Reamde

So that—not getting surrounded—was what the Americans called the Name of the Game. Zula’s startling emergence from the wilderness had obliged him to give away his position. Had it not been for that, he’d have waited for all the jihadists to expose themselves on the slope below and then spent the morning picking them off.

According to Olivia—who had obtained the information from Zula—the size of Jones’s contingent had been nine this morning. One of them had somehow been killed hours ago. During the action just concluded, Sokolov and Zula had each accounted for one. That left six unaccounted for. It was possible that Sokolov’s suppressing fire had hit someone down in the trees, but he doubted it.

Another detail: Zula reported that a rear guard of unknown size—quite likely no more than two men—was an hour or two behind Jones’s main group. But one of them was a sniper.

Which raised the question of whether any of the men down below Sokolov might be so equipped. He had engaged in several exchanges of fire with them so far, but with so many opponents, all concealed in the forest, spraying rounds at him from different directions, it had been difficult for him to take a census of their weapons. From sound alone it was obvious that most of them had submachine guns or assault rifles. But the infrequent firing of a bolt-action sniper rifle could easily have gotten lost in all that noise. Some of them might have been packing scopes in their bags, and for all he knew they were down there right now mounting better optics on the weapons that he knew about. Sokolov’s gun was pretty and expensive, with a nice scope on it, but its barrel and its ammunition imposed certain inherent limitations on its effective range. In a sniping duel against a man armed with a proper long-range weapon, he would lose.

Earlier, Olivia had assisted him by bringing a sleeping bag, food, and water right up to the edge of the rock where he had made his little nest. It had become comfortable to a degree that was actively endangering his life; he was reluctant to move from this location that had already been made known to the enemy. As a first step toward abandoning it, he wriggled back to a spot from which he could not be seen from below, then devoted a few minutes to teasing a sleeping bag out of its nylon sack and loosely restuffing it into his parka. He pulled the hood up and made sure that it was packed tight enough to keep it round, then poked his sunglasses into it and wrapped a scarf around the lower part of its “face.” The whole time he was doing this he was feeling a moderate sense of embarrassment at playing such a cheap trick. But he had read all the old propaganda stories about the snipers of Stalingrad and knew that they had achieved much with a repertoire of simple gambits such as this one. When it was complete, he crawled forward, pushing the effigy before him so that its head would pop into view over the edge of the rock long before Sokolov himself became exposed.

A mirror would have been nice to have at this point, but he lacked one. He had to use his ears. The result of the experiment was a fusillade of reports from perhaps four different weapons, most of them firing multiple rounds in semiautomatic mode, which was to say that they were shooting one bullet per trigger pull rather than simply opening up with bursts. They were, in other words, aiming. Perhaps Jones had finally made it to the top of the trail and imposed some discipline. Rounds cracked into the rock near the effigy, others whined overhead. Sokolov closed his eyes and listened for the slow, heavy cadence of a bolt-action rifle firing high-powered rounds. A jerk ran down his arm as the effigy took a bullet in the head, and he heard a plasticky clatter as the sunglasses fell out and bounced down the cliff face below.

So at least one person down there was a good shot with a properly zeroed assault rifle. But if they had a sniper’s weapon per se, they had decided not to use it; and that was, in these circumstances, an odd decision. Zula had told Olivia that there was a sniper in the rear guard. Perhaps he had all the good stuff with him.

Or perhaps a fantastically good long-range weapon was aimed at his location at this very moment and its operator, having detected Sokolov’s pathetic masquerade through his excellent telescopic scope, had elected not to show his hand.