Reamde

“May I join you?” Olivia said between gasps for air.

“Of course.” Olivia seemed to be joining her in any case.

The ground was uneven, the sight lines interrupted not only by tree trunks but by piles of firewood and outbuildings. They were moving in a wide swing around the property while Jake advanced in a straight line up the side of the cabin. So an anxious and confused minute passed as they tried to get Jake back in view without exposing themselves to whomever might be coming up the driveway. They ran afoul of chicken-wire enclosures that the Forthrasts had erected to keep rabbits away from their vegetables, coyotes and lynx away from their chickens, wolves and cougars away from their goats. But finally Zula swung into position where she was able to see Jake from the waist up, standing in his driveway, leveling his rifle at a target nearby, and shouting.

Zula stood up cautiously. Two heads came into view, down at the level of Jake’s waist. Were they kneeling? Both of them had their hands on tops of their heads, fingers laced together.

One of them looked awfully familiar. But what she was thinking could not be real. Checking to make sure that the safety was engaged, she raised the rifle and used its telescopic sight to peer at the one on the right. A big man, not much shorter than Jake even on his knees. Burly. Close-cropped copper hair and a sunburned neck.

“OMFG,” she said.

“Two men are coming in through the gate,” Olivia said, “and I don’t much like their looks.”

Zula panned the rifle down the length of the driveway until the crosshairs found the big timber gate. This was ajar. A half-wrecked SUV was partly visible through it, blocking the road. And just as Olivia had said, two men had just circumvented the vehicle and were now coming around the edge of the gate. They perfectly matched the profile of the jihadists Zula had been hanging around with for the last three weeks. One of them had a pistol drawn, the other had a carbine, which he now raised to his shoulder, apparently drawing a bead on Jake: the most obvious target. And the most vulnerable.

Zula got the crosshairs on the latter and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Look out!” Olivia screamed.

Zula flicked the safety off and tried it again. The shot apparently missed; she was breathing hard and she hadn’t really braced herself properly. But it had a remarkable effect on the two jihadists, who jumped back around behind what they perceived as the shelter of the gate and threw themselves down on the ground.

Shouting now from the driveway. She clearly recognized Csongor’s voice, and she understood his tone: Are you crazy? We’re the good guys!

“The Asian gentleman,” said Olivia, “I recognize from his hoops career in Xiamen. Marlon, it must be. And may I assume that the big lad is the famous Csongor?”

Lady, who the fuck are you? was what Zula wanted to say. Instead, what came out was: “Uncle Jake!” Zula came into the open, calling, “Let them in! It’s okay!”

Two heads—Marlon’s and Csongor’s—turned around to look in her direction. They seemed astonished. Especially Csongor.

“Go! Go!” Jake said, pivoting to face the gate. Moving somewhat uncertainly, Csongor and Marlon took their hands off their heads and clambered to their feet. They began moving toward the cabin. Jake went the other way, getting well clear of them and raising his AR-15 to his shoulder. He was aiming it straight down the driveway toward the gate. He fired a spread of several rounds, then began backing up, keeping his sights centered on the gate while closing the distance between himself and his house. Zula meanwhile had braced herself against a tree and obtained a clear view of the same target, ready to fire again if either of the two jihadists should show themselves. But nothing happened. Nothing moved.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Richard Forthrast’s ankle was clearly a sprain, not a break. He could hop and hobble, but not walk. This created an interesting situation for Seamus. Not that the situation hitherto had been devoid of fascinating qualities. According to Richard, they were only a few minutes’ walk (for an able-bodied person, anyway) from breaking out into an open space where they would be able to move south, traversing the western face of the mountain, and drop down into a valley where Richard’s brother lived in a cabin. Richard wanted Seamus to leave him behind and move in that direction as fast as possible, because he was worried that Jones’s main group was about to attack the place.

Which Seamus was more than willing to do. He was suffering a bit of survivor’s guilt, having left Jack the chopper pilot behind earlier in the day, and getting ready, now, to abandon the lamed Richard. This was made a lot easier by Richard’s insistence that he should just get on with it, and that he, Richard, could take care of himself in the meantime.

Yuxia was a different matter. Seamus had sort of imagined that she would be a good girl and hang around to look after Richard and keep him company. That being in a chopper crash and being chased through the American wilderness by a fanatical sniper might have sated her taste for adventure, at least for one morning. Barring that, that the heavy psychological aftermath of having just killed a man with a shotgun blast from point-blank range might have left her with a need to sit in a quiet place for a while and think about what it all meant.

But no, everything in her face and body language said that she was going with Seamus. That she was kind of irked by the stupid deliberation that Seamus had been displaying, in the sixty seconds since Jahandar had gone to meet his seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and that if Seamus spent any more time thinking it through, she might just grab a weapon and take off without him.

The inevitability of Yuxia’s participation in the operation’s next phase caused Seamus to think about its details a bit harder. It sounded as though they would be traversing a slope in the open, where they could be shot at from a distance by men with good rifles.

“Is there any way of getting to the same place without going across an exposed slope?” he asked Richard.

“It can be done through the woods,” Richard allowed, nodding off the trail into some formidable-looking forest. “Much more slowly.” He thought about it. “I heard some shooting from that direction a minute ago.”

“So did I. Either Jones met with opposition, or he decided to ambush a meth lab.”

“Up here, a marijuana grow would be more likely. Too far from the road for a meth lab.”

“Anyway, they seem to be going through the woods,” Seamus said, “which would slow them down.”

“If you take the high road,” Richard said, “you’ll be way up above them. You’ll be able to reach cover if you have to. And you’ll have the advantage if you are packing the A.I.” For he had recognized Jahandar’s rifle and assumed Seamus had done the same.

“The high road it is,” Seamus said, trying to put a lot of decisiveness into his voice, as a way of appeasing Yuxia, who was bouncing around in her camo like the little sidekick bruin in the old Yogi Bear cartoon. “Which gun, or guns, would you like me to leave you with?”

“You can take them all, if your intention is to shoot lots of bad guys with them.”

“I should have mentioned that it was a trick question,” Seamus continued. “We are being tailed by a mountain lion that is most definitely not as afraid of us as we are of it.”

“I know.” Richard looked around. “As much as I covet the A.I., in these woods, I can’t see far enough for its excellent qualities to be of any use beyond assuaging certain masturbatory gun-nut impulses.”

“What about the shotgun?” Seamus asked.

“Yuxia should take that. She knows how to use it, and it looks cute on her.” This, at least, elicited a dimpled grin from Yuxia as she basked for a few moments in the scrutiny of the two men.

“No argument.”

Seamus approached the pellet-riddled corpse and rolled it over. “Here’s a wheel gun, if you can believe it.”

“I thought it sounded like a six-shooter,” Richard said.

“Five-shooter, more like. Large caliber.” Seamus dropped to his knees and studied the revolver, which had been concealed under Jahandar’s body and was now lying in the middle of the trail. He carefully uncocked it, then held it up. “Trophy piece. Must have taken it off a dead American contractor.”

“Seems like just what the doctor ordered for last-ditch cougar defense. I’ll take it. You get the A.I.”

“Done,” Seamus said. Less than a minute later, he and Yuxia, regeared and rearmed, were jogging up the switchbacks.

DURING THE QUARTER of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet