Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“No,” Randy says, taking another step towards Amy, and straddling the antitank mine. “The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So it was made by a white man who is an expert in the hunting practices of Northwest Indian tribes. What else do we know about him? That's he's really good at sneaking around in the jungle. And that he's so totally fucking crazy that even when he's been injured by a land mine, he's still crawling around in the undergrowth taking shots at people.” Randy's probing the riverbed as he's talking, and now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. “Not just anyone—he took a shot at Amy. Why? Because he's been watching. He saw Amy sitting next to me when we took that break, resting her head on my shoulder. He knows that if he wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is take a shot at her.”

“Why does he want to hurt you?” Enoch asks.

“Because he's evil.”

Enoch looks tremendously impressed.

“Well, who the hell is it?” Amy hisses. She's irritated now, which he takes to be a good sign.

“His name is Andrew Loeb,” Randy says. “And Jackie Woo and John Wayne are never going to find him.”

“Jackie and John are very good,” Doug demurs.

Another step. He can almost reach out and touch Amy. “That's the problem,” Randy says. “They're way too smart to run around in a minefield without probing every step. But Andrew Loeb doesn't give a shit. Andrew's totally out of his fucking mind, Doug. He's going to run around up there at will. Or crawl, or hop, or whatever. I'd wager that Andy with one foot blown off, and not caring whether he lives or dies, can move through a minefield faster than Jackie, when Jackie does care.”

Finally, Randy's there. He crouches down before Amy, who leans forward, places a hand on each of his shoulders, and rests her weight on him, which feels good. The end of her ponytail paints the back of his neck with warm river water. The arrow's practically in his face. Randy takes his multipurpose tool out and turns it into a saw and cuts through the shaft of the arrow while Amy holds it steady with one fist. Then Amy splays her hand out, winds up, screams in Randy's ear, and slams the butt of the shaft. It disappears into her leg. She collapses over Randy's back and sobs. Randy reaches around behind her leg, cuts his hand on the edge of the arrowhead, grabs the shaft and yanks it out.

“I don't see evidence of arterial bleeding,” says Enoch Root, who has a good view of her from behind.

Randy rises to his feet, lifting Amy into the air, collapsed over his shoulder like a sack of rice. He's embarrassed that Amy's body is basically shielding his from any further arrow attacks now. But she's making it clear that she's in no mood for walking.

The shade is only four steps away: shade, and shelter from above. “A land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?” Randy says. “If I step on one, it won't kill Amy.”

“Not one of your better ideas, Randy!” Doug shouts, almost contemptuously. “Just calm down and take your time.”

“I just want to know my options,” Randy says. “I can't poke around for mines while I'm carrying her.”

“Then I'll work my way over to you,” says Enoch Root. “Oh, to hell with it!” Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.

“Fucking amateurs!” Doug bellows. Enoch Root ignores him, squats down at Randy's feet and begins probing.

Doug rises up out of the stream onto a few boulders strewn along the bank. “I'm going to ascend the wall here,” he says, “and go up and reinforce Jackie. He and I'll find this Andrew Loeb together.” It's clear that “find” here is a euphemism for probably a long list of unpleasant operations. The bank is made of soft eroded stone with lumps of hard black volcanic rock jutting out of it frequently, and by clambering from one outcropping to the next, Doug is able to make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn't want to be the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe's daughter. Doug is stymied for a moment by the overhang; but by traversing the bank a short distance he's able to reach a tangle of tree roots that's almost as good as a ladder to the top.

“She's shivering,” Randy announces. “Amy's shivering.”

“She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high,” says Enoch Root. Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood-greased leg.

One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from place to place. The sound of a brook is made by patterns in the flow of water, and those patterns encode the presence of rocks on the streambed. Randy found in this an echo of the Palouse winds thing, and said so, and Goto Dengo either thought it was terribly insightful or else was being polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream to see that a man is standing in the water about a dozen feet away from them. The man has a shaved head that is sunburned as red as a three-ball. He's wearing what used to be a decent enough business suit, which has practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red mud, which has made it so heavy that it pulls itself all out of shape as he totters to a standing position. He's got a great big pole, a wizard's staff. He has planted it in the riverbed and is sort of climbing up it hand-over-hand. When he gets fully upright, Randy can see that his right leg terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out for a few inches. The bones are scorched and splintered. Andrew Loeb has fashioned a tourniquet from sticks and a hundred-dollar silk necktie that Randy's pretty sure he has seen in the windows of airport duty-free shops. This has throttled back the flow of blood from the end of his leg to a rate comparable to what you would see coming out a Mr. Coffee during its brew cycle. Once Andy has gotten himself fully upright, he smiles brightly and begins to move towards Randy and Amy and Enoch, hopping on his intact leg and using the wizard's staff to keep from falling down. In his free hand he is carrying a great big knife: Bowie-sized, but with all of the extra spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and other features that go into a really top-of-the-line fighting and survival knife.

Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all of a sudden, that he's got the mental stance now. But he doesn't have the means.

And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to have the means.

Andy's looking him right in the eye and smiling at him, precisely the same smile you would see on the face of some old acquaintance you had just accidentally run into on an airport concourse. As he approaches, he's kind of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip for whatever kind of attack he's about to make. It is this detail that finally breaks Randy out of his trance and causes him to shrug Amy off and drop her into the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step forward and plants his wizard's staff, which suddenly flies into the air like a rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills in, of course. Now Andy's standing there like a stork, having miraculously kept his balance. He bends his one remaining knee and hops towards Randy, then does it again. Then he is dead and toppling backwards and Randy is deaf, or maybe it happens in some other order. Enoch Root has become a column of smoke with a barking, spitting white fire in the center. Andrew Loeb has become a red, comet-shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a single arm thrust out of the water, a French cuff that is still uncannily white, a cuff link shaped like a little honey bee, and a spindly fist gripping the huge knife.