Reamde

The backseats of the 300 were decidedly short on legroom, and Seamus was glad Marlon had elected not to come. After a very cursory safety briefing, they crammed Yuxia into the back and Seamus took the copilot’s seat up front. This would not win any prizes either for spaciousness or comfort, but was no worse than situations that Seamus had to put up with all the time when pursuing his career.

Jack walked around the chopper going through some preflight checks. Csongor emerged from the SUV to watch the takeoff. Jack climbed in, handed beat-up but serviceable headsets to Seamus and to Yuxia, then donned a somewhat nicer one of his own. He got these plugged into the chopper’s intercom system and did a little sound check.

After a terse conversation with local air traffic control, Jack throttled the engine up and things got very windy and noisy for a few moments. Watching from not far away, Csongor hunched his shoulders and averted his gaze. The ground fell away below them. The 300 angled forward and began to pick up speed and altitude, headed north.

THERE WERE SOME nonobvious questions as to how Richard should manage ladder climbing while maintaining possession of the shotgun and the semiautomatic pistol—a Glock 27—that he had obtained from the dead Egyptian at the base of the cliff. Not the sort of challenge that would leave him scratching his head all day, but enough to slow him down a little. The Glock had no safety lever—the safety was built into the trigger. Theoretically it wouldn’t fire accidentally. Richard shoved it into his jacket pocket and then zipped the pocket shut, not wanting the weapon to fall out during the climb. At some point during the excitement, he had dropped the knife; he was reminded of this when he felt something hard under the sole of his boot. He moved his foot and pried the tool up out of the cold damp loam, then set about slashing through the two lengths of parachute cord that secured the shotgun to the bottom of the ladder. One of them was tied around the end of its barrel, just behind the little brass bead that served as the weapon’s sight, and the other around the narrowest part of its black plastic stock, near the safety. Dangling from the weapon was a complex of black nylon webbing that his overburdened mind processed and identified as some kind of tactical strap or harness. He did not have time to sort it out now and so he merely thrust one arm through it and confirmed that it wasn’t going to fall off. Then he raised a knee, reached up, and applied his weight to the rope ladder.

This struck him as dicey in the extreme, and something he would never have done had a pack of furious, heavily armed jihadists not been running toward him through the woods. Or at least he assumed they were doing so; the blast of the shotgun had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t gather much information by listening. The parachute cord was all of about an eighth of an inch thick. Its rated strength, he knew, would probably be high enough that two strands of it would support his weight—somewhere north of 250 pounds—in theory. But if it had been damaged, or if Zula’s knots didn’t hold—

Never mind. He started climbing. Or rather, he started to pull rungs down toward him. The cord was stretchy and would not bear his weight at first. But after a couple of tries the rungs began to push back against his feet and to pull back against his fingers and he noted that the cliff face was moving downward. Once he had gained about ten feet of altitude, he was tempted to swivel his head around and look out over the space between here and the river to judge the progress of the jihadists, whom he assumed must have started running in this direction when they had heard the boom of the shotgun. But he didn’t think it would do him any practical good and so tried to focus on climbing. He scaled a few more rungs and then risked a look up. The top of the cliff was dishearteningly far away. He had lost sight of Zula. But then something moved up there and he realized he’d been looking at her all along; she was lying on her belly with just her head sticking out at the ladder’s top, lost in the visual noise of the forest towering over her head. Light gleamed in the lenses of her eyeglasses. She was looking out over the territory below and behind Richard, and what she saw was making her nervous.

“Throw me the handgun!” she called.

Richard stopped, leaned against the damp rock of the cliff face, patted his flank until he felt the hard heavy shape of the gun in his pocket, then unzipped it, pulled out the weapon, and lobbed it, swinging his arm as far outward as he could and putting a lot of oomph into the throw. He didn’t want to see the thing clattering back down past him a moment later. Zula’s face elevated as she tracked it, and then she was up on hands and knees and she disappeared from his view.