said that she was going with Seamus. That she was kind of irked by the stupid deliberation that Seamus had been displaying, in the sixty seconds since Jahandar had gone to meet his seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and that if Seamus spent any more time thinking it through, she might just grab a weapon and take off without him.

The inevitability of Yuxia’s participation in the operation’s next phase caused Seamus to think about its details a bit harder. It sounded as though they would be traversing a slope in the open, where they could be shot at from a distance by men with good rifles.

“Is there any way of getting to the same place without going across an exposed slope?” he asked Richard.

“It can be done through the woods,” Richard allowed, nodding off the trail into some formidable-looking forest. “Much more slowly.” He thought about it. “I heard some shooting from that direction a minute ago.”

“So did I. Either Jones met with opposition, or he decided to ambush a meth lab.”

“Up here, a marijuana grow would be more likely. Too far from the road for a meth lab.”

“Anyway, they seem to be going through the woods,” Seamus said, “which would slow them down.”

“If you take the high road,” Richard said, “you’ll be way up above them. You’ll be able to reach cover if you have to. And you’ll have the advantage if you are packing the A.I.” For he had recognized Jahandar’s rifle and assumed Seamus had done the same.

“The high road it is,” Seamus said, trying to put a lot of decisiveness into his voice, as a way of appeasing Yuxia, who was bouncing around in her camo like the little sidekick bruin in the old Yogi Bear cartoon. “Which gun, or guns, would you like me to leave you with?”

“You can take them all, if your intention is to shoot lots of bad guys with them.”

“I should have mentioned that it was a trick question,” Seamus continued. “We are being tailed by a mountain lion that is most definitely not as afraid of us as we are of it.”

“I know.” Richard looked around. “As much as I covet the A.I., in these woods, I can’t see far enough for its excellent qualities to be of any use beyond assuaging certain masturbatory gun-nut impulses.”

“What about the shotgun?” Seamus asked.

“Yuxia should take that. She knows how to use it, and it looks cute on her.” This, at least, elicited a dimpled grin from Yuxia as she basked for a few moments in the scrutiny of the two men.

“No argument.”

Seamus approached the pellet-riddled corpse and rolled it over. “Here’s a wheel gun, if you can believe it.”

“I thought it sounded like a six-shooter,” Richard said.

“Five-shooter, more like. Large caliber.” Seamus dropped to his knees and studied the revolver, which had been concealed under Jahandar’s body and was now lying in the middle of the trail. He carefully uncocked it, then held it up. “Trophy piece. Must have taken it off a dead American contractor.”

“Seems like just what the doctor ordered for last-ditch cougar defense. I’ll take it. You get the A.I.”

“Done,” Seamus said. Less than a minute later, he and Yuxia, regeared and rearmed, were jogging up the switchbacks.

DURING THE QUARTER of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age. These ruminations were triggered by all that he had done in the last half hour or so. He had created an effigy, seen it shot to pieces, run across a big rock, and then made a helter-skelter descent of a large open slope. Twenty times he had dived and rolled into cover on a surface consisting largely of big sharp rocks, each of which had left some kind of mark on him, some of which had inflicted bone bruises that would take weeks to get better. Another twenty times he had dived and rolled in ice-cold mud. He had sprinted into an unfamiliar abandoned mining camp with no idea of what he was going to do, then found an ideal place to take cover and taken advantage of it. He had rested there for all of about three minutes before blowing it by shooting the tall African jihadist, whereupon he had been obliged to abandon the position and go into another intense fugue of running, diving, vaulting, rolling, and hiding in uncomfortable places.

All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes.

Now, had he been a seventeen-year-old, he’d have harbored foolish and unrealistic expectations of what could really be achieved in a situation such as this one, and he’d have believed that the payoff for all that work and risk and pain ought to have been greater than bagging one enemy. Driven by that misconception, he would have been slower to abandon the log cabin, slower to give up on the hope of shooting the man who had hidden behind the outhouse. He would have adopted a combative stance toward the main group of jihadists who had come running back to the camp. As a result, they would have surrounded him and killed him. All because he was young and imbued with an unrealistic sense of what the world owed him.

On the other hand, had he been a few years older than he really was, or not in such good physical condition, then all the running and diving and exposure to the elements would have felt much more expensive to him. Unsustainable. Disheartening. And those emotions would have led to his making decisions every bit as fatal, in the end, as those of the hypothetical seventeen-year-old.

So, as loath as he was to be self-congratulatory, he saw evidence to support the conclusion that he was at precisely the right age and level of physical conditioning to be undertaking this mission.

Which, viewed superficially, seemed like a favorable judgment. But with a bit more consideration—and, as he hid beneath the tree and listened to the jihadists beating the bushes, he did have a few minutes to think about it—it was really somewhat troubling, since it implied that all the operations he had participated in during his career before today had been undertaken by a foolish boy, in over his head and surviving by dumb luck. Whereas any operations he might carry out in the future would be ill-advised excursions by a man who was over the hill, past his prime.

He really needed to get out of this line of work.

But he’d been saying that ever since Afghanistan, and look where it had gotten him.

After a while, he heard Jones calling out to the others, telling them to give up the search. The need to press on outweighed the desire to take vengeance on the man who was stalking them. Sokolov waited until he could no longer hear the jihadists moving around, then emerged from his cover very carefully, beginning with a quick bob of the head followed by an immediate retreat. When several such ventures failed to draw fire, he began to feel some confidence that they had not left anyone behind to kill him when he emerged from cover, and he moved more freely. But he had the uncomfortable sense that they were now way ahead of him, and he began to consider how he could make up for lost time. Jones and his crew had made the decision to move through the forest, which was slower than going across the high country above the tree line, and so an obvious way that Sokolov might make up for lost time would be to go back into the mining camp and then continue to move through the scrubland just outside the limit of the trees.

This involved some slogging, since the ground here at the base of the slope was saturated with runoff. After several minutes of slow progress, he was reminded of his foolishness by a sound from high above: scraping and banging rocks. He went into the best cover he could find, which was a clump of bushes that seemed to thrive in the boggy soil, and then looked up in time to see a minor avalanche petering out on the talus slope, perhaps a thousand meters above him: just a few rocks that had been dislodged by someone or something and tumbled for a short distance before coming to rest. This gave him an idea of where he should look, so he swung his rifle up and peered through its scope, starting at the place where the rocks had stopped moving and then tilting up until he could see the faint horizontal scar of the trail. With a bit of panning sideways, he was confronted with the arresting sight of a man, sitting on the ground, and aiming a rifle right back at him! His first reaction was to flinch and get deeper into cover, which caused him to lose the sight picture. Even as he was doing so, however, his mind was processing what he had glimpsed and noting a few peculiarities.

Chief of these was that the rifle’s bolt handle had been jutting perpendicularly out from the side of the weapon, which meant that it was not in condition to fire.

And—unless his memory was playing tricks—the man had been holding the weapon oddly. His right hand was not where it ought to have been—not in a position to pull the trigger.

