tentcloth and to hear the hiss of a backpacking stove being lit up.
Something told him to get moving. He wriggled out of the sleeping bag, spun around on his butt, got his booted and hobbled feet out the door, and then inchwormed out onto the ground.
Only two of the nine jihadists were out here: the tall Somalian-Minnesotan named Erasto, and another guy whose name Richard could not seem to keep in his mind. An Egyptian with a dark, callused spot in the middle of his forehead, caused by contact with the ground during prayer. They were heating a pot of water, presumably to cook up some porridge. Richard waddled closer to the stove and held his zip-tied hands out near the pot to catch some of the warmth. Erasto was eating an energy bar, the Egyptian just staring off aimlessly into the distance.
Richard realized that he had to take a crap, and he had to take it now.
He stood up. Erasto watched him carefully. He looked over toward the crap-taking place, which was a hundred or so feet away at the base of the cliff they had yesterday descended with rope.
“You guys have any toilet paper?”
No response.
“Dude,” Richard said, “I really gotta go. No fooling.”
Erasto seemed incredulous-verging-on-disgusted that he was having to deal with such matters. “Jabari!” he said. This seemed to get the attention of the Egyptian. Richard seized on it as an opportunity to finally learn the guy’s name. Jabari. As in jabber. As in jabbing someone with a knife.
Erasto was asking some kind of question. Jabari bestirred himself and began to sort through a nearby pack, apparently looking for the bumwad supply.
Richard was hopping from foot to foot, as best he could when hobbled. It was very much open to question whether he was going to make it to a suitable place in time.
“I’m going to start hopping toward a suitable place to take a crap,” he announced. He was speaking as calmly as possible, since he didn’t want to shout and give non-English speakers such as Jabari the wrong idea. “You can follow me, you can shoot me in the back, whatever. But something’s got to give.” The sentence was punctuated with an impressive fart, which proved a much more effective communication than anything that had been escaping from Richard’s other end. Richard toddled around until his back was turned to Erasto and then began mincing across the campsite, moving away from the river and into the undergrowth that grew profusely between the bank and the base of the cliff. In about half a minute’s hopping, cursing, farting struggle through the shrubs—which grew densely here, watered by the mist drifting from the falls—he came to a clear place, dotted with turds and flecked with used bumwad, at the base of the cliff.
“Cliff” was too simple a word to denote the geological phenomenon rising above him. It was not a sudden vertical wall so much as a rapid increase in the slope of the ground that became fully vertical, and even developed into a bit of an overhang, twelve or fifteen feet above. And it was not a simple monolith, but a junk pile of boulders, tenacious vegetation, and packed soil that just happened to be really steep. Its top was out of view, but he knew it to be about fifty feet above. Anyway, it was now sheltered enough that he felt he could take a decent crap and so he hopped up and down several times, reversing his direction by degrees, and began to fumble with his belt.
A roll of toilet paper in a Ziploc bag struck him in the chest, underhanded by Jabari from perhaps twenty feet away, and bounced to the ground at his feet. “Thank you,” Richard said, stripping his trousers down. Jabari turned his back and retreated somewhat. Richard, looking at him through the tops of the shrubs as he squatted to obey nature’s call, saw the Egyptian raising both hands and waving cheerfully to someone back in the camp; apparently someone, probably Abdul-Wahaab, wanted to know what the hell was going on and needed to be reassured that all was well.
Richard was just in the middle of letting it all go when a dark object dropped out of the sky and thudded to the ground right in front of him. He assumed at first that it was a short bit of a stick that had tumbled out of a tree on the top of the cliff. But on a closer look he observed that it was neatly rectangular.
It was, he now saw, a pocket multitool—a Leatherman or similar—in its black nylon belt holster.
“THIS IS ALL about making a case,” Seamus said.
The automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d’Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer.
“I’m not sure how that phrase translates into Chinese or Hungarian,” he went on. “What I’m trying to say is this. We are going to see my boss, who happens to live on the other end of the country. We have to drive because I can’t get you guys on a plane without IDs. We happen to be in striking distance of a place where I think Jones might be crossing the border. Last time I logged into T’Rain—which was about half an hour ago—Egdod was still wandering across the desert, followed by a couple of hundred coup counters and curiosity seekers. Which supports my theory.”
“It does?” Yuxia asked.
“Okay, never mind the part about Egdod. You either believe it or you don’t. I happen to believe it. Anyway, I called this dude who has a chopper.” Seamus patted the brochure for the dude in question, which was sticking out of his back pocket. “He is willing to take me up there to fly over the area. I’ll only be gone for a couple of hours. We’ll be on the road by midafternoon. Chances are we can still make Missoula tonight. You guys can hang out here, see a movie, whatever. Just don’t get arrested or do anything that would call attention to your complex immigration status.”
“I want to come with you,” Yuxia said.
“There’s not enough room in the helicopter.”
“The brochure says it can carry up to four passengers,” Yuxia said, and pulled another copy of the same brochure out of her jacket pocket.
During the awkward silence that followed, Seamus happened to look up and see Csongor and Marlon gazing at him expectantly. The waffle seemed to have been forgotten.
“The big one can take four,” Seamus admitted. “I had my eye on the little one.”
“What is it exactly you think you’re going to be doing?” Csongor asked.
“Flying over the area I’m interested in. Taking pictures. Getting a feel for it.”
“How would our being in the helicopter prevent you from doing that?” Marlon wanted to know.
Seamus shrugged. “Maybe it wouldn’t.”
Yuxia asked, “Are you just lying to us?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
The waffle maker squealed again.
“You’re acting weird,” Yuxia said. “Are you expecting to, like, land the chopper and have combat with Jones?”
“No, I am not going to have combat with Jones. That is not what this is about.”
“Good,” Yuxia said, “because if that is your plan, you should warn the pilot.”
“YOUR WAFFLE IS DONE!” shouted a peevish breakfaster from across the room.
Yuxia elbowed Seamus out of the way, figured out how to open the waffle iron, and deposited its steaming load onto a plate. The squeal stopped.
Csongor wanted to try it now. He picked up a minicarafe of waffle batter and poured it into the appliance and watched broodingly as it infiltrated the valleys between the bumps.
“Of course,” Seamus said, “if I believed that there was any chance whatsoever of getting into a firefight with jihadists, it would behoove me to say so to the pilot.”
“Behoove it would!” Yuxia agreed.
“So it is totally safe,” Csongor said.
“As safe as flying around in a chopper can ever be,” Seamus agreed. He did not actually believe a word of this, but he had been cornered.
“Whereas if we stay here, there’s a chance that we’ll get into trouble,” Csongor pointed out. “You are responsible for us.”
“Alas, yes.”
“If the chopper has a breakdown, you get stuck up north, then we are here with no car keys, no hotel room, no ID…”
