She froze and made herself still. The bear was still making hugely satisfied smacking noises, getting the most out of that MRE. But a few moments later, it too became quiet and still, as though listening, wondering about something. Zula’s first thought was that she must have made some noise or that a shift in the breeze had betrayed her presence.
The bear went into movement, and she cringed, thinking it might be moving toward her; but it wasn’t. The light of the morning was coming in now through the wrecked screen of camouflage, and ducking down, using that hand on the frame to steady herself, Zula peered back between the truck’s rear treads to see its hind legs—only its hind legs—planted on the ground. It was standing up to sniff the air and to listen. It let out a kind of indignant barking sound, then dropped to all fours and sauntered away.
There was definitely something under Zula’s right hand. She explored it with her fingertips and found that she could pry it loose from its lodging against the frame. It was a little plastic box.
She let the chain spiral off her other hand, then crawled out from beneath the truck to where the light was better.
The little box was a hide-a-key, with a magnet on one side. She slid it open and found two keys linked together by a split ring. One of them looked like a spare ignition key for the truck. The other was much smaller and looked like it belonged to a padlock. She tried it on the lock that was holding the chain around her ankle, but it would not even slide into the keyhole; this was made for a different brand.
Her eyes went to the toolbox padlock that Jones had discarded on the ground yesterday.
Voices were approaching from down the slope. This was probably what the bear had been reacting to. Zula pocketed the keys, then retreated beneath the truck again and put the box back in its place against the frame.
It was Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif.
The open padlock had been half trodden into the ground. Zula pulled it out, dusted it off, and looked at it for a few moments. Then she hooked its hasp through the last link on the chain and snapped it shut.
Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif were upon her. She expected them to notice the disturbance to their camouflage, the shredded MRE tray with huge fang holes in it. They didn’t. They were exhausted and they were in a hurry. And they only wanted her. They came in through the gap in the camouflage that the bear had made. Sharif dropped to one knee and undid the padlock that held her captive. He released the loop of chain that passed around the frame of the trailer hitch, then snapped it shut again so that it stayed fixed to her ankle. His eyes snagged for a moment on the other lock, the one from the toolbox, dangling from the end of the chain, but he made nothing of it. He didn’t have the key and had no time or need to trifle with it anyway. Zipping the long end of the chain loose from the frame, he stood up, backed away from the truck, and gave the chain a preliminary tug, like a dog’s leash. “Let’s go,” he said in Arabic.
Zula stood up, then turned and bent down as if to collect her sleeping bag. “I’ll do it! Just go!” said Abdul-Wahaab. So she turned back toward Sharif. He turned his back on her and began walking out of the woods and down the open slope toward the river. On the opposite bank, between the water and the highway, a green Suburban was waiting for them. On its door was a picture of a bear.
Day 9
She didn’t have time for a good look at the Suburban before they shoved her into its open rear doors. What came through to her was, for lack of a better term, its art direction: forest green and blazoned with a logo that incorporated a bear’s head and a pair of crossed firearms. She inferred that it belonged to a hunting guide company. This was confirmed by the cargo stored in its back: sleeping bags, tents, camp stove, and the like.
To this, her captors added some of the cargo from the pickup truck camouflaged up in the woods. Much of what they had scavenged from the mining camp was trash, usable only in desperate circumstances; now that the jihadists had gotten themselves an upgrade, they were happy to leave most of the junk behind, taking only the weapons and a few other choice items.
Jones was very keen to get going. They closed the rear doors on her, took seats up front, and peeled out. The five jihadists had all survived the night, but they were dirty and exhausted and had a kind of staring gaze that made Zula not want to meet their eyes. She had the strong feeling that they had committed murder very recently, and she wondered if they were on some kind of drug. As usual, nothing was explained to her, but much could be guessed. They had flagged this Suburban down on the road, or crept up on a campsite where it had been parked, and they had murdered the hunters and the guides, concealed the bodies, and then come back to fetch her. Now they were wondering how much time they had before the victims’ failure to check in would be noticed. They might have no more than a few hours, or as much as several days. It was impossible to know, and so they had to put as many miles as possible between themselves and the scene of the crime without drawing attention to themselves.
They drove in silence for a quarter of an hour, just getting used to their situation. Then Jones, who was driving, got the attention of Ershut, who was in the middle of the backseat, and talked to him over his shoulder for a little while. Zula could tell that he was talking about her.
Ershut turned around and made it clear that he wished to trade places with Zula. There was some awkward moving around, not made any simpler by the long chain trailing from Zula’s ankle.
He rummaged for a while in toolboxes and equipment chests and found, among other things, a roll of black duct tape and some heavy black plastic sheeting. He cut the latter into a strip about an arm’s length wide and a few meters long, then arranged this horizontally like a curtain around the side and rear windows of the cargo area, taping its edges to the head liner and the window frames. The entire back half of the Suburban was now hidden behind black plastic. Anyone looking at it from the outside would probably just assume that the glass had been deeply tinted.
She could see where this was going. They were going to be driving on public highways now. The time would come when they would find themselves close to other vehicles and then they didn’t want Zula gesticulating for help in the rear window.