Slightly emboldened by these recollections, he reacquired the sight picture and verified it all. This time, as soon as he had the other man in his sights, the guy pulled his head away from his scope, revealing a European-looking face. Not that this proved anything. But there was something in the set of that face that did not say “paleface jihadist.”

This guy, whoever he was, was on Sokolov’s side. He had seen Sokolov from above, probably tracked him through his telescopic sight, and identified him as a friendly. He had triggered the little avalanche as a way of getting Sokolov’s attention. And he now wanted to communicate.

He grinned and looked off to the side. A moment later his face was joined by that of a young Asian female.

Very familiar-looking.

Sokolov had been trained for more than two decades to remain absolutely silent in battlefield situations, but he could not prevent an expression of surprise from escaping from his lips when he recognized this person as Qian Yuxia.

The man with Yuxia now began gesturing with his hands. It was impossible to communicate well in this manner. Russians and Americans—he guessed that this fellow was American—used different systems of hand signs. But the gestures were eloquent enough. The man was envisioning a sort of pincer movement. He and Yuxia would proceed along the high road, Sokolov would likewise continue doing what he was doing, and they would converge on the jihadists at the target, which Sokolov assumed to be Jake Forthrast’s cabin.

All of which was obvious enough. And even had it not been obvious, it was more or less mandatory; neither of them had much choice as to where they would go and what they would do next. That wasn’t the point.

The point was that they should try to avoid killing each other by accident during the fight that was going to begin in a few minutes. And Sokolov thought it was an excellent point.

“THIS WAY!” ZULA called, for Csongor and Marlon were preceding Jake up the driveway, headed for the cabin. Zula could see through the scope of the rifle that the jihadists had parked a couple of vehicles athwart the driveway’s entrance, up where it joined the road. They had posted a few men behind those vehicles and in the surrounding woods, apparently to fire at any neighbors or inquisitive police who might try to come after them. The main group, numbering perhaps five, were running toward the gate, using the half-wrecked SUV as cover. When they got there, they’d be able to shoot down the driveway and pick off anyone standing out in the open.

Olivia had seen the same thing. “Get behind cover!” she was calling. “Come toward me!”

The men were all slow to hear and respond. They had a lot on their minds. Olivia switched into Mandarin and called something out in a high sharp tone that made Marlon’s head swivel around and look right at her. He seemed to come to his senses then and grabbed Csongor’s sleeve and hauled him toward the sound of Olivia’s voice. Csongor was too big and had too much momentum to be diverted by this alone, but he could be steered, and within a few moments he and Marlon were both storming through the belt of woods and undergrowth that ran along the edge of the driveway. They burst out into the semicleared space where Zula and Olivia were. A few seconds later, Jake followed in their wake. Zula collected most of these impressions through her ears, since her gaze was still fixed through the scope at the gate. She had pumped a new round into the rifle. The magazine had only held four to begin with. Muzzle flashes lit up the view through her scope, and several rounds zipped through the foliage over her head.

“I’m covering the gate,” Jake announced. “You should pull back, Zula.”

Zula turned to see Jake kneeling behind the bole of a large tree, aiming his rifle through what she could only assume was a gap in the brush. He fired a round, studied the result, fired two more. Then he glanced up at her and used his eyes and his chin to indicate the direction he thought she should go.

“Over here, Zula!” Olivia called. Zula bent low and scurried into a gap between a goat pen and a net-enclosed structure where Jake and Elizabeth cultivated raspberries. A few seconds later, she had emerged into an open space behind the shed where the goats took shelter from the mountain weather. Olivia, Marlon, and Csongor were there.

It was awkward to say the least. Csongor took a quick step toward her, then faltered.

Why did he falter?

Because she was carrying a rifle?

Because her face was a horror show?

Because he wasn’t sure whether she fancied him?

She searched his face for clues and got no answers, other than a powerful, unfamiliar, and situationally inappropriate feeling of pleasure that he was alive and here.

Two bangs sounded from up the hill. Then a third. Then a whole lot of other bangs in return.

“Uncle John,” Zula explained, in the silence that followed. “I left him with the Glock.”

Olivia said, “So, at the risk of stating the obvious, they’re coming to shake hands with that lot.” She tossed her head in the direction of the driveway, which was all of a sudden sounding like a free-fire zone. Zula peered around the edge of the shed and saw Jake retreating toward them.

“What is going on?” asked the voice of Elizabeth, coming out of the walkie-talkie. “Someone fill me in.”

Zula raised the device toward her face and was about to say something when Jake came in range of her, lashed out with his left hand, and ripped it out of her grasp. “Lock it down, baby,” he said. “Don’t wait for us.”

“Where are you?”

“Tell me you are in lockdown, and I’ll answer your question,” Jake responded testily.

A few moments’ radio silence followed. Jake turned to look at the others. “We’re cut off,” he said. “There’s no way we can get to the cabin before these guys do.”

“Done,” Elizabeth confirmed.

“The safe room is sealed,” Jake announced, then pressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie again. “Okay. We’re behind the goat shed. I’ll try to update you from time to time. Can the boys hear me?”

“Yes, they’re right here gathered around me.”

“Be brave and pray,” Jake said. “I love you all, and I hope I’ll see you soon. But until you see my face in the security camera, don’t unlock those doors no matter what happens.”

ONCE HE WAS certain that no one could see him, John sat down and began to descend the slope on his ass. His artificial legs were very nice—Richard bought him a new pair every few Christmases and spared no expense—but they were worse than useless when going downhill. Even when he was moving in ass-walking mode, all they did was get hung up on undergrowth anyway, so he paused for a minute to take them off and rub his sore-as-hell stumps. He reached around behind his back and stuffed them into the open top of his knapsack, then resumed inchworming down the mountain. Progress was slow, but—considering the switchbacks—actually not a hell of a lot slower than walking upright. In normal circumstances, he’d have been chagrined by the loss of personal dignity, but he was alone, and since his head was no more than a couple of feet off the ground, no one could see him in any case.

It was probably this detail that saved his life, since the advance scout moving ahead of Jones’s main group was doing a commendable job of passing through the forest quietly, and John—whose hearing was not the best—didn’t become aware of him until he was only twenty feet away.

John, of course, had been using his hands for locomotion. The Glock that Zula had given him was in his jacket pocket.

The scout would have blown by too quickly for John to take any action, if not for the fact that some shots sounded from below, and caused the scout’s stride to falter, and drew his attention. Standing with his back to John, he looked down toward Jake’s cabin and raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. He was a close-cropped blond man with a scar on the back of his head. John had the Glock out by this point. The shot was so ideal that he got a little ahead of himself, raising the weapon in both hands and thereby disturbing his perch on the slope. He felt his ass starting to break free and managed to squeeze off one round before he became discombobulated and slid down a yard or so to a new and more stable resting place.

