Reamde

Zula raised the device toward her face and was about to say something when Jake came in range of her, lashed out with his left hand, and ripped it out of her grasp. “Lock it down, baby,” he said. “Don’t wait for us.”

“Where are you?”

“Tell me you are in lockdown, and I’ll answer your question,” Jake responded testily.

A few moments’ radio silence followed. Jake turned to look at the others. “We’re cut off,” he said. “There’s no way we can get to the cabin before these guys do.”

“Done,” Elizabeth confirmed.

“The safe room is sealed,” Jake announced, then pressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie again. “Okay. We’re behind the goat shed. I’ll try to update you from time to time. Can the boys hear me?”

“Yes, they’re right here gathered around me.”

“Be brave and pray,” Jake said. “I love you all, and I hope I’ll see you soon. But until you see my face in the security camera, don’t unlock those doors no matter what happens.”

ONCE HE WAS certain that no one could see him, John sat down and began to descend the slope on his ass. His artificial legs were very nice—Richard bought him a new pair every few Christmases and spared no expense—but they were worse than useless when going downhill. Even when he was moving in ass-walking mode, all they did was get hung up on undergrowth anyway, so he paused for a minute to take them off and rub his sore-as-hell stumps. He reached around behind his back and stuffed them into the open top of his knapsack, then resumed inchworming down the mountain. Progress was slow, but—considering the switchbacks—actually not a hell of a lot slower than walking upright. In normal circumstances, he’d have been chagrined by the loss of personal dignity, but he was alone, and since his head was no more than a couple of feet off the ground, no one could see him in any case.

It was probably this detail that saved his life, since the advance scout moving ahead of Jones’s main group was doing a commendable job of passing through the forest quietly, and John—whose hearing was not the best—didn’t become aware of him until he was only twenty feet away.

John, of course, had been using his hands for locomotion. The Glock that Zula had given him was in his jacket pocket.

The scout would have blown by too quickly for John to take any action, if not for the fact that some shots sounded from below, and caused the scout’s stride to falter, and drew his attention. Standing with his back to John, he looked down toward Jake’s cabin and raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. He was a close-cropped blond man with a scar on the back of his head. John had the Glock out by this point. The shot was so ideal that he got a little ahead of himself, raising the weapon in both hands and thereby disturbing his perch on the slope. He felt his ass starting to break free and managed to squeeze off one round before he became discombobulated and slid down a yard or so to a new and more stable resting place.

The scout had turned around to see him and probably would have killed him had his hand not been occupied by the walkie-talkie. As it was, all he could do was shout some sort of warning into it before John fired two more rounds into his midsection and brought him down. His body spiraled around the trunk of a tree and skidded down the slope for a few yards. Abandoning all pretense of quiet movement, John skidded down after him, using his ass as a sled, and probably breaking his tailbone on a rock about halfway down. This sent such a jolt through his body that it spun him into an ungainly, sprawling roll down the hill as things spewed out of his pockets and backpack in a sort of avalanche-cum-yard-sale. But he got to the jihadist and stripped him of his weapon before any of the others could get there to investigate. This was a very nice piece, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, fully automatic. John was not familiar with it. Without his reading glasses he couldn’t make sense of the little words stamped into its metal around the controls. But with a bit of groping around and experimentation he was able to figure out how to charge it and how to take off the safety.

An anxious voice blurted from the jihadist’s walkie-talkie. But at the same time John heard the same voice saying the same thing from a few yards away.