Reamde - страница 188

Afternoon seemed to stretch out forever. The nappers awoke when the sun was only about a hand’s breadth above the ridge of the Selkirks and began hanging around her little kitchen area in the timeless manner of hungry persons who expected others to prepare their food. Zula displayed the spitted, ready-to-cook kebabs and let it be understood that they would taste better cooked over coals than on the blue flames of a camp stove. Soon Ershut and Sayed were tromping around in the nearby woods gathering firewood.

Zula grew accustomed to hearing their heavy, crashing movements in the trees and so didn’t make much of it at first when her ears picked up the faint crunch of dried pine needles being trod upon, the rustle of shrubbery being pushed out of the way by something making its way through the forest. When it did finally break the surface of her awareness, she had the immediate feeling that she had actually been hearing it for quite some time. In the back of her head she’d been thinking, Why is Ershut creeping along so slowly? He’ll never gather much firewood that way. But then she saw Ershut stomping into the campsite from the opposite direction, carrying a double armload of dead branches. So it must be Sayed? But Sayed emerged from the trees only a few paces behind Ershut.

Zakir, then, the creepy one, was sneaking up on her through the woods. But why bother? She was chained to a tree. She’d already been caught.

Was it Jahandar, getting into position in a new sniper’s perch? No, she’d seen him going off into the woods toward the Blue Fork, carrying an empty water bag.

It must be Zakir then.

Two minutes later, as Zula was putting new fuel onto the nearly burned-out remains of the campfire, she heard a loud zipping noise, and looked up to see Zakir dragging himself out of his tent, where he had apparently gone to change into some warmer clothes. Getting ready for temperatures to drop. For the sun was just a red bubble on the Selkirks now.

So who, or what, had been creeping around in the woods up there?

She became very excited for a moment, imagining that it was a rescuer. A sniper from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sent to infiltrate the camp in advance of a major, helicopter-borne rescue operation. On that illusion, she made a point of not staring into the woods, not showing any curiosity about what might be back there.

But after a little while, as the fire blazed high and then began to die down, forming beds of coals in the interstices among the tangled logs, she shook her head in a kind of self-embarrassment that she’d ever been so naive as to imagine such a thing. No one was coming to rescue her. She had to do it herself. And it was probably better that way. Running through woods in the dark, she had a chance. Chained to a tree in the middle of a pitched automatic weapons duel, she wouldn’t last long. Worse, she wouldn’t have the power to change her situation.

None of which answered the question.

She permitted herself to look out into the woods now. None of the men noticed; none of them cared.

But she’d waited too long. The sun was behind the mountains. The fire almost cast more light, now, than the sky. But she was patient, keeping her back to the sunset and the fire and waiting for her eyes to adjust as she stared into the almost perfect blackness of the woods.

She saw nothing. There was nothing to see.

And yet something was bothering her. After all she’d been through at the hands of humans, it seemed inconceivable that anything of the natural world could hold any terrors for Zula. But there was something out there, and it did terrify her. Not in the intellectual way of I hope Jones didn’t order them to kill me but at a much deeper level.

She could feel a tingle at the back of her scalp. This was something that had happened only a few times in her life. Her hair was attempting to stand up on end, like that of a dog who senses it’s staring into something big enough to kill it and wants to look bigger.

But no matter how long she stared into the deepening shadows she saw nothing more. Finally she made up her mind to tear herself away from it and attend to the cooking. She planted a heel and spun around it.

A pair of sparks drew faint red traces across the corner of her eye.

She was relearning ancient lessons here: the peripheral vision was more sensitive to movement than the central. She turned back, shaking her head from side to side like a wolf casting for a scent, and caught glimpses of the twin sparks again.

There they were. She had them now. Two points of red light.

She had missed them before because they weren’t down at ground level, where she’d been looking. They were up high in a tree.

She had almost convinced herself that they were just drops of sap reflecting the light of the fire when they winked out for a moment and then came on again.

FOR BETTER OR worse, the “attract wildlife to the campsite” strategy bore fruit some hours later. Zula had no idea of the hour — a timepiece would have come in handy — but the eastern sky was not beginning to get light yet. Maybe three in the morning.

