assume was a gap in the brush. He fired a round, studied the result, fired two more. Then he glanced up at her and used his eyes and his chin to indicate the direction he thought she should go.
“Over here, Zula!” Olivia called. Zula bent low and scurried into a gap between a goat pen and a net- enclosed structure where Jake and Elizabeth cultivated raspberries. A few seconds later, she had emerged into an open space behind the shed where the goats took shelter from the mountain weather. Olivia, Marlon, and Csongor were there.
It was awkward to say the least. Csongor took a quick step toward her, then faltered.
Why did he falter?
Because she was carrying a rifle?
Because her face was a horror show?
Because he wasn’t sure whether she fancied him?
She searched his face for clues and got no answers, other than a powerful, unfamiliar, and situationally inappropriate feeling of pleasure that he was alive and here.
Two bangs sounded from up the hill. Then a third. Then a whole lot of other bangs in return.
“Uncle John,” Zula explained, in the silence that followed. “I left him with the Glock.”
Olivia said, “So, at the risk of stating the obvious, they’re coming to shake hands with that lot.” She tossed her head in the direction of the driveway, which was all of a sudden sounding like a free-fire zone. Zula peered around the edge of the shed and saw Jake retreating toward them.
“What is going on?” asked the voice of Elizabeth, coming out of the walkie-talkie. “Someone fill me in.”
Zula raised the device toward her face and was about to say something when Jake came in range of her, lashed out with his left hand, and ripped it out of her grasp. “Lock it down, baby,” he said. “Don’t wait for us.”
“Where are you?”
“Tell me you are in lockdown, and I’ll answer your question,” Jake responded testily.
A few moments’ radio silence followed. Jake turned to look at the others. “We’re cut off,” he said. “There’s no way we can get to the cabin before these guys do.”
“Done,” Elizabeth confirmed.
“The safe room is sealed,” Jake announced, then pressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie again. “Okay. We’re behind the goat shed. I’ll try to update you from time to time. Can the boys hear me?”
“Yes, they’re right here gathered around me.”
“Be brave and pray,” Jake said. “I love you all, and I hope I’ll see you soon. But until you see my face in the security camera, don’t unlock those doors no matter what happens.”
ONCE HE WAS certain that no one could see him, John sat down and began to descend the slope on his ass. His artificial legs were very nice—Richard bought him a new pair every few Christmases and spared no expense— but they were worse than useless when going downhill. Even when he was moving in ass-walking mode, all they did was get hung up on undergrowth anyway, so he paused for a minute to take them off and rub his sore-as-hell stumps. He reached around behind his back and stuffed them into the open top of his knapsack, then resumed inchworming down the mountain. Progress was slow, but—considering the switchbacks—actually not a hell of a lot slower than walking upright. In normal circumstances, he’d have been chagrined by the loss of personal dignity, but he was alone, and since his head was no more than a couple of feet off the ground, no one could see him in any case.
It was probably this detail that saved his life, since the advance scout moving ahead of Jones’s main group was doing a commendable job of passing through the forest quietly, and John—whose hearing was not the best— didn’t become aware of him until he was only twenty feet away.
John, of course, had been using his hands for locomotion. The Glock that Zula had given him was in his jacket pocket.
The scout would have blown by too quickly for John to take any action, if not for the fact that some shots sounded from below, and caused the scout’s stride to falter, and drew his attention. Standing with his back to John, he looked down toward Jake’s cabin and raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. He was a close-cropped blond man with a scar on the back of his head. John had the Glock out by this point. The shot was so ideal that he got a little ahead of himself, raising the weapon in both hands and thereby disturbing his perch on the slope. He felt his ass starting to break free and managed to squeeze off one round before he became discombobulated and slid down a yard or so to a new and more stable resting place.
The scout had turned around to see him and probably would have killed him had his hand not been occupied by the walkie-talkie. As it was, all he could do was shout some sort of warning into it before John fired two more rounds into his midsection and brought him down. His body spiraled around the trunk of a tree and skidded down the slope for a few yards. Abandoning all pretense of quiet movement, John skidded down after him, using his ass as a sled, and probably breaking his tailbone on a rock about halfway down. This sent such a jolt through his body that it spun him into an ungainly, sprawling roll down the hill as things spewed out of his pockets and backpack in a sort of avalanche-cum-yard-sale. But he got to the jihadist and stripped him of his weapon before any of the others could get there to investigate. This was a very nice piece, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, fully automatic. John was not familiar with it. Without his reading glasses he couldn’t make sense of the little words stamped into its metal around the controls. But with a bit of groping around and experimentation he was able to figure out how to charge it and how to take off the safety.
An anxious voice blurted from the jihadist’s walkie-talkie. But at the same time John heard the same voice saying the same thing from a few yards away.
The approaching man heard it all too, and now began to use the walkie-talkie as a way to home in on his friend’s location, keying the mike every couple of seconds and listening for the answering crackle of static. John, somewhat desperately, grabbed the device and flung it away from him as if it were a live grenade. But the oncoming jihadist did not seemed to be fooled; apparently he head heard John’s clothes rustling with the sudden movement. He did not stop. John aimed toward the sound and pulled the trigger. A short burst of rounds chortled from the weapon. Poorly aimed and unlikely to hit anything; but John, unfamiliar as he was with this gun, had not been a hundred percent certain that it was in a condition to fire when the trigger was pulled, and he needed to get past that.
The jihadist, perhaps ten yards away but completely obscured by ferns and scrubby little trees, reacted instantly by diving down the slope: a desperately dangerous move, but a logical one, if he’d had reasons to doubt the security of his position. For John now had no idea where the man was, and given the density of the undergrowth, that would continue being true until he gave away his position by moving.
Speaking of which, John’s position was nothing to write home about either, and anyway he had given it up by firing the weapon. Making a reasonable guess as to where his opponent had rolled and tumbled, he edged down the slope a little more, trying to move as quietly as possible, which meant slowly. He became aware as he was doing this that more than one person was moving through the woods around him.
He was sitting very still, trying to listen for their movements, when a boot slammed into the side of his Heckler & Koch and pinned it to the ground. Since John was holding on to it firmly, this shoved him down on his side. He turned his stiff neck and looked up to see a man’s face staring down at him from six feet above.
Or maybe a bit more than six feet. The man was tall. Black fellow. Not that John had any problem with blacks. He had always been happy to judge other men on their own unique qualities as individuals.
He looked kind of familiar. John had seen his picture recently.
Abdallah Jones was gripping a pistol in one hand and, in the other, one of John’s artificial legs, which had skidded down the slope in advance of him.
“Too pathetic for words,” Jones said.
“Fuck you and the goat you rode in on,” John returned.
Jones bent down, raised the leg above his head, and brought it down toward John’s face like a truncheon.
WHEN THE GUNFIRE started in earnest, Sokolov abandoned stealth and broke into a run. There was no point in sneaking around in the woods anymore. Jones had not left anyone behind to snipe at him. The jihadists were in full flight toward Jake’s compound now, shooting at anything that moved, just trying to make their way out to a road so that they could get clear of this area before the police locked it down. Or at least that was the vision that