The scout had turned around to see him and probably would have killed him had his hand not been occupied by the walkie-talkie. As it was, all he could do was shout some sort of warning into it before John fired two more rounds into his midsection and brought him down. His body spiraled around the trunk of a tree and skidded down the slope for a few yards. Abandoning all pretense of quiet movement, John skidded down after him, using his ass as a sled, and probably breaking his tailbone on a rock about halfway down. This sent such a jolt through his body that it spun him into an ungainly, sprawling roll down the hill as things spewed out of his pockets and backpack in a sort of avalanche-cum-yard-sale. But he got to the jihadist and stripped him of his weapon before any of the others could get there to investigate. This was a very nice piece, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, fully automatic. John was not familiar with it. Without his reading glasses he couldn’t make sense of the little words stamped into its metal around the controls. But with a bit of groping around and experimentation he was able to figure out how to charge it and how to take off the safety.

An anxious voice blurted from the jihadist’s walkie-talkie. But at the same time John heard the same voice saying the same thing from a few yards away.

The approaching man heard it all too, and now began to use the walkie-talkie as a way to home in on his friend’s location, keying the mike every couple of seconds and listening for the answering crackle of static. John, somewhat desperately, grabbed the device and flung it away from him as if it were a live grenade. But the oncoming jihadist did not seemed to be fooled; apparently he head heard John’s clothes rustling with the sudden movement. He did not stop. John aimed toward the sound and pulled the trigger. A short burst of rounds chortled from the weapon. Poorly aimed and unlikely to hit anything; but John, unfamiliar as he was with this gun, had not been a hundred percent certain that it was in a condition to fire when the trigger was pulled, and he needed to get past that.

The jihadist, perhaps ten yards away but completely obscured by ferns and scrubby little trees, reacted instantly by diving down the slope: a desperately dangerous move, but a logical one, if he’d had reasons to doubt the security of his position. For John now had no idea where the man was, and given the density of the undergrowth, that would continue being true until he gave away his position by moving.

Speaking of which, John’s position was nothing to write home about either, and anyway he had given it up by firing the weapon. Making a reasonable guess as to where his opponent had rolled and tumbled, he edged down the slope a little more, trying to move as quietly as possible, which meant slowly. He became aware as he was doing this that more than one person was moving through the woods around him.

He was sitting very still, trying to listen for their movements, when a boot slammed into the side of his Heckler & Koch and pinned it to the ground. Since John was holding on to it firmly, this shoved him down on his side. He turned his stiff neck and looked up to see a man’s face staring down at him from six feet above.

Or maybe a bit more than six feet. The man was tall. Black fellow. Not that John had any problem with blacks. He had always been happy to judge other men on their own unique qualities as individuals.

He looked kind of familiar. John had seen his picture recently.

Abdallah Jones was gripping a pistol in one hand and, in the other, one of John’s artificial legs, which had skidded down the slope in advance of him.

“Too pathetic for words,” Jones said.

“Fuck you and the goat you rode in on,” John returned.

Jones bent down, raised the leg above his head, and brought it down toward John’s face like a truncheon.

WHEN THE GUNFIRE started in earnest, Sokolov abandoned stealth and broke into a run. There was no point in sneaking around in the woods anymore. Jones had not left anyone behind to snipe at him. The jihadists were in full flight toward Jake’s compound now, shooting at anything that moved, just trying to make their way out to a road so that they could get clear of this area before the police locked it down. Or at least that was the vision that Sokolov constructed in his head. It occurred to him to wonder how Jones expected to escape. Was he planning to commandeer vehicles? Or did he have confederates scheduled to rendezvous with him? The latter seemed a much better plan, and thus far Jones had planned rather well. It was also the most pessimistic scenario from Sokolov’s point of view, since it meant that Jones would have reinforcements, presumably armed with all that the gun shops of the United States of America had to offer. They would probably make directly for the Forthrast compound, since that was the most-difficult-to-fuck-up instruction that Jones could possibly give them. Men in situations like this one were largely instinct-driven, and their instinct would be to gravitate toward something that looked like a shelter and that would serve as an obvious rallying point.

As he drew closer to the compound, he began to hear more small-arms fire. He rounded a hillside and found himself only a couple of hundred meters from the cabin. Had it not been for the trees he’d have been able to see it clearly. As it was, he could glimpse a corner of roof, a chimney top with a lightning rod projecting from it, the whirling anemometer of the little home weather station that Jake and his sons had mounted up there. Gunfire and shouting were coming from out in the driveway. And other sounds of battle from nearer—the hillside leading down from the high trail. But there did not seem to be anything emanating from the cabin itself, which made him think that he had arrived before either Jones’s hikers or the U.S.-based drivers had managed to occupy the place.

And so he decided that he would occupy it first. Its walls were solid logs, almost half a meter thick, sufficient to stop most of the rounds that the jihadists’ weapons were firing.

He plunged down the hill and across a short stretch of level ground until he reached the edge of the area that Jake had cleared. This was going to become a very dangerous place in a few seconds. It might already be. He dropped to his belly and crawled several meters to a spot where he could take shelter behind a recently felled tree, not yet cut up for firewood. Its trunk was too skinny to hide him or to stop bullets, but its innumerable small dead branches, spraying out in all directions, created a visual screen. He crawled down the length of it, getting a bit closer to the cabin, then raised his head cautiously and, when this failed to draw fire, spent a few moments looking into the cabin’s windows. He saw no smashed-out panes, no faces peeking round the edges of window frames—no signs, in other words, that it had yet been occupied. He could still make out two identifiable groups of gunmen moving around the property, converging generally on the cabin—but not there yet.

He got to his feet and sprinted for the cabin’s back door.

TO PARAPHRASE A familiar proverb, Seamus had been provided with a hammer—a rather good sniper rifle—and now he was looking for nails. He and Yuxia had spent the last few minutes descending the trail that, judging from evidence (lots of recent footprints and ATV tracks) led down into wherever it was that everyone was converging—a cabin, according to some hasty directions supplied by Richard, owned by Richard’s brother Jake and occupied by family members, including women and children, who ought to have no part in this quarrel.

In his haste to get to the bottom of the slope, Seamus nearly caught up with Jones’s main group. Alerted, almost too late, by a few gunshots from just below—gunshots that were evidently not intended for him—he threw himself down, got situated in a prone firing posture with reasonable cover, flipped the lens caps off the ends of the rifle’s scope, and got it ready to fire.

He had also run some distance ahead of Yuxia, who now caught up with him and didn’t have to be told that she should throw herself down next to him so as not to present a target.

Now if one of those assholes down below would only make a target of himself. This was the rub of the hammer/nail problem. If Seamus hadn’t come into possession of the rifle, he’d have brought a completely different skill set into play, moving down the slope as stealthily as possible in search of shorter-range combat opportunities. Instead, here he was, frozen in a fixed position that was too far out of the action to be of any use.

