“‘Latitude ninety degrees north,’” Chet said. “See, they couldn’t specify their longitude, because there, all the meridians are one. They were on all the meridians, and so they were on none of them. It’s a singularity.”
Richard nodded.
“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.”
Richard kept nodding. He was afraid his voice wouldn’t work.
“Do you realize where we are?” Chet asked him.
“Somewhere pretty damned close to the border,” Richard finally got out.
“Not just close. Look!” Chet said, extending an arm in one direction, then swinging it over his head like the blade of a paper cutter to point exactly the opposite way. Following it, Richard noticed a line of widely spaced surveyor’s monuments tracking across the landscape.
“We’re on the forty-ninth parallel,” Chet said. “My feet are in the U.S. of A. and my head is in Canada.” The look on his face said that this was enormously profound to him, so Richard only nodded and tried to maintain a straight face. “I’m barring the path. Their meridians are going to end here.”
“Who are you talking about?”
Chet gestured vaguely to the north and then offered Richard the binoculars. Richard picked them up, adjusted them, planted his elbows on the border, and aimed them north toward the talus slopes angling down from the ridgeline. Gazing over them with his naked eyes, he was able to pick out a pair of human figures, spaced about a hundred feet apart, picking their way down over the rocks. With the aid of the binoculars he saw them clearly as armed men with dark hair, answering generally to the stereotypical image of jihadists. The one in the lead was burly and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The one trailing behind was wiry and had a longer rifle slung diagonally across his back. A sniper.
“The rear guard,” Chet said. “Trying to catch up with the main group.” He chuckled and coughed wetly. Richard had a pretty good idea of what he was coughing up and so he avoided looking. Chet continued, “They’re so focused on catching up they haven’t bothered to look behind them.”
Richard drew back from the binoculars in surprise, and his aging eyes struggled to pull focus on Chet. Chet was nodding at him, casting suggestive glances upward. He had coughed a thin mist of blood out onto his chin, where it had caught in the gray stubble. Richard found the jihadists again and then tracked higher up the slope until he saw something in motion. Difficult to make out because its coloration blended in with the tawny hue of the weathered rock. Moving like a drop of glycerin oozing from one boulder to the next. Maintaining a fixed gaze on this target, he raised the binoculars and inserted them in his line of sight. With a bit of searching he was able to focus on the thing and see it distinctly as a mountain lion making its way down from the ridgeline. Its eyes glowed like phosphorus in the light of the rising sun. Those eyes were fixed upon the two men struggling down the slope below it.
“Holy crap,” Richard said. Chet went into another laughing/coughing fit. “These guys are so out of their element. Let’s hope it catches up with them soon.”
“It already did,” Chet answered. “Zula told me that it already took down one of their stragglers.”
“Huh. Man-eater.”
“They’re afraid of humans. Don’t bother them, and they won’t bother you,” Chet said, mocking what a sanctimonious tree hugger would say. Cougars attacked humans all the time in these parts, and the obstinate refusal of nature lovers to accept the fact that, in the eyes of a predator, there was no distinction between humans and other forms of meat had become the subject of bitter hilarity around the bar at the Schloss.
In this Richard now perceived an opening. “Well, shit, Chet, that settles it. I can’t just leave you here. That thing has probably smelled you already.”
“Do I stink that bad?”
“You know what I mean. I can’t just leave you here defenseless. If the jihadists don’t get you, that mountain lion will.”
“I ain’t defenseless,” Chet said. He unzipped his motorcycle jacket, which fell away to reveal a ghastly and peculiar state of affairs. His bottom-most garment was a thermal underwear top, now soaked with blood all along one side, and lumpy, either from bandages or from swelling. He had thrown his leather jacket on over this. But in between those two layers, he had affixed a large object to his chest: a thick metal plate, slightly convex, lashed to his body and suspended around his neck by a crazy and irregular web of parachute cord. Words were stenciled on the plate in Cyrillic.
