Reamde

“Well, I guess an opportunity presented itself,” Seamus said. It was not an exquisitely sensitive thing to say. Richard’s eyes jumped quickly toward his face, checking for signs of archness. But Seamus had said it, and meant it, quite seriously. Richard broke eye contact and squinted up the slope.

“The question is how many did he get?”

“There were two jihadists?”

“And one man-eating cougar.”

Now it was Seamus’s turn to look at Richard for signs of sarcasm. But the latter had deadpanned it.

“If the jihadists had a lick of sense,” Seamus said, “they wouldn’t have been standing right next to each other. We had better assume that at least one of them is still alive. And it is safest to assume that he is the sniper.”

“And here we are with a shotgun and a pistol,” Richard pointed out.

“What is that thing loaded with? Slugs or—”

“Buckshot,” Richard said. “Four shells remaining.”

“What are these words?” Yuxia asked.

“All the guns we have,” Richard explained, “can only hit things that are close. Up above us, we think is a man with a gun who can hit things from far away.”

Seamus considered it. “If there’s anything to your Wikipedia entry, you know the way from here.”

“That much of it is actually true,” Richard said.

“If the three of us go together, the following will happen,” Seamus said. “The sniper will come down here and—” He nodded toward the chopper and flicked his thumb across his throat, indicating the likely fate of the crippled pilot. “Then he will track us down the valley and try to pick us off one by one. So that’s not what we’re going to do.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Richard asked him.

“A man in his element. Here’s how this is going to go. I am going to find a blind where I can hang out. You two, Richard and Yuxia, are going to get out of here and try to find your way to safety. If the sniper comes here, I will kill him. If he follows you, then I will follow him. That’s good for the pilot”—he nodded toward the chopper—“because he’s got enough warm clothes and water and stuff to stay alive here for a little while as long as fucking jihadist snipers aren’t coming after him.”

“What about the man-eating lion?” Yuxia put in.

“Fuck!” Seamus said, and then immediately felt bad since it made Yuxia flinch. “I don’t know. I’ll warn the pilot. Tell him to keep the door closed.”

A moment passed.

“What are you guys waiting for?” Seamus asked.

JUST BEFORE AWAKENING, she had dreamed of the flight from Eritrea, the six-month barefoot march into the Sudan and the quest for a refugee camp willing to take her group. The faces had faded from her memory, but the landscape, the vegetation, the feel of the march had stayed with her and become the continuo line underlying many of her dreams. Usually it was northern Eritrea, which they had marched through during the first days of the journey, when her mind had been fully open to the new sights and impressions that, once they hiked free of the caves in which she had spent her earliest years, seemed to present themselves to her every moment. The terrain was endless brown hills separated by the arroyos of seasonal streams and barely misted with scrubby vegetation. Nothing like the terrain she was running through now, densely grown with huge cedars and carpeted with ferns. But she knew that if she gained enough altitude, she would find herself in territory like what she and Chet had traveled through yesterday: steep, wide-open country where you could see for miles. And going there was not optional. If she stayed to the low moist valley of the river that flowed south from American Falls, it would lead her off in the wrong direction, taking her down into the basin of a major lake system that drained southward. It might be two days’ hiking down into those lakes before she could reach a place where she could summon help. To reach Uncle Jake’s, she would have to climb out of the valley and above the tree line to the lower reaches of Abandon Mountain, which she would have to traverse for several miles until she came to the headwaters of Prohibition Crick. That bit, she already knew, was going to be the desperate part: that was where she’d have to summon whatever it was the leaders of her refugee group had summoned on the worst days of their trek, when they were tired, short on food and water, and being pursued by men with guns.

The only thing that was going to make it possible was that she had a head start. The jihadists would have to climb farther out of the valley than she would. Even so, it was a long climb; and she feared that they would be able to narrow the gap, or even catch up with her, before she broke out above the tree line and into country where it would be impossible to hide.