Jack nodded again.
“Now, I can’t see shit from here, so I have to crawl up out of this hole and look around. We’ll get you help as soon as we can. Got that?”
Jack nodded.
“Good luck. I hope you never again have a day that sucks as hard as this one.” Seamus safetied his pistol, holstered it under his arm, and began to crawl up out of the draw on elbows and knees. When he reached a place where he could lie still, he burrowed as best he could into dry leaves and pine needles, and waited, motionless. But he didn’t have to wait long before he saw the sniper walk past, tromping and skidding awkwardly in the snow, moving parallel to the tree line, just far enough away that hitting him with a pistol would have been a miracle shot. He was looking nervously into the trees as he went. He knew, or at least suspected, that he was in view of someone who had every intention of following him. But Seamus had guessed right: the sniper simply couldn’t wait any longer. He had pressing business down-valley.
The obvious trick would be for the sniper to hike out of sight, stop, conceal himself, and wait until Seamus blundered into his sights. Seamus, accordingly, took his time and moved, when he did decide to move, in the cover of the foliage that lined the draw. Beyond the bottleneck where Jack was hiding, it broadened steadily until it developed into a valley, snow-free and heavily forested. Over the next quarter of an hour, Seamus, without exposing himself, was able to track the sniper’s footprints in the snow. But eventually the trail led down into the forest, forcing Seamus to up his game a little bit and begin tracking the sharpshooter like wild game. Before he made his plunge into the valley, he paused for a few moments to take a good look around, get his surroundings fixed in his head, make sure that he wasn’t missing anything that could be important later. Such as another contingent of jihadists bringing up the rear. It would be embarrassing to fail to notice such a thing.
He did not see another contingent of jihadists. But he was troubled by the feeling that he had seen something moving across the snow, roughly following the path that the sniper had taken. He saw nothing. He swept his gaze up and down the length of the trail that the sniper had left and convinced himself that nothing was on it. From place to place, though, it passed over a patch of khaki-colored rock that had been left exposed by the melting sun, and it had to be admitted that such places were excellent for the concealment of anything that happened to be light brown in color. After a while, with some hard looking and almost as hard thinking, he convinced himself that something might be crouching up on one of those patches, looking back at him, waiting for him to take his gaze away so that it could go back into motion.
Which might be for real, or just his imagination. But if it were for real, he could sit here all day staring at it and nothing would ever happen. So he turned his back on it and stalked into the forest.
DURING HER TIME among the jihadists, Zula had often been bemused by the slapdash and informal way that they went about certain activities. In this she recognized some of her own heritage: a mind-set and a collection of habits that had eventually been drilled out of her by Iowans. It had something to do with the way that such people assessed risk. Some might call it fatalism born of religious doctrine; others might point out that persons growing up in regions where war, disease, and famine were chronic conditions would naturally have a different set of instincts and reactions where danger was concerned.
And so when the pistol-carrying jihadist strolled out into the open and began to hike up the open slope directly toward Zula, she was not quite as dumbfounded as she might have been, had she never been around people who manifested the Third World attitude toward risk.
It could be that the man simply did not understand that Zula was armed. She had not fired the weapon recently, certainly had not showed it to them. He imagined that he would simply be able to walk up the slope, get close to her, and shoot her.
Or perhaps the plan was to take her prisoner again?
It didn’t matter. The result was the same: a moment was approaching in which Zula—lying prone, and reasonably well sheltered behind rocks—would place this man’s center of mass in her sights and pull the trigger. The closer she let him get, the easier the shot would be. As the Girl Scout in her might have predicted, she was getting cold, and her hands were beginning to shake. So she had to fight the temptation to shoot early. Better to wait for him to grow larger in the sights of the gun. But if she let him get too close, he might see the pistol in her hands.
She was lying on her side, having plastered her body into a tiny depression. It was awkward and uncomfortable. But the man below, sweeping the area with submachine-gun fire, had not been able to hit her with anything other than rock fragments, and that argued for not moving. Some little shift in position that might feel inconsequential to her could have the result of exposing some part of her body to fire.
Still—it was tempting. Her view of the man with the pistol was blocked by the pattern of the rubble. If she jackknifed, moved forward just a bit, she’d be able to see him clearly, brace her arms on a sort of flat tablet of rock a few feet away, get off the shot from a greater, and safer, distance.
Those were her thoughts while she waited and grew cold and shivery and stiff. She wondered what had caused the huge explosion she had heard earlier. Chet setting off the Claymore mine seemed like the obvious explanation. She wondered what that implied about the fate of Chet, and about Richard who had gone to look for him. She wondered what the story was on the helicopter, and whether it would be coming back.
Her meditations were interrupted by new movement, seen in the corner of her eye. She had been looking directly at the jihadist with the pistol, visible only from the shoulders up, struggling up the same scree slope she had climbed a little while ago. She now turned her head to see that the man with the submachine gun had been moving too, trying to get a new angle.
His eyes locked with hers for a moment. He looked excited and raised the weapon to his shoulder, taking aim.
