It might have made sense, then, for them to have kept a sharp eye behind them as they descended the ridgeline in the light of the early morning. But two things fixed their attention forward. One, a fusillade of gunshots that echoed from valley walls all around shortly after they began their hike. And two, a man lurking on a boulder down below them, occasionally visible for a few moments when he came awake and peeked over the top with binoculars. Jahandar occasionally drew a bead on this fellow through the telescopic sight of his rifle and reported that he did not seem to be armed. He was drunk or otherwise impaired, lying still for long periods of time and then moving about unsteadily. Jahandar might have set himself up in a sniper’s perch and then waited for a good shot to come along and gotten rid of this man before they came anywhere near him, but the man seemed so helpless that there did not seem to be a compelling reason to do so. Perhaps they could get some information out of him when they descended to his altitude.
That discussion, anyway, was cut short by the approach of the helicopter and all that happened after Jahandar fired upon it. To their considerable frustration, it slid out of direct view, and so it was not possible for them to see if any had survived, or to fire upon them. First they would have to shed a good deal of altitude. They began to do so as quickly as they could manage, throwing off their packs to give themselves greater freedom of movement and hopping from rock to rock, occasionally surfing on small avalanches that they touched off in steep patches of finer-grained scree. Their general plan was that Jahandar would hang back and try to work around into a position where he could cover the downed helicopter; Ershut, who was carrying a submachine gun that would be effective only at much shorter ranges, would get down closer until he had reached a point where he could shoot from another direction. Once Ershut opened fire, the survivors—again, assuming that there were any—would naturally move into positions of cover, hiding behind rocks or trees, and Jahandar would be able to pick them off from his place of concealment high in the rocks. It was difficult to judge the direction from which sniper fire was arriving, so it was likely that they would all be dead long before they could figure out where Jahandar was—or even come to the understanding that they were being shot at from another direction.
So intent was Ershut on executing his part of the plan that he quite forgot about the strange loiterer with the binoculars until he had descended to near the bloodstained boulder where the man had been hanging out. But he was not there now. What had seemed from high above like a single piece of rock was actually an outcropping of stone that had been shivered into a number of huge slab-sided chunks that had tumbled onto the slope below, forming a little debris trail. Ershut recognized this as a convenient place for him to make his way down the slope without exposing himself to view from below, and he traversed over to it.
And that was when he realized that the man in the black leather clothing had not gone down the hill to investigate the chopper crash but merely concealed himself in a space between two of the boulders. The man came out as Ershut approached, holding his hands up above his head to show that he was unarmed.
He looked almost more horrible than Sayed. Sayed, at least, had been dead, and therefore in a state of repose. There had been no worries that Sayed was going to climb down out of his tree and advance upon them. But this man was staggering toward Ershut with a huge grin on his face. One side of him was all bloody, and his skin would have seemed white had Ershut not been seeing it against a background of snow; instead his flesh looked gray.
The man was saying something in English, which Ershut barely spoke at all. As he raved, he staggered forward, one unsteady pace at a time, closing the distance. Ershut was not especially troubled by this since the man was still a few meters away, and still keeping his hands up, and Ershut was covering him with the barrel of the submachine gun. He rather wished that the man would stop, however, simply because there was something disturbing about his color and the look on his face and the way he was talking.
Ershut glanced down the slope, trying to get a view of the crashed chopper. He could see the bent-back tips of rotor blades dangling above the end of the long skid mark in the snow. People were definitely moving around down there, looking up at him.
The gray man said something about America.