A movement caught his eye through a gap in the foliage. Yuxia saw it too and pointed. By the time he had flicked his eyes in that direction, whatever he’d glimpsed was gone. He lost interest, reckoning that none of these jihadists would ever show himself twice in the same place. But then a little gasp from Yuxia told him he’d guessed wrong. He swung the rifle in that direction, peered through the scope, waited for a few seconds, and then, finally, saw it clearly.

But it wasn’t what he’d expected. Not a head. Not a gun. Not a hand. But a foot. A disembodied boot on the end of a rod.

Holding the rod about halfway along, a gloved hand. It descended sharply, then came back up again.

Seamus risked climbing up to his knees, so that he could get a better view. It took a moment to get the scene recentered in his scope. This time he was able to see the arm attached to that hand. Following it down, he identified the face of none other than Abdallah Jones.

He was just about to pull the trigger when his sight picture was obscured by the head and shoulders of another man who had entered the scene, gesticulating like crazy, trying to get Jones’s attention. Seamus lifted his eye from the scope, trying to see what this other jihadist was looking at, but his view of the world was limited to a single narrow aperture between tree branches, and whatever had got this man so excited was far out of his view.

So he exhaled, dropped his eye back to the scope, made sure the crosshairs were still on the man’s back, and pulled the trigger. The rifle went off like a motherfucker and the jihadist sprang forward as if he had been kicked in the back. He dropped out of view, revealing Jones, who Seamus fondly hoped might have been struck by the same bullet. But the bullet had either fragmented in the first man’s body or else caromed off a vertebra and gone off in another direction.

There might be some alternate, parallel universe, designed to the exact specifications of snipers, where Jones would now freeze with terror long enough for Seamus to work the bolt, chamber another round, and fire. But not here. Jones dove and rolled and was long gone before Seamus was in a position to shoot again.

“They know we’re here,” Seamus said.

“Ya think?”

“We just have to proceed with caution, is all I’m saying.”

“Why was that man waving his arms?”

“Could have been anything,” Seamus said, “but I’ll bet he saw Sokolov.”

“DON’T SHOOT!” OLIVIA cried, for Jake Forthrast, attracted by movement in his peripheral vision, had swung his AR-15 around to bear on a man sprinting in a zigzag pattern across his backyard, headed for his cabin. Olivia had just recognized the man as Sokolov.

“Thank you,” Jake said, and turned instead to aim in the general direction of some gunshots sounding from the base of the hill. Some of the jihadists were up there, trying to bring down Sokolov. A single very sharp crack sounded from higher up the slope.

“They’ve got a sniper,” Jake said. But at almost the same moment they could hear excited voices from where Jones and his men had gone to ground, apparently saying much the same thing.

“Maybe we’ve got a sniper,” Csongor suggested.

“Maybe,” Jake said, “but who the hell?”

Olivia heard all of this as if from a great distance, focused as she was on Sokolov. About halfway through his run he had disappeared from her view, hidden behind the corner of the cabin, and she had no way of knowing whether he had found shelter there or been brought down by that clatter of fire from the woods. But then a curtain moved in an upper-story window. He was too smart to expose himself where she, or anyone, would be able see his face, so she saw nothing more than this subtle movement; but that alone gave her confidence that the one behind that curtain was him. “I believe he made it,” she said. “He’s in the cabin.”

Glass shattered in the front of the house and a series of bangs sounded. A scream of dismay erupted from the driveway.

“So it would appear,” Zula said.

“What do we do now?” Marlon wanted to know.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Jake said, “if you all can just hole up somewhere and not get killed, well, that’s the best you can reasonably hope for.”

“I’m all in favor of not getting killed,” Olivia said, “but what are you going to do, Jake?”

“My neighbors are probably headed this way right now, loaded for bear,” Jake said. “If they just blunder into the middle of this, they’ll be mowed down—they have no idea what they are getting themselves into. I’m going to work my way back out to the gate and do what I can to prevent that from happening.”

A jihadist sprinted out of cover, making a run for the rear of the house—apparently thinking that he could get in through the back door while Sokolov was shooting out the front. He thudded up the porch steps, grabbed the doorknob, and found it locked. Zula was getting into position to aim her rifle at the man. Before she could do anything, however, his head snapped forward as if he were trying to head-butt his way through the door. He slid and crumpled to the deck and lay there twitching. The echo of another sharp bang resounded from above.

“Definitely our sniper,” Marlon concluded.

Jake had already departed, taking advantage of these distractions to run for the cover of a woodpile some yards away. From there he was quickly able to make his way off the property, or at least out of their field of view. More bangs sounded from the upper-story windows of the cabin, as Sokolov was apparently moving from window to window taking aim at any targets that presented themselves: sometimes shooting out the back at Jones’s group, other times out the front at the ones trying to come up the driveway. The latter seemed more numerous and better armed. Jones’s contingent had lost a few members and also had to contend with the sniper firing down on them from the hillside behind.

“They are coming closer to us,” Marlon said. His face was turned toward the back side of the property, his ears tracking the purr of a submachine gun, firing in occasional bursts that got a little nearer each time. Each of those bursts caused damage to a window or a window frame on the cabin’s upper story, and those targets were migrating slowly along the back and around the corner of the building. The dark weathered surface of the logs was splintering to reveal blond wood underneath, as if the place were being swarmed by invisible chainsaws.

Sokolov popped up in the window where he had twitched the curtain earlier, and fired two rounds before ducking back down to avoid a long burst of fire. So it would seem the owner of the submachine gun was working his way through the property, dodging around the side of the cabin in a wide arc, probably trying to connect with his brothers in the driveway without exposing himself to fire from either Sokolov or the sniper. The farther he got without being cut down, the more likely it was that others would follow in his wake and that the four behind the shed—who were armed only with Zula’s rifle and the pistol that Jake Forthrast had handed to Csongor—would find themselves confronting all that remained of Jones’s group, who were few in number but armed to the teeth. And no doubt pissed. All four of them assembled this picture in their minds over the course of a few moments and instinctively drew away from the approaching shooter, seeking cover around the corner of the shed or behind tree trunks. But the news was not particularly good from the driveway side either. The jihadists in front were communicating with those in back using walkie-talkies. While Sokolov had been focusing all of his attention on Jones’s group, trying to prevent them from coming around the side and tangling with Zula, Olivia, Marlon, and Csongor, the attackers in the driveway had begun to move up toward the cabin.

Zula, prone behind a cedar tree and gazing over the sight of the rifle, trying to catch sight of the agile shooter with the submachine gun, was growingly conscious of a rhythmic thud-thud-thud that was growing to fill the air and shake the ground. Focused as she was on other matters, she had not given it much thought at first. She now recognized it as the sound of a helicopter. It had come in at higher altitude but was now making a low and slow pass over the compound. She rolled over on her back and looked almost vertically upward at the belly of a chopper passing maybe a hundred feet overhead. Men were peering out the windows, trying to make sense of what was going on down here. As it passed by and banked around, she was able to see markings of the Idaho State Patrol.

It made a lazy swing over the back forty and then came around to the front and hovered above the driveway.

