“What about the man-eating lion?” Yuxia put in.
“Fuck!” Seamus said, and then immediately felt bad since it made Yuxia flinch. “I don’t know. I’ll warn the pilot. Tell him to keep the door closed.”
A moment passed.
“What are you guys waiting for?” Seamus asked.
JUST BEFORE AWAKENING, she had dreamed of the flight from Eritrea, the six-month barefoot march into the Sudan and the quest for a refugee camp willing to take her group. The faces had faded from her memory, but the landscape, the vegetation, the feel of the march had stayed with her and become the continuo line underlying many of her dreams. Usually it was northern Eritrea, which they had marched through during the first days of the journey, when her mind had been fully open to the new sights and impressions that, once they hiked free of the caves in which she had spent her earliest years, seemed to present themselves to her every moment. The terrain was endless brown hills separated by the arroyos of seasonal streams and barely misted with scrubby vegetation. Nothing like the terrain she was running through now, densely grown with huge cedars and carpeted with ferns. But she knew that if she gained enough altitude, she would find herself in territory like what she and Chet had traveled through yesterday: steep, wide-open country where you could see for miles. And going there was not optional. If she stayed to the low moist valley of the river that flowed south from American Falls, it would lead her off in the wrong direction, taking her down into the basin of a major lake system that drained southward. It might be two days’ hiking down into those lakes before she could reach a place where she could summon help. To reach Uncle Jake’s, she would have to climb out of the valley and above the tree line to the lower reaches of Abandon Mountain, which she would have to traverse for several miles until she came to the headwaters of Prohibition Crick. That bit, she already knew, was going to be the desperate part: that was where she’d have to summon whatever it was the leaders of her refugee group had summoned on the worst days of their trek, when they were tired, short on food and water, and being pursued by men with guns.
The only thing that was going to make it possible was that she had a head start. The jihadists would have to climb farther out of the valley than she would. Even so, it was a long climb; and she feared that they would be able to narrow the gap, or even catch up with her, before she broke out above the tree line and into country where it would be impossible to hide.
So there was only one thing for it, and that was to run like hell and not stop for anything. She had grabbed all the water she had—the CamelBak pilfered from the Schloss, about three-quarters full—and as many energy bars as she could stuff into her pockets, and then simply lit out in the direction Richard had indicated. Down below, the jihadists were making it easy for her by shouting to one another and communicating on loud walkie-talkies.
Her first objective—which she achieved perhaps half an hour after parting from Richard—was to make contact with a trail that switchbacked up out of the gorge. The idea of following a marked trail was ridiculous in a way, since the jihadists would use the same route, and therefore be on her tail the entire way. But the terrain left no choice; the slope seemed nearly vertical when viewed from below, and it was a wildly uneven jumble of fallen, rotting logs. To bushwhack to the top would have taken days, if it were possible at all. Switchbacking up the trail, Richard had assured her, could be done in hours by a man carrying heavy cargo on his back.
She didn’t reckon she had hours.
She slammed to a halt when the trail came into view, then retreated several paces and squatted in ferns to listen and think for a moment. While she was doing that, she sucked water out of the tube of the CamelBak and forced herself to eat a food bar. The sounds being made by the jihadists had become fainter during her run, which was of course better than the alternative, but still no reason to relax. If they knew what was good for them, they were talking less and running more, working their way down the bank of the river and looking for the head of this trail, just a few hundred yards below where she was now perched.
She had been peeling off layers as she ran, tying them around her waist, and was now dressed in a black tank top and cargo pants with the legs rolled up to expose her calves. She understood now that she would have to discard the outer layers. They would do nothing but slow her down. And they were bright pastel colors that could be seen for miles. The Girl Scout in her was screaming that it was a bad idea, that she’d become hypothermic the moment she stopped running.