Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“But you’re not helping the killers,” Chet said. Something about lying on the ground, combined with her outburst, had revived him a little, made him feel almost normal.

“Of course I’m not helping them.”

“You fired that shotgun, didn’t you? To warn me.”

“Jahandar—the sniper—was drawing a bead on you. Yes. I warned you by firing the shotgun.”

“So you’re fighting against them.”

“Of course I am. But what’s the point, if it just leads to a different set of people getting killed?”

“Too heavy a question for me,” he said. “You just do what you can, pretty lady.”

She tried to fight it, but the corners of her mouth drew back into a smile. “You call all women that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s been a while since I heard that kind of talk.”

Chet shrugged demurely.

“Well,” Zula continued, “all those people died for nothing unless I help Richard escape. And then we can go for help. But I have to get to the border first. And I need your help for that.”

“American Falls,” Chet said. “That’s where we’re going.”

“How do I—do we—get there?”

He turned his head, raised his good arm, gestured at the ridge that rose above them to the south: a blade of cream-colored granite, patched with snow, skirted by a ramp of boulders that had been flaking away from it and thundering down into the valley for millions of years. The trail had taken them up onto the ridge’s middle slopes, flying on creosoted stilts over the rubble fields, and terminated at a place where a wall of sound rock jumped out of the talus. The tunnel had been blasted straight into it, aimed horizontally through the heart of the ridge.

“We use the mine tunnels to get past this bad boy. See, we don’t have to hike over the top. That would take days. It’d kill me. Hell, it’d kill you. No. We use the tunnels. That’s what Richard discovered. That’s his secret. We go out the other side. Then down the river to the falls. Latitude forty-nine north. That’s where I stop, and you keep going.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”

“Yes. It’s what I want.”

THE TUNNEL WAS large enough to accommodate a narrow-gauge train, which was to say that a car could have driven into it with room to spare. To prevent just that sort of behavior, the owners had fabricated a massive steel gridiron, bolted into the rock, that blocked the passage. The barrier was situated about ten meters inside the entrance of the tunnel. That ten meters was a tornado of lurid graffiti and an ankle-deep trash heap of discarded beer bottles, chip bags, knotted condoms, and drained batteries. Just at the entrance was a fire ring; Zula, acting in Sherlock Holmes mode, verified that its ashes were still blazing hot. They were only a couple of hours behind Jones and company.

In the middle of the gridiron was a man-sized door. This had clearly been locked and vandalized, chained and vandalized, welded shut and vandalized, so many times as to threaten the integrity of the entire structure. Now it stood slightly ajar and Zula’s flashlight, shining through the grid, revealed that the graffiti and trash on its opposite side were only a little less prevalent. Her nose caught a pungent and familiar odor: fresh spray paint. Playing her flashlight over the steel plate on the door, she saw a few characters in Arabic. She couldn’t read them. She touched one of the glyphs and fresh green paint came away on her fingertip.

“Careful!” called Chet, strolling along slowly in her wake.

“Why?”

“They used to booby-trap it.”

“ Who did!?”

“Back in the day,” Chet said, “the business got a little competitive. A little nasty. Crazy people got into it. People who’d kill you. That’s when Dodge and I decided to go straight.”

Zula painted the light beam up and down the length of the door crack, and noticed, way up at the top, a steely glint. Piano wire. It had been made fast around the vertical bar that served as the edge of the door, and routed horizontally across the gap between door and frame, across the grid and all the way to the tunnel wall. There it disappeared into a mound of trash that had been piled up in the corner formed by the wall and the steel grid.

By the time she finished piecing this all together, Chet had caught up with her and was following the wire with his own eyes as he leaned against the gridiron, breathing raggedly and gurgling as he did so. “Holy crap,” he said, “I didn’t actually expect to see it.”

“You think there’s something hidden in that trash pile?”

“Must be.”

In a pocket of his leathers, Chet was carrying a Leatherman that included pliers and a wire cutter. After insisting that Zula go back outside and stand with her back to the mountain, he reached up, snipped the wire, and pushed the gate open—she could hear the massive hinges groaning. “All clear,” he announced, after counting to ten. “But before we go through, I’m going to take a little rest here while you go back to my bike and get something.”

The something turned out to be a massive cable lock. Zula fetched it back into the tunnel and helped Chet thread it through the bars of the gridiron and the gate, locking it securely behind them.

After that, they proceeded with extreme caution, which was not that difficult anyway since Chet couldn’t move very fast. Once they got past the drifts of party trash that cluttered the floor near the grid, there weren’t that many places to hide booby traps. And if the first one was anything to go by, Jones would have marked them all with spray-painted warnings so that the follow-up group—presumably Ershut, Jahandar, and anyone else deemed worthy to follow—wouldn’t run afoul of them. So her nose became extremely sensitive to the sharp perfume of spray paint, and her eyes keen for the fluorescent green color that Jones had been using.

After a few minutes, they came to a place where the tunnel terminated in a rock wall pierced by a mouse hole just big enough for Chet to walk upright. “See, this thing was an adit,” Chet was explaining, “which is what the miners call a tunnel that runs horizontal, flat enough that you can run rail cars on it. Straight into the ore body in the heart of the mountain. Only this first part of it, here, got expanded for the railway. But now we’re going into the adit proper.” There was another pileup of trash and another steel door, barring the entrance to the adit, that had been jimmied open and left hanging askew. It would have been a natural place to put another booby trap. But Zula did not see or smell spray paint, and Chet’s minute inspection of the trash and the door revealed nothing suspicious. They stepped into the much more confined space of the adit and discovered that, as always, revelers and graffitists had been there first.

“Third one on the right,” Chet intoned, then coughed and hacked up something dark which he spat against the wall. The physical effort of the coughing left him woozy, and he leaned against the stone for a few moments, then stumbled forward, insisting on leading the way.

Zula wanted to ask Third what on the right? but reckoned she would see soon enough and didn’t want to put Chet to the trouble of talking. She got a clue when they passed a hole in the wall, and she shone her light into it to see another adit leading away into what she gathered was the ore body. They had clearly entered into a sort of rock that was different from what they’d seen at the surface: darker but laced through with veins of color and a-sparkle with crystalline growths, especially in those places where water seeped out of cracks and trickled along the gutter carved into the adit’s floor. Only a few moments later they went by another, similar landmark, and perhaps twenty meters farther along, after passing momentarily through rock of a different sort, they reentered the ore body and came to adit number three. Which Zula could have guessed just by nosing it out, since the odor of spray paint had become strong again. This time several lines of script had been scrawled across the wall next to the side passage.