Neal Stephenson - Reamde

All they had to do was get there; and that, Jake said, was straightforward from here on out. He had printed out some maps of the area and added hand-drawn notations showing them useful landmarks and telling them what to avoid.

This, in other words, was where they would be parting company. Olivia thanked him, and even hugged him, hoping that she was not trespassing on any moral/religious boundaries by doing so. Sokolov shook his hand and thanked him politely but, as she thought, a trifle coldly. Later, maybe, she could find out what he really thought of Jake and his people. But maybe she was misreading the situation; perhaps the Russian’s coolness, his evident haste to be finished with the pleasantries, was just him being focused on the mission (he would probably think of it as a mission) at hand: getting out of this country and figuring out what was going to come next. And for a man in that state of mind, being able to look out and see the border engendered a powerful urge to get moving and get it behind him.

So Jake turned back and coasted on his bicycle down the side of the spur to a place where it became positively dangerous and then hopped off it and resumed the arduous trudge back across the talus slope. Olivia, who had been known to harbor slight feelings of resentment when she found herself obligated to give a friend a lift to Heathrow, felt ashamed by comparison.

But she was with a man who had little time or patience for such ruminations, so they were on their way as soon as they could down a few swallows of water and finish their candy bars. The north side of the spur was a different proposition from the one they had just climbed, being flatter, smoother, and easier to move on at first. They were pushing and sometimes carrying the bicycles, picking their way down among huge shivered boulders, headed for a stretch of talus that would take them down into the tree line a couple of hundred meters below.

Olivia had been hearing a dim whacka-whacka-whacka noise for a few moments.

“Helicopter,” Sokolov said, and drew into the shadow of a boulder, indicating with a look at Olivia that she might want to do the same. They laid the bikes on their sides and then squatted down.

A minute later, a small helicopter, moving at a leisurely pace, traversed across the broad valley to the west of them, headed generally north. It slowed and descended as it drew closer to the falls and hovered there for a couple of minutes. Then its tail elevated, and it began to head north.

“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Olivia asked. “They’re not cops.”

Sokolov seemed to have been thinking quite hard about the same question. He shrugged. “It is not how I would do it,” he said. “But someone is looking for something. It is better that we not be seen.”

“In a few more minutes, we’ll be down in the trees,” she pointed out, tapping a notation on Jake’s map.

“Then let us go that way while they are looking at something else,” Sokolov suggested, and rose to his feet and picked up his bicycle.

The chopper, flying quite close to the ground now, had disappeared from view among the convolutions of the ridges and valleys. Sokolov now set a pace that Olivia was barely able to keep up with. He was too much the gentleman to leave her far behind, but she did not want to make him stop and wait any more than was strictly necessary. They soon emerged from the boulder field and began to pick their way straight down the talus slope toward the trees.

The footing was treacherous and demanded all her attention. So she almost rear-ended him. He had pulled up short and was holding out a hand for silence.

“What?” she asked. She had veered to the left to avoid a collision and now found herself nearly abreast of him.

“Shooting, maybe,” he said.

They stood absolutely silent for a minute, then two, then three. Finally Sokolov began to breathe more deeply and to show interest in things around them. He hitched his bottom up onto the seat of his bicycle, got a foot on a pedal, and eyed the slope below. Wondering if he could take it on wheels. Olivia was praying he wouldn’t.

“Interesting that there is no more helicopter,” he pointed out.

“Maybe they landed.”

“Blades would still be moving, I think.”

His sentence was punctuated by a sharp bang, impressively loud even though it was at a great distance. Echoes continued to reach them, reflecting from various slopes, for what seemed like a full sixty seconds afterward.

Sokolov’s eyes met Olivia’s. He saw the uncertainty on her face. Read her mind, perhaps, as she got ready to put forth the theory that it was a big tree branch snapping, or a stick of dynamite going off in a mining operation.

“Ordnance,” Sokolov said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We are in some kind of little war.” Then, seeing a look of incomprehension or disbelief on her face: “Jones is here.”

SEAMUS DID NOT have a direct line of sight to what happened above, but his eyes saw a sort of blood comet hurtling upward just a moment before his eardrums were all but staved in. The comet expanded and faded to a bank of pink fog that, mercifully, was blown in another direction by the light breeze coming up out of the valley.

Yuxia was standing next to the helicopter, where she had been bantering with the pilot, trying to get his mind off his troubles. She had belatedly clapped her hands over the side of her head and was standing there with her mouth in an O, eyes darting around uncertainly. Richard Forthrast seemed to have been taken by a dizzy spell and sat down roughly on the ground and hugged his knees, staring in an unfocused way in the general direction of the explosion. Seamus noted with approval and interest that, even as Richard had been semicollapsing to the ground, he had taken care to manage the shotgun hanging from his shoulder, making sure that its barrel did not dig into the ground and get jammed with dirt.

“Care to fill me in on anything?” Seamus asked, when he felt as though he had some chance of being able to hear the answer.

“That was my friend Chet,” Richard answered.

“The casualty on the rock?”

Richard nodded. “He had a claymore mine strapped to his chest. He was going to use it on those guys, if he got an opportunity.”

“Well, I guess an opportunity presented itself,” Seamus said. It was not an exquisitely sensitive thing to say. Richard’s eyes jumped quickly toward his face, checking for signs of archness. But Seamus had said it, and meant it, quite seriously. Richard broke eye contact and squinted up the slope.

“The question is how many did he get?”

“There were two jihadists?”

“And one man-eating cougar.”

Now it was Seamus’s turn to look at Richard for signs of sarcasm. But the latter had deadpanned it.

“If the jihadists had a lick of sense,” Seamus said, “they wouldn’t have been standing right next to each other. We had better assume that at least one of them is still alive. And it is safest to assume that he is the sniper.”

“And here we are with a shotgun and a pistol,” Richard pointed out.

“What is that thing loaded with? Slugs or—”

“Buckshot,” Richard said. “Four shells remaining.”

“What are these words?” Yuxia asked.

“All the guns we have,” Richard explained, “can only hit things that are close. Up above us, we think is a man with a gun who can hit things from far away.”

Seamus considered it. “If there’s anything to your Wikipedia entry, you know the way from here.”

“That much of it is actually true,” Richard said.

“If the three of us go together, the following will happen,” Seamus said. “The sniper will come down here and—” He nodded toward the chopper and flicked his thumb across his throat, indicating the likely fate of the crippled pilot. “Then he will track us down the valley and try to pick us off one by one. So that’s not what we’re going to do.”