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.
Richard looked up the slope, just to see whether the jihadist with the sniper rifle had come into view yet. Either he hadn’t, or he was taking sniperlike care not to be seen. Anyway, they’d be in his sights soon enough, and Richard wanted to make the newcomers aware of that fact and get them free of the chopper. He staggered to his feet and sloshed through snow and undergrowth toward the downed machine’s right side — only to be greeted by the muzzle of a semiautomatic pistol, which had appeared by some sleight of hand in the passenger’s right hand and was now aimed right at him.
“Okay,” Richard said, letting his hands be seen, “if I’d just been through that, I’d be a little jumpy too.”
“It’s not so much that,” said the passenger. “It’s the Mossberg 500 on the tactical sling.” He nodded at said weapon, which was dangling from Richard’s shoulder.
“Fair enough,” Richard conceded.
“You’re Richard Forthrast,” said the passenger, and dropped the pistol’s muzzle. Then he was distracted by a series of vicious kicks directed against the back of his seat.
“T’Rain player?” Dodge asked.
“Yeah, actually. But there’s more going on here than just a random fan encounter. We have information about your niece. Or rather she does.” He nodded toward the back. “I have never met her, but I hear she is a fine young lady.”
“I just saw her an hour ago.”
The kicking and thrashing stopped. A face peeked out from behind the rear seat.
“She’s alive?” the young Asian woman asked.
GETTING OUT OF the chopper required some knife work, since parts of the instrument panel had been crushed upward, and sharp sheet-metal edges were catching on seat belts and on camouflage clothing. But eventually the man, who gave his name as Seamus, and the woman, Yuxia, extricated themselves and went around to the other side to look in on the pilot. He was awake now. Richard, conditioned by long exposure to Hollywood, was wondering when the chopper was going to burst into flames, but this seemed less and less likely as time went on. The fuel tank was not leaking, and there were no sources of ignition that Richard could see.
The pilot was reporting, rather calmly, that all parts of his body from his navel on down felt as though they had gone to sleep. Not in the sense of being totally numb, for he could move them and feel sensations, but in the sense of tingling like crazy. His spinal column, obviously enough, had been jammed by the force of the impact and perhaps suffered some vertebral damage that was messing with his spinal cord. He wasn’t paralyzed. But he might be if they tried to move him around “like a bunch of fucking do-gooder shit-for-brains” as Seamus put it.
Yuxia and Seamus both seemed to have come through the crash with little trauma other than a good deal of hard banging around that would leave them stiff and bruised tomorrow. Adrenaline seemed to be taking care of the rest. That, and, in Yuxia’s case, what looked like a serious endorphin rush generated by the awareness that Zula was alive — or at least had been an hour ago. While Seamus interviewed the pilot and tried to figure out what to do, Yuxia focused on Richard. “Your niece honors you very much.”
“I just figured out who you are,” Richard said. “She wrote about you on a paper towel.”
Once he had made up his mind that the chopper was not going to explode, and taken into consideration the fact that they now had two firearms between them, he had begun to feel quite optimistic — as if it were all over now except for rounding up the bad guys and buying people plane tickets home.
“Are others on the way?” he asked Seamus.
“Other what? What are you talking about?”
“Like … reinforcements?”
“We’re on our own,” Seamus said.
“But you knew I was here … that the jihadists were here.”
“If we’d known they were here, we would have showed up with the entire fucking Idaho National Guard. And once we got here, we would not have hovered in a place where we could get shot down by one asshole with a rifle.”
Richard just stared at him.
“I’m doing this on my own,” Seamus said. “Checking out a hypothesis. No one else believes me. I had only a vague suspicion Jones might have come this way until rounds started going through our engine block.”
“Were you able to send out a distress call or — ” Then Richard shut up, realizing he was making an ass of himself. He had seen the shoot-down. They had not had time to send out a distress call. “Okay, but at some point someone is going to notice that the chopper hasn’t come back.”
“It is a one-man operation. It might take hours. By then, it’s all going to be over.”
“What’s all going to be over?”
“Whatever is going to happen now,” Seamus said. “Where the hell is Jones, by the way?”
“The guys who just shot you down are the rear guard. Jones is farther south. I’m happy to show you the way. But first may I suggest that we think about the ones who are actually shooting at us?”
As Richard was saying this, Seamus’s eyes wandered up the slope in the general direction of the bad guys in question. Then they snagged on something. “It looks like someone else is already on that particular case,” he pointed out. “Dead man walking.”
THE HIKE SOUTH to the border had involved a number of events that Ershut might have accounted disappointments, hardships, and setbacks had he grown up in an effete Western democracy. As it was, he could hardly be bothered to notice them. The only thing that had really disturbed him had been what had happened to poor Sayed. A long bloody trail through the woods had led to a small tree where Sayed’s body had been dragged up three meters off the ground and stuffed in a fork between two branches. His head lolled forward, nose pressed against breastbone, since all the structure had been removed from the back of his neck. A neat hole had been carved in the front of his abdomen and his liver removed. The very weirdness of the spectacle had made it much more troubling to him than the body of Zakir, who had expired in a way that was extremely bloody but much more conventional.