It was during this little respite that she heard the sound of a helicopter somewhere and debated whether she ought to run out into the open and flag it down. But it was hopeless; the chopper was a good distance away and the sight lines obscured by trees.
If only she had saved some of those bright pastel garments so that she could wave them in the air.
Speaking of which, the air was now bitingly cold on her shoulders. She bolted the last of her energy bar and forced herself to accelerate into a trot, then slowly build that up into a run.
She was just hitting her stride when she heard a sharp cracking boom. Because of the way it echoed around all the neighboring slopes, she found it difficult to judge direction. She was fairly certain, though, that it had sounded out of the direction from which she had just come. Miles away.
There was no one moment, no one place when she made the decision to go for it. The trees became thinner and thinner, the sight lines became clearer and longer, the ground angled more and more steeply under her feet. Minutes ago, she had been running across nearly level ground. But now she noticed that she was scrambling, almost on all fours, up a talus slope; looking back and down to judge her progress, she saw a good quarter of a mile of perfectly open ground behind and below her, terminated in the distance by a fringe of scrubby undergrowth that shortly developed into proper forest.
Down in that forest she could see movement. At least one man, possibly two of them. They were at most five minutes behind her: a sufficient head start to keep her alive in the dense forest down below, but, up here, just enough to make it a challenging shot.
She snapped her head back around to scan the slope above her, hoping she might see a place to take cover.
In most ways, this place could not have been worse. During her geoengineering studies, she had learned all about the angle of repose, which was the slope that a heap of particulate matter naturally adopted over time; it explained the shape of an anthill, a mound of sugar, a pile of gravel, or a mountain of scree. The angle was different for each type of material. Its exact value was not important here. What was important was that the angle was everywhere the same, and so slopes made of such materials tended to be ruler straight. There were no mounds or bulges to hide behind.
And—as she kept being reminded—they were inherently unstable. As long as she remained on areas of larger rocks, her weight was not sufficient to break anything loose, but when she strayed into sandy or gravely areas she set off little avalanches. Nothing big enough to be dangerous, either to her or (unfortunately) those below her, but enough to give her the impression that she was climbing on a treadmill, burning energy but, like Sisyphus, going nowhere.
She had made it about two-thirds of the way up this sharpshooter’s paradise when she began to hear guns firing from below. At first, a loose and irregular string of four or five pops, probably shots from a pistol. One of them whanged off a football-sized rock perhaps ten feet away from her and dislodged it. It went tumbling down the slope, neither picking up speed nor slowing down, occasionally loosening smaller stones but not setting off anything like a proper avalanche. So the shooter had missed her by a mile, which was to be expected with that sort of a weapon at this distance; but the mere fact of being shot at and of seeing bullets hit things nearby had frozen her in a low crouch for several moments—moments that, she knew, the slower members of Jones’s crew were using to make up for lost time. She forced herself to keep scrambling, heading for a patch about twenty feet above her that seemed to include a few larger rocks—perhaps just enough that she could flatten herself behind them. This worked for all of about three seconds, until a hellish racket started up from below, so startling her that she planted a foot wrong, lost her footing, and fell hard, banging one elbow and nearly planting her face. The air around her was full of sharp dust and zinging fragments of rock. Someone down there had opened up with a fully automatic weapon. She hazarded a look down and saw, through a cloud of kicked-up rock dust, one of the jihadists planted there with a submachine gun braced on his hip. Not one of the bigger assault rifles, which fired high-velocity rifle rounds. This would be loaded with pistol rounds. Still perfectly capable of tearing up her body, of course, but intended for short-range work. Urban combat. Mowing down commuters on buses.
The shooter’s companion—the one who had been firing the pistol a few moments earlier—shouted some advice at him, and he sullenly raised the weapon from his hip to his shoulder. Yes, he was actually going to try aiming it this time.
Zula got up and scrambled as hard as she could.
More shouted debate from below. The man with the submachine gun had been persuaded that he would get better results if he deployed its collapsible stock and braced it against his shoulder.
While this was being done Zula was putting everything she had into a frantic series of leaps and pounces. When frantic pawing didn’t work, she paused, breathed, planted feet and hands on big rocks, and hurled her body upward.
The noise began again and then stopped; a hail of rock splinters peppered her back. Another burst then struck the slope above her, sending a few stones tumbling down, forcing her to dodge sideways for a couple of yards. Something tugged at the loose fabric of her cargo trousers, behind her thigh, and she dared not believe that a bullet had passed through it. A brief silence, and then several rounds chattered against a mosaic of bigger rocks, perhaps watermelon sized, just ahead of her: the shooter had figured out where she was going and was trying to drive her back. But she had already launched herself and could not have changed her course even if she’d had second thoughts. Something whacked her in the mouth. She landed on her belly and flattened herself on the upper side of this tiny collection of larger stones. She could not see the shooter; that was good. Rounds struck near her feet. She kicked wildly, bashing a few protuberant rocks out of the way, enabling her to settle her legs and her feet just a few inches lower. Important inches.
She was choking on something that was cold and sharp and hard, and hot and sticky and wet at the same time. She hocked and spat and felt the hard thing leave her mouth, sending a jolt of pain up into her skull.
