Reamde

The approaching man heard it all too, and now began to use the walkie-talkie as a way to home in on his friend’s location, keying the mike every couple of seconds and listening for the answering crackle of static. John, somewhat desperately, grabbed the device and flung it away from him as if it were a live grenade. But the oncoming jihadist did not seemed to be fooled; apparently he head heard John’s clothes rustling with the sudden movement. He did not stop. John aimed toward the sound and pulled the trigger. A short burst of rounds chortled from the weapon. Poorly aimed and unlikely to hit anything; but John, unfamiliar as he was with this gun, had not been a hundred percent certain that it was in a condition to fire when the trigger was pulled, and he needed to get past that.

The jihadist, perhaps ten yards away but completely obscured by ferns and scrubby little trees, reacted instantly by diving down the slope: a desperately dangerous move, but a logical one, if he’d had reasons to doubt the security of his position. For John now had no idea where the man was, and given the density of the undergrowth, that would continue being true until he gave away his position by moving.

Speaking of which, John’s position was nothing to write home about either, and anyway he had given it up by firing the weapon. Making a reasonable guess as to where his opponent had rolled and tumbled, he edged down the slope a little more, trying to move as quietly as possible, which meant slowly. He became aware as he was doing this that more than one person was moving through the woods around him.

He was sitting very still, trying to listen for their movements, when a boot slammed into the side of his Heckler & Koch and pinned it to the ground. Since John was holding on to it firmly, this shoved him down on his side. He turned his stiff neck and looked up to see a man’s face staring down at him from six feet above.

Or maybe a bit more than six feet. The man was tall. Black fellow. Not that John had any problem with blacks. He had always been happy to judge other men on their own unique qualities as individuals.

He looked kind of familiar. John had seen his picture recently.

Abdallah Jones was gripping a pistol in one hand and, in the other, one of John’s artificial legs, which had skidded down the slope in advance of him.

“Too pathetic for words,” Jones said.

“Fuck you and the goat you rode in on,” John returned.

Jones bent down, raised the leg above his head, and brought it down toward John’s face like a truncheon.

WHEN THE GUNFIRE started in earnest, Sokolov abandoned stealth and broke into a run. There was no point in sneaking around in the woods anymore. Jones had not left anyone behind to snipe at him. The jihadists were in full flight toward Jake’s compound now, shooting at anything that moved, just trying to make their way out to a road so that they could get clear of this area before the police locked it down. Or at least that was the vision that Sokolov constructed in his head. It occurred to him to wonder how Jones expected to escape. Was he planning to commandeer vehicles? Or did he have confederates scheduled to rendezvous with him? The latter seemed a much better plan, and thus far Jones had planned rather well. It was also the most pessimistic scenario from Sokolov’s point of view, since it meant that Jones would have reinforcements, presumably armed with all that the gun shops of the United States of America had to offer. They would probably make directly for the Forthrast compound, since that was the most-difficult-to-fuck-up instruction that Jones could possibly give them. Men in situations like this one were largely instinct-driven, and their instinct would be to gravitate toward something that looked like a shelter and that would serve as an obvious rallying point.

As he drew closer to the compound, he began to hear more small-arms fire. He rounded a hillside and found himself only a couple of hundred meters from the cabin. Had it not been for the trees he’d have been able to see it clearly. As it was, he could glimpse a corner of roof, a chimney top with a lightning rod projecting from it, the whirling anemometer of the little home weather station that Jake and his sons had mounted up there. Gunfire and shouting were coming from out in the driveway. And other sounds of battle from nearer—the hillside leading down from the high trail. But there did not seem to be anything emanating from the cabin itself, which made him think that he had arrived before either Jones’s hikers or the U.S.-based drivers had managed to occupy the place.

And so he decided that he would occupy it first. Its walls were solid logs, almost half a meter thick, sufficient to stop most of the rounds that the jihadists’ weapons were firing.