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.