“I think it says something like ‘This side toward enemy,’” Chet said. Then, seeing incomprehension still written on Richard’s face, he added, “It’s a Russian claymore mine.”
Richard had nothing to say for a few moments.
“If they can do it,” Chet said, “so can I.”
“You mean, blow yourself up?”
“Yeah.”
“I never really saw you as a suicide bomber.”
“It’s not suicide,” Chet said, “when you’re already a dead man.”
Richard could think of nothing to say to this.
“Now listen,” Chet said. “It’s time for you to get the hell out of here. You’re already in range of that one with the rifle. Get you gone. Your meridian isn’t finished yet, you’ve got a ways to go south yet. Me, I’m curving under to the pole. I can see it before my eyes. Those guys up there, they’re going to reach it at the same time as I do.”
“I’ll see you there” was all Richard could get out.
“Looking forward to it.”
Richard hugged Chet, trying to be gentle, but Chet hooked one arm around the nape of his neck and pulled him in tight, hard enough to press the claymore mine against his chest and scrape Richard’s face with his bloody whiskers. Then he let him go. Richard spun away and began to move south. His vision was fogged by tears, and he practically had to go on hands and knees to avoid turning an ankle on the strewn rocks.
He knew that Chet was correct about the range of the sniper’s rifle, and so his first instinct was to get out of the line of sight and of fire. This was easily enough done by taking advantage of the ruggedness of the terrain and occasional clusters of desperate trees. He wouldn’t be able to move freely, though, until he reached the edge of the woods, which was about half a mile down the slope. On his way up to Chet’s position, he had trudged and scrambled wearily up the broken and boulder-strewn terrain, various muscles screaming at him the whole way, since they had already taken enough abuse during the previous days’ hiking. He had taken a somewhat meandering course between areas of melting snow. Now it seemed to him that those snowfields would afford him a quick way down. Quick, and a little dangerous. But now that he had said good-bye to Chet, he was feeling an almost panicky imperative to work south and warn Jake, perhaps reconnecting with Zula en route. So he crab-walked to the edge of a large area of snow that sloped down all the way into the woods. His feet lost traction immediately. Rather than letting himself fall on his ass, though, he leaned forward carefully and allowed himself to skid down the slope on the soles of his boots, a procedure known as a standing glissade. Essentially he was skiing without skis. It was a common enough practice, when slope and conditions allowed it, and his involvement in the cat skiing industry had given him many opportunities to practice. He covered the distance to the tree line in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to pick his way down from rock to rock. En route he fell three times. The last fall was a deliberate plunge into a snowbank to kill his velocity before he slammed into the trees.
The snowbank was soft, and now sported a Richard-shaped depression that cradled his tired and battered body in a way that was extremely comfortable. The cold
had not yet begun to soak through his clothing. He swiveled his head around and verified that the jihadists with the guns could not see him.
He was tempted to just lie there and take a nap. He stuffed a handful of snow into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. His heart had been beating very fast during the glissade, and he saw no harm in relaxing in this safe place for a few moments, pacing himself, giving his body a little rest, letting his pulse drop to a more moderate level.
Which it didn’t seem to be doing. He could feel a steady whomping in his chest and wondered if he was finally succumbing to some sort of cardiac arrhythmia.
But this seemed to be the opposite of that, since it had nothing but rhythm. Almost mechanical in its perfection. He pressed a hand to his chest under his left nipple and observed that this beating sensation had nothing to do with his heart.
It was coming from outside his body.
It was in the air all around him.
It was a helicopter.
He rolled up to his feet and staggered out into the open, waving his arms.
THE MOUNTAINS THAT now filled the windscreen, rising up from the flat valley to an altitude somewhere above their heads, looked familiar to Seamus. Not because he’d ever been here before; he hadn’t. But he had been in mountain ranges like these all over the world. These were the sorts of mountains that insurgents loved to hang out in.