A streak of fire lanced up out of the trees near the gate and struck it near the tail rotor. The back half of the chopper disappeared for a moment in a spike of white fire. What was left of it began to pinwheel, descending rapidly. It dropped out of Zula’s view, and a moment later she heard it crash into the driveway, and fusillades of gunfire as the jihadists on that side poured rounds into its wreckage.

SOKOLOV UNDERSTOOD THAT the rocket-propelled grenade had been intended for him. Pinned down by his fire from the upper story of the cabin, the jihadists had sent a man back to get the device out of the trunk of a car. He had been stealing through the woods, trying to get into position to fire a grenade through a window, when the chopper had appeared overhead and presented him with an even more tempting target. And so he had played his hand and ruined the surprise.

The next RPG would be headed his way as soon as the jihadist could reload.

The back of the cabin sported screened-in decks on both the ground level and the upper story; Elizabeth, last night, had referred to the latter as a “sleeping porch.” Sokolov vaulted through a shattered window and landed flat on the deck of the sleeping porch. If any of the jihadists out back had noticed this—and they probably had—then they knew that they now had a shot at him. Not a good shot, for if they were close, they’d be firing upward through the two-by-four decking of the porch; and if they were farther away, their view would cluttered by furniture. But their surplus of ammunition would make up for many of these deficiencies. Sokolov’s life expectancy up on this deck was well under sixty seconds.

Or at least that was the state of affairs before the upper story of the cabin exploded. The man with the RPG knew what he was doing: with two shots he had brought down a helicopter and essentially decapitated the building that Sokolov had been using as a sniper’s perch.

Sokolov now became part of a large mass of rubble—mostly logs—finding its way to the ground. The sleeping porch peeled away from the side of the house and toppled, and he of course fell with it and struck the ground with less violence than might have been expected. But logs, and a considerable part of the roof structure, came after, and Sokolov’s world grew dark and confined, and when he tried to move his right leg, it budged not at all, but responded only with weird tingling sensations that he knew as harbingers of serious pain.

SEAMUS’S QUEST FOR nails to hit with his hammer had been petering out as the would-be nails either died or fled, making their way around the side of the cabin and taking cover behind the numerous trees, small structures, and woodpiles that complicated that swath of the property. It became obvious that he needed to relocate to a position farther down the slope. And yet he hesitated. He knew that Yuxia would insist on coming with him, and he did not want to bring her into what would clearly turn into a vicious, short-range, tree-to-tree kind of affair, your basic hatchet fight in a dark cellar. He was trying to think of some way to broach this topic with her when he noticed the chopper making its pass over the back of the compound, just above treetop level—which meant it was nearly on a level with Seamus. Had he been one of the bad guys he could have taken out both the pilot and the copilot with a single round through both of their helmets. As it was, he levered himself up on his elbows and simply watched it fly by with the cynical and helpless attitude of the experienced combat veteran. For it was obvious that the two troopers in the chopper had no idea how much danger they were in. They had probably flown up here in response to a vague, excited telephone report of shots fired in the woods: something that must happen all the time in these parts. Assuming that it was nothing more than poachers, or kids screwing around with their dads’ guns, they were making a low and slow pass over the area, just to put the fear of God into the hearts of the miscreants. After which they would fly home and spend the afternoon drinking coffee and writing up a very dull report.

They were going to die.

The copilot was swiveling his head from side to side, scanning the ground below, occasionally turning to an angle from which Seamus might—just might—show up in his peripheral vision. If only Seamus were not clad from head to toe in camouflage.

Seamus jumped to his feet and did a few jumping jacks. He unzipped his parka, turned it inside out, began waving it over his head.

The chopper turned its tail rotor toward him, like a dog presenting its ass to be sniffed, and began to cruise away.

Seamus noticed something red on his arm, just above the elbow, and looked down curiously to see that a chunk of flesh was missing from it.

Yuxia jumped to her feet and fired the shotgun. Pumped it, ejecting the spent shell, and chambering the last one.

ZULA HAD BEEN having miserable bad luck with the rifle. The jihadists seemed to be quite good at staying behind cover. She had fired another round but apparently not hit anything. She had just two left.

Olivia had sprung to her feet when the top half of Jake’s cabin had disintegrated, and she had taken a few paces toward its still-settling ruins before Marlon had jumped up and tackled her to the ground. He was lying next to her now, a consoling hand on her shoulder, talking to her.

Zula flinched, sensing movement nearby, and looked back to see that it was Csongor, approaching on hands and knees. He flopped down, pressing against her. Her body responded to the contact as if it were just him being companionable. But her mind understood that he was making himself a human shield to protect her from any shots that might come from the direction they were most concerned about.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Ssh,” he said. “It is very logical.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. You have to use your rifle to get the guy with the big weapon—I guess it must be rocket-propelled grenade? But you can’t do that if this asshole over here”—he waved the pistol vaguely in the direction from which they’d been hearing the bursts of the submachine gun—“is shooting at you. So I’ll take care of him.”

She was about to take issue with this when a racket sounded from above their heads. They looked up, blinking their eyes against a descending haze of wood dust, to see a ragged line of fresh bullet holes in the wall of the shed.

Zula met Olivia’s eye for a moment.

“Scatter!” Zula cried, and rolled up and ran around to the other side of the shed. She heard Olivia relay the command to Marlon and then felt and heard their footfalls and their ragged breathing as they sought other cover.

She was looking around trying to figure out where Csongor had ended up when a fusillade, the longest and the loudest yet, sounded from the driveway, up near the gate. Cringing against the shed wall, she understood that this had to be Jake and the neighbors, mounting some kind of organized assault. They’d be moving up the driveway, which meant that the remaining jihadists on this side would have to retreat toward the house.

Had Jake and his group seen the RPGs? Did they understand what they were up against?

Zula, summoning energy she had no right to have, risked getting to her feet and running several yards to the cover of the woodpile that Jake had used earlier. Throwing herself down, she raised her head cautiously and tried to scope out the scene in front of her.

In this environment, so filled with irregular natural forms, anything straight and smooth captured the eye. She saw one such thing now, projecting outward near the base of a tree. Definitely a man-made shape. But not a rifle. She suspected that it might be the stock of the RPG launcher. It was wiggling around, as if its operator were getting ready to use it.

Getting ready to fire a grenade into the middle of the group that Jake was leading up the driveway.

She was too low. She sat up, leaned against the side of the woodpile to steady her aim, and drew a bead on what she’d just been looking at.

From this higher vantage point she was clearly able to see the head and shoulders of a man, crouching against a tree with his back to her, holding a loaded RPG on his shoulder.

She got the crosshairs between his shoulder blades and took up the slack in the trigger. Then she heard a loud crack and felt something crash down on top of her head.

THE MAN WITH the submachine gun had been maddeningly elusive. When the four had scattered at Zula’s suggestion, he ought to have fired wildly in all directions, trying to hit at least one of them. This, at any rate, would have made things easier for Csongor. Instead, the jihadist had prudently held his fire, probably realizing that in such a melee he was only going to waste ammunition.

