SEAMUS DID NOT have a direct line of sight to what happened above, but his eyes saw a sort of blood comet hurtling upward just a moment before his eardrums were all but staved in. The comet expanded and faded to a bank of pink fog that, mercifully, was blown in another direction by the light breeze coming up out of the valley.
Yuxia was standing next to the helicopter, where she had been bantering with the pilot, trying to get his mind off his troubles. She had belatedly clapped her hands over the side of her head and was standing there with her mouth in an O, eyes darting around uncertainly. Richard Forthrast seemed to have been taken by a dizzy spell and sat down roughly on the ground and hugged his knees, staring in an unfocused way in the general direction of the explosion. Seamus noted with approval and interest that, even as Richard had been semicollapsing to the ground, he had taken care to manage the shotgun hanging from his shoulder, making sure that its barrel did not dig into the ground and get jammed with dirt.
“Care to fill me in on anything?” Seamus asked, when he felt as though he had some chance of being able to hear the answer.
“That was my friend Chet,” Richard answered.
“The casualty on the rock?”
Richard nodded. “He had a claymore mine strapped to his chest. He was going to use it on those guys, if he got an opportunity.”
“Well, I guess an opportunity presented itself,” Seamus said. It was not an exquisitely sensitive thing to say. Richard’s eyes jumped quickly toward his face, checking for signs of archness. But Seamus had said it, and meant it, quite seriously. Richard broke eye contact and squinted up the slope.
“The question is how many did he get?”
“There were two jihadists?”
“And one man-eating cougar.”
Now it was Seamus’s turn to look at Richard for signs of sarcasm. But the latter had deadpanned it.
“If the jihadists had a lick of sense,” Seamus said, “they wouldn’t have been standing right next to each other. We had better assume that at least one of them is still alive. And it is safest to assume that he is the sniper.”
“And here we are with a shotgun and a pistol,” Richard pointed out.
“What is that thing loaded with? Slugs or—”
“Buckshot,” Richard said. “Four shells remaining.”
“What are these words?” Yuxia asked.
“All the guns we have,” Richard explained, “can only hit things that are close. Up above us, we think is a man with a gun who can hit things from far away.”
Seamus considered it. “If there’s anything to your Wikipedia entry, you know the way from here.”
“That much of it is actually true,” Richard said.
“If the three of us go together, the following will happen,” Seamus said. “The sniper will come down here and—” He nodded toward the chopper and flicked his thumb across his throat, indicating the likely fate of the crippled pilot. “Then he will track us down the valley and try to pick us off one by one. So that’s not what we’re going to do.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Richard asked him.
“A man in his element. Here’s how this is going to go. I am going to find a blind where I can hang out. You two, Richard and Yuxia, are going to get out of here and try to find your way to safety. If the sniper comes here, I will kill him. If he follows you, then I will follow him. That’s good for the pilot”—he nodded toward the chopper —“because he’s got enough warm clothes and water and stuff to stay alive here for a little while as long as fucking jihadist snipers aren’t coming after him.”
“What about the man-eating lion?” Yuxia put in.
“Fuck!” Seamus said, and then immediately felt bad since it made Yuxia flinch. “I don’t know. I’ll warn the pilot. Tell him to keep the door closed.”
A moment passed.
“What are you guys waiting for?” Seamus asked.
JUST BEFORE AWAKENING, she had dreamed of the flight from Eritrea, the six-month barefoot march into the Sudan and the quest for a refugee camp willing to take her group. The faces had faded from her memory, but the landscape, the vegetation, the feel of the march had stayed with her and become the continuo line underlying many of her dreams. Usually it was northern Eritrea, which they had marched through during the first days of the journey, when her mind had been fully open to the new sights and impressions that, once they hiked free of the caves in which she had spent her earliest years, seemed to present themselves to her every moment. The terrain was endless brown hills separated by the arroyos of seasonal streams and barely misted with scrubby vegetation. Nothing like the terrain she was running through now, densely grown with huge cedars and carpeted with ferns. But she knew that if she gained enough altitude, she would find herself in territory like what she and Chet had traveled through yesterday: steep, wide-open country where you could see for miles. And going there was not optional. If she stayed to the low moist valley of the river that flowed south from American Falls, it would lead her off in the wrong direction, taking her down into the basin of a major lake system that drained southward. It might be two days’ hiking down into those lakes before she could reach a place where she could summon help. To reach Uncle Jake’s, she would have to climb out of the valley and above the tree line to the lower reaches of Abandon Mountain, which she would have to traverse for several miles until she came to the headwaters of Prohibition Crick. That bit, she already knew, was going to be the desperate part: that was where she’d have to summon whatever it was the leaders of her refugee group had summoned on the worst days of their trek, when they were tired, short on food and water, and being pursued by men with guns.
The only thing that was going to make it possible was that she had a head start. The jihadists would have to climb farther out of the valley than she would. Even so, it was a long climb; and she feared that they would be able to narrow the gap, or even catch up with her, before she broke out above the tree line and into country where it would be impossible to hide.
So there was only one thing for it, and that was to run like hell and not stop for anything. She had grabbed all the water she had—the CamelBak pilfered from the Schloss, about three-quarters full—and as many energy bars as she could stuff into her pockets, and then simply lit out in the direction Richard had indicated. Down below, the jihadists were making it easy for her by shouting to one another and communicating on loud walkie-talkies.
Her first objective—which she achieved perhaps half an hour after parting from Richard—was to make contact with a trail that switchbacked up out of the gorge. The idea of following a marked trail was ridiculous in a way, since the jihadists would use the same route, and therefore be on her tail the entire way. But the terrain left no choice; the slope seemed nearly vertical when viewed from below, and it was a wildly uneven jumble of fallen, rotting logs. To bushwhack to the top would have taken days, if it were possible at all. Switchbacking up the trail, Richard had assured her, could be done in hours by a man carrying heavy cargo on his back.
She didn’t reckon she had hours.
She slammed to a halt when the trail came into view, then retreated several paces and squatted in ferns to listen and think for a moment. While she was doing that, she sucked water out of the tube of the CamelBak and forced herself to eat a food bar. The sounds being made by the jihadists had become fainter during her run, which was of course better than the alternative, but still no reason to relax. If they knew what was good for them, they were talking less and running more, working their way down the bank of the river and looking for the head of this trail, just a few hundred yards below where she was now perched.
She had been peeling off layers as she ran, tying them around her waist, and was now dressed in a black tank top and cargo pants with the legs rolled up to expose her calves. She understood now that she would have to discard the outer layers. They would do nothing but slow her down. And they were bright pastel colors that could be seen for miles. The Girl Scout in her was screaming that it was a bad idea, that she’d become hypothermic the moment she stopped running.
But if she stopped running, she would be dead much sooner from other causes. So she dropped all those layers of fleece that Jones had bought for her at various Walmarts, stuffing them under a rotten log where men running up the trail would be unlikely to notice them, and went on with nothing except the clothes on her body and
