Neal Stephenson - Reamde

FOR BETTER OR worse, the “attract wildlife to the campsite” strategy bore fruit some hours later. Zula had no idea of the hour—a timepiece would have come in handy—but the eastern sky was not beginning to get light yet. Maybe three in the morning.

She had dozed off but was now awakened by rustling noises in the vicinity of the jihadists’ tents.

She reached up and undid the padlock, then made a little prayer or resolution that she’d never have it on her again.

This made it possible for her to peel off some of the fleece pullovers she had been wearing ever since they had put the chain on. On top of those, she had also been wearing some zip-up garments that could be put on and taken off even with the chain in place, but she had removed those a few hours ago when she had gone to bed. Stripped down, now, to a set of navy blue synthetic long johns, she stuffed the bulky fleeces into her sleeping bag, trying to make it look as if she were still in it.

She had prepared a fake head by stuffing handfuls of pine needles into a plastic shopping bag until it was round and head-sized, then stretching a stocking cap over it. She placed that in the hood of a pullover and snugged the drawstring around it, then pulled the top of the sleeping bag over it, arranging things so that a flashlight beam shone into the tent and played over this scene would make it look as if she had curled up and pulled the edge of the sleeping bag over her face. She stuck the end of the chain into place beneath it.

The little tent’s exit was already unzipped; she had seen to that earlier. Only after she’d made all these arrangements did she reach up and part the flaps a fraction of an inch to look out.

In the light of the moon, she could see at least two creatures waddling around gathering up the food scraps she’d left. From the amount of noise they’d been making, she’d guessed bear cubs. But they were only raccoons.

She saw, now, too late, that leaving food out had been a mistake. It had attracted animals that were large enough to wake the men up but not large enough to pose an actual threat to them.

In any case, she could not just squat there in her tent’s entrance. Sooner or later the men would wake up. She emerged from the tent. The damp air struck a chill in her limbs, but she knew that soon enough she’d be perspiring. Trying to ignore the cold, she walked in a straight line, moving deliberately, toward the tent shared by Zakir and Sayed. The latter’s hiking boots—brand-new from Walmart—were standing at attention in front of it. She plucked these off the ground with a quick motion of the hand—a motion she’d been rehearsing in her mind all night long—and pivoted away. She was headed now for the front of the tent shared by Ershut and Jahandar. Her next intention was to grab their boots as well and carry them off into the woods. Zakir she wasn’t as worried about, but it would help her immeasurably to leave those two barefoot.

Something streaked across her vision about twenty feet away, dark gray moving fast against darker gray. There was a tussle and then a scream, like a toddler being backed over by a car. Zula froze.

To stop moving was a bad idea, but her mind wasn’t working at the level of ideas.

Some kind of struggle was taking place, rattling the walls of Ershut and Jahandar’s tent, tumbling across the ground, sending sticks and litter flying.

A raccoon had been attacked by some other creature. Something that had been stalking it.

Zula lit out and ran.

SHE’D NEVER KNOW, and didn’t especially care to know, in what order things had then happened in the camp. Ershut and Jahandar could not possibly have stayed asleep. They’d have climbed out of their tent, guns drawn, to see some kind of Wild Kingdom melee in progress, or perhaps just its bloody aftermath. Not knowing that a hundred meters away Zula was sitting on the ground in the trees, pulling Sayed’s boots onto her feet. Their adrenaline would have been pumping madly. They might have laughed upon realizing that all the fuss had been nothing more than wild animals banging around in the night. Perhaps that laughter would wake up Zakir and Sayed, if they hadn’t been awakened already, and perhaps Sayed would look out and notice that his boots had gone missing. Or perhaps Ershut would go up to Zula’s tent with a flashlight, look inside, and notice the deception, or not.

All she knew was that, within perhaps a quarter of an hour of her departure, flashlights were bobbing down the plank-avalanche behind her, making their way toward the trail along which Zula was running as fast as she could.

She ran faster.

A wave of nausea came over her, and she had to stop to throw up. Her hands were tingling. She wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. She had been running anaerobically. She had no choice but to take the next couple of miles at a more measured pace. Behind her—something like a mile—she could see a flashlight bobbing rhythmically as its owner sprinted along the trail. This gave her a rough idea of how much time she would have, when she reached the Schloss, to get inside and call the police. Right now it was looking pretty favorable. Shaking a little from the nausea but feeling better as her heart and lungs caught up with oxygen debt, she built speed until she had reached the quickest pace she could maintain.

In her mind the distance from the camp to the Schloss had grown larger with every hour that had passed while she’d been chained to that tree, and so she was startled when she glimpsed one of its roofs in the moonlight. She had covered the distance in very little time. She took the risk of slowing down a little bit so that she could look back over her shoulder and saw the bobbing light still in pursuit, perhaps a bit closer than last time, but still a few minutes away.

She tried the front door just to see whether it was open, but Uncle Richard had apparently locked it on his way out. That was okay. She’d been visualizing the place in her mind and had already decided where to break in. She ran around to the side facing the dam, which was the least scenic part of the property and consequently where they had situated things like utility sheds and parking lots. The rooms facing that direction tended to be meeting rooms and offices. She picked up a round river rock, about the size of a cantaloupe, from some landscaping. Carrying it in both hands she ran toward an office window and projected it into the glass. It burst through with a noise that must have been audible in Elphinstone. She stood on one foot and used the other to kick away projecting shards, then reached around through the opening and unlocked the window.

A few moments later she was inside the office, holding the telephone to her head, hearing nothing.

The lights didn’t work either.

All the power, all the phones, all the Internet were dead.

Jones must have cut the lines when he had come to call on Richard.

A very powerful impulse was now pushing her to burst out crying, but she turned her back on it, as it were, snubbing it like an unwelcome guest at a party, and tried to think.

Her whole plan had been predicated on the assumption that she would be able to make a phone call from here. Or at least trigger the alarm system. Flash lights on and off. That was all she needed: to get someone’s attention down the valley. Chet being her best hope; he lived in a little homestead about five miles down the road. On a quiet night it might be possible to hear an alarm from that far away.

This bank of the river—the right bank—was impassable beyond this point, because of Baron’s Rock, which turned the shore into a vertical stone wall scoured by icy water in violent motion. To get to Elphinstone she would have to cross to the left bank by running across the dam, following the road that ran over its top. From there she’d have twenty miles of bad road between her and Elphinstone. Jahandar—she was pretty sure that the fast-running jihadist was he—was only a short distance behind her at this point, and was running faster. If she merely followed the road, he could drop her with a rifle shot, or simply catch up with her and put a knife in her back.