Reamde

would prefer to avoid deus ex machina stuff, and so as soon as I get done with this email I’ll call a meeting for tomorrow morning.”

“Agenda?”

“Figuring out some less obvious way to fuck up the Bright invasion of the Torgai Foothills.”

Day 7

The back end of the double-wide was a bunkhouse, divided into half a dozen small rooms each equipped with bunk beds that had been knocked together out of two-by-fours and drywall screws. The beds still had thin foam mattresses. They gave Zula a room of her own, then nailed the door shut behind her and nailed a scrap of plywood over the outside of its window. She spent a long and shivering night under the bare minimum of blankets needed to keep her from perishing outright of hypothermia. When morning came, and they pulled the nails out of her door, she went to the front room, which was warm because of the stove. She curled up on the sofa under as many blankets as she could scavenge and did not move for a long time.

They had destroyed the lock on the filing cabinet and found a lot of papers belonging to the mining company: pay records, receipts, assay reports, hardcopies of spreadsheets. But they also found a survey map of the area, and a road map of British Columbia.

Jones and the most senior-looking of the soldiers, an Afghan named Abdul-Wahaab, took as many of the warm clothes as they could fit on their bodies, bundled themselves up, packed food and water for a couple of days’ journey, and, after a lengthy study of the survey map, trekked off into the woods. Zula, peering out through a gap between blankets, watched them go and thought that she understood their strategy: the snow was less deep in the trees, and it seemed that they were able to move a bit more rapidly there.

Nothing else happened for the rest of the day. Zula did not move much from the sofa. The three remaining soldiers took turns going out in pairs to explore the vicinity, but they couldn’t stay out for long because of the shortage of winter clothing. One was always left behind, presumably to keep an eye on Zula. Sometimes they came back with trophies scavenged from other buildings: tools, first aid kits, dead flashlights, worn-out hoodies, work gloves, pornographic magazines, bars of soap, cans of oil. The scavenging developed momentum as they found more warm things to wear. During the afternoon, they put considerable effort into moving snow away from a travel trailer that had been left parked about a hundred meters from the headquarters building. This had been visible yesterday as an anomalous snow drift. Now it was revealed as an Airstream trailer, Zula guessed between twenty and thirty feet long. It had been jacked up to take the weight off its wheels and a shed roof of corrugated fiberglass had been affixed to one side, creating a sheltered outdoor space that, when cleared of snow, proved to contain a picnic table and some lawn chairs. From its interior they scavenged more kitchen ware, blankets, a foam mattress, packets of instant coffee and quick-cook oatmeal.

Zula had not really slept in a few days, but that afternoon, out of some combination of exhaustion, depression, and jet lag, she finally did fall into a deep slumber that lasted until some time after sundown. Then she got out of bed and took it upon herself to melt some more snow. Her Crocs had been confiscated and so she had to make her snow-collection forays barefoot. The pain in her feet reminded her of just how impossible it would be to get away from these people until she could solve the equipment problem. When she had a full pot of warm water, she carried it into the lavatory and gave herself a sponge bath using a bar of soap that had been left there years ago by departing miners. When she was done, she dried herself off using paper towels (a bale of them had also been left behind) and then emerged feeling weirdly and inappropriately energetic. She cooked some rice and some lentils, which were eaten, though not relished, by all (the kitchen had salt and pepper but no other seasonings).

The three jihadists made for quite a study. Two of them, Mahir and Sharif, were native Arabic speakers who, she collected, had gravitated from their home countries (Mahir looked pure Middle Eastern, Sharif had a bit of a North African look about him) to Afghanistan where they had become part of Jones’s organization. The third, Ershut, was some kind of Central Asian who seemed to speak limited Arabic. Ershut was not tall, but he was stocky and powerful and tended to get saddled with grunt work, which he always seemed to accept as his lot in life. It was he who had loaded much of the heavy gear from the fishing vessel onto the smaller boat that they’d taken into Xiamen, and who had loaded it from the boat into the taxi and from the taxi into the plane. He was pious without showing the demented fanaticism of the late Khalid; during one of her lavatory forays on the jet last night, Zula had found him praying in the aisle of the main cabin, having apparently divined the direction to Mecca by looking at the on-screen map displayed on the flat-screen TV. One of his first acts in this place had been to scavenge a carpet scrap from a back room and get it pointed a little bit south of east.

Mahir and Sharif were almost certainly lovers. If not, then they were certainly taking male friendship to a level rarely seen in Western culture. They always sat together, and when Sharif went out on a scavenging expedition with Ershut, Mahir spent the whole time sitting by the window and sighing.

Zula was free to move around as long as she gave the impression of doing something useful, such as cooking or cleaning. At one point when no one was paying much attention, she took a yellow pad and a few pencils back into her room and hid them under the mattress. Later, when she’d been nailed back into her room for the night (having begged for and been given an extra ration of blankets), she sat by the light of a candle (these, at least, were abundant) and wrote a letter in the same general vein as the one she had scribbled on a paper towel and stuffed into the disconnected drain trap in the safe house bathroom in Xiamen. This one was a little more discursive, since she literally had all night. When she was finished, she slipped it under the mattress. Her body was showing no interest at all in going to sleep. She tried to tire herself out by doing all of the exercises she could think of that would not make a lot of noise: push-ups, dips, squats, and a gallimaufry of half-remembered yoga moves. But this only jacked up her energy level and made matters worse.

Consequently she was wide awake at about four in the morning when the building was slowly pervaded by the rumble of an approaching engine. This was not a steady drone, as of an overflying plane, but a patternless sequence of sharp rev-ups and die-downs. After a while it became loud enough to wake up Ershut. Through gaps around the edge of the wood they’d nailed over her window, Zula could see that they were being strafed by the headlights of, she guessed, some wildly veering and bucking vehicle that was headed toward them. Ershut pounded on the (apparently locked) door of the room where Mahir and Sharif were spooning. Then she heard feet thumping, magazines being jacked into guns, bolts being drawn back.

Then a horn honked just outside the building. A vehicle door opened. Men began to shout in Arabic, but the sound of their voices was buried under an eruption of gunfire. The high-pitched noise was filtered by the walls, but the deep concussion came right through, making her nostrils sting. She dropped to the floor with a thought of crawling under the bed, then came to her senses and understood that this would do her no good whatsoever. But then she heard the men outside laughing giddily and calling out “Allahu akbar!”

They were not in a gunfight. This was celebratory fire. The jihadists had themselves a vehicle; and since it had gotten in to the camp, it must be capable of getting them out.

ZULA WONDERED WHETHER the jihadists were simply out of their minds, firing guns into the air as a way of expressing joy when they were deep behind enemy lines. Or did they understand something about this place that she didn’t? Could they really be so isolated that random bursts of automatic weapons fire in the middle of the night would go unheard by human ears?

She would find out soon enough. When the cops came and turned this place upside down—which she assumed had to happen sooner or later—they’d certainly find her letter. This improved her mood greatly, since she had been fretting the last day or two about the hell her extended family must be going through. They would continue in that state of unendurable not-knowing until the snow melted and the plane was exposed. Someone would notice it. Maybe in a month and maybe in a year. But the letter would ultimately be found and her family would be able to read it and understand what had happened and grieve properly and, she hoped, be proud of her.

They let her out of the room, apparently with the expectation that she’d be happy to prepare breakfast for them. She pretended that this was the case. But it was not until everyone had eaten and she was cleaning things up that the sky grew bright enough to let her see outside and get a load of the vehicle that Jones and Abdul-