DURING THE QUARTER of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age. These ruminations were triggered by all that he had done in the last half hour or so. He had created an effigy, seen it shot to pieces, run across a big rock, and then made a helter-skelter descent of a large open slope. Twenty times he had dived and rolled into cover on a surface consisting largely of big sharp rocks, each of which had left some kind of mark on him, some of which had inflicted bone bruises that would take weeks to get better. Another twenty times he had dived and rolled in ice-cold mud. He had sprinted into an unfamiliar abandoned mining camp with no idea of what he was going to do, then found an ideal place to take cover and taken advantage of it. He had rested there for all of about three minutes before blowing it by shooting the tall African jihadist, whereupon he had been obliged to abandon the position and go into another intense fugue of running, diving, vaulting, rolling, and hiding in uncomfortable places.
All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes.
Now, had he been a seventeen-year-old, he’d have harbored foolish and unrealistic expectations of what could really be achieved in a situation such as this one, and he’d have believed that the payoff for all that work and risk and pain ought to have been greater than bagging one enemy. Driven by that misconception, he would have been slower to abandon the log cabin, slower to give up on the hope of shooting the man who had hidden behind the outhouse. He would have adopted a combative stance toward the main group of jihadists who had come running back to the camp. As a result, they would have surrounded him and killed him. All because he was young and imbued with an unrealistic sense of what the world owed him.
On the other hand, had he been a few years older than he really was, or not in such good physical condition, then all the running and diving and exposure to the elements would have felt much more expensive to him. Unsustainable. Disheartening. And those emotions would have led to his making decisions every bit as fatal, in the end, as those of the hypothetical seventeen-year-old.
So, as loath as he was to be self-congratulatory, he saw evidence to support the conclusion that he was at precisely the right age and level of physical conditioning to be undertaking this mission.
Which, viewed superficially, seemed like a favorable judgment. But with a bit more consideration—and, as he hid beneath the tree and listened to the jihadists beating the bushes, he did have a few minutes to think about it—it was really somewhat troubling, since it implied that all the operations he had participated in during his career before today had been undertaken by a foolish boy, in over his head and surviving by dumb luck. Whereas any operations he might carry out in the future would be ill-advised excursions by a man who was over the hill, past his prime.
He really needed to get out of this line of work.
But he’d been saying that ever since Afghanistan, and look where it had gotten him.
After a while, he heard Jones calling out to the others, telling them to give up the search. The need to press on outweighed the desire to take vengeance on the man who was stalking them. Sokolov waited until he could no longer hear the jihadists moving around, then emerged from his cover very carefully, beginning with a quick bob of the head followed by an immediate retreat. When several such ventures failed to draw fire, he began to feel some confidence that they had not left anyone behind to kill him when he emerged from cover, and he moved more freely. But he had the uncomfortable sense that they were now way ahead of him, and he began to consider how he could make up for lost time. Jones and his crew had made the decision to move through the forest, which was slower than going across the high country above the tree line, and so an obvious way that Sokolov might make up for lost time would be to go back into the mining camp and then continue to move through the scrubland just outside the limit of the trees.
This involved some slogging, since the ground here at the base of the slope was saturated with runoff. After several minutes of slow progress, he was reminded of his foolishness by a sound from high above: scraping and banging rocks. He went into the best cover he could find, which was a clump of bushes that seemed to thrive in the boggy soil, and then looked up in time to see a minor avalanche petering out on the talus slope, perhaps a thousand meters above him: just a few rocks that had been dislodged by someone or something and tumbled for a short distance before coming to rest. This gave him an idea of where he should look, so he swung his rifle up and peered through its scope, starting at the place where the rocks had stopped moving and then tilting up until he could see the faint horizontal scar of the trail. With a bit of panning sideways, he was confronted with the arresting sight of a man, sitting on the ground, and aiming a rifle right back at him! His first reaction was to flinch and get deeper into cover, which caused him to lose the sight picture. Even as he was doing so, however, his mind was processing what he had glimpsed and noting a few peculiarities.
Chief of these was that the rifle’s bolt handle had been jutting perpendicularly out from the side of the weapon, which meant that it was not in condition to fire.
And—unless his memory was playing tricks—the man had been holding the weapon oddly. His right hand was not where it ought to have been—not in a position to pull the trigger.
Slightly emboldened by these recollections, he reacquired the sight picture and verified it all. This time, as soon as he had the other man in his sights, the guy pulled his head away from his scope, revealing a European-looking face. Not that this proved anything. But there was something in the set of that face that did not say “paleface jihadist.”
This guy, whoever he was, was on Sokolov’s side. He had seen Sokolov from above, probably tracked him through his telescopic sight, and identified him as a friendly. He had triggered the little avalanche as a way of getting Sokolov’s attention. And he now wanted to communicate.
He grinned and looked off to the side. A moment later his face was joined by that of a young Asian female.
Very familiar-looking.