Richard hugged Chet, trying to be gentle, but Chet hooked one arm around the nape of his neck and pulled him in tight, hard enough to press the claymore mine against his chest and scrape Richard’s face with his bloody whiskers. Then he let him go. Richard spun away and began to move south. His vision was fogged by tears, and he practically had to go on hands and knees to avoid turning an ankle on the strewn rocks.
He knew that Chet was correct about the range of the sniper’s rifle, and so his first instinct was to get out of the line of sight and of fire. This was easily enough done by taking advantage of the ruggedness of the terrain and occasional clusters of desperate trees. He wouldn’t be able to move freely, though, until he reached the edge of the woods, which was about half a mile down the slope. On his way up to Chet’s position, he had trudged and scrambled wearily up the broken and boulder-strewn terrain, various muscles screaming at him the whole way, since they had already taken enough abuse during the previous days’ hiking. He had taken a somewhat meandering course between areas of melting snow. Now it seemed to him that those snowfields would afford him a quick way down. Quick, and a little dangerous. But now that he had said good-bye to Chet, he was feeling an almost panicky imperative to work south and warn Jake, perhaps reconnecting with Zula en route. So he crab-walked to the edge of a large area of snow that sloped down all the way into the woods. His feet lost traction immediately. Rather than letting himself fall on his ass, though, he leaned forward carefully and allowed himself to skid down the slope on the soles of his boots, a procedure known as a standing glissade. Essentially he was skiing without skis. It was a common enough practice, when slope and conditions allowed it, and his involvement in the cat skiing industry had given him many opportunities to practice. He covered the distance to the tree line in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to pick his way down from rock to rock. En route he fell three times. The last fall was a deliberate plunge into a snowbank to kill his velocity before he slammed into the trees.
The snowbank was soft, and now sported a Richard-shaped depression that cradled his tired and battered body in a way that was extremely comfortable. The cold had not yet begun to soak through his clothing. He swiveled his head around and verified that the jihadists with the guns could not see him.
He was tempted to just lie there and take a nap. He stuffed a handful of snow into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. His heart had been beating very fast during the glissade, and he saw no harm in relaxing in this safe place for a few moments, pacing himself, giving his body a little rest, letting his pulse drop to a more moderate level.
Which it didn’t seem to be doing. He could feel a steady whomping in his chest and wondered if he was finally succumbing to some sort of cardiac arrhythmia.
But this seemed to be the opposite of that, since it had nothing but rhythm. Almost mechanical in its perfection. He pressed a hand to his chest under his left nipple and observed that this beating sensation had nothing to do with his heart.
It was coming from outside his body.
It was in the air all around him.
It was a helicopter.
He rolled up to his feet and staggered out into the open, waving his arms.
THE MOUNTAINS THAT now filled the windscreen, rising up from the flat valley to an altitude somewhere above their heads, looked familiar to Seamus. Not because he’d ever been here before; he hadn’t. But he had been in mountain ranges like these all over the world. These were the sorts of mountains that insurgents loved to hang out in.
Insurgents did not care for spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges. Snow impeded movement and implied harsh cold. “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance,” and insurgents did not like being seen. Insurgents liked mountain ranges that sprawled over large reaches of territory. That crossed national borders. That were high and rugged enough to discourage casual visitors and impede the operations of police and of military forces, but not so high as to be devoid of tree cover or bitterly cold all the time. Many of the features that tourists liked, insurgents found positively undesirable—most of all, the presence of tourists. But Seamus could see at a glance that tourists would not choose to visit these mountains when the Rockies were a few hours’ drive to the east and the Cascades an equal distance to the west. These were low, forgettable mountains, no good for skiing, carved up by logging roads, partly deforested in a way that provided employment to the locals but was considered unsightly by tourists.
No wonder all the right-wing wack jobs came here. No wonder smugglers loved it.