chain, equidistant from the garbage place and the sleeping place, and used the spoon to dig out a shallow pit. The going was easy at first, but then she came to a depth, only a few inches below the surface, where interlocking roots of trees and shrubs made it impossible to go any deeper. She stood above it and wrapped a green plastic tarp around herself for privacy, then dropped her pants and squatted over it, creating a little tent lit up on the inside by her flashlight. She hunched her shoulders and drew the tarp over her head so that she could see what she was doing. The pill of damp cotton came out first, and she was able to pluck it clear before the rest came. When she was finished, she pulled the key out and placed it in a zippered pocket on the leg of her trousers before standing up, getting fully reclothed, and tossing the tarp to one side. Then she used the shovel to fill the hole back in and kicked some more loose pine needles and pebbles over the top for good measure. The men had all long since gone into their tents, the only exception being the sniper Jahandar, who had retreated up into the trees after dinner to, she assumed, keep watch while the others slept. Since Zula was the only person moving in the camp, she had to assume that he was watching her. If so, he was seeing her as a little blob of light bobbing around and tending to chores. After she had finished going to the toilet, she kicked off her Crocs—still the only footwear she was allowed to have—and climbed into her sleeping bag fully clothed and zipped the tiny tent closed, except for a gap down at the bottom where the chain emerged.
She lay there for several minutes just listening. Wondering whether Jahandar or one of the other men might bother to come and check on her. But nothing happened. She could hear Jahandar moving occasionally, but he was just shifting his position, standing up to stretch his legs, pacing around, stretching.
Moving as quietly as she could, she slid a hand down to the side of her thigh, slowly worried the pocket’s zipper open, found the key with her fingers, and drew it out. She brought it up to her neck, wrapped one hand around the padlock to muffle any mechanical clicking noises that might come out of it, and got the key inserted. The padlock snicked open, and she felt the chain go slack around her throat. Not exactly a surprise; but one of her nightmares had been that for some reason it would fail to work.
It was a mistake, in a way, to have done this. For now she was overcome by an almost physical longing to squirm out of this sleeping bag and make a run for it.
She seriously considered it until, far off in the darkness, she heard the hiss and snick of a lighter, Jahandar’s lungs filling with cigarette smoke.
If she got out, went to the end of the chain as if she had to use the toilet again, and then suddenly made a run for it, would he be able to put a bullet in her before she had vanished into the trees? As he sat up there on his perch, was he keeping her in his crosshairs the whole time or just hanging out with the rifle across his lap, keeping casual watch over the camp?
It seemed unlikely that he would be able to plug her on the first pull of the trigger, given that it was dark and that he would be surprised. But the mere fact that he
From nearby, the sound of a long zipper, somewhat muffled. A sleeping bag, she guessed. Then a second long zipper, sharper. A tent being opened. The swish of someone sliding out of his bag. Probably going to take a leak. Footsteps. Someone made himself comfortable on a camp chair. Some plasticky clicking noises and then the whooshy, saccharine jingle made by Windows as it was booting up.
She rolled onto her stomach, propped herself up on her elbows, and opened the tent zipper a minute amount, worrying the pull upward one tooth at a time so as not to make noise. Peering out through the hole just made, she saw Jones, sitting in the camp chair about thirty feet away, his face ghastly in the light of the laptop’s screen. He screwed himself around in his chair, thrust out a leg, got a hand into a hip pocket, and pulled out something tiny which he inserted into the side of the machine: a thumb drive. And then he went to work.
Had he not been right there, wide awake, with a pistol strapped into his armpit, this would have been the most difficult decision in her life. As it was, she had little choice: she snapped the padlock shut again. Then she replaced the key in her pocket and zipped it securely closed.
Despair would have been reasonable. But she reminded herself, again and again, that they could not, all of them, remain together in this camp indefinitely. Most of them would soon be leaving, with only a skeleton crew to keep an eye on Zula, and then her odds would go up accordingly. Jahandar could not be expected to stay up all night, every night, keeping watch over the camp. Sooner or later Zakir’s turn would come up, and Zakir would fall asleep immediately.
So she tried to rest. Sleep did not seem realistic, but she could at least lie still and give her body an opportunity to relax muscles, digest food, and store energy.
She must have dozed off, since she was awakened by a tinny Arabic pop song coming from someone’s phone: an alarm, not an incoming call. There was no way for her to judge time, but it was definitely still dark and she didn’t feel that she had been out for very long. She heard shifting around from one of the tents and low voices.
Peering out through her spyhole, she saw Jones exactly as before. But now pools of light were bobbing and veering across the ground as Ershut and the white American Abdul-Ghaffar—emerged from one of the tents. Sharjeel crawled out from another and scurried over to Jones to suck up to him some more, but Jones, deeply involved in whatever he was doing, told him to bugger off. Gradually they formed a little circle on the ground, anchored by Jones looming above them as on a throne. Occasionally they shone their flashlights across her tent, and she had to resist the temptation to flinch away. There was no way that they could possibly see her through this tiny crevice in the zipper. They gathered around the stove, only a few yards from her tent, and began banging pots. She felt an absolutely ridiculous flash of annoyance that they were somehow invading her territory, making a mess of her kitchen. Strange how the mind worked. They filled a pot with water, lit the stove, began making tea, snacking on bananas from a grocery bag.
After everyone had come fully awake, Jones began to talk, saying everything in English and Arabic so that Abdul-Ghaffar could understand it. Sharjeel was another whose Arabic could use some improvement. But Jahandar spoke nothing but Pashtun and Arabic, so the conversation had to be bilingual.
Actually it was not a conversation so much as a briefing.
“It’s 3:30,” Jones said. “We’ll be under way in moments. I estimate half an hour to get there, half an hour to reconnoiter the place and get in and show him this.” He yanked the thumb drive out, held it up as if they could all see what was on it, then put it into the breast pocket of his shirt and smoothed a Velcro flap over it. “Then he’ll have to pack some items, I should imagine, which might take another half an hour, and then another half hour to get to the rendezvous point below. So figure we meet there at 5:30 and get under way. Sharjeel, give the men another hour to sleep. Wake her up at 4:00 so that when you rouse the men at 4:30, water will be hot and breakfast ready. That’s time for eating, for morning prayers, and for packing. Jahandar and Ershut will,
A minute later Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, Ershut, and Jahandar got up and walked away into the woods, headed downhill into the mining complex, leaving Sharjeel the only one keeping watch over the camp. Zula was tempted to make a run for it then. But then she’d be bracketed between the aroused camp and Jones’s contingent. Not a good situation. After five thirty, though, most of these men would be gone for good, leaving her with only four guards, two of whom were incompetent. That would be the time to make a break for it.
To be precise, she needed to make her break during the interval between five thirty and whenever it was that they were supposed to kill her. No schedule had been set for that yet, or if it had, they’d been discreet enough to do it out of her hearing.
Even if they intended to keep her alive indefinitely, she had an obligation to get free as soon as possible. After the jet crash, with Jones’s gun in her face, she’d blurted out the one thing she could think of that might keep her alive. And she didn’t imagine that Richard or anyone else in the family would fault her for it. But soon, as consequence, Richard was going to be in their power; and if he ended up taking Jones down his usual pathway into northern Idaho, it would lead them straight to the cabin where Uncle Jake and his family lived. She was obligated to do whatever she could to help them out of the mess she’d put them in.
To bears, she added boots as something to be thinking about. Zakir was a big lumbering man, but Sayed the graduate student was a good inch shorter than Zula. She made up her mind to have a look at what was on his feet
