The men were running back and forth between it and the Suburban, moving cargo. Someone started the Suburban and drove it up alongside to expedite matters.
It took them no more than a quarter of an hour to get the gear sorted and then she heard the RV’s engine start up, far ahead, at the opposite end. For this was some kind of a huge RV, one of those bus-length retirement-homes-on-wheels. It began to move across the gravel, slowly as the driver got the feel of it, then picking up speed. She heard the Suburban falling into formation behind and gave up on any thoughts of trying to kick out the rear window.
Only after they had been on the road for half an hour did Ershut come back and remove her gag. Air rushed into her mouth, greatly improving her sense of smell, and she got an unmistakable scent of blood—the cabin in the jet, Khalid bleeding out on the floor.
“Hold still,” Ershut said in Arabic, then cut through the lashings of duct tape around her arms and wrists. “Okay.” Then he walked out of the room, leaving its door open.
Zula devoted a few minutes to getting her blindfold and her leg tape off and kicked off the urine-soaked sleeping bag. It took her eyes a few minutes to work properly again, but when she could see, she saw Mahir and Sharif on hands and knees in the RV’s kitchen area, using rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of 409 to clean blood off its white linoleum floor.
TOWARD THE END of the long day’s drive, there had been an interlude that had posed Zula with a minor brainteaser. The Suburban had been cruising down a highway for some time. She could tell it was a two-laner because of the sound made by oncoming vehicles as they zoomed by a few feet away, and by the fact that it wound from side to side more than a freeway. But at one point they had slowed down, without turning off the road, and descended a long straight slope, losing speed the whole way, and finally come to a halt, still sloping downhill. Nothing had happened for a quarter of an hour or so. Then she had heard the engines of other cars and trucks starting up all around. A series of vehicles had passed them coming up the other way. The Suburban had descended some distance farther, then leveled out, clanking over steel plates, and then parked again. Presently a deep rumbling had started and continued for twenty minutes or so.
By this time, Zula had figured out that they were on a ferry. The obvious conclusion would have been that they were headed over to Vancouver Island. But she’d been on those ferries before and she knew that they were gigantic and that the land approaches to their sprawling terminals would have felt and sounded different. They must be on something smaller. And indeed the crossing had not lasted long, and soon the engines of the Suburban and of the other vehicles around them had started up again and they had ascended up a long gentle slope, building speed as it turned back into a highway.
During the visit that she and Peter had made to B.C., she had learned that the southern part of the province sported a number of long, skinny, deep lakes, oriented north-south, presumably gouges left in the earth by glaciers during the most recent Ice Age. They were too long to dodge around and too wide to bridge, so the east-west highways ran right up to them and stopped and then started again on the opposite side. The dead ends were connected by small ferries.