Insurgents did not care for spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges. Snow impeded movement and implied harsh cold. “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance,” and insurgents did not like being seen. Insurgents liked mountain ranges that sprawled over large reaches of territory. That crossed national borders. That were high and rugged enough to discourage casual visitors and impede the operations of police and of military forces, but not so high as to be devoid of tree cover or bitterly cold all the time. Many of the features that tourists liked, insurgents found positively undesirable—most of all, the presence of tourists. But Seamus could see at a glance that tourists would not choose to visit these mountains when the Rockies were a few hours’ drive to the east and the Cascades an equal distance to the west. These were low, forgettable mountains, no good for skiing, carved up by logging roads, partly deforested in a way that provided employment to the locals but was considered unsightly by tourists.
No wonder all the right-wing wack jobs came here. No wonder smugglers loved it.
Seamus felt weird. It wasn’t hard to understand why. He always felt this way when he was riding a chopper into mountains like this. Because it usually meant going into combat. He had to keep reminding himself that all the adrenaline flooding into his system was going to be wasted. That if it weren’t wasted—if something actually did happen—it would be a very bad thing given that the people he was with were not geared, physically or mentally, for combat.
Assuming, reasonably enough, that these tourists would want to see the highest mountains, the pilot carved a long sweeping turn up a valley with a white thread snaking down its bottom: a river violent with snowmelt. After a few minutes, this frayed into several tributaries draining a few miles of high Selkirk crest. All the mountains along the crest proper were above the tree line and presented a bleak prospect of barren rocky snags and crags reaching high above vast talus fields where nothing would grow except the occasional freak tree. They burned a lot of fuel in a short time gaining altitude and thudded over a low saddle between peaks, suddenly giving them a view of many more insurgent-friendly mountains beyond, stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by a long north-south lake in the middle distance. Turning north again, the pilot made for the border, following the slow curve of the ridgeline, passing some especially prominent peaks. But during the last few miles to the border, the ridgeline lost a couple of thousand feet of altitude and plunged back below the tree line again. One bald peak jutted out of it a few miles south of the border—Abandon Mountain, the pilot called it—but other than that, it was scrub trees, patchy snowfields, and talus ranging northward well into Canada. In the far distance, the Selkirks leaped upward and became a truly magnificent range, but that was in British Columbia, where, plainly enough, everything was bigger and better.
Seamus, though, had eyes only for the dark valleys that wriggled through the lower country below. This was out-and-out wilderness. A few old roads wandered through it, connecting to widely spaced mineheads or logging camps. But it was as wild and as untouched by humans as anything you could expect to see in the Lower Forty-Eight. And as the pilot, responding to Seamus’s directions, slowed the chopper down and allowed it to shed altitude, those valleys began to take on depth that he hadn’t noticed from farther above. As if he had just put on a pair of 3D glasses at a movie theater, he saw into the gorges of the rivers now and understood the steepness of the terrain. The fury of the rivers told the same story.
“What would you like to see?” the pilot asked him. For they had just been hovering there for a couple of minutes, admiring a jewel-like waterfall set in a deep misty bowl.
Seamus had been looking for paths. The spoor of insurgents sneaking along secret ways through the forest.
“The border,” he answered.
“You’re looking at it,” said the pilot, pointing northward. “I don’t want to cross it, but I’ll take you right up to it if you want.”
“Sure.”
They passed over a partially forested slope rising up from the waterfall toward a wildly uneven plateau of boulders and snowfields and clustered trees. Above that rose a much broader and higher talus slope that, according to the pilot, was a mile or two north of the border and roughly parallel to it. The rock wall rising out of that was pierced in one place by a man-made opening, evidently the adit of an old mine.
“Someone painted the rock,” Yuxia observed.
“Where?” Seamus asked.
“Right below us,” Yuxia said.
Seamus’s gaze had been directed horizontally and north, but he now looked straight down and saw that Yuxia was right. What he had identified, a few moments ago, as a gnarled tree, branches covered with brilliant green sprigs of new leaves, was, on closer examination, a snarl of acid-green spray paint on a rock. Like graffiti. Except impossible to make sense of.
