He thrust the rifle up into the air with his good arm. “Shoot him,” he said. “Shoot Abdallah Jones.”
CSONGOR MOVED FORWARD cautiously to see whether he had managed to hit the man with the submachine gun. He heard a slight rustle and looked over to see Abdallah Jones, just standing there looking at him. Csongor moved his pistol around to bear on Jones. Jones brought a Kalashnikov around and aimed it at Csongor, at the same moment.
The range was greater than Csongor was comfortable with. His hands were shaking.
“You,” Jones said. “If it were anyone else, I’d have already pulled the trigger. As it is, I’m just standing here dumbfounded. How the hell, Csongor? It is Csongor, right?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“The story is complicated.”
“Shame, that. Because I really would love to hear it. But there is, of course, no time.” He raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder.
A crack sounded from off to the side. The sniper again. Jones looked in that direction, but showed no ill effects; the sniper had somehow missed.
Csongor dropped to the ground and began firing blindly through foliage.
Several rounds came back in his general direction, but this was nothing more than Jones firing to keep Csongor’s head down. It worked. The next time Csongor felt brave enough to lift his head, Jones was nowhere to be seen.
From over near the cabin, he heard the drone of a small engine starting up.
He stood to see Jones astride an all-terrain vehicle. Jones spent a few moments figuring out the controls, then got the thing turned around and headed around the side of the house, trying to make it out to the road.
SOKOLOV WAS IN worse pain than he’d ever experienced, and he reckoned that he might lose the leg before this was all over. Had even considered pulling out his knife and self-amputating. Other than that, however, he was not doing that badly. No bullets had struck him. He had not suffered serious trauma during the collapse of the sleeping porch. The actual deck of the porch, which had thudded into the ground right next to him—a blunt guillotine blade that would have pinched him in half, had he landed wrong—had formed a pocket; all the logs and other debris that had rained down on top had been held up above the ground by its planking, which had been crumpled and compressed but not altogether driven into the ground.
So he was fine. He just couldn’t move. The heap of logs provided several large apertures through which he could look out and view his surroundings, and he had experimented with aiming the rifle through these. But no targets had presented themselves.
Until, that is, he heard the ATV starting up.
He could not actually see the ATV—his view in that direction was blocked by a sizable chunk of the cabin’s roof—and so he assumed that this was Jake, come back to reclaim his vehicle.
It idled for a few moments. The driver revved its motor and put it into gear, then began to ride it around the side of the cabin, circumventing the debris pile in which Sokolov was trapped.
Through a gap between logs Sokolov caught a brief glimpse of the driver’s head. Jones.
He thrashed around, sending a shocking wave of pain up his leg, and twisted into a position from which he could fire the rifle through another gap. He expected that Jones would be passing by very soon.
Which Jones obligingly did, and Sokolov pulled the trigger a few times as the vehicle came into view.
The engine stopped with a mechanical crunch, and Jones cursed. Unfortunately the vehicle’s momentum had carried it out of Sokolov’s sight. He heard Jones climbing off and unlimbering his Kalashnikov. The end of the weapon’s barrel appeared for a moment, silhouetted on the edge of Sokolov’s aperture.
But the gunshots that he heard next were not Kalashnikov rounds fired from nearby, but pistol shots from a greater distance. Not just one, but two pistols firing round after round.
TOTALLY EXPOSED AT the base of the rubble pile, harassed by poorly aimed rounds from faraway pistols, unable to seek cover in the log heap because he knew that an armed man was lurking back in there, Jones rolled to his feet and broke into a run, heading away from the cabin, back the way he had come. When it became obvious what he was doing, Yuxia broke from cover and went charging after him, screaming curses and firing the pistol wildly until it was out of ammunition. But by that time, Jones had disappeared into the forest at the base of the hill.