He then embarked on a retreat toward the edge of the woods. The fight had begun too soon: less than a minute since Jones and the main group had departed. They would come back, they would figure out where he was, and they would surround him. Given more time, Sokolov would have won the duel with the man hiding behind the outhouse. As it was, he had no choice but to make himself scarce in the most excellent hiding place he could find, and wait for them to move on.
On cue the other four jihadists came running back out of the woods firing undisciplined bursts. The man behind the outhouse called for a cease-fire and then stood up, exposing himself in a manner that verged on insolent. This man was both good and brave: he was daring Sokolov to take a shot at him and give away his position. Sokolov, inching out of the mining camp on his back, was tempted. But he was making an obvious track in the mud that they would soon find and follow. His only purpose for the next quarter of an hour was to get into the woods and run and hide. If he survived that, the jihadists would begin moving again, and his pursuit of them could resume.
THE SUV BOTTOMED out in a dip, angled sharply upward, and vaulted a sharp rise, nearly jumping into the air. In the same instant, they came in view of a wide spot, just ahead, where a smaller road forked off to the left and strayed up into the mountains. Two vehicles had taken advantage of this to pull over to the side of the road. One was the Subaru wagon they’d been tailing. The other was a dust-caked Camry. Both vehicles’ doors were hanging open, in perfect position for them to be sheared off by the bumper of the onrushing SUV. Men had emerged from both cars and were holding an impromptu conference around the back of the Camry. Some were looking at maps spread out on its rear window. One had a laptop open on the Subaru’s hood and was pointing something out to another. A man was pacing up and down the shoulder of the road, talking into a very large phone. No, on second thought that thing was a walkie-talkie. Most of them were smoking. There were at least eight of them—more than could be counted at a glance. All their heads turned to look in alarm at the SUV, which fishtailed wildly at the top of the rise as Csongor twitched the steering wheel. For a moment, nearly airborne, the big vehicle had practically no grip on the road. Then it slammed back down onto its suspension.
“Left!” Marlon shouted. “Go left!”
Csongor gunned it up the little road that forked off to the left. As they blew past the parked vehicles, Marlon gave them a cheerful grin and a friendly wave. These pleasantries were not returned. Csongor felt the tires losing traction for a moment as he shifted course, and all the muscles in his neck and back went hard as he imagined bullets coming in through the tailgate. But then they were on their way up the little side road, going considerably slower now as this one was even steeper, windier, and rougher than the one they’d just turned off of. “Just keep going,” Marlon said.
“I get it.”
“They have guns.”
Csongor turned to look at him. “You saw guns?”
“No. But when we came over the hill, their hands moved.” He pantomimed a jerk of the elbow, a reach of grasping fingers toward a concealed weapon.
“Crap. So now there’s, what, eight of them?”
“At least.”
“Where was that Toyota from?”
“Some place with a lot of dirt.”
Csongor had been gradually tapering the SUV’s speed down to little more than a walking pace. They had rapidly gained altitude and now found themselves creeping along the edge of a slope so steep that some might accuse it of being a cliff. In any case, it was too steep for trees to grow on, so Marlon now had an excellent view down toward the river and the main road that snaked along its bank. “Okay, they are moving again,” he announced, from this Olympian perspective.
“We must have spooked them.”
“We should turn around and go back,” Marlon said, “because this road goes friggin’ nowhere.”
But Csongor, lacking Marlon’s view to the side, had been scanning the territory ahead and begged to differ. “These roads are for the men who cut down the trees,” he said. He was unsure of the English term for that occupation, and even if he had known it, Marlon might not have recognized it. “They go all over the place.” And indeed, in another few hundred meters—once they had gotten clear of an out-thrust lobe of mountain that accounted for the steep slope—the road forked again, the left fork winding up a valley into the mountains, the right plunging downhill. Csongor took the latter. A few seconds later they passed through another such intersection and found themselves on a short spur that dropped straight down to rejoin the road along the river. Once again they were following a dust trail. But it was so dense now that they could not see more than a hundred or so meters into it; the Subaru and the Camry might be just ahead of them, easily close enough that they could shoot back out their windows and hit the SUV. Csongor had to steady his nerves by reminding himself that the dust was even thicker in the wake of those vehicles; they could peer back out their rear windows all they wanted, but they wouldn’t be able to see anything, not even a vehicle as big as this one.
Along a curve of the river they caught sight of the lead vehicle—the Camry—just a short distance ahead of them, and Marlon exhorted him to drop back a little bit, lest they be spotted.
“What the hell are we going to do when we get to the end of the road?” Csongor asked.
The question elicited a slack-jawed, distracted expression from Marlon. It occurred to Csongor that Marlon, born and raised in a colossal, densely packed city, had no instincts that were useful for being out in the middle of fucking nowhere.
“Hide,” Marlon said, “and wait for them to come back out. Then we follow them out. When we get to that town, we stop and call the cops.”
“We could just do that here.”
“There’s no place to hide here.” Marlon spoke an evident truth; the road was a narrow graveled ledge trapped between a mountain and a river.