Zula looked back and nodded.
“He never intended for things to get quite so fouled up,” Olivia said, returning to the topic of Sokolov. “Was keeping an eye on you. Didn’t want you hurt.”
“I had sort of gotten that vibe, but it was hard to tell.”
“Then, when Jones entered the picture, I’m afraid our man Sokolov took it quite personally. In other words, I don’t think it’s about you anymore.”
“I’m perfectly happy for it not to be about me.”
“All right then, are you ready?”
“I guess so,” Zula said, though in truth she could hardly have been more exhausted.
“One good push over the top.” And Olivia began churning her feet in the scree, setting off little avalanches that Zula had to hop over. Their progress through this last exposed bit was probably not as nimble or as quick as Olivia had pictured, and Zula, becoming stuck at one point, risked a look back and verified that they were now in view of the tree line again. But the distance was so great that the shot would have been impossible without a scoped rifle, and the shooters down there seemed to have become thoroughly demoralized by Sokolov’s policy of firing high-velocity rounds down into their muzzle flashes. The next time Zula glanced back, all she could see was rocks, and then she and Olivia enjoyed a fairly easy scramble up a little chute and out onto the broad and generally flat top of this giant outcropping.
Until now Zula had had only a vague idea of where she was on the larger map, which had been fine since she’d had very little leisure to think about grand strategy. But from here the whole thing became plain. Abandon Mountain was at her back. Looking outward and down over the territory from which she had just ascended, she was facing generally west. Off to the right, a few miles away, was the ridge through which she and Chet had passed yesterday via the old mining tunnels. To her left, a long, gently curving talus slope spanned a distance of a couple of miles to a long ridge thrown out southward from the mountain. She knew from Richard’s description that if she traversed that slope and popped up over that ridge she would descend into the valley of Prohibition Crick and find Jake’s place.
She collected all these impressions while following Olivia, at an exhausted, shambling pace, across the top of the rock toward the precipitous edge from which Sokolov had been shooting at the jihadists. The farther Olivia went, the more she tended to hunch over, then crouch, then crawl. Deeply tired of such inefficient forms of locomotion, Zula balked at going farther. She advanced slowly to the point where she would have to begin crawling on hands and knees, then stopped and squatted on her haunches, stretching out her wrecked thigh muscles and her calves. About thirty feet away she could see the soles of Sokolov’s boots, heels up and toes down, as he lay prone at the cliff edge, peering through the scope of a tricked-out AR-15 rifle that looked oddly similar to the one Peter had kept in his safe. Olivia was lying on her side next to him, talking into his ear, and he was nodding and making little remarks back to her. Something in Olivia’s body language—the almost total relaxation with which she lay next to him—told Zula that she was watching a sort of intimate moment, which made her feel awkward. But after a few moments, Olivia began to inchworm back from the precipice, and Sokolov turned his head and gazed back at Zula with his blue eyes. An American would have made some sentimental gesture here, made it mawkish, but Sokolov contented himself with the tiniest nod and a suggestion of a wink. Zula responded by raising her hand and twitching her fingers in a suggestion of a wave. This was plenty for Sokolov, who snapped his head back around and returned to his occupation.
Olivia led her to a place where she and Sokolov had stashed a couple of mountain bikes. These were loaded with gear, much of which was now irrelevant—or perhaps of greater use to Sokolov than to them. All of this Olivia stripped off and left lying on the ground. They had come well supplied with water and food, a good deal of which went into Zula’s mouth while Olivia was sorting through the rest. A first aid kit contained some over-the-counter painkillers, which Zula consumed at greater than the recommended dosage. Olivia helped Zula adjust the height of her seat post—she was apparently going to use what had been Sokolov’s bicycle—and led her on a short ride up this outflung spur of rock toward the summit of the mountain. In a minute or so they came to a place where they could ramp down onto the faintest trace of a trail that tracked horizontally across the talus slope in the direction they wanted to go.