She wriggled forward, moving to the new position a couple of yards ahead. The man with the pistol was startlingly close. He was flailing his arms, trying to maintain his balance. She stretched out her arms on the rock and lined up the front and rear sights, then swung them onto the dark form of the climber.
A single loud noise sounded from above her. Her ears suggested as much. The climber’s face proved it. For his immediate reaction was to freeze and look up the slope.
She pulled the trigger, felt the pistol jerk as its action cycled, saw the shell casing tinkle onto the rocks nearby.
The man was just standing there with a sort of Oh shit look on his face, and she thought for a moment that she must have missed him. But then he tried to sit down, which wasn’t going to work when facing up a steep slope. His legs flew up in the air before his ass had even touched the ground, and he began to turn back-somersaults down the mountain, gathering speed as he went.
She twitched her head around to look at the man with the submachine gun. But he was gone. Raising her head carefully, she found him at the base of the slope, lying spread-eagled.
The edge of the wood now lit up with muzzle flashes from two different weapons: freshly arrived jihadists who had witnessed all of this. But if they were firing at Zula, they were missing by a mile.
Answering fire now came from above: single shots, fired deliberately. These seemed to discourage the shooters below. Zula rolled on her back, rested her head on that flat rock, tried to figure out where it was coming from. The obvious answer was a large mass of solid stone, about the size of a city block, that jutted out from the ramp of talus. She inferred that it had a flattish top and that someone was up on top of it with a long gun.
Then her eye was drawn to movement. Along the side of that outcropping, someone was waving a piece of cloth. A T-shirt. Zula turned to look at this and, after a few moments, waved back.
A person emerged into view and began to make huge beckoning motions toward Zula. Run to me.
Zula had no idea wh
o it was. She got up and began running anyway. She was tired of being cold and she was tired of being alone, and she was willing to try anything. Even if some risk was involved. Call it fatalism. But the piercing bangs that sounded overhead—high-powered rifle rounds lancing down into the tree line from the top of the rock—seemed to give the men below second thoughts about coming out to shoot at her.
SOKOLOV’S IMMEDIATE REACTION to the loud bang was to shed his backpack, open it up, and begin assembling the assault rifle that Igor had taken from Peter and that he had taken from Igor. The logic of this move was far from obvious to Olivia. They were only a couple of miles away from a country in which possession of this gun would be spectacularly illegal. They had not seen another living soul today, other than the Forthrasts. But Sokolov was firm in his conviction that what they had heard was not a mining blast but the detonation of a tactical military device and that they were now in a state of open war with unseen and unknown enemies.
Olivia saw, then, how it all made sense. She had known it all along, really, but had suppressed it out of a sort of bureaucratic instinct: the fear that she would never be able to sell the idea in a meeting. Of course Jones would interrogate Zula, read Richard’s Wikipedia entry, learn about the smuggling, go to his place near Elphinstone, use Zula as leverage to make Richard guide him across the border. And of course the explosion at the border crossing yesterday had just been a diversion.
He was here, now.
How long had Sokolov known it? Until the moment of the blast he had betrayed no suspicions that they might be hiking into a free-fire zone with a gang of heavily armed jihadists. But she saw now that he had been expecting this all along.
Had he been playing her?
It was more complicated than that, she suspected. He had been playing the odds. There were good reasons for Olivia and Sokolov to cross the border. They could have done it anywhere. Sokolov had favored the crossing point that was most likely to produce a meeting with Jones.
They spent a quarter of an hour—though it seemed much longer—staging a tactical retreat back up the slope, through the boulder field, to the top of the rocky spur where they had parted company with Jake.
Inside Sokolov’s pack was a smaller bag, just a thin nylon stuff sack, made to hold a wadded-up sleeping bag. Once Sokolov had found a convenient place to lie prone on the top of the rock, he pulled this out by its drawstring and set it down on the rock. It clattered. It was full, she realized, of hard, heavy objects with corners. Once he had finished assembling the rifle, Sokolov zipped the bag’s drawstring open and dumped it out on the rock. It contained half a dozen curved plastic boxes: ammunition clips for the rifle. From their weight it was obvious that they were loaded.
Sokolov had gotten to Bourne’s Ford before her, made the rounds of local gun stores, bought all of this stuff, and loaded the clips. Just to be ready.
Okay, so he had been playing her. She found that it didn’t really bother her. Because, in a sense, she’d been playing him too. Hoping that something like this would happen.
In any case, there was little time for these metaphysical considerations. Sokolov—who had belly-crawled to the edge of the big flat rock—called her forward and got her to see what was going on below them: a young woman, brown-skinned, black-haired, in a tank top and cargo pants, scrambling up the slope in obvious fear for her life. Bursts of submachine-gun fire from a location that, at first, they were unable to see. By the time they had repositioned themselves to a place where Sokolov could get the man with the submachine gun in his sights, that man had stopped firing and was biding his time while a companion flailed and scrabbled up the slope with a pistol in one hand.
“Go down,” Sokolov commanded her, “and get Zula.”
This—more than the helicopter, the sudden appearance of the assault rifle, the shocking blasts of the submachine gun—snapped Olivia’s head around.
“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.