Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  He plunged down the hill and across a short stretch of level ground until he reached the edge of the area that Jake had cleared. This was going to become a very dangerous place in a few seconds. It might already be. He dropped to his belly and crawled several meters to a spot where he could take shelter behind a recently felled tree, not yet cut up for firewood. Its trunk was too skinny to hide him or to stop bullets, but its innumerable small dead branches, spraying out in all directions, created a visual screen. He crawled down the length of it, getting a bit closer to the cabin, then raised his head cautiously and, when this failed to draw fire, spent a few moments looking into the cabin’s windows. He saw no smashed-out panes, no faces peeking round the edges of window frames—no signs, in other words, that it had yet been occupied. He could still make out two identifiable groups of gunmen moving around the property, converging generally on the cabin—but not there yet.

  He got to his feet and sprinted for the cabin’s back door.

  TO PARAPHRASE a familiar proverb, Seamus had been provided with a hammer—a rather good sniper rifle—and now he was looking for nails. He and Yuxia had spent the last few minutes descending the trail that, judging from evidence (lots of recent footprints and ATV tracks) led down into wherever it was that everyone was converging—a cabin, according to some hasty directions supplied by Richard, owned by Richard’s brother Jake and occupied by family members, including women and children, who ought to have no part in this quarrel.

  In his haste to get to the bottom of the slope, Seamus nearly caught up with Jones’s main group. Alerted, almost too late, by a few gunshots from just below—gunshots that were evidently not intended for him—he threw himself down, got situated in a prone firing posture with reasonable cover, flipped the lens caps off the ends of the rifle’s scope, and got it ready to fire.

  He had also run some distance ahead of Yuxia, who now caught up with him and didn’t have to be told that she should throw herself down next to him so as not to present a target.

  Now if one of those assholes down below would only make a target of himself. This was the rub of the hammer/nail problem. If Seamus hadn’t come into possession of the rifle, he’d have brought a completely different skill set into play, moving down the slope as stealthily as possible in search of shorter-range combat opportunities. Instead, here he was, frozen in a fixed position that was too far out of the action to be of any use.

  A movement caught his eye through a gap in the foliage. Yuxia saw it too and pointed. By the time he had flicked his eyes in that direction, whatever he’d glimpsed was gone. He lost interest, reckoning that none of these jihadists would ever show himself twice in the same place. But then a little gasp from Yuxia told him he’d guessed wrong. He swung the rifle in that direction, peered through the scope, waited for a few seconds, and then, finally, saw it clearly.

  But it wasn’t what he’d expected. Not a head. Not a gun. Not a hand. But a foot. A disembodied boot on the end of a rod.

  Holding the rod about halfway along, a gloved hand. It descended sharply, then came back up again.

  Seamus risked climbing up to his knees, so that he could get a better view. It took a moment to get the scene recentered in his scope. This time he was able to see the arm attached to that hand. Following it down, he identified the face of none other than Abdallah Jones.

  He was just about to pull the trigger when his sight picture was obscured by the head and shoulders of another man who had entered the scene, gesticulating like crazy, trying to get Jones’s attention. Seamus lifted his eye from the scope, trying to see what this other jihadist was looking at, but his view of the world was limited to a single narrow aperture between tree branches, and whatever had got this man so excited was far out of his view.

  So he exhaled, dropped his eye back to the scope, made sure the crosshairs were still on the man’s back, and pulled the trigger. The rifle went off like a motherfucker and the jihadist sprang forward as if he had been kicked in the back. He dropped out of view, revealing Jones, who Seamus fondly hoped might have been struck by the same bullet. But the bullet had either fragmented in the first man’s body or else caromed off a vertebra and gone off in another direction.

  There might be some alternate, parallel universe, designed to the exact specifications of snipers, where Jones would now freeze with terror long enough for Seamus to work the bolt, chamber another round, and fire. But not here. Jones dove and rolled and was long gone before Seamus was in a position to shoot again.

  “They know we’re here,” Seamus said.

  “Ya think?”

  “We just have to proceed with caution, is all I’m saying.”

  “Why was that man waving his arms?”

  “Could have been anything,” Seamus said, “but I’ll bet he saw Sokolov.”

  “DON’T SHOOT!” Olivia cried, for Jake Forthrast, attracted by movement in his peripheral vision, had swung his AR-15 around to bear on a man sprinting in a zigzag pattern across his backyard, headed for his cabin. Olivia had just recognized the man as Sokolov.

  “Thank you,” Jake said, and turned instead to aim in the general direction of some gunshots sounding from the base of the hill. Some of the jihadists were up there, trying to bring down Sokolov. A single very sharp crack sounded from higher up the slope.

  “They’ve got a sniper,” Jake said. But at almost the same moment they could hear excited voices from where Jones and his men had gone to ground, apparently saying much the same thing.

  “Maybe we’ve got a sniper,” Csongor suggested.

  “Maybe,” Jake said, “but who the hell?”

