Reamde

He did not see another contingent of jihadists. But he was troubled by the feeling that he had seen something moving across the snow, roughly following the path that the sniper had taken. He saw nothing. He swept his gaze up and down the length of the trail that the sniper had left and convinced himself that nothing was on it. From place to place, though, it passed over a patch of khaki-colored rock that had been left exposed by the melting sun, and it had to be admitted that such places were excellent for the concealment of anything that happened to be light brown in color. After a while, with some hard looking and almost as hard thinking, he convinced himself that something might be crouching up on one of those patches, looking back at him, waiting for him to take his gaze away so that it could go back into motion.

Which might be for real, or just his imagination. But if it were for real, he could sit here all day staring at it and nothing would ever happen. So he turned his back on it and stalked into the forest.

DURING HER TIME among the jihadists, Zula had often been bemused by the slapdash and informal way that they went about certain activities. In this she recognized some of her own heritage: a mind-set and a collection of habits that had eventually been drilled out of her by Iowans. It had something to do with the way that such people assessed risk. Some might call it fatalism born of religious doctrine; others might point out that persons growing up in regions where war, disease, and famine were chronic conditions would naturally have a different set of instincts and reactions where danger was concerned.

And so when the pistol-carrying jihadist strolled out into the open and began to hike up the open slope directly toward Zula, she was not quite as dumbfounded as she might have been, had she never been around people who manifested the Third World attitude toward risk.

It could be that the man simply did not understand that Zula was armed. She had not fired the weapon recently, certainly had not showed it to them. He imagined that he would simply be able to walk up the slope, get close to her, and shoot her.

Or perhaps the plan was to take her prisoner again?

It didn’t matter. The result was the same: a moment was approaching in which Zula—lying prone, and reasonably well sheltered behind rocks—would place this man’s center of mass in her sights and pull the trigger. The closer she let him get, the easier the shot would be. As the Girl Scout in her might have predicted, she was getting cold, and her hands were beginning to shake. So she had to fight the temptation to shoot early. Better to wait for him to grow larger in the sights of the gun. But if she let him get too close, he might see the pistol in her hands.

She was lying on her side, having plastered her body into a tiny depression. It was awkward and uncomfortable. But the man below, sweeping the area with submachine-gun fire, had not been able to hit her with anything other than rock fragments, and that argued for not moving. Some little shift in position that might feel inconsequential to her could have the result of exposing some part of her body to fire.

Still—it was tempting. Her view of the man with the pistol was blocked by the pattern of the rubble. If she jackknifed, moved forward just a bit, she’d be able to see him clearly, brace her arms on a sort of flat tablet of rock a few feet away, get off the shot from a greater, and safer, distance.

Those were her thoughts while she waited and grew cold and shivery and stiff. She wondered what had caused the huge explosion she had heard earlier. Chet setting off the Claymore mine seemed like the obvious explanation. She wondered what that implied about the fate of Chet, and about Richard who had gone to look for him. She wondered what the story was on the helicopter, and whether it would be coming back.

Her meditations were interrupted by new movement, seen in the corner of her eye. She had been looking directly at the jihadist with the pistol, visible only from the shoulders up, struggling up the same scree slope she had climbed a little while ago. She now turned her head to see that the man with the submachine gun had been moving too, trying to get a new angle.

His eyes locked with hers for a moment. He looked excited and raised the weapon to his shoulder, taking aim.

She wriggled forward, moving to the new position a couple of yards ahead. The man with the pistol was startlingly close. He was flailing his arms, trying to maintain his balance. She stretched out her arms on the rock and lined up the front and rear sights, then swung them onto the dark form of the climber.

A single loud noise sounded from above her. Her ears suggested as much. The climber’s face proved it. For his immediate reaction was to freeze and look up the slope.

She pulled the trigger, felt the pistol jerk as its action cycled, saw the shell casing tinkle onto the rocks nearby.