She would find out soon enough. When the cops came and turned this place upside down—which she assumed had to happen sooner or later—they’d certainly find her letter. This improved her mood greatly, since she had been fretting the last day or two about the hell her extended family must be going through. They would continue in that state of unendurable not-knowing until the snow melted and the plane was exposed. Someone would notice it. Maybe in a month and maybe in a year. But the letter would ultimately be found and her family would be able to read it and understand what had happened and grieve properly and, she hoped, be proud of her.
They let her out of the room, apparently with the expectation that she’d be happy to prepare breakfast for them. She pretended that this was the case. But it was not until everyone had eaten and she was cleaning things up that the sky grew bright enough to let her see outside and get a load of the vehicle that Jones and Abdul-Wahaab had stolen.
From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth-wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.
The whole time that she was tending to food, Jones’s crew were spreading out all the gear that they had brought with them, and everything that they had scavenged from the plane and from the mining camp, and making decisions about what to take and how to pack it. Guns and ammunition seemed to get first priority, followed by warm clothing and blankets. Blue tarps and ropes were deemed of inestimable value; perhaps they’d be camping? They seemed to have a passion for shovels, a detail that she could not help but interpret in the most morbid way possible.
The truck was a crew cab model, meaning that it had a second row of seats. They put Zula in the back, sandwiched between Sharif on her left and Mahir on her right. She felt strangely awkward coming between them, as if committing a social faux pas. But perhaps Jones was fed up with their clinginess and wanted them apart. Ershut rode shotgun and Abdul-Wahaab was squeezed into the middle of the front seat. Jones drove. Zula couldn’t help but think that they would be just a little conspicuous rumbling around British Columbia in this contraption with that particular lineup of faces glaring out the windshield.
But that wouldn’t even be an issue until they actually made it down to a road; and this did not look like it was happening any time soon. During whatever escapades that he and Abdul-Wahaab had enjoyed yesterday, Jones had learned how to drive the thing and had satisfied himself that if he shifted it into a sufficiently low gear (and this truck had some extremely low gears), it would go anywhere. Once the truck was packed, they headed up the valley, avoiding its sloped walls and sticking to its bottom, which was flat, but sinuous and multiforked. Jones seemed to be playing a connect-the-dots game on the map. Every few hundred meters was a cleared area, and these were strung together by a road. Or at least by a lane that had been bulldozed through the trees. The road and the cleared sites were marked on a survey map, which Abdul-Wahaab had spread out on his lap, the better for Jones to follow it. Zula caught glimpses of it during their frequent and voluble disputes as to its interpretation. At one point Jones pointed out the windshield into the sky and glared expectantly into the face of Abdul-Wahaab, and Zula understood that he was pointing out the location of the sun, as a trump card.
They fetched up parallel to a mountain stream, mostly buried under ice with snow on it. In some places it was open to the sky, and there it was possible to see that it was running broad and shallow, easily fordable by the truck. They rumbled and juddered across it, crept up its bank for half a mile, then struck out in what seemed to Zula like a random direction, plowing directly into the woods and attacking a steep uphill slope as a way of getting out of this valley. Tree branches were pushed out of the way by the windshield, bending back until they either snapped off or else whipped in through the open driver’s-side window where Jones had to beat them back with his left arm. She wondered why he would not simply roll up the window until she noticed little blue cubes of safety glass that had been sprayed all over the cab, and understood that the glass had been shattered. It seemed obvious enough that this must have happened when they were stealing the truck yesterday. She hoped that they had merely punched out the window so that they could get in and hot-wire it. Then she noted a key chain dangling from its ignition. They must have stolen it from a person who had been driving it. They must have killed that person.