  Olivia heard all of this as if from a great distance, focused as she was on Sokolov. About halfway through his run he had disappeared from her view, hidden behind the corner of the cabin, and she had no way of knowing whether he had found shelter there or been brought down by that clatter of fire from the woods. But then a curtain moved in an upper-story window. He was too smart to expose himself where she, or anyone, would be able see his face, so she saw nothing more than this subtle movement; but that alone gave her confidence that the one behind that curtain was him. “I believe he made it,” she said. “He’s in the cabin.”

  Glass shattered in the front of the house and a series of bangs sounded. A scream of dismay erupted from the driveway.

  “So it would appear,” Zula said.

  “What do we do now?” Marlon wanted to know.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Jake said, “if you all can just hole up somewhere and not get killed, well, that’s the best you can reasonably hope for.”

  “I’m all in favor of not getting killed,” Olivia said, “but what are you going to do, Jake?”

  “My neighbors are probably headed this way right now, loaded for bear,” Jake said. “If they just blunder into the middle of this, they’ll be mowed down—they have no idea what they are getting themselves into. I’m going to work my way back out to the gate and do what I can to prevent that from happening.”

  A jihadist sprinted out of cover, making a run for the rear of the house—apparently thinking that he could get in through the back door while Sokolov was shooting out the front. He thudded up the porch steps, grabbed the doorknob, and found it locked. Zula was getting into position to aim her rifle at the man. Before she could do anything, however, his head snapped forward as if he were trying to head-butt his way through the door. He slid and crumpled to the deck and lay there twitching. The echo of another sharp bang resounded from above.

  “Definitely our sniper,” Marlon concluded.

  Jake had already departed, taking advantage of these distractions to run for the cover of a woodpile some yards away. From there he was quickly able to make his way off the property, or at least out of their field of view. More bangs sounded from the upper-story windows of
the cabin, as Sokolov was apparently moving from window to window taking aim at any targets that presented themselves: sometimes shooting out the back at Jones’s group, other times out the front at the ones trying to come up the driveway. The latter seemed more numerous and better armed. Jones’s contingent had lost a few members and also had to contend with the sniper firing down on them from the hillside behind.

  “They are coming closer to us,” Marlon said. His face was turned toward the back side of the property, his ears tracking the purr of a submachine gun, firing in occasional bursts that got a little nearer each time. Each of those bursts caused damage to a window or a window frame on the cabin’s upper story, and those targets were migrating slowly along the back and around the corner of the building. The dark weathered surface of the logs was splintering to reveal blond wood underneath, as if the place were being swarmed by invisible chainsaws.

  Sokolov popped up in the window where he had twitched the curtain earlier, and fired two rounds before ducking back down to avoid a long burst of fire. So it would seem the owner of the submachine gun was working his way through the property, dodging around the side of the cabin in a wide arc, probably trying to connect with his brothers in the driveway without exposing himself to fire from either Sokolov or the sniper. The farther he got without being cut down, the more likely it was that others would follow in his wake and that the four behind the shed—who were armed only with Zula’s rifle and the pistol that Jake Forthrast had handed to Csongor—would find themselves confronting all that remained of Jones’s group, who were few in number but armed to the teeth. And no doubt pissed. All four of them assembled this picture in their minds over the course of a few moments and instinctively drew away from the approaching shooter, seeking cover around the corner of the shed or behind tree trunks. But the news was not particularly good from the driveway side either. The jihadists in front were communicating with those in back using walkie-talkies. While Sokolov had been focusing all of his attention on Jones’s group, trying to prevent them from coming around the side and tangling with Zula, Olivia, Marlon, and Csongor, the attackers in the driveway had begun to move up toward the cabin.

  Zula, prone behind a cedar tree and gazing over the sight of the rifle, trying to catch sight of the agile shooter with the submachine gun, was growingly conscious of a rhythmic thud-thud-thud that was growing to fill the air and shake the ground. Focused as she was on other matters, she had not given it much thought at first. She now recognized it as the sound of a helicopter. It had come in at higher altitude but was now making a low and slow pass over the compound. She rolled over on her back and looked almost vertically upward at the belly of a chopper passing maybe a hundred feet overhead. Men were peering out the windows, trying to make sense of what was going on down here. As it passed by and banked around, she was able to see markings of the Idaho State Patrol.

  It made a lazy swing over the back forty and then came around to the front and hovered above the driveway.

  A streak of fire lanced up out of the trees near the gate and struck it near the tail rotor. The back half of the chopper disappeared for a moment in a spike of white fire. What was left of it began to pinwheel, descending rapidly. It dropped out of Zula’s view, and a moment later she heard it crash into the driveway, and fusillades of gunfire as the jihadists on that side poured rounds into its wreckage.

  SOKOLOV UNDERSTOOD THAT the rocket-propelled grenade had been intended for him. Pinned down by his fire from the upper story of the cabin, the jihadists had sent a man back to get the device out of the trunk of a car. He had been stealing through the woods, trying to get into position to fire a grenade through a window, when the chopper had appeared overhead and presented him with an even more tempting target. And so he had played his hand and ruined the surprise.

  The next RPG would be headed his way as soon as the jihadist could reload.

