Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Occasional bangs sounded from higher up: people shooting at each other, he reckoned. Most of it sounded tentative, exploratory. What did John call it? Reconnaissance by fire. But then came a prolonged exchange, scores of rounds being fired, some from semiautomatic and others from fully automatic weapons, and he had the sense that it had come to a head somehow.

He knew that one side of this small war had to be Jones and his jihadists, but who was on the other side? Had the cops finally arrived? If so, why didn’t they have helicopters?

These ruminations caused his attention to waver for some time, while also making it difficult to hear more subtle noises emanating from the trail below.

He became aware that Yuxia was gesticulating furiously. Which gave him a pang of guilt, since he got the idea that she had been signaling to him in a more discreet way for some time and that he had failed to notice it and forced her to make herself obvious.

She got a stricken look on her face and dropped from view.

A mighty crack sounded from what seemed like just over Richard’s shoulder, and mud and moss exploded from the slope just behind where Yuxia’s head had been a moment earlier.

Jahandar must have come up the trail behind Richard and passed all the way behind him, then looked uphill and seen Yuxia waving her arms.

He heard the bolt of the rifle being worked, ejecting the spent casing, chambering a new round. Then the rustle of clothing. Then the sound, amazingly crisp and distinct in the clear, quiet air, of a revolver’s hammer being pulled back and cocked.

Why was Jahandar switching to a handgun?

Because he’d seen Yuxia gesturing, trying to get someone’s attention down below. From that, he knew someone had to be down here, hiding. Waiting for him. And the obvious place to hide was the root-ball only a few yards away from where Jahandar was standing. The sniper rifle was not going to do him any good in that sort of a fight.

Slow, subtle rustling now as Jahandar stepped off the path, into the foliage, looking for a way to come around Richard’s flank.

Richard had checked the shotgun a hundred times to verify that a shell was chambered, and forced himself not to do so again, since doing so would make a noise. He looked down and inspected the safety lever to make sure that the red dot was showing. It was ready to fire.

He had nestled himself back into a hollow among the dead tree’s roots, which might not be the best situation since it was constraining his field of view, limiting his arm swing. He was considering how to improve this state of affairs without getting killed when his glance fell on a round stone, about the size of a baseball, that hundreds of years ago had gotten caught up in the root system of this tree and was now sticking out of the clotted mud down by his knee. Remembering a trick he had played as a boy, stalking and being stalked by John in the ravine of the farm crick, he acted now without thinking. Until this point he had been mired in a kind of psychological cold molasses. But now he just reached down with his left hand, found the rock, pulled it free from its mud matrix, and underhanded it into some shrubs about five yards off to his right. It flew soundlessly and probably invisibly, then rustled through the bushes and struck the ground with shocking and sudden noise. Jahandar responded immediately, firing a round at it, recocking. This gave away his position: too far off to the right for Richard to get a clear shot without moving farther away from the root-ball. Reckoning that it was now or never, Richard shoved off against the roots with his butt, pivoting around his planted right foot as his left swung around like the leg of a compass tracing a ninety-degree arc. At the same time he was bringing the shotgun up, getting the barrel and the bead aligned with the pupil of his eye, wondering when the hell Jahandar was going to swim into his sight picture. Finally he saw Jahandar in his peripheral vision and realized he had not pivoted far enough; he gave his hips an extra twitch. His left foot was coming down, a bit sooner than he’d have liked; he tried to raise the knee, delay the footfall, give himself some extra rotation, but the result was that the toe hooked on a root and torqued badly. He was falling to his left now, balance lost, still lacking a solid plant for the left foot, which came down hard and uncontrolled on whatever happened to be there. Whatever it was, it was slippery and uneven and made his foot twist around in a way that it wasn’t supposed to. He felt no pain, yet. He had glanced away from Jahandar for just a fraction of a second. He now returned his attention to the sights. Jahandar was gone. He had executed some sort of dive-and-roll back onto the trail. Richard was tempted to fire blindly but held his finger away from the trigger, mindful of the limited number of shells in the magazine. Reconnaissance by fire wasn’t going to work for him.

Getting low seemed to be a good idea and so he let himself drop, which was already happening anyway: his ankle was badly messed up, and the first spike of pain had just made it up his leg to his brain. He took his left hand off the shotgun’s forearm and let its barrel go vertical for a few moments as he tumbled back onto his ass, using his left hand to break the fall just a bit.

Then he looked up to see Jahandar staring at him through a gap between dangling roots, no more than ten feet away. Jahandar was just in the act of bringing his revolver up to bear on Richard.

Richard, who had been so much at gravity’s mercy an instant ago, now found it too weak and slow to bring the shotgun’s barrel down as fast as he would like. Rather than wait here to get shot, he twitched his body sideways, flinging himself down onto his back and then his side, rolling away. A younger man on better terrain might have rolled all the way over and come back up firing, but Richard bogged down in rocks and tree roots about halfway through this maneuver and found himself in the worst possible situation of having to get up on hands and knees with his ass pointed squarely in Jahandar’s direction and the shotgun down in the mud. How could anything go so badly wrong? It was just like John’s Vietnam stories, the ones he told when he was drunk and weeping. A pistol was banging, banging, banging . Richard wasn’t dead yet. His mind had registered something odd about that banging, but he hadn’t had time to think about it yet. An eternity later he fell heavily onto his ass, finally facing toward the enemy, finally with the shotgun up where he wanted it. He expected to see Jahandar still aiming the revolver his way, fire spurting from the barrel and all but scorching Richard’s nylon parka, but the jihadist had turned to look downhill and had crouched down so that only the curve of his back was showing.

The banging hadn’t come from Jahandar’s pistol. It must be Seamus, firing from farther way.

Richard, taking advantage of the slope, rolled up onto his feet, got a clear view of Jahandar’s center of mass, aimed the shotgun, and fired. He then collapsed facefirst into the root-ball as his ankle gave way beneath his weight. A broken-off root jabbed him in the eye. His hand came up involuntarily, and the shotgun tumbled into his lap. He heard himself letting out a brief scream.

In the silence that followed, a gentle footfall, very nearby. He looked up with his one operant eye and saw nothing but the forest moving alongside him. The shotgun slid out of his lap as if moving under its own power.

Qian Yuxia jerked the forearm back. Sharply. A spent shell flew out and bounced off Richard’s head. She rammed it home, then raised it to her shoulder. Someone said, in a gurgling voice, “ Allahu akbar,” but the final syllable was buried in the shotgun’s muzzle blast.