“Technology fails to work the way it’s supposed to. What a shock.”
“Anyway—how many you got?” Jack’s eyes flicked over to the SUV. “I was going to put you in the 300.” He half turned and jerked his head toward the smaller of the two choppers. “It’s a little less comfortable but if you don’t mind—”
“Not at all,” Seamus said. “But how many passengers will it carry?”
“Two. Maybe three in a pinch.”
“And the big one is definitely down.”
“The 500 ain’t flying today.”
“Give me a sec.”
Seamus got back into the SUV. “Change of plans,” he announced. “Big chopper is busted. Little chopper can only take two or three of us. One or two have to stay behind here and wait.”
“Obviously I cannot fit into that thing,” Csongor volunteered, looking incredulously at the 300. “I would not enjoy it anyway.”
Yuxia had taken to bouncing up and down in her seat, worried that she was about to be left behind. She looked as if she were about to jump out of the car, run over, and cling to the chopper’s skids. Marlon, observing this, looked at Seamus and said, “I will stay and use Wi-Fi.” For during the wait he had borrowed Seamus’s laptop, logged on to a guest account that Seamus had set up for him, and discovered an unsecured network emanating from the portable office.
Seamus twisted the SUV’s keys to the off position, killing the engine, then moved it to the accessory position so that the laptop could suck juice from the cigarette lighter jack. “No joyriding!” he warned them. Then he nodded at Yuxia, who jumped out onto the tarmac.
Before they departed, there was a discussion of flight plan and travel time. Jack estimated forty-five minutes each way to cover the eighty miles to the area that Seamus wanted to see, plus half an hour to forty-five minutes actually circling the area and looking around. It was now about quarter to seven. They should be back by nine, nine thirty at the latest.
The backseats of the 300 were decidedly short on legroom, and Seamus was glad Marlon had elected not to come. After a very cursory safety briefing, they crammed Yuxia into the back and Seamus took the copilot’s seat up front. This would not win any prizes either for spaciousness or comfort, but was no worse than situations that Seamus had to put up with all the time when pursuing his career.
Jack walked around the chopper going through some preflight checks. Csongor emerged from the SUV to watch the takeoff. Jack climbed in, handed beat-up but serviceable headsets to Seamus and to Yuxia, then donned a somewhat nicer one of his own. He got these plugged into the chopper’s intercom system and did a little sound check.
After a terse conversation with local air traffic control, Jack throttled the engine up and things got very windy and noisy for a few moments. Watching from not far away, Csongor hunched his shoulders and averted his gaze. The ground fell away below them. The 300 angled forward and began to pick up speed and altitude, headed north.
THERE WERE SOME nonobvious questions as to how Richard should manage ladder climbing while maintaining possession of the shotgun and the semiautomatic pistol—a Glock 27—that he had obtained from the dead Egyptian at the base of the cliff. Not the sort of challenge that would leave him scratching his head all day, but enough to slow him down a little. The Glock had no safety lever—the safety was built into the trigger. Theoretically it wouldn’t fire accidentally. Richard shoved it into his jacket pocket and then zipped the pocket shut, not wanting the weapon to fall out during the climb. At some point during the excitement, he had dropped the knife; he was reminded of this when he felt something hard under the sole of his boot. He moved his foot and pried the tool up out of the cold damp loam, then set about slashing through the two lengths of parachute cord that secured the shotgun to the bottom of the ladder. One of them was tied around the end of its barrel, just behind the little brass bead that served as the weapon’s sight, and the other around the narrowest part of its black plastic stock, near the safety. Dangling from the weapon was a complex of black nylon webbing that his overburdened mind processed and identified as some kind of tactical strap or harness. He did not have time to sort it out now and so he merely thrust one arm through it and confirmed that it wasn’t going to fall off. Then he raised a knee, reached up, and applied his weight to the rope ladder.
This struck him as dicey in the extreme, and something he would never have done had a pack of furious, heavily armed jihadists not been running toward him through the woods. Or at least he assumed they were doing so; the blast of the shotgun had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t gather much information by listening. The parachute cord was all of about an eighth of an inch thick. Its rated strength, he knew, would probably be high enough that two strands of it would support his weight—somewhere north of 250 pounds—in theory. But if it had been damaged, or if Zula’s knots didn’t hold—
Never mind. He started climbing. Or rather, he started to pull rungs down toward him. The cord was stretchy and would not bear his weight at first. But after a couple of tries the rungs began to push back against his feet and to pull back against his fingers and he noted that the cliff face was moving downward. Once he had gained about ten feet of altitude, he was tempted to swivel his head around and look out over the space between here and the river to judge the progress of the jihadists, whom he assumed must have started running in this direction when they had heard the boom of the shotgun. But he didn’t think it would do him any practical good and so tried to focus on climbing. He scaled a few more rungs and then risked a look up. The top of the cliff was dishearteningly far away. He had lost sight of Zula. But then something moved up there and he realized he’d been looking at her all along; she was lying on her belly with just her head sticking out at the ladder’s top, lost in the visual noise of the forest towering over her head. Light gleamed in the lenses of her eyeglasses. She was looking out over the territory below and behind Richard, and what she saw was making her nervous.
“Throw me the handgun!” she called.
Richard stopped, leaned against the damp rock of the cliff face, patted his flank until he felt the hard heavy shape of the gun in his pocket, then unzipped it, pulled out the weapon, and lobbed it, swinging his arm as far outward as he could and putting a lot of oomph into the throw. He didn’t want to see the thing clattering back down past him a moment later. Zula’s face elevated as she tracked it, and then she was up on hands and knees and she disappeared from his view.
Until now Richard had been held against the cliff face—which was not completely vertical—by gravity. Now he arrived at a concavity, created by a heavy brow of rock that protruded slightly, perhaps fifteen feet above him. Climbing the rope ladder became much more difficult as his feet thrust forward into the empty space, causing his whole body to lean back, hanging from nearly straight arms. His progress slowed considerably, and he found himself escalating into something that approached panic, so eager was he to get past this part of the climb and get over that brow, where he fancied he might be sheltered from anyone shooting upward from the cliff’s base. His movements became jerky and he started to swing. He saw too late that the strand of cord on the left side was being sawed at by a sharp edge of rock on the prominence above him.
The rock was nearly within his reach, about two rungs above him, when the left cord snapped. The ladder collapsed into a single strand of parachute cord with a series of sticks dangling from it. He swung to the right and his entire body rotated helplessly, causing the world to spin around him and giving him a view of the riverbank below: undergrowth thrashing madly all over the place as jihadists sprinted through it, calling out the name of Jabari. Farther distant he could see a tall figure clambering up onto a huge fallen log to gain some altitude and get a better view of the proceedings. It was Jones. His gaze went right to the bright spray of blood where Jabari had fallen, then traveled up the rope ladder until he locked eyes with Richard.
Richard was not one to back away from a staredown, but he had other concerns at the moment and so he kicked his legs to get turned around, then flailed them until he had trapped a fallen rung between his ankles, and straightened his knees while pulling as hard as he could with both arms. He hand-over-handed his grip to a higher position, raised his knees, reestablished the ankle grip, and repeated the procedure.
Something whined past him and in the same instant made a sharp whacking noise against the rock back in the little concavity. Then it happened a couple more times, and he heard the reports of a gun from down below. There was no rational reason why this should make him stop climbing. On the contrary. But he couldn’t help freezing up for a few moments.
A series of bangs sounded from closer, up above him. He looked up to see flashes of light spurting from the
