Csongor. Peter. Yuxia. Even Sokolov. Whenever her mind went back over those events in Xiamen it snagged on those names, those faces. The mere fact of Peter’s death would have prostrated her for a week in normal circumstances. She was now asking herself a hundred times a day what had become of the others. Were any of them alive? If so, were they wondering what had become of Zula?
What had become of Zula: this would have required considerable explanation, much of which Zula was not competent to supply, since they weren’t telling her much. Circumstantial evidence (the key chain flailing from the ignition) made it clear that this strange truck with tank treads had been carjacked, as opposed to hot-wired. It seemed simplest to assume that the person they’d stolen it from was dead; it would have been crazy for them to leave the victim alive to call the Mounties. What kind of person drove such a vehicle around in the mountains of British Columbia during the mud season? It was quite obviously a working, not a recreational, vehicle and so Zula guessed it must be some sort of a caretaker or property manager. Perhaps that mine was not as abandoned as they had supposed; perhaps a number of such properties were spread around those mountains and they hired a local jack-of-all-trades to look in on each one of them from time to time.
The question on Jones’s mind must then be: How long would it take for his victim to go missing? Because this contraption that they were driving around in was about the most conspicuous vehicle imaginable, short of a Zeppelin, and having five jihadists and a black girl crammed into it was not going to make it any easier to blend in with ordinary traffic on the byways of British Columbia.
At about three in the afternoon, according to the dashboard clock, they stopped at a place where they could look for miles down a mostly barren, rock-strewn valley. A broad stream ran down the middle of it, many braided channels finding their way across an expanse of glacier-dropped stones. Running roughly parallel to the watercourse, on its right, was a paved road that, several miles down-valley, hopped over the river on a low bridge. They were still in the forest; for the last two hours they had been traveling at little better than a walking pace, smashing down any foliage that could not stand up to the truck’s inexorable advance, diverting around any trees that were too large to knock over, sometimes traversing slopes so steep that Zula braced her hands against the ceiling, ready for the truck to roll over sideways, sometimes avalanching down slopes so steep that little could grow on them. The front end of the truck looked like the inside of a lawn mower, covered with inches of mulch and mud. They had approached this place by following the course of a tributary, sometimes driving right down the middle of the stream and sometimes nosing up into the surrounding woods. They had now stopped at the edge of the trees. Before them the ground dropped away sharply, the tributary leaping down a succession of rapids and waterfalls to the place where it joined in with the larger river. The truck might have survived the plunge to the bottom, and had it survived, it might have been able to make it to the road and go a few more miles before running out of fuel. But if, as seemed likely, it got stuck in boulders or wrecked itself during the descent, it would have been marooned in a place that was utterly exposed to view from the road and from the air. Best to leave it here. Or this was what Zula surmised must be going on in Jones’s mind. He shifted it into reverse and backed it deeper into the trees, then killed the engine.
Apparently this was not the first time that the jihadists had camouflaged a vehicle in mountains. Leaving Zula inside for the time being, they smeared mud over all of its windows and mirrors and any other parts that were capable of reflecting a gleam of sunlight. They unloaded some of the gear from the back—just what they could carry under their own power. They foraged through the woods for ferns and huckleberry bushes and cedar fronds, which they uprooted or hacked off, dragged over, and leaned and stacked around the truck’s sides. At some point, they remembered that Zula was still in there, so they extracted her through the cab’s sliding rear window and dragged her back straight to the open tailgate, many hands on her arms and ankles, trying to stifle even the mere thought of fighting or running. Ershut bent over and braced both hands against her right leg, and Abdul-Wahaab wrapped a chain around her ankle and then snapped a padlock into place. She was shooed and chivied back off the edge of the tailgate and onto the ground behind the truck. The chain was looped around part of the trailer hitch.
There followed one of those comical interludes in which the jihadists were confused about what to do next and fell to bitter recriminations.
It seemed that they were short one padlock. At some point during their scrounging activities around the mining camp they had found this length of chain, and at some other point they had found this padlock and the key that went with it. So they could lock the chain around her ankle. Fine. But they were now wanting the second padlock that was needed to connect the other end of the chain to the trailer hitch. Some of them shouted at each other, some of them rummaged aimlessly through all the piles of junk that they had scrounged.
Ershut said, “It’s not a problem, we can do it with one padlock. Look, I’ll show you.”
He said it in Arabic.
Zula understood it.
Interesting.
Other men might have gathered round to see Ershut’s cleverness, but these guys were all pursuing their own strategies. In the back of the pickup was a toolbox, secured with another padlock, and Abdallah Jones was going through the key chain, apparently on the reasonable assumption that it might contain the key needed to open this thing.