Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn’t doing it. He simply couldn’t get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones’s sake.

Maybe because all that behavior ultimately seemed like groveling to him. That was really his problem: deep down, he believed that all such people were grovelers.

They took a little break at the mine’s exit to enjoy the view, to set the last booby trap, to brew tea, to pray, and to try to get phone reception. Reasonable enough; it seemed as though the whole Idaho panhandle were directly visible from here, and there had to be a cell tower somewhere in that. The experiment would have been over very quickly if there’d been no reception at all, but it seemed that some of the jihadists were able to get one bar if they stood in a particular attitude in a particular place and held the phone a certain way and invoked various higher powers. Richard was tempted to make a sour analogy to pointing oneself in the direction of Mecca, but he didn’t think it would do much for his life expectancy. Their rituals became ludicrous after a certain point. Because none of these guys had an ironic modern attitude, none saw the humor.

No, strike that. Almost all of them had been living under cover in the Western world and were as capable of seeing the humor as any fourteen-year-old American sitting on his couch watching South Park reruns and sending snarky tweets to his friends. But they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally. Only Jones had the self-confidence to let himself be amused, and that was how he and Richard ended up making eye contact.

“So,” Richard said, after he and Jones had enjoyed the moment, “you going to put a bullet in me now, or should I show you the easiest way to get past American Falls?”

“I’m happy with the arrangement in its current form,” Jones said. “If that changes, you’ll be the first to know. Assuming you see it coming.”

“Well, you raise an interesting question there, Abdallah. Would I see it coming? Is it going to be one of those slow beheadings? Or just an unannounced shot to the head?”

Richard now watched in some degree of fascination as Jones actually mulled it over. “Other things being equal,” he said, “I’d prefer to give you some opportunity to pray first, perhaps write out a statement. But if we find ourselves trapped in some awkward situation, there may not be time for that.”

“Is that a little incentive program you just laid out for me? A built-in penalty for awkward situations?”

“The incentive program, as I’m sure you understand, is all about Zula. Because of the regrettable lack of phone reception, we have not been able to check in with our comrades. You may assume that she is still alive and that you may keep her in that condition by keeping us out of awkward situations and doing other things for us.”

“Does that mean that if you’d been able to get bars, you’d have given the order to kill her?”

“There is no fixed plan. We assess our situation from hour to hour.”

“Then assess this: we’re sitting in an exposed place up here. Anyone down there in those valleys could see us. What are we waiting for?”

Jones acted as if he hadn’t heard this. “Is that Abandon Mountain?” he asked, nodding south.

“Yes.”

“Roads connect to its opposite side.”

“The lower slopes, yes. That’s the way out.”

“Let’s go then,” Jones said, rising to his feet and dusting off his bum.

Richard had just tasked him: told him that they had to move away from this exposed position. Jones, not wanting to bow to Richard, had pretended not to hear it. But a few moments later he had done what Richard had suggested, as if it had been his own idea. Now that was the kind of psychological program that Richard could get involved in, if he could only find, or create, more opportunities to develop it.

Such an opportunity came along rather soon, as they came to a place where they could see an obvious way to traipse off in the general direction of Abandon Mountain. Every greenhorn pot smuggler who came this way tried it, only to find himself in difficulties two hours later when he learned that this easy-looking trail led to a cul-de-sac. In order to prove that it was a cul-de-sac, it was necessary to expend another few hours probing for a way out of it, thereby wasting most of a day. And so here Richard actually did have to perform a little sell job, convincing Jones that it would really be much better for them if they turned aside from the obvious and easy path and instead spent the next couple of hours picking their way down a slope that, had it supported a proper trail, would have been an endless succession of densely packed switchbacks. But no one could have built a proper trail on this thing without using tactical nuclear weapons. It was a junk pile of fallen logs strewn over primeval talus and covered with a loose slippery froth of moss and decaying vegetation. After leaving a green spray-paint annotation at the top, they devoted four hours to clambering down it, covering all of about half a mile on the map.

Richard, back in his dope-carrying days, had made this trip three or four times before he had lost all patience with it. He had come here with nothing on his back except for food and a bedroll and devoted several days to finding a quicker and easier way down: the proverbial Secret Shortcut: an abrupt and chancy descent into a dry wash followed by a relatively quick and easy hike down a gully leading to a spot near the top of the falls. Had it not been for that discovery, his nascent smuggling career probably would have been snuffed out by the sheer unattractiveness of this part of the journey. But he felt no particular need to share the shortcut with Jones and his men. For now, they were stuck in a place that had no phone reception: a state of affairs that seemed to limit the amount of damage that Jones could do. The longer this lasted, the greater the chance that someone would notice the signs of his hasty departure from the Schloss and launch a proper investigation.

And there was also the fact that, like it or not, Richard was leading these people directly toward the place where Jake lived. He was doing all of this to save the life of his niece. It had all seemed easy until he had looked out from the mine’s exit and seen Abandon Mountain. Now he was thinking pretty hard about the fact that, to save his niece, he was leading a band of terrorists straight toward a remote cabin containing two brothers, a sister-in-law, and three nephews.

The plan that took shape in his head, then, as they devoted the entire morning to clambering down into the valley of the river, was that he would slip away from camp tonight and make his way to Jake’s place and warn them.

They took a long siesta at the side of the river, prayed some more, cooked lunch, rested sore muscles, and wrapped bandages around twisted ankles. Richard pulled his hat over his face and pretended to sleep, but in fact stayed awake the whole time working out the plan in his mind. They would make one more push after this break, and he would show them how to get around the falls: yet another surprisingly difficult operation. After that they would set up the evening’s camp, and Jones would kill him or not. If not, Richard would try to get out of there after dark. The falls were deep in a rock bowl, covered with mist-fed vegetation so dense that not even GPS signals could get through. Forget about phones.

If only he had a flashlight.

Then he remembered that he did have one, a pinky-sized LED light attached to his key chain.