Neal Stephenson - Reamde

This in a strange way helped her feel better about the gory images of Khalid—half remembered and half dreamed—that kept appearing before her blindfolded eyes. Like it or not, this was the league she was playing in now. Her friends—assuming they were still alive—were playing in it too. And she at least had the advantage that she’d been in it before, or at least in its junior auxiliary, back in Eritrea.

They must have traveled for sixteen hours that day. Zula dozed occasionally, perhaps for twenty minutes, perhaps for three hours—there was no way to guess. They were traveling at highway speeds almost the entire time, which suggested that they were covering a vast distance—something on the order of a thousand miles. It was a long day but, in the end, not radically worse than flying between continents in an economy-class airline seat. And like such a flight, it seemed interminable when she was in the middle of it. At the end of the day, though, it seemed to have taken no time at all, since nothing really had happened.

They slowed suddenly, pulled off the highway onto gravel, and began to descend a relatively steep slope. Ershut scrambled over the backseat and hurriedly reinstated the gag; apparently this was a spur-of-the-moment excursion. The ground beneath the Suburban leveled off, and the vehicle eased through a series of maneuvers, then stopped. She heard a zipping noise as Jones stomped the parking brake down. The engine stopped. A door opened and one person—she assumed Jones—got out. She heard his feet crunching away across gravel. A few moments later, he greeted someone who gave him a cheerful greeting back.

Two greetings, actually, almost in unison: a man and a woman.

A conversation began. Zula could not make out words, but it all sounded cheerful enough. A friendly shooting-the-breeze type of chat. Zula could not hear anything else: no other vehicles, no traffic of any kind, none of the noises of a city. Just a low rushing sound that she was pretty sure came from a nearby river, a fast-flowing mountain stream.

After about ten minutes, the conversation paused, then resumed in much more subdued tones. Less than a minute later, she heard a door swing open and feet ascending a short stairway. Then the door thumped shut.

Two other jihadists got out of the Suburban and walked away over the gravel and there was a repetition of the door opening, the thump-thump-thump on the stairs, the door closing again.

Nothing seemed to happen for ten minutes, to the point where Ershut and Mahir—the two still in the Suburban—began to exchange a few nervous remarks. But then suddenly they both made happy exclamations. That door opened again. Someone jogged around behind the Suburban and opened its rear doors, then grabbed Zula’s feet and dragged her out. She got thrown over someone’s shoulder—Jones’s. He carried her across the gravel for some distance and then, with a great deal of effort, up that short stairway and into a place that sounded enclosed and smelled like a house. He pivoted and carried her down a narrow corridor and through a doorway. Then he bent forward at the waist and launched her. She fell back helplessly, unable to stop herself, imagining that she was about to smash the back of her head against something. But she made a soft landing on a bed and bounced. Jones was already out of the room, slamming the door behind himself. The entire structure rocked slightly beneath his footfalls.

They were in an RV, she realized. An RV parked on a flat gravel lot by the side of a mountain river.

The men were running back and forth between it and the Suburban, moving cargo. Someone started the Suburban and drove it up alongside to expedite matters.

It took them no more than a quarter of an hour to get the gear sorted and then she heard the RV’s engine start up, far ahead, at the opposite end. For this was some kind of a huge RV, one of those bus-length retirement-homes-on-wheels. It began to move across the gravel, slowly as the driver got the feel of it, then picking up speed. She heard the Suburban falling into formation behind and gave up on any thoughts of trying to kick out the rear window.

Only after they had been on the road for half an hour did Ershut come back and remove her gag. Air rushed into her mouth, greatly improving her sense of smell, and she got an unmistakable scent of blood—the cabin in the jet, Khalid bleeding out on the floor.

“Hold still,” Ershut said in Arabic, then cut through the lashings of duct tape around her arms and wrists. “Okay.” Then he walked out of the room, leaving its door open.

Zula devoted a few minutes to getting her blindfold and her leg tape off and kicked off the urine-soaked sleeping bag. It took her eyes a few minutes to work properly again, but when she could see, she saw Mahir and Sharif on hands and knees in the RV’s kitchen area, using rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of 409 to clean blood off its white linoleum floor.

TOWARD THE END of the long day’s drive, there had been an interlude that had posed Zula with a minor brainteaser. The Suburban had been cruising down a highway for some time. She could tell it was a two-laner because of the sound made by oncoming vehicles as they zoomed by a few feet away, and by the fact that it wound from side to side more than a freeway. But at one point they had slowed down, without turning off the road, and descended a long straight slope, losing speed the whole way, and finally come to a halt, still sloping downhill. Nothing had happened for a quarter of an hour or so. Then she had heard the engines of other cars and trucks starting up all around. A series of vehicles had passed them coming up the other way. The Suburban had descended some distance farther, then leveled out, clanking over steel plates, and then parked again. Presently a deep rumbling had started and continued for twenty minutes or so.

By this time, Zula had figured out that they were on a ferry. The obvious conclusion would have been that they were headed over to Vancouver Island. But she’d been on those ferries before and she knew that they were gigantic and that the land approaches to their sprawling terminals would have felt and sounded different. They must be on something smaller. And indeed the crossing had not lasted long, and soon the engines of the Suburban and of the other vehicles around them had started up again and they had ascended up a long gentle slope, building speed as it turned back into a highway.

During the visit that she and Peter had made to B.C., she had learned that the southern part of the province sported a number of long, skinny, deep lakes, oriented north-south, presumably gouges left in the earth by glaciers during the most recent Ice Age. They were too long to dodge around and too wide to bridge, so the east-west highways ran right up to them and stopped and then started again on the opposite side. The dead ends were connected by small ferries.

About an hour after they stole the RV, she got to see one of those ferry terminals. Albeit dimly. It was long after dark. The terminal was closed. The lights—if there were any—had been turned off. Jones switched off the RV’s headlamps as they cruised past a sign warning them that there’d be no more sailings until six A.M. tomorrow morning. A moment later, the Suburban went dark too. They felt their way down the ramp by starlight. It was just a straight gash blasted through the woods down to the shore of the lake. It ramped straight into black water. The connection to the shore was bifurcated. To the right, the road leveled off onto a platform built out over the lake on pilings and equipped with gates and ramps and huge bitts for mating with the ferry. To the left, the pavement just sloped straight down through the waterline. It was incised with a pair of deep straight channels hardened with iron rails. These ran obliquely up across the road to a broad open lot off to the side of the waiting area, surrounded by equipment sheds with heavy lifting equipment and other gear: a maintenance yard, she supposed, for the ferries, which could be winched straight up out of the water on those rails and brought to dry dock on higher ground. She got a reasonably good look at the place out the RV’s windows because that was where Jones got the gigantic vehicle turned around in a long series of back-and-forths. Meanwhile, Abdul-Wahaab—who had been driving the Suburban—had stopped it in the middle of the ramp, nose aimed down toward the water. He had rolled down all of the windows, opened the sunroof, and parted the rear cargo doors, which he now seemed to be wedging open with a stick. She could not see into it from this distance, but she had a good idea as to its contents. In the time she had spent in this bedroom, she had seen copious evidence—in the form of family photographs, toiletries, denture-soaking equipment, and knickknacks—that this RV was owned by a retired ­couple whose corpses were now in the back of that Suburban.