Csongor was confident that he had found reasonably secure cover. Since he was a large target with a small gun, he didn’t fancy his chances in a running-and-shooting duel with a small, elusive person carrying anything fully automatic. So, as difficult as this was, he lay very still and very quiet, and simply waited for the other guy to make a move.

Nothing happened for a minute or so, other than the sound of shots coming from the driveway.

But then the man just stood up, perhaps ten meters away, and fired a burst from his hip. He examined the results, then raised the weapon to his shoulder to fire at something with better aim.

The man was shooting at Zula.

Csongor pressed himself up to one knee, raised the pistol, and fired half a dozen rounds. By the time he was finished, the man was gone: dead or fled to cover, it was difficult to say.

ZULA HAD BEEN struck by a hunk of firewood that had been dislodged from the top of the pile by what she guessed was a poorly aimed burst of fire. It would leave a nasty bump but nothing serious.

Trying not to think about what this meant, she lined up her shot again and saw the man with the RPG, still about where he had been before, squatting on his haunches, bouncing up and down a little, pivoting and moving from time to time as he evaluated different targets.

Then a change came over him. He had been restless, nervous, but now had settled down into the attitude of a cat getting ready to pounce. Through the scope she could see his eye making itself comfortable in the weapon’s sight, his finger finding the trigger.

She pounced herself by pulling her trigger first.

Nothing happened. She understood now that her finger must have contracted against the trigger and fired a shot when the piece of wood had struck her on the head. The chamber was empty.

She pumped the weapon, chambering her last round, quickly lined up her shot again, and fired. Lifting her head from the sight she saw the man sprawling forward, and a jet of fire leaping from his shoulder as the RPG was launched. It caromed off the ground a few yards in front of him, spiraled into the air, and went screaming away.

“OKAY,” SEAMUS SAID, “I guess you can come with me. Just save the last shell for something really important, okay?” And with that he plunged forward down the slope at a run, cradling the rifle in his good arm and letting the damaged one dangle. Blood streamed down it freely and dribbled from his fingertips. He nearly tripped over the body of the man who had shot him, and who had been destroyed by Yuxia’s shotgun blast. Jones must have sent this guy back to track down the annoying sniper and kill him, which Seamus had almost made too easy by jumping up and presenting himself as a target.

Though, on the other hand, that might have saved his life. Had he stayed down, the stalker would have drawn closer before opening fire. By doing jumping jacks in plain view, Seamus had made himself irresistible, and the stalker had given way to the temptation to open fire at longer range than his pistol could really hit anything at.

“Should I take his gun?” Yuxia asked, thrashing along a few yards behind him.

“Good idea, honey,” Seamus called back. “Know that if you pull the trigger, it will fire.”

“Okay.”

“On top of it is a moving slide thingy that will jump back and bite a hunk of flesh from your hand if you keep holding it that way.”

“Mmmkay,” she said, a bit absently.

“I’m serious. Move your hand down.”

She did so, finally.

“You all right?” Seamus asked.

“We are running in the open.”

“You’re welcome to stop at any time,” Seamus pointed out, a little testily. “We are doing this because the end game of this thing is happening right now, and we are no longer near the place where it’s happening. I need an angle, and a shot.”

“You are bleeding on the ground.”

“Excellent place for it.”

They ran for a couple of hundred yards through the open space along the perimeter of the cleared compound, seeing no jihadists who were alive. Something spectacularly bad had happened to the cabin, but Seamus saw and understood it only dimly. He was, he realized, probably going into shock. And he was a little ashamed of that, since the wound on his arm ought not to have been such a big deal. His act of running down the hill and into the compound had, in a way, been a semiconscious tactic to put it out of his mind and get him focused on something else.

“I see the fucker,” he announced. The head of a tall man had popped up into view perhaps a hundred yards away. Advancing to the next tree, he leaned against it, to steady the upcoming shot, and then dropped to his left knee.

He hadn’t planned to drop to a knee; it just happened. His right leg had buckled.

Something heavy had been slapping against his thigh with each stride. Something in his right pants pocket. When he dropped, his right knee came up, and that pocket got squeezed as the front of his trousers creased, and a large amount of warm fluid gushed out of it and washed over his right buttock and ran down his thigh.

He glanced down for the first time in a while and observed that he had also been shot on the right side of his abdomen and that blood had been running out of the wound this whole time and accumulating, for some reason, in his pocket.

He was lying on his back, and Yuxia was standing above him with her hands clapped over her mouth. She might have let out a bit of a scream.

He thrust the rifle up into the air with his good arm. “Shoot him,” he said. “Shoot Abdallah Jones.”

CSONGOR MOVED FORWARD cautiously to see whether he had managed to hit the man with the submachine gun. He heard a slight rustle and looked over to see Abdallah Jones, just standing there looking at him. Csongor moved his pistol around to bear on Jones. Jones brought a Kalashnikov around and aimed it at Csongor, at the same moment.

The range was greater than Csongor was comfortable with. His hands were shaking.

“You,” Jones said. “If it were anyone else, I’d have already pulled the trigger. As it is, I’m just standing here dumbfounded. How the hell, Csongor? It is Csongor, right?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“The story is complicated.”

“Shame, that. Because I really would love to hear it. But there is, of course, no time.” He raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder.

A crack sounded from off to the side. The sniper again. Jones looked in that direction, but showed no ill effects; the sniper had somehow missed.

Csongor dropped to the ground and began firing blindly through foliage.

Several rounds came back in his general direction, but this was nothing more than Jones firing to keep Csongor’s head down. It worked. The next time Csongor felt brave enough to lift his head, Jones was nowhere to be seen.

From over near the cabin, he heard the drone of a small engine starting up.

He stood to see Jones astride an all-terrain vehicle. Jones spent a few moments figuring out the controls, then got the thing turned around and headed around the side of the house, trying to make it out to the road.

SOKOLOV WAS IN worse pain than he’d ever experienced, and he reckoned that he might lose the leg before this was all over. Had even considered pulling out his knife and self-amputating. Other than that, however, he was not doing that badly. No bullets had struck him. He had not suffered serious trauma during the collapse of the sleeping porch. The actual deck of the porch, which had thudded into the ground right next to him—a blunt guillotine blade that would have pinched him in half, had he landed wrong—had formed a pocket; all the logs and other debris that had rained down on top had been held up above the ground by its planking, which had been crumpled and compressed but not altogether driven into the ground.

So he was fine. He just couldn’t move. The heap of logs provided several large apertures through which he could look out and view his surroundings, and he had experimented with aiming the rifle through these. But no targets had presented themselves.

Until, that is, he heard the ATV starting up.

He could not actually see the ATV—his view in that direction was blocked by a sizable chunk of the cabin’s roof—and so he assumed that this was Jake, come back to reclaim his vehicle.

