The good roads were behind them now. For a while there was rough tarmac, and then the tarmac began to break up, and as they drew near the foothills they were on a wide track lined with trees, even enough but muddy after the rain and scattered with stones and potholes. Civilization began to slip away. They passed overgrown farmsteads, wild horses grazing under wet oaks, herds of bony cattle ambling about. From time to time the sun broke through and lit some part of the scene with glistening light, causing Hammer to forget his mission, forget the trials of the last four days, and wonder at the innocent perfection of the place, the magic of its simple elements.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said, more to himself than to Koba, and tried to remember the last time he had been in nature like this, with the world he knew unimaginable and forgotten.
“Ya,” said Koba, unengaged.
The road settled alongside a fast-flowing river and started to climb.
Soon the river was far below them and the road had narrowed to a single rocky track, a foot wider than the car, that clung to the rocky hillside. Grass gave way to sinewy trees that still dripped after the rain, and hardy bushes sprouted over the cliff face. Every so often wooden posts set back in little clusters marked their progress. If Hammer looked down to his right all he saw was an abrupt and growing drop and a shoulder that just crumbled into space, but Koba charged on unaffected, taking corners at the same speed as the straights and letting the car veer wide in the mud as he fished in his top pocket for his cigarettes and rummaged in the glove box for his lighter. They might be in a hurry, Hammer told him at one point, but there was no need to rush on his account—as long as they arrived today. But Koba insisted he was taking it slowly, they’d be OK, and bristled, if anything, at the implied slight on his driving. Entrusting himself to the god of the road, Hammer held on. As long as they arrived.
Perhaps because of the recent rain they saw few other cars going their way, and those they did see were soon compelled to stop on one of the rare stretches that were wide enough to let them by. The drop now was sheer, and already hundreds of feet. As Koba crept past them, no more than an inch away, Hammer forced himself to look ahead so that he couldn’t see how close the wheels beneath him were to the edge. At every moment he expected to feel them start to slip and then give.
As a cursing Koba maneuvered around a Lada that was barely coping with the steeper stretches, Hammer got to inspect the wooden marker posts by the side of the road. There were three together, in the form of crosses, carefully made, and at each intersection was a faded portrait.
“I guess they didn’t make it.”
Koba, concentrating on the Lada, merely grunted.
“The posts,” said Hammer.
Koba glanced across. His mood seemed to be declining as they left his world behind. Hammer suspected that he was finding the driving more taxing than he let on. “Idiots. They drink, fall from mountain. You will see. All this people are idiots.”
With a final curse he was free of the other car.
“Should we help them?” said Hammer, looking back. “They’re never going to get up.”
“I tell you. Idiots!”
For all Koba’s dispatch, progress was slow. In a straight line it was only twelve miles to Omalo, where they were headed, but the road snaked so tightly upward, hairpin after hairpin, that there were eighty to cover in all. After an hour the last straggling trees ran out and they emerged into sunshine; when he looked down, Hammer could see glimpses of the way they had come, the track winding in and out of sight hundreds of feet below, and beyond, already unimaginably remote, the distant plain. Above and around them were sublime peaks and green ridges folded like cloth.
Another hour passed, his ears popped twice, the air grew cold, and still there seemed to be more mountain above them than there was below. Except to make the odd curse, Koba drove in silence now. Hammer’s conversation had dried up.
“Fuck,” Koba said, straining to look at the road above them. Hammer followed his gaze, and saw, a hundred feet up, three vehicles in convoy, two of them the old army trucks he had grown used to seeing everywhere, and in between them a smaller white van.
Within ten minutes they had caught up with the second truck as it waited for the first to pull the van through a particularly steep hairpin, its huge wheels laboring and slipping on the rocky ground. Somehow it managed it, whereupon both stopped, the rope was released, and they all set off lumbering toward the next turn. Koba looked at Hammer and slowly shook his head.
“All way up,” he said. “You see. No way past. All way up.”
This corner the van tried to take on its own, but it failed and the procedure was repeated. Koba turned off the engine and lit another cigarette, watching the group climbing at the slowest possible speed up one leg, then another, and another. Shadows began to appear on the eastern slopes. Hammer’s watch showed four.
“Must be in Omalo before night,” said Koba.
“There’s plenty of time.” He didn’t mean it. It was the hardest part of this whole thing, racing against time and having no idea how much was left.
“Is dark early, the other side.”
“Of course.”
“Not good in dark.”
For almost another hour they hung back, caught up, hung back, Koba occasionally trying to find a way around, frustrated now beyond measure. Dead pylons bent by winter snowfalls loomed over the road. Then, rounding a long corner, they found the first truck stopped in a crook of the track where it crossed a shallow stream, from which the driver and another man were filling a collection of plastic bottles. Koba saw his opportunity and moved sharply to the left to go past.
“Stop!” shouted Hammer. What Koba had seen as a dip in the road was in fact the shoulder. There was no road, just space.
Hammer felt the wheel underneath him lose grip and begin to slip away. There was nothing to check their fall but scree and scrub. By the stream the two men were shouting, their arms up in warning and disbelief.
Koba braked hard, and the car’s three wheels scrabbled to a stop on the loose grit. Hammer, fear coursing through every part of him, looked across at Koba with astonishment and reproach, but Koba just stared straight ahead, his big face white and furious. Even in that moment Hammer felt a certain awe at the extent of the man’s pride.
Koba put the car in reverse, checked twice that he had the right gear, and slowly took them back. Outside, the Georgians were incredulous and let Koba know it. Through the open window he shouted back.
Hammer breathed deeply, but his pulse still raced. “I think I’d like a smoke,” he said.
Still staring straight ahead, Koba removed the pack from his shirt pocket, took one for himself, and offered the rest to Hammer, who found the lighter in the glove box and lit first Koba’s, then his own. This cigarette was different from last night’s. Calming, yes, but not comforting. Two thoughts occupied him as he smoked: that if he and Koba had tumbled down the cliff, there was no one who might come for him as he had come for Ben; and that the only memorial he might leave behind was a cross at the side of this fucking road.
“That was close,” he said, already thinking about Koba’s fury and the rest of the journey. “You did good.”
But Koba either didn’t believe him or was still too angry—with himself, with the other drivers, with the mountains—to speak.
“For a moment I thought you and I were going to have a nice little spot on the road, here, with a couple of crosses.” He gave Koba a chance to respond in kind. “We could have been together forever. People would have taken us for brothers.”
Koba flicked his half-finished cigarette out of the window.
“Idiots. Up here, like this.” His jaw jutted out as he shook his head. “Motherfuckers.”