She had dozed off but was now awakened by rustling noises in the vicinity of the jihadists’ tents.

She reached up and undid the padlock, then made a little prayer or resolution that she’d never have it on her again.

This made it possible for her to peel off some of the fleece pullovers she had been wearing ever since they had put the chain on. On top of those, she had also been wearing some zip-up garments that could be put on and taken off even with the chain in place, but she had removed those a few hours ago when she had gone to bed. Stripped down, now, to a set of navy blue synthetic long johns, she stuffed the bulky fleeces into her sleeping bag, trying to make it look as if she were still in it.

She had prepared a fake head by stuffing handfuls of pine needles into a plastic shopping bag until it was round and head-sized, then stretching a stocking cap over it. She placed that in the hood of a pullover and snugged the drawstring around it, then pulled the top of the sleeping bag over it, arranging things so that a flashlight beam shone into the tent and played over this scene would make it look as if she had curled up and pulled the edge of the sleeping bag over her face. She stuck the end of the chain into place beneath it.

The little tent’s exit was already unzipped; she had seen to that earlier. Only after she’d made all these arrangements did she reach up and part the flaps a fraction of an inch to look out.

In the light of the moon, she could see at least two creatures waddling around gathering up the food scraps she’d left. From the amount of noise they’d been making, she’d guessed bear cubs. But they were only raccoons.

She saw, now, too late, that leaving food out had been a mistake. It had attracted animals that were large enough to wake the men up but not large enough to pose an actual threat to them.

In any case, she could not just squat there in her tent’s entrance. Sooner or later the men would wake up. She emerged from the tent. The damp air struck a chill in her limbs, but she knew that soon enough she’d be perspiring. Trying to ignore the cold, she walked in a straight line, moving deliberately, toward the tent shared by Zakir and Sayed. The latter’s hiking boots — brand-new from Walmart — were standing at attention in front of it. She plucked these off the ground with a quick motion of the hand — a motion she’d been rehearsing in her mind all night long — and pivoted away. She was headed now for the front of the tent shared by Ershut and Jahandar. Her next intention was to grab their boots as well and carry them off into the woods. Zakir she wasn’t as worried about, but it would help her immeasurably to leave those two barefoot.

Something streaked across her vision about twenty feet away, dark gray moving fast against darker gray. There was a tussle and then a scream, like a toddler being backed over by a car. Zula froze.

To stop moving was a bad idea, but her mind wasn’t working at the level of ideas.

Some kind of struggle was taking place, rattling the walls of Ershut and Jahandar’s tent, tumbling across the ground, sending sticks and litter flying.

A raccoon had been attacked by some other creature. Something that had been stalking it.

Zula lit out and ran.

SHE’D NEVER KNOW, and didn’t especially care to know, in what order things had then happened in the camp. Ershut and Jahandar could not possibly have stayed asleep. They’d have climbed out of their tent, guns drawn, to see some kind of Wild Kingdom melee in progress, or perhaps just its bloody aftermath. Not knowing that a hundred meters away Zula was sitting on the ground in the trees, pulling Sayed’s boots onto her feet. Their adrenaline would have been pumping madly. They might have laughed upon realizing that all the fuss had been nothing more than wild animals banging around in the night. Perhaps that laughter would wake up Zakir and Sayed, if they hadn’t been awakened already, and perhaps Sayed would look out and notice that his boots had gone missing. Or perhaps Ershut would go up to Zula’s tent with a flashlight, look inside, and notice the deception, or not.

All she knew was that, within perhaps a quarter of an hour of her departure, flashlights were bobbing down the plank-avalanche behind her, making their way toward the trail along which Zula was running as fast as she could.

She ran faster.

A wave of nausea came over her, and she had to stop to throw up. Her hands were tingling. She wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. She had been running anaerobically. She had no choice but to take the next couple of miles at a more measured pace. Behind her — something like a mile — she could see a flashlight bobbing rhythmically as its owner sprinted along the trail. This gave her a rough idea of how much time she would have, when she reached the Schloss, to get inside and call the police. Right now it was looking pretty favorable. Shaking a little from the nausea but feeling better as her heart and lungs caught up with oxygen debt, she built speed until she had reached the quickest pace she could maintain.