Reamde

On the other hand, there was this thick bundle of wires running from a point on the building’s facade not far from where Sokolov was now, across the street to an office building under construction. The wires, in aggregate, must be a lot heavier than Sokolov, and so would probably support his weight. He favored the idea of using them as an escape route, for two reasons. First of all, simply getting down to the street might not help him that much, since, unlike the hackers, he could not blend in. He would be noticed and arrested very quickly. But if he could get into the other building he would have some chance of hiding somewhere, long enough, at least, to devise a plan.

Second, the apartment he had just left was full of high explosives and was on fire.

Now, compared to the typical layman, Sokolov was not especially worried about the proximity of ANFO and open flames. Like most high explosives, the stuff was difficult to set off. Fire alone would not suffice. Some sort of primer was needed: a detonator, such as a blasting cap. So it was quite possible that the entire building could burn to the ground without any sort of explosion taking place.

And yet this was a simplistic reading of the situation. There was a lot of other stuff in that apartment besides ANFO. During the few, frenzied moments he had spent there, Sokolov had not been able to make a systematic inventory. But if they were planning to use the ANFO, as seemed likely, then they must have some blasting caps in the place; and if they were planning to use it soon, then it was likely that they had already assembled some complete explosive devices in which the detonators had been mated with the ANFO. And anyway, in that devil’s kitchen he had just left behind, there was no telling what other stuff they might have mixed up: the terrorists had recipes for other explosives besides ANFO that were much less stable. And so there was a strong argument for getting away from the building as fast as he could. The wire bundle offered him that.

The main argument against it was that the terrorists could easily shoot at him as he was suspended in the air above the street right outside their windows.

But he could hand-over-hand his way along a stretched wire about as fast as most men could run. And the few terrorists who were still alive must be rather preoccupied. So that made the decision easy. He clambered over a series of window grates and other stuff to the wire bundle, reached out with one hand, grabbed, and slowly transferred his weight. The bundle didn’t rip loose from the wall. Good. He let go of the apartment building altogether, swung out into space, reached, and made another grab. Then another. Then another.

Then felt himself descending and saw the bundle receding into the sky.

This wasn’t like crossing a stretched steel cable in a military training camp. The bundle was a skein of perhaps two dozen separate wires, as gaily colored as a maypole. Some of the wires were electrical, some telephone, some data, some not clearly identifiable. He couldn’t get his hand around the whole bundle, and so every time he swung forward he had to thrust his fingertips like a blade into the heart of the thing and get a grip on whatever presented itself. This had worked the first few times, but on his last grab he had aimed wrong, missed the bundle, and snatched one single wire, a blue Ethernet cable that spiraled around all the other wires, and now his weight was pulling all the slack out of that one wire and peeling it loose from the bundle. He reached up with his free hand, whipped it around the taut blue line, and pulled himself up enough to get that first hand free, then repeated, ascending the wire but not gaining altitude since the blue wire was still giving up slack. He was only an arm’s length below the bundle but couldn’t quite reach it. Finally the wire stopped giving way and held fast and he kicked up with his legs, making himself upside down for a moment, and got both legs wrapped around the whole bundle. The rifle, and a CamelBak water pouch that he was wearing on his back, fell to the ends of their straps and dangled. He allowed himself a few seconds to catch his breath before he began shinnying along the bundle as rapidly as he could manage. This was much slower than the hand-over-hand technique and made him feel like an incompetent civilian, but he could not risk doing it the other way. In any case, he was not too worried about being shot at since the apartment was now completely engulfed in flames. Solvent cans burst open and vomited storms of combustible vapor from windows.