Or, for that matter, kicking the windows out. As she was easily capable of doing, whether or not the windows had plastic over them.
They took the chain off her ankle and obliged her to climb into a sleeping bag. Then they wrapped duct tape tightly around the outside of the bag, binding first her ankles and then her knees together. “I suppose going to the powder room is out of the question?” she called, as they were doing this.
“You’ll have to just go inside the bag,” Jones announced. “It’s distasteful, but it won’t hurt you.”
They duct-taped her wrists together on the outside of the bag, in front of her waist, and then wrapped more tape around her arms, pinning them down to her sides. Sharif had found a watch cap, or perhaps taken it off a dead hunter, so they pulled this down over her eyes and then sealed it with a blindfold of more tape.
Then they drove forever.
Zula tried to think of some way to gauge the progress of time, but she had nothing other than stops for gas. These occurred three times. Before each one, Ershut climbed into the backseat and jammed a sock into Zula’s mouth and then bound it in place with a bridle of duct tape. He remained poised over her as, just a few inches away from her head, someone—probably Jones, since he could pass for a Canadian or an American of African descent—jacked the nozzle into the fuel filler pipe and pumped in another thirty gallons of fuel. An absence of electronic beeps suggested that Jones was going inside and paying in cash, rather than using credit cards.
Where would they have obtained Canadian cash?
Probably from dead hunters.
Only a few minutes after the second of these fuel stops, the Suburban pulled off the road into a flat paved space, presumably a parking lot, and Zula heard typing and clicking from the front. Jones had apparently found a truck stop or coffee shop with Wi-Fi and was messing about
on the Internet. Perhaps seeing if any missing persons reports had been filed.
The web surfing lasted for about fifteen minutes. They got back on the road again, and Ershut removed the gag from Zula’s mouth. Maybe fifteen minutes later, she finally went ahead and pissed herself. This was no picnic, but she felt better—well, less bad, anyway—when she compared it to what had happened to friends in Xiamen: Yuxia’s head in the bucket, Csongor pistol-whipped, Peter dead.
This in a strange way helped her feel better about the gory images of Khalid—half remembered and half dreamed—that kept appearing before her blindfolded eyes. Like it or not, this was the league she was playing in now. Her friends—assuming they were still alive—were playing in it too. And she at least had the advantage that she’d been in it before, or at least in its junior auxiliary, back in Eritrea.
They must have traveled for sixteen hours that day. Zula dozed occasionally, perhaps for twenty minutes, perhaps for three hours—there was no way to guess. They were traveling at highway speeds almost the entire time, which suggested that they were covering a vast distance—something on the order of a thousand miles. It was a long day but, in the end, not radically worse than flying between continents in an economy-class airline seat. And like such a flight, it seemed interminable when she was in the middle of it. At the end of the day, though, it seemed to have taken no time at all, since nothing really had happened.
They slowed suddenly, pulled off the highway onto gravel, and began to descend a relatively steep slope. Ershut scrambled over the backseat and hurriedly reinstated the gag; apparently this was a spur-of-the-moment excursion. The ground beneath the Suburban leveled off, and the vehicle eased through a series of maneuvers, then stopped. She heard a zipping noise as Jones stomped the parking brake down. The engine stopped. A door opened and one person—she assumed Jones—got out. She heard his feet crunching away across gravel. A few moments later, he greeted someone who gave him a cheerful greeting back.
Two greetings, actually, almost in unison: a man and a woman.
A conversation began. Zula could not make out words, but it all sounded cheerful enough. A friendly shooting-the-breeze type of chat. Zula could not hear anything else: no other vehicles, no traffic of any kind, none of the noises of a city. Just a low rushing sound that she was pretty sure came from a nearby river, a fast-flowing mountain stream.
After about ten minutes, the conversation paused, then resumed in much more subdued tones. Less than a minute later, she heard a door swing open and feet ascending a short stairway. Then the door thumped shut.
Two other jihadists got out of the Suburban and walked away over the gravel and there was a repetition of the door opening, the thump-thump-thump on the stairs, the door closing again.
Nothing seemed to happen for ten minutes, to the point where Ershut and Mahir—the two still in the Suburban—began to exchange a few nervous remarks. But then suddenly they both made happy exclamations. That door opened again. Someone jogged around behind the Suburban and opened its rear doors, then grabbed Zula’s feet and dragged her out. She got thrown over someone’s shoulder—Jones’s. He carried her across the gravel for some distance and then, with a great deal of effort, up that short stairway and into a place that sounded enclosed and smelled like a house. He pivoted and carried her down a narrow corridor and through a doorway. Then he bent forward at the waist and launched her. She fell back helplessly, unable to stop herself, imagining that she was about to smash the back of her head against something. But she made a soft landing on a bed and bounced. Jones was already out of the room, slamming the door behind himself. The entire structure rocked slightly beneath his footfalls.
They were in an RV, she realized. An RV parked on a flat gravel lot by the side of a mountain river.
The men were running back and forth between it and the Suburban, moving cargo. Someone started the Suburban and drove it up alongside to expedite matters.
