He had nestled himself back into a hollow among the dead tree’s roots, which might not be the best situation since it was constraining his field of view, limiting his arm swing. He was considering how to improve this state of affairs without getting killed when his glance fell on a round stone, about the size of a baseball, that hundreds of years ago had gotten caught up in the root system of this tree and was now sticking out of the clotted mud down by his knee. Remembering a trick he had played as a boy, stalking and being stalked by John in the ravine of the farm crick, he acted now without thinking. Until this point he had been mired in a kind of psychological cold molasses. But now he just reached down with his left hand, found the rock, pulled it free from its mud matrix, and underhanded it into some shrubs about five yards off to his right. It flew soundlessly and probably invisibly, then rustled through the bushes and struck the ground with shocking and sudden noise. Jahandar responded immediately, firing a round at it, recocking. This gave away his position: too far off to the right for Richard to get a clear shot without moving farther away from the root-ball. Reckoning that it was now or never, Richard shoved off against the roots with his butt, pivoting around his planted right foot as his left swung around like the leg of a compass tracing a ninety-degree arc. At the same time he was bringing the shotgun up, getting the barrel and the bead aligned with the pupil of his eye, wondering when the hell Jahandar was going to swim into his sight picture. Finally he saw Jahandar in his peripheral vision and realized he had not pivoted far enough; he gave his hips an extra twitch. His left foot was coming down, a bit sooner than he’d have liked; he tried to raise the knee, delay the footfall, give himself some extra rotation, but the result was that the toe hooked on a root and torqued badly. He was falling to his left now, balance lost, still lacking a solid plant for the left foot, which came down hard and uncontrolled on whatever happened to be there. Whatever it was, it was slippery and uneven and made his foot twist around in a way that it wasn’t supposed to. He felt no pain, yet. He had glanced away from Jahandar for just a fraction of a second. He now returned his attention to the sights. Jahandar was gone. He had executed some sort of dive-and-roll back onto the trail. Richard was tempted to fire blindly but held his finger away from the trigger, mindful of the limited number of shells in the magazine. Reconnaissance by fire wasn’t going to work for him.
Getting low seemed to be a good idea and so he let himself drop, which was already happening anyway: his ankle was badly messed up, and the first spike of pain had just made it up his leg to his brain. He took his left hand off the shotgun’s forearm and let its barrel go vertical for a few moments as he tumbled back onto his ass, using his left hand to break the fall just a bit.
Then he looked up to see Jahandar staring at him through a gap between dangling roots, no more than ten feet away. Jahandar was just in the act of bringing his revolver up to bear on Richard.
Richard, who had been so much at gravity’s mercy an instant ago, now found it too weak and slow to bring the shotgun’s barrel down as fast as he would like. Rather than wait here to get shot, he twitched his body sideways, flinging himself down onto his back and then his side, rolling away. A younger man on better terrain might have rolled all the way over and come back up firing, but Richard bogged down in rocks and tree roots about halfway through this maneuver and found himself in the worst possible situation of having to get up on hands and knees with his ass pointed squarely in Jahandar’s direction and the shotgun down in the mud. How could anything go so badly wrong? It was just like John’s Vietnam stories, the ones he told when he was drunk and weeping. A pistol was
The banging hadn’t come from Jahandar’s pistol. It must be Seamus, firing from farther way.
Richard, taking advantage of the slope, rolled up onto his feet, got a clear view of Jahandar’s center of mass, aimed the shotgun, and fired. He then collapsed facefirst into the root-ball as his ankle gave way beneath his weight. A broken-off root jabbed him in the eye. His hand came up involuntarily, and the shotgun tumbled into his lap. He heard himself letting out a brief scream.
In the silence that followed, a gentle footfall, very nearby. He looked up with his one operant eye and saw nothing but the forest moving alongside him. The shotgun slid out of his lap as if moving under its own power.
Qian Yuxia jerked the forearm back. Sharply. A spent shell flew out and bounced off Richard’s head. She rammed it home, then raised it to her shoulder. Someone said, in a gurgling voice, “
“Nice,” pronounced a voice. The voice of Seamus. “But don’t stand so fucking close to him next time. I almost nailed you.”
“Dream on,” said Qian Yuxia.
SOKOLOV WATCHED THE departure of Olivia and Zula with a vast sense of relief: an emotion that he would, of course, never be able to share, or even hint at, with those two estimable females. By this point he had seen enough of them to know that they were cooler under pressure, and better to be with in a tight spot, than 999 out of 1,000 women. But their presence obliged him to divert a significant fraction of his attention into being considerate of their needs, responding to their inquiries, and keeping them alive. In most other circumstances it would have been no trouble at all, and more than repaid by the pleasure of their company. But this business now was going to be formidable trouble, and he needed to think of it to the exclusion of all else.
The environment was, on the whole, markedly Afghanistan-like. The jihadists would feel at home here, would instinctively know how to move, where to seek cover, how to react. Sokolov, of course, had done his time in Afghanistan. But that was long ago, and most of his work since then had been of a decidedly urban character. Advantage Jones.
There were more of them. Sokolov was alone, at least until such time as Zula and Olivia could get back to the compound where the fanatics—those American Taliban—lived with all their guns and their stockpiles of ammunition and materiel. Even then, it was not clear to what extent those people could form themselves up into an effective force on short notice. It was clear that Zula’s relatives were well armed and that they had the marksmanship part of the curriculum well covered. But military recruits spent only a small portion of their time actually shooting at targets; other forms of training were ultimately more important. Even supposing that they did come out from their bunkers with their assault rifles and their expensive knives, they might be more hazard than help to Sokolov. He had no way of communicating with them. They were as likely to identify him as foe than as friend. Soon he might have not just one but two groups of well-armed mountain men trying to kill him. Advantage Jones.
Sokolov was operating completely alone, which, while it technically placed him at a numerical disadvantage, conferred another sort of benefit in that he did not have to coordinate his actions with anyone else. No communication meant no foul-ups. The tiniest bit of cover could be used to advantage. Advantage Sokolov, provided he kept his distance and avoided getting surrounded.
So that—not getting surrounded—was what the Americans called the Name of the Game. Zula’s startling emergence from the wilderness had obliged him to give away his position. Had it not been for that, he’d have waited for all the jihadists to expose themselves on the slope below and then spent the morning picking them off.
According to Olivia—who had obtained the information from Zula—the size of Jones’s contingent had been nine this morning. One of them had somehow been killed hours ago. During the action just concluded, Sokolov and Zula had each accounted for one. That left six unaccounted for. It was possible that Sokolov’s suppressing fire had hit someone down in the trees, but he doubted it.
Another detail: Zula reported that a rear guard of unknown size—quite likely no more than two men—was an hour or two behind Jones’s main group. But one of them was a sniper.
Which raised the question of whether any of the men down below Sokolov might be so equipped. He had engaged in several exchanges of fire with them so far, but with so many opponents, all concealed in the forest, spraying rounds at him from different directions, it had been difficult for him to take a census of their weapons. From sound alone it was obvious that most of them had submachine guns or assault rifles. But the infrequent firing of a bolt-action sniper rifle could easily have gotten lost in all that noise. Some of them might have been packing scopes in their bags, and for all he knew they were down there right now mounting better optics on the weapons that he knew about. Sokolov’s gun was pretty and expensive, with a nice scope on it, but its barrel and its ammunition imposed certain inherent limitations on its effective range. In a sniping duel against a man armed with
