Reamde

Yuxia was a different matter. Seamus had sort of imagined that she would be a good girl and hang around to look after Richard and keep him company. That being in a chopper crash and being chased through the American wilderness by a fanatical sniper might have sated her taste for adventure, at least for one morning. Barring that, that the heavy psychological aftermath of having just killed a man with a shotgun blast from point-blank range might have left her with a need to sit in a quiet place for a while and think about what it all meant.

But no, everything in her face and body language said that she was going with Seamus. That she was kind of irked by the stupid deliberation that Seamus had been displaying, in the sixty seconds since Jahandar had gone to meet his seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and that if Seamus spent any more time thinking it through, she might just grab a weapon and take off without him.

The inevitability of Yuxia’s participation in the operation’s next phase caused Seamus to think about its details a bit harder. It sounded as though they would be traversing a slope in the open, where they could be shot at from a distance by men with good rifles.

“Is there any way of getting to the same place without going across an exposed slope?” he asked Richard.

“It can be done through the woods,” Richard allowed, nodding off the trail into some formidable-looking forest. “Much more slowly.” He thought about it. “I heard some shooting from that direction a minute ago.”

“So did I. Either Jones met with opposition, or he decided to ambush a meth lab.”

“Up here, a marijuana grow would be more likely. Too far from the road for a meth lab.”

“Anyway, they seem to be going through the woods,” Seamus said, “which would slow them down.”

“If you take the high road,” Richard said, “you’ll be way up above them. You’ll be able to reach cover if you have to. And you’ll have the advantage if you are packing the A.I.” For he had recognized Jahandar’s rifle and assumed Seamus had done the same.

“The high road it is,” Seamus said, trying to put a lot of decisiveness into his voice, as a way of appeasing Yuxia, who was bouncing around in her camo like the little sidekick bruin in the old Yogi Bear cartoon. “Which gun, or guns, would you like me to leave you with?”

“You can take them all, if your intention is to shoot lots of bad guys with them.”

“I should have mentioned that it was a trick question,” Seamus continued. “We are being tailed by a mountain lion that is most definitely not as afraid of us as we are of it.”

“I know.” Richard looked around. “As much as I covet the A.I., in these woods, I can’t see far enough for its excellent qualities to be of any use beyond assuaging certain masturbatory gun-nut impulses.”

“What about the shotgun?” Seamus asked.

“Yuxia should take that. She knows how to use it, and it looks cute on her.” This, at least, elicited a dimpled grin from Yuxia as she basked for a few moments in the scrutiny of the two men.

“No argument.”

Seamus approached the pellet-riddled corpse and rolled it over. “Here’s a wheel gun, if you can believe it.”

“I thought it sounded like a six-shooter,” Richard said.

“Five-shooter, more like. Large caliber.” Seamus dropped to his knees and studied the revolver, which had been concealed under Jahandar’s body and was now lying in the middle of the trail. He carefully uncocked it, then held it up. “Trophy piece. Must have taken it off a dead American contractor.”

“Seems like just what the doctor ordered for last-ditch cougar defense. I’ll take it. You get the A.I.”

“Done,” Seamus said. Less than a minute later, he and Yuxia, regeared and rearmed, were jogging up the switchbacks.

DURING THE QUARTER of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age. These ruminations were triggered by all that he had done in the last half hour or so. He had created an effigy, seen it shot to pieces, run across a big rock, and then made a helter-skelter descent of a large open slope. Twenty times he had dived and rolled into cover on a surface consisting largely of big sharp rocks, each of which had left some kind of mark on him, some of which had inflicted bone bruises that would take weeks to get better. Another twenty times he had dived and rolled in ice-cold mud. He had sprinted into an unfamiliar abandoned mining camp with no idea of what he was going to do, then found an ideal place to take cover and taken advantage of it. He had rested there for all of about three minutes before blowing it by shooting the tall African jihadist, whereupon he had been obliged to abandon the position and go into another intense fugue of running, diving, vaulting, rolling, and hiding in uncomfortable places.

All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes.