Richard had checked the shotgun a hundred times to verify that a shell was chambered, and forced himself not to do so again, since doing so would make a noise. He looked down and inspected the safety lever to make sure that the red dot was showing. It was ready to fire.
He had nestled himself back into a hollow among the dead tree’s roots, which might not be the best situation since it was constraining his field of view, limiting his arm swing. He was considering how to improve this state of affairs without getting killed when his glance fell on a round stone, about the size of a baseball, that hundreds of years ago had gotten caught up in the root system of this tree and was now sticking out of the clotted mud down by his knee. Remembering a trick he had played as a boy, stalking and being stalked by John in the ravine of the farm crick, he acted now without thinking. Until this point he had been mired in a kind of psychological cold molasses. But now he just reached down with his left hand, found the rock, pulled it free from its mud matrix, and underhanded it into some shrubs about five yards off to his right. It flew soundlessly and probably invisibly, then rustled through the bushes and struck the ground with shocking and sudden noise. Jahandar responded immediately, firing a round at it, recocking. This gave away his position: too far off to the right for Richard to get a clear shot without moving farther away from the root-ball. Reckoning that it was now or never, Richard shoved off against the roots with his butt, pivoting around his planted right foot as his left swung around like the leg of a compass tracing a ninety-degree arc. At the same time he was bringing the shotgun up, getting the barrel and the bead aligned with the pupil of his eye, wondering when the hell Jahandar was going to swim into his sight picture. Finally he saw Jahandar in his peripheral vision and realized he had not pivoted far enough; he gave his hips an extra twitch. His left foot was coming down, a bit sooner than he’d have liked; he tried to raise the knee, delay the footfall, give himself some extra rotation, but the result was that the toe hooked on a root and torqued badly. He was falling to his left now, balance lost, still lacking a solid plant for the left foot, which came down hard and uncontrolled on whatever happened to be there. Whatever it was, it was slippery and uneven and made his foot twist around in a way that it wasn’t supposed to. He felt no pain, yet. He had glanced away from Jahandar for just a fraction of a second. He now returned his attention to the sights. Jahandar was gone. He had executed some sort of dive-and-roll back onto the trail. Richard was tempted to fire blindly but held his finger away from the trigger, mindful of the limited number of shells in the magazine. Reconnaissance by fire wasn’t going to work for him.
Getting low seemed to be a good idea and so he let himself drop, which was already happening anyway: his ankle was badly messed up, and the first spike of pain had just made it up his leg to his brain. He took his left hand off the shotgun’s forearm and let its barrel go vertical for a few moments as he tumbled back onto his ass, using his left hand to break the fall just a bit.
Then he looked up to see Jahandar staring at him through a gap between dangling roots, no more than ten feet away. Jahandar was just in the act of bringing his revolver up to bear on Richard.
Richard, who had been so much at gravity’s mercy an instant ago, now found it too weak and slow to bring the shotgun’s barrel down as fast as he would like. Rather than wait here to get shot, he twitched his body sideways, flinging himself down onto his back and then his side, rolling away. A younger man on better terrain might have rolled all the way over and come back up firing, but Richard bogged down in rocks and tree roots about halfway through this maneuver and found himself in the worst possible situation of having to get up on hands and knees with his ass pointed squarely in Jahandar’s direction and the shotgun down in the mud. How could anything go so badly wrong? It was just like John’s Vietnam stories, the ones he told when he was drunk and weeping. A pistol was banging, banging, banging. Richard wasn’t dead yet. His mind had registered something odd about that banging, but he hadn’t had time to think about it yet. An eternity later he fell heavily onto his ass, finally facing toward the enemy, finally with the shotgun up where he wanted it. He expected to see Jahandar still aiming the revolver his way, fire spurting from the barrel and all but scorching Richard’s nylon parka, but the jihadist had turned to look downhill and had crouched down so that only the curve of his back was showing.
The banging hadn’t come from Jahandar’s pistol. It must be Seamus, firing from farther way.
Richard, taking advantage of the slope, rolled up onto his feet, got a clear view of Jahandar’s center of mass, aimed the shotgun, and fired. He then collapsed facefirst into the root-ball as his ankle gave way beneath his weight. A broken-off root jabbed him in the eye. His hand came up involuntarily, and the shotgun tumbled into his lap. He heard himself letting out a brief scream.
In the silence that followed, a gentle footfall, very nearby. He looked up with his one operant eye and saw nothing but the forest moving alongside him. The shotgun slid out of his lap as if moving under its own power.
Qian Yuxia jerked the forearm back. Sharply. A spent shell flew out and bounced off Richard’s head. She rammed it home, then raised it to her shoulder. Someone said, in a gurgling voice, “Allahu akbar,” but the final syllable was buried in the shotgun’s muzzle blast.
“Nice,” pronounced a voice. The voice of Seamus. “But don’t stand so fucking close to him next time. I almost nailed you.”
“Dream on,” said Qian Yuxia.
SOKOLOV WATCHED THE departure of Olivia and Zula with a vast sense of relief: an emotion that he would, of course, never be able to share, or even hint at, with those two estimable females. By this point he had seen enough of them to know that they were cooler under pressure, and better to be with in a tight spot, than 999 out of 1,000 women. But their presence obliged him to divert a significant fraction of his attention into being considerate of their needs, responding to their inquiries, and keeping them alive. In most other circumstances it would have been no trouble at all, and more than repaid by the pleasure of their company. But this business now was going to be formidable trouble, and he needed to think of it to the exclusion of all else.
The environment was, on the whole, markedly Afghanistan-like. The jihadists would feel at home here, would instinctively know how to move, where to seek cover, how to react. Sokolov, of course, had done his time in Afghanistan. But that was long ago, and most of his work since then had been of a decidedly urban character. Advantage Jones.
There were more of them. Sokolov was alone, at least until such time as Zula and Olivia could get back to the compound where the fanatics—those American Taliban—lived with all their guns and their stockpiles of ammunition and materiel. Even then, it was not clear to what extent those people could form themselves up into an effective force on short notice. It was clear that Zula’s relatives were well armed and that they had the marksmanship part of the curriculum well covered. But military recruits spent only a small portion of their time actually shooting at targets; other forms of training were ultimately more important. Even supposing that they did come out from their bunkers with their assault rifles and their expensive knives, they might be more hazard than help to Sokolov. He had no way of communicating with them. They were as likely to identify him as foe than as friend. Soon he might have not just one but two groups of well-armed mountain men trying to kill him. Advantage Jones.
Sokolov was operating completely alone, which, while it technically placed him at a numerical disadvantage, conferred another sort of benefit in that he did not have to coordinate his actions with anyone else. No communication meant no foul-ups. The tiniest bit of cover could be used to advantage. Advantage Sokolov, provided he kept his distance and avoided getting surrounded.
So that—not getting surrounded—was what the Americans called the Name of the Game. Zula’s startling emergence from the wilderness had obliged him to give away his position. Had it not been for that, he’d have waited for all the jihadists to expose the
mselves on the slope below and then spent the morning picking them off.
According to Olivia—who had obtained the information from Zula—the size of Jones’s contingent had been nine this morning. One of them had somehow been killed hours ago. During the action just concluded, Sokolov and Zula had each accounted for one. That left six unaccounted for. It was possible that Sokolov’s suppressing fire had hit someone down in the trees, but he doubted it.
Another detail: Zula reported that a rear guard of unknown size—quite likely no more than two men—was an hour or two behind Jones’s main group. But one of them was a sniper.
Which raised the question of whether any of the men down below Sokolov might be so equipped. He had engaged in several exchanges of fire with them so far, but with so many opponents, all concealed in the forest, spraying rounds at him from different directions, it had been difficult for him to take a census of their weapons. From sound alone it was obvious that most of them had submachine guns or assault rifles. But the infrequent firing of a bolt-action sniper rifle could easily have gotten lost in all that noise. Some of them might have been packing scopes in their bags, and for all he knew they were down there right now mounting better optics on the weapons that he knew about. Sokolov’s gun was pretty and expensive, with a nice scope on it, but its barrel and its ammunition imposed certain inherent limitations on its effective range. In a sniping duel against a man armed with a proper long-range weapon, he would lose.
Earlier, Olivia had assisted him by bringing a sleeping bag, food, and water right up to the edge of the rock where he had made his little nest. It had become comfortable to a degree that was actively endangering his life; he was reluctant to move from this location that had already been made known to the enemy. As a first step toward abandoning it, he wriggled back to a spot from which he could not be seen from below, then devoted a few minutes to teasing a sleeping bag out of its nylon sack and loosely restuffing it into his parka. He pulled the hood up and made sure that it was packed tight enough to keep it round, then poked his sunglasses into it and wrapped a scarf around the lower part of its “face.” The whole time he was doing this he was feeling a moderate sense of embarrassment at playing such a cheap trick. But he had read all the old propaganda stories about the snipers of Stalingrad and knew that they had achieved much with a repertoire of simple gambits such as this one. When it was complete, he crawled forward, pushing the effigy before him so that its head would pop into view over the edge of the rock long before Sokolov himself became exposed.
A mirror would have been nice to have at this point, but he lacked one. He had to use his ears. The result of the experiment was a fusillade of reports from perhaps four different weapons, most of them firing multiple rounds in semiautomatic mode, which was to say that they were shooting one bullet per trigger pull rather than simply opening up with bursts. They were, in other words, aiming. Perhaps Jones had finally made it to the top of the trail and imposed some discipline. Rounds cracked into the rock near the effigy, others whined overhead. Sokolov closed his eyes and listened for the slow, heavy cadence of a bolt-action rifle firing high-powered rounds. A jerk ran down his arm as the effigy took a bullet in the head, and he heard a plasticky clatter as the sunglasses fell out and bounced down the cliff face below.
So at least one person down there was a good shot with a properly zeroed assault rifle. But if they had a sniper’s weapon per se, they had decided not to use it; and that was, in these circumstances, an odd decision. Zula had told Olivia that there was a sniper in the rear guard. Perhaps he had all the good stuff with him.
Or perhaps a fantastically good long-range weapon was aimed at his location at this very moment and its operator, having detected Sokolov’s pathetic masquerade through his excellent telescopic scope, had elected not to show his hand.
Taking only what he thought he’d need to survive the next few hours, Sokolov pulled back from the edge of the rock. Jones’s vanguard might have been idiots, but Darwinian selection had now removed them from the battle, and the only people left down there were the smart and cautious remainder, probably being led personally by Jones. They’d not expose themselves to his fire again. If they were feeling extraordinarily feisty, they might look for a way to outflank his position and get him in a cross fire, but this would take half the day, and they must know they didn’t have that long. The tree line stretched south all the way to—well, to wherever the hell these men needed to go. Moving through the forest was slow and awkward, but preferable to being shot at from above. That, Sokolov was quite sure, was what they would do. They would only post some sort of rear guard to keep an eye out for him and make sure he didn’t fall on them from behind.
His understanding of the local geography was not perfect, but he had the general sense that, on their way out to the open highways of the United States, they would pass near to the compounds of the American Taliban. Had it not been for the fact that Olivia and Zula were headed for one of those compounds right now, Sokolov might have been tempted to set up a blind and wait for the stragglers Zula had warned him of. The American survivalists, after all, could take care of themselves, and Sokolov was not above feeling a certain “plague on both your houses” attitude toward these groups.
