Reamde

aim.

She wriggled forward, moving to the new position a couple of yards ahead. The man with the pistol was startlingly close. He was flailing his arms, trying to maintain his balance. She stretched out her arms on the rock and lined up the front and rear sights, then swung them onto the dark form of the climber.

A single loud noise sounded from above her. Her ears suggested as much. The climber’s face proved it. For his immediate reaction was to freeze and look up the slope.

She pulled the trigger, felt the pistol jerk as its action cycled, saw the shell casing tinkle onto the rocks nearby.

The man was just standing there with a sort of Oh shit look on his face, and she thought for a moment that she must have missed him. But then he tried to sit down, which wasn’t going to work when facing up a steep slope. His legs flew up in the air before his ass had even touched the ground, and he began to turn back-somersaults down the mountain, gathering speed as he went.

She twitched her head around to look at the man with the submachine gun. But he was gone. Raising her head carefully, she found him at the base of the slope, lying spread-eagled.

The edge of the wood now lit up with muzzle flashes from two different weapons: freshly arrived jihadists who had witnessed all of this. But if they were firing at Zula, they were missing by a mile.

Answering fire now came from above: single shots, fired deliberately. These seemed to discourage the shooters below. Zula rolled on her back, rested her head on that flat rock, tried to figure out where it was coming from. The obvious answer was a large mass of solid stone, about the size of a city block, that jutted out from the ramp of talus. She inferred that it had a flattish top and that someone was up on top of it with a long gun.

Then her eye was drawn to movement. Along the side of that outcropping, someone was waving a piece of cloth. A T-shirt. Zula turned to look at this and, after a few moments, waved back.

A person emerged into view and began to make huge beckoning motions toward Zula. Run to me.

Zula had no idea who it was. She got up and began running anyway. She was tired of being cold and she was tired of being alone, and she was willing to try anything. Even if some risk was involved. Call it fatalism. But the piercing bangs that sounded overhead—high-powered rifle rounds lancing down into the tree line from the top of the rock—seemed to give the men below second thoughts about coming out to shoot at her.

SOKOLOV’S IMMEDIATE REACTION to the loud bang was to shed his backpack, open it up, and begin assembling the assault rifle that Igor had taken from Peter and that he had taken from Igor. The logic of this move was far from obvious to Olivia. They were only a couple of miles away from a country in which possession of this gun would be spectacularly illegal. They had not seen another living soul today, other than the Forthrasts. But Sokolov was firm in his conviction that what they had heard was not a mining blast but the detonation of a tactical military device and that they were now in a state of open war with unseen and unknown enemies.

Olivia saw, then, how it all made sense. She had known it all along, really, but had suppressed it out of a sort of bureaucratic instinct: the fear that she would never be able to sell the idea in a meeting. Of course Jones would interrogate Zula, read Richard’s Wikipedia entry, learn about the smuggling, go to his place near Elphinstone, use Zula as leverage to make Richard guide him across the border. And of course the explosion at the border crossing yesterday had just been a diversion.

He was here, now.

How long had Sokolov known it? Until the moment of the blast he had betrayed no suspicions that they might be hiking into a free-fire zone with a gang of heavily armed jihadists. But she saw now that he had been expecting this all along.

Had he been playing her?

It was more complicated than that, she suspected. He had been playing the odds. There were good reasons for Olivia and Sokolov to cross the border. They could have done it anywhere. Sokolov had favored the crossing point that was most likely to produce a meeting with Jones.

They spent a quarter of an hour—though it seemed much longer—staging a tactical retreat back up the slope, through the boulder field, to the top of the rocky spur where they had parted company with Jake.

Inside Sokolov’s pack was a smaller bag, just a thin nylon stuff sack, made to hold a wadded-up sleeping bag. Once Sokolov had found a convenient place to lie prone on the top of the rock, he pulled this out by its drawstring and set it down on the rock. It clattered. It was full, she realized, of hard, heavy objects with corners. Once he had finished assembling the rifle, Sokolov zipped the bag’s drawstring open and dumped it out on the rock. It contained half a dozen curved plastic boxes: ammunition clips for the rifle. From their weight it was obvious that they were loaded.

Sokolov had gotten to Bourne’s Ford before her, made the rounds of local gun stores, bought all of this stuff, and loaded the clips. Just to be ready.

Okay, so he had been playing her. She found that it didn’t really bother her. Because, in a sense, she’d been playing him too. Hoping that something like this would happen.

In any case, there was little time for these metaphysical considerations. Sokolov—who had belly-crawled to the edge of the big flat rock—called her forward and got her to see what was going on below them: a young woman, brown-skinned, black-haired, in a tank top and cargo pants, scrambling up the slope in obvious fear for her life. Bursts of submachine-gun fire from a location that, at first, they were unable to see. By the time they had repositioned themselves to a place where Sokolov could get the man with the submachine gun in his sights, that man had stopped firing and was biding his time while a companion flailed and scrabbled up the slope with a pistol in one hand.

“Go down,” Sokolov commanded her, “and get Zula.”

This—more than the helicopter, the sudden appearance of the assault rifle, the shocking blasts of the submachine gun—snapped Olivia’s head around.

“That’s her!?”

Sokolov pulled his face away from the rifle’s sight and turned to give her a certain look that was very male, and very Russian.

“Okay,” she said, “but what about the guy with the pistol?”

“Zula is going to kill him,” Sokolov said.

“Seriously?”

The look again. “Seriously. But then. Only a short time—what do you call it—a window of opportunity—when she can run to safer place. I will fire suppression.”

ALL THE CHINESE people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was. This was made evident by the fact that he was always seeing her face. Because she was always ahead of him and frequently turned around to see what was taking him so long.

He was afraid that she was going to ask him whether he needed any help.

On one of those occasions, only a couple of minutes after they started running, she got an awed look on her face. Richard already felt as though he knew Yuxia, partly because of Zula’s description of her in the paper towel note. Her face was expressive and handsome, but not given to unguarded moments. Much of the time she had a keen and interested look about her, and frequently she flashed a knowing grin, as if enjoying a private joke. Frank astonishment was not something she would allow herself to manifest unless it was a really big deal. So Richard faltered and turned around, taking a couple of backward steps in an amazed, staggering gait. A mushroom cloud of yellow fire was turning inside out as it sprang into the air above the site of the chopper crash.

“I’m sure it’s okay,” he blurted out, turning back around and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder, encouraging her to get turned around and moving again. She recoiled, and not in a stop-harassing-me-you-dirty- old-man way. She had taken more damage in the chopper crash than she wanted to let on. When she did turn around, she did so stiffly, and Richard understood that the spryness he had been envying her for was at least partly an act, a willed refusal to show pain. Because she didn’t want men covering for her. Because chivalry sometimes came with a price.