It idled for a few moments. The driver revved its motor and put it into gear, then began to ride it around the side of the cabin, circumventing the debris pile in which Sokolov was trapped.

Through a gap between logs Sokolov caught a brief glimpse of the driver’s head. Jones.

He thrashed around, sending a shocking wave of pain up his leg, and twisted into a position from which he could fire the rifle through another gap. He expected that Jones would be passing by very soon.

Which Jones obligingly did, and Sokolov pulled the trigger a few times as the vehicle came into view.

The engine stopped with a mechanical crunch, and Jones cursed. Unfortunately the vehicle’s momentum had carried it out of Sokolov’s sight. He heard Jones climbing off and unlimbering his Kalashnikov. The end of the weapon’s barrel appeared for a moment, silhouetted on the edge of Sokolov’s aperture.

But the gunshots that he heard next were not Kalashnikov rounds fired from nearby, but pistol shots from a greater distance. Not just one, but two pistols firing round after round.

TOTALLY EXPOSED AT the base of the rubble pile, harassed by poorly aimed rounds from faraway pistols, unable to seek cover in the log heap because he knew that an armed man was lurking back in there, Jones rolled to his feet and broke into a run, heading away from the cabin, back the way he had come. When it became obvious what he was doing, Yuxia broke from cover and went charging after him, screaming curses and firing the pistol wildly until it was out of ammunition. But by that time, Jones had disappeared into the forest at the base of the hill.

A FEW MINUTES after Seamus and Yuxia left him behind, Richard forced himself to get on his feet and begin hobbling up the trail. He had swallowed as much ibuprofen as his system could handle and he had swaddled the sprained ankle in strips of fabric cut from Jahandar’s garments. A long tree branch, trimmed and whittled, served as a walking staff. The high road—the climb up to the top of the big flat rock, followed by the long traversal of the talus slope—would be many hours of misery for a man in his condition. But there was another way of getting to Jake’s, a low road leading along the edge of the forest, through the old abandoned mining camp and then around a spur of the mountain into the valley of Prohibition Crick. It seemed much the better choice. So he split off from the trail shortly before it pierced the tree line, and hobbled south through the woods. He had feared that this would turn into an endless, toiling death march, but once he found his stride, he began to make reasonably good time—not a hell of a lot slower than if he hadn’t sprained his ankle.

The first leg of the journey, from the trail to the old mining camp, presented some difficult going in places. At one point, he was forced to range up and down a slope looking for the easiest place to traverse it. In the end, he found the spot by noticing a trail that had been pounded into the ground by several people who had gone before him. It was obvious from the freshness of the traces and the litter left behind that he was now following literally in the bootprints of Jones’s contingent of jihadists. Once he worked his way through the difficult bit, which involved a certain amount of scooting along on his butt, keeping his staff planted to prevent him from avalanching down the hill, he came out into a stretch of more level ground that, if memory served, would lead eventually to the mining camp. Here the jihadists’ trail spread out, as they had formed a broad front while reconnoitering the level ground. Richard chugged along freely in their wake, planting his staff with each stride.

His mind wandered. He now dared to believe that everything was going to work out okay, that Zula would have made it safely to Jake’s by this point, and that he would get there soon. That Jones would slip away into the Idaho/Montana wilderness, or else be captured, and that life for the Forthrasts would return to normal. Which got him to thinking about all the email, all the tweets that would be waiting for him, all the things left undone. And as part of all that, it occurred to him to wonder what Egdod was up to. Because, come to think of it, Richard had been logged on as Egdod when Jones had severed his Internet link. Egdod would have reverted to his bothavior, which in his case would mean trudging for thousands of miles across T’Rain, trying to get back to his mountaintop palace. This would, to put it mildly, draw lots of notice in that world. He wondered how many high-level characters had showed up to attack Egdod, and whether any of them had succeeded in bringing the old man down. He tried to recollect what the landscapes looked like between Carthinias and Egdod’s home zone. He envisioned the aged wizard wading through swamps, trudging doggedly across deserts, scaling mountain ranges, and walking through forests.

Kind of like Richard was doing. Egdod, of course, carried a wizard’s staff, just a simple stick, no fancy carvings or jewels. Just like what Richard was carrying now. Egdod’s beard was long and white, where Richard’s was just a couple of days’ gray stubble. And Egdod, of course, had no need to carry a huge, looted revolver in his waistband. Hell, Egdod didn’t even have a waistband. But despite all of those differences, Richard still found something hugely enjoyable about the fact that, at the same moment, both he and Egdod were wandering alone across their respective worlds, seeing everything close up in a way that they rarely had a chance to. Getting back in touch with the terrains from which they had sprung, autochthonously, early in their lives.

And possibly beset by unknown enemies. Richard, in his reverie, had quite forgotten to keep an eye out for the mountain lion. He executed a slow pirouette around his staff, just to see if anything was hunting him. But of course the whole point of being hunted was that you didn’t know it was happening. He stood still for a minute or two, just listening, just being aware of the place. Enjoying the moment. Because very soon this part of his life would be over, and he’d be descending into the valley of Prohibition Crick the way he had done on that autumn afternoon in 1974 with a bearskin on his back. Except that instead of finding a hidden smuggler’s cabin, he would find a nice modern cabin with Internet, full of people who would all want to talk to him.

When he was good and ready, he turned back around and followed the jihadists’ muddy footprints out of the trees and into the open plateau of the old mining camp.

A solitary man was walking toward him, a couple of hundred meters away, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He was moving with the weary, hitching gait of a man who knew he ought to be running but simply could not summon the energy. Occasionally he spun around and walked backward for a couple of steps, much as Richard had done just a few minutes before when he had been worried about the cougar. Unlike Richard, he was also scanning the sky. And indeed, now that Richard was out in the open, he noticed the sound of at least one helicopter.

The man turned forward again and froze, staring directly at Richard. It was Abdallah Jones.

Richard considered reaching around behind his back and drawing the revolver, but even with its long barrel and large caliber, it was useless at this range. No point, then, in letting Jones know that he was armed. Using the staff to ease his descent, he dropped to one knee. He and Jones were now looking at each other through a haze of scrub brush. Jones was bringing up his rifle: a Kalashnikov. Richard dropped to both knees, then to all fours, then scurried to a different position just as a few exploratory rounds hummed through the air above him and pelted into the mucky ground behind.

It was difficult to move in this way without making the brush wiggle, which would give Jones a way to track where he was. And in any case he was leaving a mashed-down trail that Jones could simply follow until he had a clear shot. Richard, looking behind him, saw that trail and noted its embarrassing width and, even here, heard the voice of a Furious Muse reminding him that he needed to lose weight. Zigzagging would break the trail up into short segments and make it more difficult for Jones to just drill him in his fat ass while strolling along in his wake. But it would also slow him down. So he very much needed to find proper cover and to take shelter there and force Jones to expose himself.

