Sokolov constructed in his head. It occurred to him to wonder how Jones expected to escape. Was he planning to commandeer vehicles? Or did he have confederates scheduled to rendezvous with him? The latter seemed a much better plan, and thus far Jones had planned rather well. It was also the most pessimistic scenario from Sokolov’s point of view, since it meant that Jones would have reinforcements, presumably armed with all that the gun shops of the United States of America had to offer. They would probably make directly for the Forthrast compound, since that was the most-difficult-to-fuck-up instruction that Jones could possibly give them. Men in situations like this one were largely instinct-driven, and their instinct would be to gravitate toward something that looked like a shelter and that would serve as an obvious rallying point.
As he drew closer to the compound, he began to hear more small-arms fire. He rounded a hillside and found himself only a couple of hundred meters from the cabin. Had it not been for the trees he’d have been able to see it clearly. As it was, he could glimpse a corner of roof, a chimney top with a lightning rod projecting from it, the whirling anemometer of the little home weather station that Jake and his sons had mounted up there. Gunfire and shouting were coming from out in the driveway. And other sounds of battle from nearer—the hillside leading down from the high trail. But there did not seem to be anything emanating from the cabin itself, which made him think that he had arrived before either Jones’s hikers or the U.S.-based drivers had managed to occupy the place.
And so he decided that he would occupy it first. Its walls were solid logs, almost half a meter thick, sufficient to stop most of the rounds that the jihadists’ weapons were firing.
He plunged down the hill and across a short stretch of level ground until he reached the edge of the area that Jake had cleared. This was going to become a very dangerous place in a few seconds. It might already be. He dropped to his belly and crawled several meters to a spot where he could take shelter behind a recently felled tree, not yet cut up for firewood. Its trunk was too skinny to hide him or to stop bullets, but its innumerable small dead branches, spraying out in all directions, created a visual screen. He crawled down the length of it, getting a bit closer to the cabin, then raised his head cautiously and, when this failed to draw fire, spent a few moments looking into the cabin’s windows. He saw no smashed-out panes, no faces peeking round the edges of window frames—no signs, in other words, that it had yet been occupied. He could still make out two identifiable groups of gunmen moving around the property, converging generally on the cabin—but not there yet.
He got to his feet and sprinted for the cabin’s back door.
TO PARAPHRASE a familiar proverb, Seamus had been provided with a hammer—a rather good sniper rifle —and now he was looking for nails. He and Yuxia had spent the last few minutes descending the trail that, judging from evidence (lots of recent footprints and ATV tracks) led down into wherever it was that everyone was converging—a cabin, according to some hasty directions supplied by Richard, owned by Richard’s brother Jake and occupied by family members, including women and children, who ought to have no part in this quarrel.
In his haste to get to the bottom of the slope, Seamus nearly caught up with Jones’s main group. Alerted, almost too late, by a few gunshots from just below—gunshots that were evidently not intended for him—he threw himself down, got situated in a prone firing posture with reasonable cover, flipped the lens caps off the ends of the rifle’s scope, and got it ready to fire.
He had also run some distance ahead of Yuxia, who now caught up with him and didn’t have to be told that she should throw herself down next to him so as not to present a target.
Now if one of those assholes down below would only make a target of himself. This was the rub of the hammer/nail problem. If Seamus hadn’t come into possession of the rifle, he’d have brought a completely different skill set into play, moving down the slope as stealthily as possible in search of shorter-range combat opportunities. Instead, here he was, frozen in a fixed position that was too far out of the action to be of any use.
A movement caught his eye through a gap in the foliage. Yuxia saw it too and pointed. By the time he had flicked his eyes in that direction, whatever he’d glimpsed was gone. He lost interest, reckoning that none of these jihadists would ever show himself twice in the same place. But then a little gasp from Yuxia told him he’d guessed wrong. He swung the rifle in that direction, peered through the scope, waited for a few seconds, and then, finally, saw it clearly.
But it wasn’t what he’d expected. Not a head. Not a gun. Not a hand. But a foot. A disembodied boot on the end of a rod.
Holding the rod about halfway along, a gloved hand. It descended sharply, then came back up again.
Seamus risked climbing up to his knees, so that he could get a better view. It took a moment to get the scene recentered in his scope. This time he was able to see the arm attached to that hand. Following it down, he identified the face of none other than Abdallah Jones.
He was just about to pull the trigger when his sight picture was obscured by the head and shoulders of another man who had entered the scene, gesticulating like crazy, trying to get Jones’s attention. Seamus lifted his eye from the scope, trying to see what this other jihadist was looking at, but his view of the world was limited to a single narrow aperture between tree branches, and whatever had got this man so excited was far out of his view.
So he exhaled, dropped his eye back to the scope, made sure the crosshairs were still on the man’s back, and pulled the trigger. The rifle went off like a motherfucker and the jihadist sprang forward as if he had been kicked in the back. He dropped out of view, revealing Jones, who Seamus fondly hoped might have been struck by the same bullet. But the bullet had either fragmented in the first man’s body or else caromed off a vertebra and gone off in another direction.
There might be some alternate, parallel universe, designed to the exact specifications of snipers, where Jones would now freeze with terror long enough for Seamus to work the bolt, chamber another round, and fire. But not here. Jones dove and rolled and was long gone before Seamus was in a position to shoot again.
“They know we’re here,” Seamus said.
“Ya think?”
“We just have to proceed with caution, is all I’m saying.”
“Why was that man waving his arms?”
“Could have been anything,” Seamus said, “but I’ll bet he saw Sokolov.”
“DON’T SHOOT!” Olivia cried, for Jake Forthrast, attracted by movement in his peripheral vision, had swung his AR-15 around to bear on a man sprinting in a zigzag pattern across his backyard, headed for his cabin. Olivia had just recognized the man as Sokolov.
“Thank you,” Jake said, and turned instead to aim in the general direction of some gunshots sounding from the base of the hill. Some of the jihadists were up there, trying to bring down Sokolov. A single very sharp crack sounded from higher up the slope.
“They’ve got a sniper,” Jake said. But at almost the same moment they could hear excited voices from where Jones and his men had gone to ground, apparently saying much the same thing.
“Maybe
“Maybe,” Jake said, “but who the hell?”
Olivia heard all of this as if from a great distance, focused as she was on Sokolov. About halfway through his run he had disappeared from her view, hidden behind the corner of the cabin, and she had no way of knowing whether he had found shelter there or been brought down by that clatter of fire from the woods. But then a curtain moved in an upper-story window. He was too smart to expose himself where she, or anyone, would be able see his face, so she saw nothing more than this subtle movement; but that alone gave her confidence that the one behind that curtain was him. “I believe he made it,” she said. “He’s in the cabin.”
Glass shattered in the front of the house and a series of bangs sounded. A scream of dismay erupted from the driveway.
“So it would appear,” Zula said.
“What do we do now?” Marlon wanted to know.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Jake said, “if you all can just hole up somewhere and not get killed, well, that’s the best you can reasonably hope for.”
“I’m all in favor of not getting killed,” Olivia said, “but what are
“My neighbors are probably headed this way right now, loaded for bear,” Jake said. “If they just blunder into the middle of this, they’ll be mowed down—they have no idea what they are getting themselves into. I’m going to
