Reamde

“You’re welcome to stop at any time,” Seamus pointed out, a little testily. “We are doing this because the end game of this thing is happening right now, and we are no longer near the place where it’s happening. I need an angle, and a shot.”

“You are bleeding on the ground.”

“Excellent place for it.”

They ran for a couple of hundred yards through the open space along the perimeter of the cleared compound, seeing no jihadists who were alive. Something spectacularly bad had happened to the cabin, but Seamus saw and understood it only dimly. He was, he realized, probably going into shock. And he was a little ashamed of that, since the wound on his arm ought not to have been such a big deal. His act of running down the hill and into the compound had, in a way, been a semiconscious tactic to put it out of his mind and get him focused on something else.

“I see the fucker,” he announced. The head of a tall man had popped up into view perhaps a hundred yards away. Advancing to the next tree, he leaned against it, to steady the upcoming shot, and then dropped to his left knee.

He hadn’t planned to drop to a knee; it just happened. His right leg had buckled.

Something heavy had been slapping against his thigh with each stride. Something in his right pants pocket. When he dropped, his right knee came up, and that pocket got squeezed as the front of his trousers creased, and a large amount of warm fluid gushed out of it and washed over his right buttock and ran down his thigh.

He glanced down for the first time in a while and observed that he had also been shot on the right side of his abdomen and that blood had been running out of the wound this whole time and accumulating, for some reason, in his pocket.

He was lying on his back, and Yuxia was standing above him with her hands clapped over her mouth. She might have let out a bit of a scream.

He thrust the rifle up into the air with his good arm. “Shoot him,” he said. “Shoot Abdallah Jones.”

CSONGOR MOVED FORWARD cautiously to see whether he had managed to hit the man with the submachine gun. He heard a slight rustle and looked over to see Abdallah Jones, just standing there looking at him. Csongor moved his pistol around to bear on Jones. Jones brought a Kalashnikov around and aimed it at Csongor, at the same moment.

The range was greater than Csongor was comfortable with. His hands were shaking.

“You,” Jones said. “If it were anyone else, I’d have already pulled the trigger. As it is, I’m just standing here dumbfounded. How the hell, Csongor? It is Csongor, right?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“The story is complicated.”

“Shame, that. Because I really would love to hear it. But there is, of course, no time.” He raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder.

A crack sounded from off to the side. The sniper again. Jones looked in that direction, but showed no ill effects; the sniper had somehow missed.

Csongor dropped to the ground and began firing blindly through foliage.

Several rounds came back in his general direction, but this was nothing more than Jones firing to keep Csongor’s head down. It worked. The next time Csongor felt brave enough to lift his head, Jones was nowhere to be seen.

From over near the cabin, he heard the drone of a small engine starting up.

He stood to see Jones astride an all-terrain vehicle. Jones spent a few moments figuring out the controls, then got the thing turned around and headed around the side of the house, trying to make it out to the road.

SOKOLOV WAS IN worse pain than he’d ever experienced, and he reckoned that he might lose the leg before this was all over. Had even considered pulling out his knife and self-amputating. Other than that, however, he was not doing that badly. No bullets had struck him. He had not suffered serious trauma during the collapse of the sleeping porch. The actual deck of the porch, which had thudded into the ground right next to him—a blunt guillotine blade that would have pinched him in half, had he landed wrong—had formed a pocket; all the logs and other debris that had rained down on top had been held up above the ground by its planking, which had been crumpled and compressed but not altogether driven into the ground.

So he was fine. He just couldn’t move. The heap of logs provided several large apertures through which he could look out and view his surroundings, and he had experimented with aiming the rifle through these. But no targets had presented themselves.

Until, that is, he heard the ATV starting up.

He could not actually see the ATV—his view in that direction was blocked by a sizable chunk of the cabin’s roof—and so he assumed that this was Jake, come back to reclaim his vehicle.

It idled for a few moments. The driver revved its motor and put it into gear, then began to ride it around the side of the cabin, circumventing the debris pile in which Sokolov was trapped.

Through a gap between logs Sokolov caught a brief glimpse of the driver’s head. Jones.