He could see now the faint traces of a trail, leading down to the graffiti from the north, coming from the approximate direction of that old mine tunnel. On the talus it was nearly imperceptible, but from place to place he saw tufts of fresh litter, and in one location it was absolutely clear that someone had glissaded down a snowfield, carving two parallel tracks, still crisp at the edges, not yet blurred by a day’s, or even an hour’s, exposure to the warmth of the sun.
He followed the track upward and was shocked to see, some distance above it, a dead man spread-eagled on a rock.
“Holy shit,” the pilot said, seeing it too.
“Let’s get a better look at that,” Seamus said, feeling that weird sensation again: the adrenaline coming back into his system. The chopper pointed its nose down and accelerated north.
They were passing over that grooved snowfield when Yuxia let out a gasp that was almost a scream. “He’s waving at us!” she called.
“Who’s waving at us?” Seamus returned skeptically. For the man on the boulder definitely wasn’t doing any waving, and that was the only man Seamus could see.
“I think it’s Zula’s uncle,” Yuxia answered. “I saw him on Wikipedia.”
A crack, explosively loud, sounded from above them. Then two more.
“What the hell?” said the pilot in the weird silence that followed. Silence being, in general, a bad thing in a helicopter.
“We’re being shot at,” Seamus said. For he had heard similar noises before. In general, military choppers stood up to the treatment a little better than this one had. “They have taken out the engine. Bite down.” He twisted around so that Yuxia could see his face, opened his mouth, inserted the helicopter company brochure, and bit down on it, keeping his lips peeled back grotesquely so that she
could see his jaws clenched together.
Staring at him fixedly, she reached up with one hand, bit down on the end of her camouflage mitten, then pulled her naked hand out of it.
“Brace for impact,” the pilot said. But halfway through this utterance, Seamus stopped hearing his voice in the headphones, because another round seemed to have gone through the middle of the instrument panel and fucked up the electrical system.
The pilot, to his great credit, knew what to do: he manipulated the controls in such a way as to make the chopper autorotate, converting some of the energy of its fall into passive spinning of the rotors that broke the descent marginally. That, and the fact that they landed at an angle on the snowfield, saved them. Even so, the impact was so sharp that Seamus felt his teeth jumping in their sockets. Because he was biting down, they didn’t slam together and they didn’t bite his tongue off and he hoped that the same was true of the others.
The chopper planted its nose in the snow and began to skid downhill like a big out-of-control toboggan. Directly in front of them were trees. Standing in front of the trees was—just as Yuxia had been trying to tell him—Richard Forthrast. A.k.a. Dodge.
He dodged.
The trees didn’t.
THE TEN OR fifteen seconds between the appearance of the chopper in the sky above him and its coming to rest in the trees, only a few yards away from where he had thrown himself to the ground, presented Richard with an unbroken chain of never-before-experienced sensations that, in other times, he’d have spent several weeks sifting through and making sense of. There was something in the modern mind that would not stop saying, If only I had caught that on video, or This is going to make the coolest blog entry ever! Barring which, he at least wanted to just lie there for a few moments asking himself whether that had really just happened.
People were stirring behind the cracked and spalled windshield of the chopper. At a glance he guessed two. On further consideration, three: there was a small person, a woman, in the back. The pilot seemed unconscious or at least unwilling to move. The passenger next to him was a lanky man with strawberry-blond hair and a beard, and he was flailing around like a spider in a bathtub, trying to get free of several entanglements while being belabored from the rear by the backseat person, who couldn’t get out until he did. And she—the voice, speaking what he guessed was Chinese, was clearly that of a female—very much wanted to get out. The man was dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, which suggested that he had flown up here to get in some hunting. Wrong season for it, but perhaps he was a poacher who had come to this area specifically to get away from game wardens.
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