Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Getting ready to fire a grenade into the middle of the group that Jake was leading up the driveway.

She was too low. She sat up, leaned against the side of the woodpile to steady her aim, and drew a bead on what she’d just been looking at.

From this higher vantage point she was clearly able to see the head and shoulders of a man, crouching against a tree with his back to her, holding a loaded RPG on his shoulder.

She got the crosshairs between his shoulder blades and took up the slack in the trigger. Then she heard a loud crack and felt something crash down on top of her head.

THE MAN WITH the submachine gun had been maddeningly elusive. When the four had scattered at Zula’s suggestion, he ought to have fired wildly in all directions, trying to hit at least one of them. This, at any rate, would have made things easier for Csongor. Instead, the jihadist had prudently held his fire, probably realizing that in such a melee he was only going to waste ammunition.

Csongor was confident that he had found reasonably secure cover. Since he was a large target with a small gun, he didn’t fancy his chances in a running-and-shooting duel with a small, elusive person carrying anything fully automatic. So, as difficult as this was, he lay very still and very quiet, and simply waited for the other guy to make a move.

Nothing happened for a minute or so, other than the sound of shots coming from the driveway.

But then the man just stood up, perhaps ten meters away, and fired a burst from his hip. He examined the results, then raised the weapon to his shoulder to fire at something with better aim.

The man was shooting at Zula.

Csongor pressed himself up to one knee, raised the pistol, and fired half a dozen rounds. By the time he was finished, the man was gone: dead or fled to cover, it was difficult to say.

ZULA HAD BEEN struck by a hunk of firewood that had been dislodged from the top of the pile by what she guessed was a poorly aimed burst of fire. It would leave a nasty bump but nothing serious.

Trying not to think about what this meant, she lined up her shot again and saw the man with the RPG, still about where he had been before, squatting on his haunches, bouncing up and down a little, pivoting and moving from time to time as he evaluated different targets.

Then a change came over him. He had been restless, nervous, but now had settled down into the attitude of a cat getting ready to pounce. Through the scope she could see his eye making itself comfortable in the weapon’s sight, his finger finding the trigger.

She pounced herself by pulling her trigger first.

Nothing happened. She understood now that her finger must have contracted against the trigger and fired a shot when the piece of wood had struck her on the head. The chamber was empty.

She pumped the weapon, chambering her last round, quickly lined up her shot again, and fired. Lifting her head from the sight she saw the man sprawling forward, and a jet of fire leaping from his shoulder as the RPG was launched. It caromed off the ground a few yards in front of him, spiraled into the air, and went screaming away.

“OKAY,” SEAMUS SAID, “I guess you can come with me. Just save the last shell for something really important, okay?” And with that he plunged forward down the slope at a run, cradling the rifle in his good arm and letting the damaged one dangle. Blood streamed down it freely and dribbled from his fingertips. He nearly tripped over the body of the man who had shot him, and who had been destroyed by Yuxia’s shotgun blast. Jones must have sent this guy back to track down the annoying sniper and kill him, which Seamus had almost made too easy by jumping up and presenting himself as a target.

Though, on the other hand, that might have saved his life. Had he stayed down, the stalker would have drawn closer before opening fire. By doing jumping jacks in plain view, Seamus had made himself irresistible, and the stalker had given way to the temptation to open fire at longer range than his pistol could really hit anything at.

“Should I take his gun?” Yuxia asked, thrashing along a few yards behind him.

“Good idea, honey,” Seamus called back. “Know that if you pull the trigger, it will fire.”

“Okay.”

“On top of it is a moving slide thingy that will jump back and bite a hunk of flesh from your hand if you keep holding it that way.”

“Mmmkay,” she said, a bit absently.

“I’m serious. Move your hand down.”

She did so, finally.

“You all right?” Seamus asked.

“We are running in the open.”

“You’re welcome to stop at any time,” Seamus pointed out, a little testily. “We are doing this because the end game of this thing is happening right now, and we are no longer near the place where it’s happening. I need an angle, and a shot.”

“You are bleeding on the ground.”

“Excellent place for it.”

They ran for a couple of hundred yards through the open space along the perimeter of the cleared compound, seeing no jihadists who were alive. Something spectacularly bad had happened to the cabin, but Seamus saw and understood it only dimly. He was, he realized, probably going into shock. And he was a little ashamed of that, since the wound on his arm ought not to have been such a big deal. His act of running down the hill and into the compound had, in a way, been a semiconscious tactic to put it out of his mind and get him focused on something else.

“I see the fucker,” he announced. The head of a tall man had popped up into view perhaps a hundred yards away. Advancing to the next tree, he leaned against it, to steady the upcoming shot, and then dropped to his left knee.

He hadn’t planned to drop to a knee; it just happened. His right leg had buckled.

Something heavy had been slapping against his thigh with each stride. Something in his right pants pocket. When he dropped, his right knee came up, and that pocket got squeezed as the front of his trousers creased, and a large amount of warm fluid gushed out of it and washed over his right buttock and ran down his thigh.

He glanced down for the first time in a while and observed that he had also been shot on the right side of his abdomen and that blood had been running out of the wound this whole time and accumulating, for some reason, in his pocket.

He was lying on his back, and Yuxia was standing above him with her hands clapped over her mouth. She might have let out a bit of a scream.

He thrust the rifle up into the air with his good arm. “Shoot him,” he said. “Shoot Abdallah Jones.”

CSONGOR MOVED FORWARD cautiously to see whether he had managed to hit the man with the submachine gun. He heard a slight rustle and looked over to see Abdallah Jones, just standing there looking at him. Csongor moved his pistol around to bear on Jones. Jones brought a Kalashnikov around and aimed it at Csongor, at the same moment.

The range was greater than Csongor was comfortable with. His hands were shaking.

“You,” Jones said. “If it were anyone else, I’d have already pulled the trigger. As it is, I’m just standing here dumbfounded. How the hell, Csongor? It is Csongor, right?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“The story is complicated.”

“Shame, that. Because I really would love to hear it. But there is, of course, no time.” He raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder.

A crack sounded from off to the side. The sniper again. Jones looked in that direction, but showed no ill effects; the sniper had somehow missed.

Csongor dropped to the ground and began firing blindly through foliage.

Several rounds came back in his general direction, but this was nothing more than Jones firing to keep Csongor’s head down. It worked. The next time Csongor felt brave enough to lift his head, Jones was nowhere to be seen.