Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“I thought this was what you were good at. PowerPoint presentations. Consensus building.”

“Only when you give me something to work with. And lots of time. But if we could turn it into a military thing, that would be much easier.”

“What does it cost to charter a business jet?”

“How should I know? Do I look like the kind of person who charters business jets?”

“No, but Marlon does.”

“Who’s Marlon?”

Once the main party had gone south, the camp was much reduced in number of tents (only two left, not counting Zula’s little one-person shelter) but hugely expanded in its solid waste footprint. Much of what they had brought up here had been carried straight from grocery stores or Walmarts, and during the morning’s last-minute packing frenzy, they had pulled everything out of its sacks and packaging material, which they had simply dropped on the ground. Now the wind was blowing it around, much of it tumbling away until it snagged in shrubs or tree branches. Zula wondered if it was stupid for her to be offended by this desecration of the natural environment, given the larger goal of the jihadists’ mission and the number of people they’d already killed.

Ershut and Jahandar spent much of the afternoon napping. Zula couldn’t tell whether this was in consequence of having awakened early or in the expectation of staying on watch tonight.

While they slumbered, Zula went to work cutting up some mutton to make kebabs. Sayed spent his time reading and praying, and Zakir, supine on a camping mat in a patch of sunlight, either stared at Zula from under the brim of his hat or snored. When he was snoring, Zula took trimmings of fat, bones, and even whole pieces of red meat, and put them in paper grocery bags and tossed them down the slope in the direction of the tents. In any proper grad-student-run campsite this would have led to an inquisition on the scale of the Salem witch trials, but here, given the jihadists’ insensitivity to litter, it would go unnoticed save by wild animals. Last night had been bear-free, but, given that this wasn’t a frequently used campsite, the animals would have no reason to visit the place until they came to associate it with the availability of food.

All the while she was doing this, she was maintaining, in her head, a debate as to whether it was a good idea. If they didn’t execute her before sundown, she stood a good chance of getting away from these men, even without the assistance of the local Ursus arctos horribilis community. It wasn’t as if she were going to sit up all night long, padlock key in her hot little hand, waiting for the arrival of bears before making her move. If they did show up, they’d be as likely to wake up her captors as to help cover her escape; and if they were of a mind to kill and eat humans, they’d be at least as interested in her as in them. But she did it anyway, because it seemed a fine way to show her contempt for these men.

Afternoon seemed to stretch out forever. The nappers awoke when the sun was only about a hand’s breadth above the ridge of the Selkirks and began hanging around her little kitchen area in the timeless manner of hungry persons who expected others to prepare their food. Zula displayed the spitted, ready-to-cook kebabs and let it be understood that they would taste better cooked over coals than on the blue flames of a camp stove. Soon Ershut and Sayed were tromping around in the nearby woods gathering firewood.

Zula grew accustomed to hearing their heavy, crashing movements in the trees and so didn’t make much of it at first when her ears picked up the faint crunch of dried pine needles being trod upon, the rustle of shrubbery being pushed out of the way by something making its way through the forest. When it did finally break the surface of her awareness, she had the immediate feeling that she had actually been hearing it for quite some time. In the back of her head she’d been thinking, Why is Ershut creeping along so slowly? He’ll never gather much firewood that way . But then she saw Ershut stomping into the campsite from the opposite direction, carrying a double armload of dead branches. So it must be Sayed? But Sayed emerged from the trees only a few paces behind Ershut.

Zakir, then, the creepy one, was sneaking up on her through the woods. But why bother? She was chained to a tree. She’d already been caught.

Was it Jahandar, getting into position in a new sniper’s perch? No, she’d seen him going off into the woods toward the Blue Fork, carrying an empty water bag.

It must be Zakir then.

Two minutes later, as Zula was putting new fuel onto the nearly burned-out remains of the campfire, she heard a loud zipping noise, and looked up to see Zakir dragging himself out of his tent, where he had apparently gone to change into some warmer clothes. Getting ready for temperatures to drop. For the sun was just a red bubble on the Selkirks now.

So who, or what, had been creeping around in the woods up there?

She became very excited for a moment, imagining that it was a rescuer. A sniper from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sent to infiltrate the camp in advance of a major, helicopter-borne rescue operation. On that illusion, she made a point of not staring into the woods, not showing any curiosity about what might be back there.

But after a little while, as the fire blazed high and then began to die down, forming beds of coals in the interstices among the tangled logs, she shook her head in a kind of self-embarrassment that she’d ever been so naive as to imagine such a thing. No one was coming to rescue her. She had to do it herself. And it was probably better that way. Running through woods in the dark, she had a chance. Chained to a tree in the middle of a pitched automatic weapons duel, she wouldn’t last long. Worse, she wouldn’t have the power to change her situation.

None of which answered the question.

She permitted herself to look out into the woods now. None of the men noticed; none of them cared.

But she’d waited too long. The sun was behind the mountains. The fire almost cast more light, now, than the sky. But she was patient, keeping her back to the sunset and the fire and waiting for her eyes to adjust as she stared into the almost perfect blackness of the woods.

She saw nothing. There was nothing to see.

And yet something was bothering her. After all she’d been through at the hands of humans, it seemed inconceivable that anything of the natural world could hold any terrors for Zula. But there was something out there, and it did terrify her. Not in the intellectual way of I hope Jones didn’t order them to kill me but at a much deeper level.

She could feel a tingle at the back of her scalp. This was something that had happened only a few times in her life. Her hair was attempting to stand up on end, like that of a dog who senses it’s staring into something big enough to kill it and wants to look bigger.

But no matter how long she stared into the deepening shadows she saw nothing more. Finally she made up her mind to tear herself away from it and attend to the cooking. She planted a heel and spun around it.

A pair of sparks drew faint red traces across the corner of her eye.

She was relearning ancient lessons here: the peripheral vision was more sensitive to movement than the central. She turned back, shaking her head from side to side like a wolf casting for a scent, and caught glimpses of the twin sparks again.

There they were. She had them now. Two points of red light.

She had missed them before because they weren’t down at ground level, where she’d been looking. They were up high in a tree.

She had almost convinced herself that they were just drops of sap reflecting the light of the fire when they winked out for a moment and then came on again.