Actually it was two hard things, borne on a spate of blood and saliva: a chip of rock, about the size of a chickpea, but angular and sharp. And a tooth that it had apparently sheared off at its root when the rock chip had flown into her mouth, which had been open and gasping for air. Feeling with her tongue, she found a seeping hole where her right canine ought to have been. In front of that her upper lip was numb and felt huge. It was going to hurt soon, if she lived that long.
A few more bursts of fire swept across the tiny bulwark of stones behind which she was hiding, but to no effect, other than psychological. She could hear the men talking down below. Shouting, actually, since they had deafened themselves by playing with loud toys.
What would she do in their situation? Leave the one with the submachine gun below to keep her pinned in place with occasional bursts of fire. Meanwhile the one with the pistol could scramble up the slope and find an angle from which to shoot at her.
She said good-bye to her tooth, wiped her bloody hand on her shirt, then groped down the side of her body until she found the Glock in the cargo pocket of her trousers. This she pulled out and brought up in front of her face. She had no idea how many rounds it contained. Since she seemed to have some time, she ejected its clip and rotated the back of it into the sunlight so that she could see through the little holes in its back and count the bullets. This was a seventeen-round magazine that contained nine rounds at the moment; a tenth was already chambered. She shoved the clip back into the pistol’s grip, made sure it was firmly seated, and slipped her finger carefully over the trigger, which was in its forward position: her weapon was cocked and ready to fire.
YUXIA ABOUT-FACED AND hurled herself down into the forest with Richard mounting the hottest pursuit of which he was capable. Seamus was very close to having his feelings hurt by the decisiveness with which the young lady had embraced, and acted
upon, his plan. He had been assuming that there would be a lengthy and tedious transitional phase during which he would be obliged to convince her, against all of her soft womanly emotions, to leave him behind in this mortally dangerous situation: semiexposed, facing an enemy with a vastly longer-range weapon, yet unable to maneuver freely because of the requirement not to abandon Jack the chopper pilot.
In the minutes after she and Richard departed, Seamus had to keep himself busy moving about the area in a very specific manner, trying to situate himself so that the sniper above would (preferably) not be able to see him, or (barring that) not be able to get a good shot off at him. His camouflage clothing, ironically, was doing him very little good. The helicopter had come to a halt in a small and sparse collection of trees surrounded on three sides by a field of blindingly white snow. Unless he wanted to expose himself on that snow like a cockroach in a bathtub, he only had one way out, which was to move downhill into a little draw, lined with shrubs and scrubby little coniferous trees, that drained this part of the slope and eventually turned into a tributary of the river that plunged over the American Falls. This was the route that Yuxia and Richard had taken. There was little doubt in Seamus’s mind that those two were safe, at least for the time being. He was hoping that the sniper would see the disturbance that they made in the low foliage as they hustled through it, hear them crashing through dry undergrowth and snapping branches with their feet, and decide to chase after them, which would bring him directly across Seamus’s field of fire. The sniper couldn’t possibly know how many surviving people were in this party, and he couldn’t know how many had just run down the draw; with luck he would assume that they had all run off and feel no inhibitions about giving chase openly.
Seamus found a place that suited him, where he was able to settle himself into a little depression in the ground and peer uphill between tree trunks. He had pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head and cinched its drawstring tight, covering his hair and as much as possible of the oval of his face. This interfered with hearing and peripheral vision but seemed preferable to giving the sniper a nice round flesh-colored target. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He settled in to wait.
The thing with Yuxia meant nothing, he convinced himself. It wasn’t like she had been living in normal circumstances for the last couple of weeks. Even before recent events, she had been decisive and strong-minded, probably to the point where people in her village considered her a little weird. He could see that much. All this stuff with the Russians, with Jones, the Philippine excursion, the chopper crash—it had just made her more so. She just wanted to get out of this alive.
Having satisfied himself as to that, he began questioning his judgment in re the matter of Jack the pilot. If the only objective was to keep Jack’s spine stabilized until medical help could be brought in, then leaving him tightly strapped into his seat was probably a good move. But in these circumstances, leaving him there, exposed to observation and to fire from above, seemed downright ghoulish.
Jack was moving his arms. It wasn’t clear why. Trying to actually do something? Or just flailing around in agony? A lot of times, trauma did not actually hurt. The pain came later. Maybe this was happening to him now. It was difficult to see what was going on in there. The chopper’s windscreen was a casserole of cracks and shards.
“Seamus,” Jack called, “I need to get out of here.”
“Fuck!” Seamus said under his breath.
“Seamus! Help me, man! I’m in a lot of pain!”
Seamus was biting his tongue. He wanted to tell Jack to shut up, but he had no idea how close the sniper might be, whether he could hear anything that Seamus might say.
But Jack was already making it pretty obvious that someone else was down here with him and that his name was Seamus.
He heard the distinctive and never-to-be-forgotten sound of a high-velocity round passing through the vicinity, and a sharp pop/tinkle from the direction of the chopper, and, on its heels, the crack of a rifle shot from up the slope.
