Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The whole northwestern third of British Columbia seemed to lie above the Canadian IZ and below the American, and this was where Abdallah Jones seemed to be focusing all of his attention. At a glance it appeared to be impossibly mountainous and desolate, but since this was an air chart, very few features were labeled, roads didn’t appear, and towns were not marked unless they sported significant runways. So maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Khalid’s attention span did not seem to extend beyond about thirty seconds, and so it was his lot to roll his eyes and sigh hopelessly as Jones devoted hour after hour to his cartographic research. Zula had met any number of men like Khalid and so, even though they’d spent very little time together, she felt she knew the man and his ways. The only thing that could hold the attention of this kind of person for very long was direct interaction with another human being. What kind of interaction didn’t really matter. Since three of the four soldiers had dozed off and the fourth was still fixated on his flight simulator, and since Jones was absorbed in the map and the two pilots were intensely focused on this project of flying in close formation beneath the belly of the 747, there was no one for him to interact with except for Zula. And Zula was spending most of her time in the aft cabin with the door closed. Whenever she opened the door, it was to find Khalid’s burning eyes staring directly at her in a way that seemed to demand some kind of a response. Those eyes tracked her every movement. Khalid couldn’t help but notice when Zula glanced over Jones’s shoulder at the map.

This show of curiosity on Zula’s part had astonished Khalid the first time and offended him the second time. The third time he flew into what she thought was a pretty well-rehearsed rage, getting to his feet and invading her space in a way that all but forced her to back away from him. She couldn’t parse the grammar of his sentences, but she was able to recognize a few none-too-flattering nouns; if Khalid had been a gangsta rapper, he’d have been calling her a bitch and a ho. This went on until it disturbed Jones’s train of thought, at which point he spoke up and told Khalid to pipe down and put a lid on it. Jones spoke in a tired, even dispirited tone of voice, which seemed to match the overall mood of the jihadists.

Returning to her cabin, Zula considered it. A few hours ago, back in Xiamen, Jones had been convinced that they would be able to fly the jet to some friendly location in Pakistan, pick up a cargo of Bad (perhaps a dirty bomb?), then turn the jet around and fly it straight to some kind of Armageddon in Las Vegas. Instead, because of the intricacies of the international rules around flight plans and restricted airspace, and because of the way Pavel and Sergei had shown some backbone at a critical moment, he had been forced to settle for a hastily patched-together plan that had gotten them safely out of China but that would apparently lead to their running out of fuel many hundreds of miles short of the U.S. border. They would have to touch down in the middle of nowhere and then improvise. He had to be feeling as though he’d been handed an incredible opportunity, then squandered it; but there was little else that he could have done. Zula could clearly perceive a struggle in Jones’s head between the Western, university-trained engineer and the Islamic fundamentalist; the former wanted to execute carefully laid plans while the latter just wanted to wing it and trust to fate. Most of his comrades were fatalists and looked askance at the decisions he had been making.

She began considering what she might need to survive in northern Canada at this time of year. Though winter was over, it was still going to be cold. She did not know whether the jihadists had packed winter clothes among the gear in the plane’s cargo hold. It seemed unlikely, given that they’d been planning to carry out an operation in Xiamen, a hyperurban zone at the same latitude as Hawai’i. On the other hand, they’d been hanging out on a fishing boat, and such vessels usually had foul weather gear.

So they might have something; but Zula had nothing except for the bed linens in this cabin. Which the others would confiscate anyway, as soon as they felt a need for them. And in any case, she had nothing to wear on her feet except for the pair of ersatz Crocs that had been issued to her in Vladivostok, and if she went outside in those things she would, in short order, be crippled and then maimed by frostbite. The best she could do was rip up the blankets and wrap them around her feet, then slip the Crocs over them. This was better than nothing. But it would have been a lot easier with a knife.

She had always found her gun- and knife-obsessed male relatives to be faintly ridiculous. But she would go so far as to admit that a knife was a good thing to have, in a whole lot of different ways. She had, therefore, been looking around for things in her environment that might be convertible into knives. Plan A had been to shatter the glass screen of the television monitor, pull out a shard, and then fashion a handle by wrapping one end in a strip torn from a bedsheet. She reckoned that this would work but that it would be loud and difficult to hide and might produce knives of highly variable quality.

Plan B, then, had been simply to steal an actual knife from the galley: a nook between the bathroom and the cockpit, which she came close to whenever she went up to pee. She had conceived this idea after her first pee trip—the one where she had looked up through the cockpit windows to see the 747 directly above them. She had planned it during her second pee trip and executed it during her third, scoring a large, heavy steak knife from a drawer. She had shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans, piercing the pocket’s internal lining so that the blade was between her thigh and her pant leg, and the wooden handle was concealed in the pocket. With a chef’s knife, this would have been crazy, but the steak knife wasn’t sharp enough to do damage as long as it stayed flat against her skin.

Which only reminded her of a bit of lore she’d picked up in Girl Scouts, which was that jeans were the worst possible clothing for cold and wet weather. The heavy cotton fabric would soak up moisture and then lose its power to insulate.

Anyway, trapped now in the cabin by Khalid’s free-floating rage, unable to sleep, and with absolutely nothing to do, she decided to kill some time by watching a movie. It was a ridiculous urge, but it might be the last movie she’d ever watch and she literally could not think of anything else to do. One of the DVDs on the shelf was Love Actually, a romantic comedy, something like ten years old by this point, which she had seen about twenty times; she and her college roommates watched it ritualistically whenever they found themselves in a certain mood. So she turned that on.

The cabin was so arranged that the television monitor was in its aft bulkhead, facing forward, at the foot of the bed. Zula had made a pile of pillows at the head of the bed and arranged herself facing the screen, which meant that her back was to the entrance, off to one side.

Perhaps an hour into the movie, she became aware that she was not alone. The door had been opened a crack. Someone had been peering through, watching the movie with her.

Her first reaction was embarrassment more than anything else, since the film had a couple of ridiculous comic-relief subplots featuring extremely broad sexual comedy, probably meant to be self-mocking and read ironically by most of the intended audience, but which others on this plane might be inclined to take at face value.

She then got a feeling of vulnerability and discomfort from her position: lying on a bed. So she grabbed the remote, paused the video, and swung her feet onto the floor, preparing to stand up and see who was peeking in at the door.