Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Somewhere pretty damned close to the border,” Richard finally got out.

“Not just close. Look!” Chet said, extending an arm in one direction, then swinging it over his head like the blade of a paper cutter to point exactly the opposite way. Following it, Richard noticed a line of widely spaced surveyor’s monuments tracking across the landscape.

“We’re on the forty-ninth parallel,” Chet said. “My feet are in the U.S. of A. and my head is in Canada.” The look on his face said that this was enormously profound to him, so Richard only nodded and tried to maintain a straight face. “I’m barring the path. Their meridians are going to end here.”

“Who are you talking about?”

Chet gestured vaguely to the north and then offered Richard the binoculars. Richard picked them up, adjusted them, planted his elbows on the border, and aimed them north toward the talus slopes angling down from the ridgeline. Gazing over them with his naked eyes, he was able to pick out a pair of human figures, spaced about a hundred feet apart, picking their way down over the rocks. With the aid of the binoculars he saw them clearly as armed men with dark hair, answering generally to the stereotypical image of jihadists. The one in the lead was burly and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The one trailing behind was wiry and had a longer rifle slung diagonally across his back. A sniper.

“The rear guard,” Chet said. “Trying to catch up with the main group.” He chuckled and coughed wetly. Richard had a pretty good idea of what he was coughing up and so he avoided looking. Chet continued, “They’re so focused on catching up they haven’t bothered to look behind them.”

Richard drew back from the binoculars in surprise, and his aging eyes struggled to pull focus on Chet. Chet was nodding at him, casting suggestive glances upward. He had coughed a thin mist of blood out onto his chin, where it had caught in the gray stubble. Richard found the jihadists again and then tracked higher up the slope until he saw something in motion. Difficult to make out because its coloration blended in with the tawny hue of the weathered rock. Moving like a drop of glycerin oozing from one boulder to the next. Maintaining a fixed gaze on this target, he raised the binoculars and inserted them in his line of sight. With a bit of searching he was able to focus on the thing and see it distinctly as a mountain lion making its way down from the ridgeline. Its eyes glowed like phosphorus in the light of the rising sun. Those eyes were fixed upon the two men struggling down the slope below it.

“Holy crap,” Richard said. Chet went into another laughing/coughing fit. “These guys are so out of their element. Let’s hope it catches up with them soon.”

“It already did,” Chet answered. “Zula told me that it already took down one of their stragglers.”

“Huh. Man-eater.”

“They’re afraid of humans. Don’t bother them, and they won’t bother you,” Chet said, mocking what a sanctimonious tree hugger would say. Cougars attacked humans all the time in these parts, and the obstinate refusal of nature lovers to accept the fact that, in the eyes of a predator, there was no distinction between humans and other forms of meat had become the subject of bitter hilarity around the bar at the Schloss.

In this Richard now perceived an opening. “Well, shit, Chet, that settles it. I can’t just leave you here. That thing has probably smelled you already.”

“Do I stink that bad?”

“You know what I mean. I can’t just leave you here defenseless. If the jihadists don’t get you, that mountain lion will.”

“I ain’t defenseless,” Chet said. He unzipped his motorcycle jacket, which fell away to reveal a ghastly and peculiar state of affairs. His bottom-most garment was a thermal underwear top, now soaked with blood all along one side, and lumpy, either from bandages or from swelling. He had thrown his leather jacket on over this. But in between those two layers, he had affixed a large object to his chest: a thick metal plate, slightly convex, lashed to his body and suspended around his neck by a crazy and irregular web of parachute cord. Words were stenciled on the plate in Cyrillic.

“I think it says something like ‘This side toward enemy,’” Chet said. Then, seeing incomprehension still written on Richard’s face, he added, “It’s a Russian claymore mine.”

Richard had nothing to say for a few moments.

“If they can do it,” Chet said, “so can I.”

“You mean, blow yourself up?”

“Yeah.”

“I never really saw you as a suicide bomber.”

“It’s not suicide,” Chet said, “when you’re already a dead man.”

Richard could think of nothing to say to this.

“Now listen,” Chet said. “It’s time for you to get the hell out of here. You’re already in range of that one with the rifle. Get you gone. Your meridian isn’t finished yet, you’ve got a ways to go south yet. Me, I’m curving under to the pole. I can see it before my eyes. Those guys up there, they’re going to reach it at the same time as I do.”

“I’ll see you there” was all Richard could get out.

“Looking forward to it.”

Richard hugged Chet, trying to be gentle, but Chet hooked one arm around the nape of his neck and pulled him in tight, hard enough to press the claymore mine against his chest and scrape Richard’s face with his bloody whiskers. Then he let him go. Richard spun away and began to move south. His vision was fogged by tears, and he practically had to go on hands and knees to avoid turning an ankle on the strewn rocks.

He knew that Chet was correct about the range of the sniper’s rifle, and so his first instinct was to get out of the line of sight and of fire. This was easily enough done by taking advantage of the ruggedness of the terrain and occasional clusters of desperate trees. He wouldn’t be able to move freely, though, until he reached the edge of the woods, which was about half a mile down the slope. On his way up to Chet’s position, he had trudged and scrambled wearily up the broken and boulder-strewn terrain, various muscles screaming at him the whole way, since they had already taken enough abuse during the previous days’ hiking. He had taken a somewhat meandering course between areas of melting snow. Now it seemed to him that those snowfields would afford him a quick way down. Quick, and a little dangerous. But now that he had said good-bye to Chet, he was feeling an almost panicky imperative to work south and warn Jake, perhaps reconnecting with Zula en route. So he crab-walked to the edge of a large area of snow that sloped down all the way into the woods. His feet lost traction immediately. Rather than letting himself fall on his ass, though, he leaned forward carefully and allowed himself to skid down the slope on the soles of his boots, a procedure known as a standing glissade. Essentially he was skiing without skis. It was a common enough practice, when slope and conditions allowed it, and his involvement in the cat skiing industry had given him many opportunities to practice. He covered the distance to the tree line in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to pick his way down from rock to rock. En route he fell three times. The last fall was a deliberate plunge into a snowbank to kill his velocity before he slammed into the trees.

The snowbank was soft, and now sported a Richard-shaped depression that cradled his tired and battered body in a way that was extremely comfortable. The cold had not yet begun to soak through his clothing. He swiveled his head around and verified that the jihadists with the guns could not see him.

He was tempted to just lie there and take a nap. He stuffed a handful of snow into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. His heart had been beating very fast during the glissade, and he saw no harm in relaxing in this safe place for a few moments, pacing himself, giving his body a little rest, letting his pulse drop to a more moderate level.