RELUCTANT AS SHE was to give the jihadists credit for anything, Zula had to admit that they showed commendable restraint when it came to talking on the radio. Perhaps it was a Darwinian selection thing. All the jihadists who failed to observe radio silence had been vaporized by drone strikes.
There was no walkie-talkie or phone chatter from the time Jones left the camp with his three comrades until two and a half hours later, when Ershut and Jahandar trudged up the hill, looking winded but satisfied. In the meantime, the other members of the expedition—everyone except for Zakir and Sayed—breakfasted, prayed, and packed. The latter activity seemed to consume a great deal of emotional energy. It looked like every family-leaving-on-vacation meshuggas Zula had ever witnessed in the developed world, blended with a healthy dollop of desperate-refugees-striking-out-for-Sudan. The only thing missing was yelping dogs and crying kids. These men were not being helped any by the fact that each of them was obliged to carry lots of weapons. Washing the dishes and tidying the kitchen area at the base of her tree, Zula had a central viewpoint on the resulting arguments and the ruthless prioritization that flowed from them. It all seemed to come down to: pound for pound, what would kill the largest number of people? Bricks of plastic explosive ended up being given high priority. Guns too were highly thought of. Ammunition, somewhat less so; it seemed that they were expecting to purchase a lot of it in the States. Which Zula had to grant was a very reasonable plan. Unless their weapons used really weird bullets, they’d be able to pick up everything they needed in sporting goods emporia. Bullets, being made of lead, were heavy; and it seemed that heaviness was very much on their minds as they hoisted their packs off the ground, staring off into the distance, thinking about what it would be like to carry this up and down mountains for several days.
In another sample of the weird and profoundly distasteful emotional involvement that had been coming over her of late, Zula actually became anxious that they wouldn’t be ready in time. She didn’t think she had Stockholm syndrome yet, but she was beginning to understand how people got that way.
In any case, Ershut and Jahandar trudged back into the camp to find their comrades perhaps 75 percent finished with packing; and the intensity of their outrage was sufficient to make the remaining 25 percent come together rapidly. Even so, a quarter of an hour must have expired before the others were ready. During that interval, Zula was, for lack of a better word, exhibited. Ershut was the custodian of the keys. He opened the padlock that secured the end of the chain around the tree, then used it as a very long and heavy dog-leash to prevent Zula from straying as he led her down the hill for a short distance. Below their campsite, but above the uppermost reaches of the plank-avalanche, a lump of granite, about the size of a two-story house, protruded from the slope. It saw, and could be seen from, much of the valley below. Much of the Blue Fork’s course could be seen from it, beginning in talus-and snow-covered mountains some miles to the south, or left, and running beneath the cliffs of Bayonet Ridge, directly below, to its junction with the White Fork at the Schloss, off to the right. The slope was heavily forested, but when the angles were right, it was possible to get a clear view of the road and of the turnaround at its end.
Standing in the middle of the turnaround were three men. She could not really see faces at this distance, but she knew them from their shapes as Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, and Uncle Richard. And she knew that they could see her.
A childish thrill shot down her arm, telling her to raise it and wave at her uncle. She controlled that impulse and lost sight of the men below through a screen of tears. Turning her back on her uncle in shame, she began to trudge back to the campsite, heedless of the tug of the chain. Ershut let her go and locked her back up and left her to sit at the base of the tree, curled up and sobbing. A pathetic state of affairs. But better than she deserved. She had just betrayed her own uncle. He was now in the power of men who would certainly kill him as soon as he was no longer useful.
SOKOLOV HAD A moment’s irrational fear that he was never going to strike the water, but he mastered the urge to look down, since this would have led to getting punched in the face by the ocean. He wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. He kept his toes pointed and his ankles together, not wanting any water hammer effects on his testicles either, and then suddenly there was a shock in his legs and a searing whoosh immediately snuffed out by a deep mechanical throb: the screws of the freighter, churning away just behind him. An old habit told him that he should begin swimming now. But he was zipped up from ankles to neckline in an orange survival suit that knew how to find the surface. He waited. The frigid water, churned into a foaming sluice by the screws, streamed over him.
His head broke the surface and he was breathing again. To get his bearings, he spun in place, treading water as best he could in the unwieldy suit, until he could see the transom of the freighter receding. It was already impressively far away.
He turned his head to the right and saw what he’d seen a few seconds earlier from the ship’s fantail: brassy light reflecting against the underside of low clouds. The lights of a city, and perhaps of an impending sunrise. Brighter, sharper lights gleamed along a slope perhaps a kilometer distant, a bluff rising out of the sea, carpeted with trees but densely settled with houses, and a few big avenues aglow with the logos of strip malls and fast-food places.