Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Instead he saw a frizz of black hair exploding out from beneath a stocking cap.

It took him several moments to understand that the person he was staring at was Zula.

She extended one arm and pointed, drawing his attention to something on the ground behind him: Jabari, who was coming to investigate.

Richard looked back up and saw her waving frantically, telling him to move farther away along the base of the cliff. She herself had risen from a squat and was beginning to move that way, exhorting him with gestures to follow.

Until now he had moved slowly, to hide the fact that he had removed his hobbles. But Jabari was closing in on the place where Richard had been taking his dump and would see the cut zip ties soon enough. Richard broke into a run.

Within a few moments he understood that Jabari was coming after him.

It was difficult to run, to keep an eye on Jabari, and at the same time to keep casting glances upward toward Zula. But at some point he realized that she was holding both hands out, gesturing at him to stop.

Which didn’t make sense. Why would he want to stop?

He looked back and saw that Jabari was much closer than he’d expected. The Egyptian had drawn a semiautomatic pistol but not aimed it yet; he was still using both hands to flail away at undergrowth that was impeding his progress.

Richard looked up again and saw Zula at the very lip of the cliff with a bundle of sticks in her arms. She heaved it out into space.

Jabari stepped out of the undergrowth. He was perhaps ten feet from Richard, looking him up and down, amazed that he had gotten out of the zip ties.

Richard looked up again and saw a rickety construct unfolding in the space above them: two thin lines of parachute cord with sticks lashed between them at regular intervals.

A rope ladder.

Jabari had seen it too. He seemed only slightly more dumbfounded than Richard.

It had been all rolled up and was now falling and unrolling in a tangledy mess. The rung in the middle of the bundle was the longest and heaviest of them all, and its weight was helping to pull the whole roll downward and keep it straight. Richard understood that it was coming right at his head, and so he stepped back against the wall of the cliff, allowing it to fall down in front of him.

The ladder bounced to a stop, yawing and sashaying. Jabari was looking up toward the top, trying to see who had thrown it. He aimed his pistol nearly straight up in the air.

Richard couldn’t see what Jabari was aiming at. But he did now notice a curious fact, which was that the bottom rung of the ladder—the heavy thing that had made it all unroll—was a black pump-action shotgun.

While Jabari was preoccupied with trying to identify threats at the top of the cliff, Richard stepped forward, got the weapon in his hands, flipped off the safety, and pulled the forepiece back slightly so that he could see into its breech. A shell was already chambered.

Maneuvering the weapon was not made any easier by the rattletrap skein of parachute cord and tree branches from which it dangled, but, at a range of three yards, this wasn’t going to be a precision operation anyhow. He brought the stock up to his shoulder and drew a bead on Jabari.

The movement finally drew the Egyptian’s notice. He looked down at Richard. At the same time he was beginning to lower the pistol. Not fast enough to make a difference.

“Sorry,” Richard said, as they were making eye contact. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Jabari’s head off.

SEAMUS HAD DEVELOPED a set of instincts around timing and schedule that owed a lot to his upbringing in Boston and his postings in teeming Third World megacities such as Manila, which was to say that he always expected it would take hours to get anywhere. Those habits led him comically astray in Coeur d’Alene at six thirty in the morning. They reached the municipal airport in less time than it took the SUV’s windows to defog. The chopper place was just inside the entrance. Two helicopters, a big one and a small one, were parked on the apron outside a portable office. A pickup truck was parked in front of it, aimed at the big chopper, headlights on, providing supplementary illumination for a man in a navy blue nylon pilot’s jacket who was sprawled on his back under the instrument panel, legs dangling out onto the skid, messing with wires. “Never a good sign,” Seamus remarked, and parked in front of the portable office.

It was evident from the look and style of the place that it was not, first and foremost, an operation for making tourists happy. Their bread and butter was serving clients in the timber industry. When that flagged, they were happy to take people on joyrides. A hundred percent of their budget for that part of the operation had gone into the printing of the brochure. Which was a completely rational choice, since by the time their clients showed up here to discover what a bare-bones operation they were dealing with, the decision had already been made. No one, having come this far, was going to storm out simply because they weren’t serving lattes and scones in a tastefully decorated waiting area.

Yuxia was all for dragging the man in the blue jacket out by his ankles, but Seamus talked her around to the point of view that everything would go better in the long run if they left him alone to finish his work. It was surprisingly chilly. They sat in the car and let the motor run until it got warm. Eventually the man oozed out of the chopper and climbed to his feet, holding an electronic box with a connector dangling from it.

Seamus got out of the SUV and greeted him. “Morning, Jack.” Last names were not much in vogue around these parts.

“You’d be Seamus? I can tell from your accent.” Jack was probably ex-military, now with a neatly trimmed red-brown beard slung under a round, somewhat pudgy face.

“Sparky trouble?”

“I thought this’d be a quick fix and we’d be in the air by now,” Jack said, waving the box around, “but the connectors don’t match up.”

“Technology fails to work the way it’s supposed to. What a shock.”

“Anyway—how many you got?” Jack’s eyes flicked over to the SUV. “I was going to put you in the 300.” He half turned and jerked his head toward the smaller of the two choppers. “It’s a little less comfortable but if you don’t mind—”

“Not at all,” Seamus said. “But how many passengers will it carry?”

“Two. Maybe three in a pinch.”

“And the big one is definitely down.”

“The 500 ain’t flying today.”

“Give me a sec.”

Seamus got back into the SUV. “Change of plans,” he announced. “Big chopper is busted. Little chopper can only take two or three of us. One or two have to stay behind here and wait.”

“Obviously I cannot fit into that thing,” Csongor volunteered, looking incredulously at the 300. “I would not enjoy it anyway.”

Yuxia had taken to bouncing up and down in her seat, worried that she was about to be left behind. She looked as if she were about to jump out of the car, run over, and cling to the chopper’s skids. Marlon, observing this, looked at Seamus and said, “I will stay and use Wi-Fi.” For during the wait he had borrowed Seamus’s laptop, logged on to a guest account that Seamus had set up for him, and discovered an unsecured network emanating from the portable office.

Seamus twisted the SUV’s keys to the off position, killing the engine, then moved it to the accessory position so that the laptop could suck juice from the cigarette lighter jack. “No joyriding!” he warned them. Then he nodded at Yuxia, who jumped out onto the tarmac.

Before they departed, there was a discussion of flight plan and travel time. Jack estimated forty-five minutes each way to cover the eighty miles to the area that Seamus wanted to see, plus half an hour to forty-five minutes actually circling the area and looking around. It was now about quarter to seven. They should be back by nine, nine thirty at the latest.