It took them no more than a quarter of an hour to get the gear sorted and then she heard the RV’s engine start up, far ahead, at the opposite end. For this was some kind of a huge RV, one of those bus-length retirement-homes-on-wheels. It began to move across the gravel, slowly as the driver got the feel of it, then picking up speed. She heard the Suburban falling into formation behind and gave up on any thoughts of trying to kick out the rear window.
Only after they had been on the road for half an hour did Ershut come back and remove her gag. Air rushed into her mouth, greatly improving her sense of smell, and she got an unmistakable scent of blood—the cabin in the jet, Khalid bleeding out on the floor.
“Hold still,” Ershut said in Arabic, then cut through the lashings of duct tape around her arms and wrists. “Okay.” Then he walked out of the room, leaving its door open.
Zula devoted a few minutes to getting her blindfold and her leg tape off and kicked off the urine-soaked sleeping bag. It took her eyes a few minutes to work properly again, but when she could see, she saw Mahir and Sharif on hands and knees in the RV’s kitchen area, using rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of 409 to clean blood off its white linoleum floor.
TOWARD THE END of the long day’s drive, there had been an interlude that had posed Zula with a minor brainteaser. The Suburban had been cruising down a highway for some time. She could tell it was a two-laner because of the sound made by oncoming vehicles as they zoomed by a few feet away, and by the fact that it wound from side to side more than a freeway. But at one point they had slowed down, without turning off the road, and descended a long straight slope, losing speed the whole way, and finally come to a halt, still sloping downhill. Nothing had happened for a quarter of an hour or so. Then she had heard the engines of other cars and trucks starting up all around. A series of vehicles had passed them coming up the other way. The Suburban had descended some distance farther, then leveled out, clanking over steel plates, and then parked again. Presently a deep rumbling had started and continued for twenty minutes or so.
By this time, Zula had figured out that they were on a ferry. The obvious conclusion would have been that they were headed over to Vancouver Island. But she’d been on those ferries before and she knew that they were gigantic and that the land approaches to their sprawling terminals would have felt and sounded different. They must be on something smaller. And indeed the crossing had not lasted long, and soon the engines of the Suburban and of the other vehicles around them had started up again and they had ascended up a long gentle slope, building speed as it turned back into a highway.
During the visit that she and Peter had made to B.C., she had learned that the southern part of the province sported a number of long, skinny, deep lakes, oriented north-south, presumably gouges left in the earth by glaciers during the most recent Ice Age. They were too long to dodge around and too wide to bridge, so the east-west highways ran right up to them and stopped and then started again on the opposite side. The dead ends were connected by small ferries.
About an hour after they stole the RV, she got to see one of those ferry terminals. Albeit dimly. It was long after dark. The terminal was closed. The lights—if there were any—had been turned off. Jones switched off the RV’s headlamps as they cruised past a sign warning them that there’d be no more sailings until six A.M. tomorrow morning. A moment later, the Suburban went dark too. They felt their way down the ramp by starlight. It was just a straight gash blasted through the woods down to the shore of the lake. It ramped straight into black water. The connection to the shore was bifurcated. To the right, the road leveled off onto a platform built out over the lake on pilings and equipped with gates and ramps and huge bitts for mating with the ferry. To the left, the pavement just sloped straight down through the waterline. It was incised with a pair of deep straight channels hardened with iron rails. These ran obliquely up across the road to a broad open lot off to the side of the waiting area, surrounded by equipment sheds with heavy lifting equipment and other gear: a maintenance yard, she supposed, for the ferries, which could be
winched straight up out of the water on those rails and brought to dry dock on higher ground. She got a reasonably good look at the place out the RV’s windows because that was where Jones got the gigantic vehicle turned around in a long series of back-and-forths. Meanwhile, Abdul-Wahaab—who had been driving the Suburban—had stopped it in the middle of the ramp, nose aimed down toward the water. He had rolled down all of the windows, opened the sunroof, and parted the rear cargo doors, which he now seemed to be wedging open with a stick. She could not see into it from this distance, but she had a good idea as to its contents. In the time she had spent in this bedroom, she had seen copious evidence—in the form of family photographs, toiletries, denture-soaking equipment, and knickknacks—that this RV was owned by a retired couple whose corpses were now in the back of that Suburban.
Having finished his preparations, Abdul-Wahaab made one last orbit around the big SUV, inspecting his work, then reached into the open driver’s-side door. Zula heard a distant thunk as he released the parking brake. The Suburban began to roll forward down the ramp. He walked, then ran alongside, keeping his right hand on the steering wheel, then peeled away from it just before it nosed into the water. It lost most of its velocity in the first few yards, plashing up a concentric wave that spread out into the lake, but it never stopped moving. Air burbled up out of the engine compartment. It slid forward into the lake, instantly filling with water, and disappeared, leaving a trail of bubbles that slowly moved away from shore as the vehicle found its way down to the lake bottom. The terrain all around was rocky and steep, and Zula had no doubt that the bottom dropped away precipitously beyond the end of the paved ferry-ramp. The lake must be a hundred meters deep, and the Suburban would come to rest at the very bottom of it.