But as it was, he felt obliged to pursue these men. They would already have a considerable head start. He ought to be able to erase this, however, by moving through open territory and proceeding generally downslope.
He ran over the top of the big rock, following roughly in the tracks that Zula and Olivia had made a bit earlier, and then began working his way judiciously down the talus slope. Below he could see the abandoned mining facility. He had not examined this carefully when he and Olivia had passed above it a few hours ago. Now he confirmed his vague memory that the place was overgrown with scrub trees and high weeds. For it was situated right at the edge of the zone where it was possible for vegetation to survive. Beyond it was the mature forest through which the jihadists were moving, or would be soon.
He was exposed on this slope, but it offered enough scraps of cover that—being that he was a lone operative, not a platoon—he could move from one to the next, throwing himself down when he reached them and making little stops to listen and observe. For about the first half of his progress down the talus field, he neither saw nor heard a thing. The jihadists—assuming they were coming this way—had been forced to work their way around a lobe of the mountain, traveling two kilometers to cover one kilometer of straight-line distance. Sokolov was just hurtling somewhat recklessly down the southern face of that landform, so it was to be expected that he would not see them at first. The seventeen-year-old buck private in him just wanted to sprint all the way to the bottom and take cover in the old mine buildings strewn invitingly around the base of the slope. The veteran wanted to creep on his belly from one cover to the next, never rising to his feet, never exposing himself. In the early going, the buck private won the argument, but as he lost more and more altitude, the verge of the forest began to seem more and more fraught with hazards and the veteran’s approach began to take over. He was lower down now, more on a level with any possible attackers, and this made it easier to find cover.
He came to a point where he could definitely hear the jihadists making their way through the trees, and then it became a matter of calibration: he didn’t have as far to travel now, but he had to do it more carefully. They did not appear to think that he was nearby. Perhaps they believed that, in shooting the effigy atop the rock, they had killed Sokolov. Perhaps they had become confused as to geography. In any case, they did not know that he had come around from another direction to engage them, and as long as they remained in that state of ignorance he had a huge advantage that could be lost in an instant if he behaved indiscreetly. And so the last part of Sokolov’s journey was a reenactment of the very worst moments of his special forces training: he spent the whole time crawling on his belly, at first over sharp rocks and then over sopping ice-cold mud overgrown with thorny and poky
vegetation.
But this got him, at last, into the precincts of the mining camp, which was a generally flat bottomland at forest’s edge, really a kind of sump that had accepted more snowmelt in the last few weeks than it could absorb. It extended perhaps fifty meters from the base of the slope to the edge of the true forest and several hundred meters in the direction parallel to the slope, and it was scattered with abandoned trucks, trailers, shacks, and one structure that seemed to be an actual log cabin. Sokolov gravitated to the latter. Its cedar-shake roof had long since fallen in to cover its floor, and windblown pine needles and other such debris had collected in the lee of its walls, almost a meter deep. Sokolov burrowed into the needle pile, then reached around him and arranged the stuff to form a mound of camouflage, nothing showing except for the snout of his Makarov.
Then he relaxed and sipped from his CamelBak tube. Ten minutes later, he was listening as Jones, probably standing no more than twenty meters away, gave orders to his men. Sokolov’s Arabic was rusty. Even without the half-remembered vocabulary he had managed to retain, he could guess what Jones was saying, simply based upon the tactical realities of the situation. He was telling some of his men—probably no more than two of them—to find suitable cover in this mining camp and keep an eye on the slope above. Anyone trying to make his way down that slope should be tracked until he was close enough to make for easy shooting, then shot. Anyone taking the high road should be harassed with long-range fire, which might not hit the target but would at least give him something to think about while warning Jones and the others that they were being shadowed from the commanding heights.
Jones then moved on with the main group.
The ones he’d left behind talked to each other in low tones for a minute and then began to explore the camp, looking for places where they could take cover and wait. Sokolov was now convinced that there were exactly two of them.
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