Calling to mind the last prospect he had enjoyed before he’d noticed Jones, he recalled a tumbledown log cabin that ought to be about fifty yards away from him now. It was not terribly far from the edge of the woods; and he could get into the trees with a short, very painful sprint from where he was now. He crawled, therefore, toward the woods, pausing occasionally to listen, hoping to get a fix on Jones’s location.

Which Jones obligingly provided by calling out: “Who’s your sneaky little friend, Dodge?”

Richard got to his feet and sprinted toward the woods, then dove as soon as he began to hear gunfire. Actually “sprint” was an awfully optimistic way to describe his movement; for Richard, it meant simply that he was moving as fast as he possibly could. Several rounds passed nearby, or so he judged from the weird sounds that seemed to be tearing up air molecules in his vicinity. From the place where he landed, it was a short belly crawl through mud into the trees. There he felt safe in getting up to a crouch and moving along through the forest until the old log cabin was visible just a stone’s throw away.

He could see Jones, tracking him at a leisurely pace through the part of the camp where he’d been running, diving, and crawling just a few moments earlier. Jones’s attention, quite reasonably, was directed mostly forward into the woods. But he kept turning to look back in the direction from which Richard had emerged into the camp a minute before. Richard took advantage of one such moment to hop out from cover and “sprint” perhaps half of the way from the tree line to the cabin, keeping an eye on Jones as he was doing so. Eventually Jones noticed him and brought the Kalashnikov around. Richard then dove again and belly-crawled the rest of the way to the cabin with rounds from Jones’s rifle humming through the air. If Jones had been carrying unlimited ammo, he could have laid down a lot more fire, and almost certainly hit Richard. But he seemed to be conserving his rounds. Which was a good thing. But it did cause him to wonder what had gone wrong, for Jones, in the last few hours. Why was he backtracking, alone, with depleted ammunition? What had been happening at Prohibition Crick this morning?

Once he had reached the safe side of the cabin, Richard got to his feet and shambled wearily into its front door and, in the sudden darkness, tripped over something soft that turned out to be the dead body of Erasto. Flies were already getting to it. Where did flies come from in situations like this?

Controlling a powerful urge to throw up, Richard patted the corpse down looking for weapons. But someone had already done this and relieved his departed comrade of everything except one ammunition clip for a pistol that was no longer here.

Richard knee-walked over the rotting remains of the building’s collapsed roof to a vacant window, popped his head up for a moment, and withdrew it. Jones had altered his course and was walking directly toward the cabin now, holding the rifle up at his shoulder, ready to fire.

“Another Forthrast holed up in the ruins of another log cabin, waiting to die,” Jones said. “You people are consistent, I’ll give you that. Unfortunately I don’t have an RPG, like the one we used on your brother’s place, but the results are going to be the same: a pile of dead meat in a ruined shack.”

Richard, as a younger man, might have been powerfully moved by this sort of talk. As it was, he was largely ignoring the meaning of the words themselves and using them mostly as a way to keep track of Jones’s position. He had pulled out the revolver, checked its cylinder, verified that it was loaded with the full five rounds. He got his thumb on its massive hammer and drew it back until it cocked.

“You see,” Jones said, “when you make the mistake of letting me get this close, the grenade doesn’t need to be rocket propelled.”

Richard was sitting on the floor beneath the window, gazing up into the shaft of light coming in through it, and saw an object fly in, bounce across the opposite wall, and tumble to the floor—which was actually the former roof. It bounced and came to rest almost within arm’s reach. Richard rolled toward it. His hand closed around it at the same moment as his conscious mind was understanding what it was: a grenade. It would have been clever, he later supposed, to toss it back through the same window at Jones, but the easy and obvious—and quick—throw from here was out the cabin’s vacant doorway. So that was where he threw it, and he was relieved to see it disappear from direct shrapnel line of fire beyond the poured concrete front stoop. It went off, and for a few seconds afterward, Richard’s life was all about that.

But only for a few seconds. He had waited too long, been too conservative; he had escaped the effects of that grenade only through dumb luck. He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, not just because of the ankle but the brain-stirring effect of the blast, and stood with his back to the wall next to the window. Through the opening he could see a narrow swath of what was out there, but Jones wasn’t in that swath. Getting the revolver out in front of him, he pivoted around his good foot and presented himself in the window opening long enough to get a wide-open view outside the cabin.

Jones was at about ten o’clock, and lower down than Richard had been expecting, since he had apparently thrown himself down to await the results of the grenade. He was just clambering to his feet, and when Richard caught his eye, he made a sudden sideways dive toward the cabin. Richard swung the revolver laterally, trying to track the movement, but his elbow struck the frame of the window at the same moment as he was deciding to pull the trigger. The revolver made a sound that would have seemed loud, had a grenade not just gone off, and a bullet drew a trace through weedy foliage about a foot away from Jones’s head. Jones was bringing his rifle up to return fire, but Richard was already withdrawing from the window. He pulled back so quickly, in fact, that he lost his balance and tumbled onto his ass.

He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin.

Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs. Or he could go out the way he had come in, move around the side of the cabin, and try to shoot around the corner. Or he could present himself in the window again and just fire from point-blank range.

He was cocking the revolver again when Jones opened fire with his Kalashnikov. Richard’s whole body flinched, and he very nearly let the hammer slip. But no rounds seemed to be passing through the cabin. Nor could they, really, given Jones’s location. So what the hell was Jones shooting at?

It came to him then that he was overthinking this.

This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to dodge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt. His opponent, of course, simply didn’t give a shit what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway—which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match only by adopting the same attitude. It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised. Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror. But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him.

All of this came simply and immediately into his head, as though the Furious Muses had chosen this moment to give up on being furious for once—perhaps forever—and were now singing in his ears like angels.

Richard stood up in the window, holding the revolver in one hand now, and swung it out and down.

Jones was right there, sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wall of the cabin, aiming his rifle, not up at Richard, but out into the open space beyond. He had been shooting in that direction for some reason.

He glanced up into Richard’s eyes.

“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!” Jones exclaimed.

Richard pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.

He cocked the revolver again and stood poised there for several seconds, looking at the aftermath to make sure he was not misinterpreting the evidence of his eyes, out of wishful thinking. But Jones was unquestionably dead.

Finally he raised his gaze from what remained of Jones and looked up and out over the field of weeds and overgrown scrub beyond. It was by no means clear what Jones had been marveling at in the last moment of his life. For fresh green leaves had not yet begun to bud out, and the hue of the place was the tawny umber of last year’s dead growth. Finally, though, Richard’s eyes locked on something out there that was unquestionably a face. Not a human face. Humans did not have golden eyes.

The eyes stared into Richard’s long enough for Richard to experience a warm rush of blood to his cheeks. He was blushing. Some kind of atavistic response, apparently, to being so watched. But then the eyes blinked, and the cougar’s tiny head turned to one side, ears twitching in reaction to something unseen. Then it spun around, and the last Richard saw of it was its furry tail snapping like a whip, and the white pads of its feet as it ran away.