  The back of the cabin sported screened-in decks on both the ground level and the upper story; Elizabeth, last night, had referred to the latter as a “sleeping porch.” Sokolov vaulted through a shattered window and landed flat on the deck of the sleeping porch. If any of the jihadists out back had noticed this—and they probably had—then they knew that they now had a shot at him. Not a good shot, for if they were close, they’d be firing upward through the two-by-four decking of the porch; and if they were farther away, their view would cluttered by furniture. But their surplus of ammunition would make up for many of these deficiencies. Sokolov’s life expectancy up on this deck was well under sixty seconds.

  Or at least that was the state of affairs before the upper story of the cabin exploded. The man with the RPG knew what he was doing: with two shots he had brought down a helicopter and essentially decapitated the building that Sokolov had been using as a sniper’s perch.

  Sokolov now became part of a large mass of rubble—mostly logs—finding its way to the ground. The sleeping porch peeled away from the side of the house and toppled, and he of course fell with it and struck the ground with less violence than might have been expected. But logs, and a considerable part of the roof structure, came after, and Sokolov’s world grew dark and confined, and when he tried to move his right leg, it budged not at all, but responded only with weird tingling sensations that he knew as harbingers of serious pain.

  SEAMUS’S QUEST FOR nails to hit with his hammer had been petering out as the would-be nails either died or fled, making their way around the side of the cabin and taking cover behind the numerous trees, small structures, and woodpiles that complicated that swath of the property. It became obvious that he needed to relocate to a position farther down the slope. And yet he hesitated. He knew that Yuxia would insist on coming with him, and he did not want to bring her into what would clearly turn into a vicious, short-range, tree-to-tree kind of affair, your basic hatchet fight in a dark cellar. He was trying to think of some way to broach this topic with her when he noticed the chopper making its pass over the back of the compound, just above treetop level—which meant it was nearly on a level with Seamus. Had he been one of the bad guys he could have taken out both the pilot and the copilot with a single round through both of their helmets. As it was, he levered himself up on his elbows and simply watched it fly by with the cynical and helpless attitude of the experienced combat veteran. For it was obvious that the two troopers in the chopper had no idea how much danger they were in. They had probably flown up here in response to a vague, excited telephone report of shots fired in the woods: something that must happen all the time in these parts. Assuming that it was nothing more than poachers, or kids screwing around with their dads’ guns, they were making a low and slow pass over the area, just to put the fear of God into the hearts of the miscreants. After which they would fly home and spend the afternoon drinking coffee and writing up a very dull report.

  They were going to die.

  The copilot was swiveling his head from side to side, scanning the ground below, occasionally turning to an angle from which Seamus might—just might—show up in his peripheral vision. If only Seamus were not clad from head to toe in camouflage.

  Seamus jumped to his feet and did a few jumping jacks. He unzipped his parka, turned it inside out, began waving it over his head.

  The chopper turned its tail rotor toward him, like a dog presenting its ass to be sniffed, and began to cruise away.

  Seamus noticed something red on his arm, just above the elbow, and looked down curiously to see that a chunk of flesh was missing from it.

  Yuxia jumped to her feet and fired the shotgun. Pumped it, ejecting the spent shell, and chambering the last one.

  ZULA HAD BEEN having miserable bad luck with the rifle. The jihadists seemed to be quite good at staying behind cover. She had fired another round but apparently not hit anything. She had just two left.

  Olivia had sprung to her feet when the top half of Jake’s cabin had disintegrated, and she had taken a few paces toward its still-settling ruins before Marlon had jumped up and tackled her to the
ground. He was lying next to her now, a consoling hand on her shoulder, talking to her.

  Zula flinched, sensing movement nearby, and looked back to see that it was Csongor, approaching on hands and knees. He flopped down, pressing against her. Her body responded to the contact as if it were just him being companionable. But her mind understood that he was making himself a human shield to protect her from any shots that might come from the direction they were most concerned about.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “Ssh,” he said. “It is very logical.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. You have to use your rifle to get the guy with the big weapon—I guess it must be rocket-propelled grenade? But you can’t do that if this asshole over here”—he waved the pistol vaguely in the direction from which they’d been hearing the bursts of the submachine gun—“is shooting at you. So I’ll take care of him.”

  She was about to take issue with this when a racket sounded from above their heads. They looked up, blinking their eyes against a descending haze of wood dust, to see a ragged line of fresh bullet holes in the wall of the shed.

  Zula met Olivia’s eye for a moment.

  “Scatter!” Zula cried, and rolled up and ran around to the other side of the shed. She heard Olivia relay the command to Marlon and then felt and heard their footfalls and their ragged breathing as they sought other cover.

  She was looking around trying to figure out where Csongor had ended up when a fusillade, the longest and the loudest yet, sounded from the driveway, up near the gate. Cringing against the shed wall, she understood that this had to be Jake and the neighbors, mounting some kind of organized assault. They’d be moving up the driveway, which meant that the remaining jihadists on this side would have to retreat toward the house.

  Had Jake and his group seen the RPGs? Did they understand what they were up against?