The temptation here, of course, was to engage in sudden movement, which was exactly what the sniper would be looking for. Seamus contented himself with swiveling his eyeballs to examine the chopper. It was such a wreck that it was difficult to see clear evidence of its having been newly shot. But as he was watching, he heard the bullet sound again and saw another round impact the fuselage, behind the cabin, below the engine. Searching its vicinity, he now saw the previous bullet hole, just a hand’s breadth away.
Another hole appeared, between the first two.
The fucker was using the chopper as a target to zero his sights.
No, wait. What was that smell?
“Gasoline!” Jack cried. “The tank is ruptured, I’m getting the hell out of here, Seamus!” And Seamus saw Jack lurch free as he undid his harness. The sudden movement caused him to scream. Seamus, like anyone else who was not a complete sociopath, felt sympathy for Jack and wanted to help him, or at least to call out some encouraging words. But those lovely altruistic instincts were completely suppressed, at the moment, by tactical calculations. Jack was actually doing the right thing, without any help, or even encouragement, from Seamus. If Seamus were to move or to call out now, he’d be giving the sniper exactly what the sniper wanted, and he wouldn’t be doing Jack any good at all.
Because—if Seamus were reading the situation correctly—the sniper suspected that there was another person down here, another person who was named Seamus and who was assumed to be able-bodied. That much he could have guessed from overhearing Jack. His plan had been to draw Seamus out of cover by creating an implicit threat to cremate the helpless pilot.
Now that Jack was moving, though, the sniper had to shoot at him directly in order to create a threat. And this was difficult since much of the helicopter was between him and the target. Jack had tumbled out the chopper’s side door and collapsed to the ground in a manner that could not have been pleasant for him. He was now dragging himself downhill, headed for the draw, albeit very slowly, his fear of the burning gasoline overriding the pain in his back.
The gasoline was ice cold and would be more difficult to ignite than usual. Merely shooting at it from a distance might not do the trick and would waste bullets. Seamus, a connoisseur of high-speed gun photography, knew that a plume of still-burning gunpowder and hot gas would erupt from the barrel of his Sig when he fired a round and probably set fire to the fuel—if he could get close enough.
Unfortunately, he was something like twenty feet away from the chopper.
Jack was moving commendably for a man with a serious spinal injury, dragging himself down the slope on his elbows.
Seamus stood up. He just stood straight up and gazed directly up the slope for perhaps two seconds and got an excellent view of the sniper, who was ensconced on a rock in the seated position, rifle at the ready, but gazing over the top of his scope, taking in a general view of the scene. The sniper reacted quickly, raising the weapon and getting his eye socketed into the scope, trying to find Seamus with it. But as Seamus knew perfectly well, these things took time. Seamus had a pretty good idea of how long they took. The transition from normal vision to the world as seen through the scope was jarring and confusing to the visual system no matter how many times you practiced it; the scope was never aimed in exactly the right direction, you had to swing the barrel around to bring the target into view, and there was a tendency to overmove it when you were hurrying to catch up with something that was moving rapidly.
And Seamus was definitely doing that. Having fixed an image of the sniper in his mind, he spun and ran toward the chopper, not in a straight line but in a series of zigzagging lunges, like Nate Robinson driving through a zone defense, and when he reached a place where he could see the side of the chopper wet with streaming gasoline, he aimed his Sig right at it, hurled himself forward, planted his feet for a quick reversal, and pulled the trigger three times as fast as his finger would move. Without pausing to observe the results, he spun away and shov
ed off with all the force he could muster in both legs, gaining himself an immediate distance of maybe six or eight feet. He dove to his belly and skidded across a stew of melting snow and icy mud that was suddenly growing bright, as though Venetian blinds had been opened to let the rays of the sun invade this little copse of trees. A couple of downhill somersaults got him clear of the burning wreck while (he hoped) putting out any fires that might have started on his back. Then he crawled into the draw, following the rut that Jack had made a few moments before.
He caught up with the stricken pilot in a location that was actually rather good: a water-worn cleft, forming a bottleneck in the draw, overgrown with vegetation, difficult to see or to shoot into. They were only a stone’s throw downhill from the chopper but, tactically, it was a whole different world.
Seamus motioned for Jack to stop and make himself comfortable. He did not aim his Sig at the pilot, but he certainly made no secret of the fact that it was right there in his hand, ready to fire. “If you make another fucking sound, I’ll shoot you dead,” he said. “Sorry, but those are the rules. Do you understand the rules?”
Jack nodded.
“Sniper has a predicament,” Seamus said. “He suspects we are still alive. This makes him want to stay behind and take care of us. But he knows that we sent other people on ahead of us. He needs to catch up with them and kill them. I am betting that the psychological impact of what just happened will be that he says, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to go look for the other guys.’ He will bypass this draw, which looks scary to him because it equalizes the odds—his long gun doesn’t do him any good, he has to get close, within range of this.” Seamus gave the Sig a little flick of the wrist. “He’ll go past us. I’ll follow him. You’ll stay here. If you want, you can make your way back to the chopper after it stops exploding, and throw some sticks on the fire and warm yourself up.”
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