Reamde - страница 206

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.

Which it didn’t seem to be doing. He could feel a steady whomping in his chest and wondered if he was finally succumbing to some sort of cardiac arrhythmia.

But this seemed to be the opposite of that, since it had nothing but rhythm. Almost mechanical in its perfection. He pressed a hand to his chest under his left nipple and observed that this beating sensation had nothing to do with his heart.

It was coming from outside his body.

It was in the air all around him.

It was a helicopter.

He rolled up to his feet and staggered out into the open, waving his arms.

THE MOUNTAINS THAT now filled the windscreen, rising up from the flat valley to an altitude somewhere above their heads, looked familiar to Seamus. Not because he’d ever been here before; he hadn’t. But he had been in mountain ranges like these all over the world. These were the sorts of mountains that insurgents loved to hang out in.

Insurgents did not care for spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges. Snow impeded movement and implied harsh cold. “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance,” and insurgents did not like being seen. Insurgents liked mountain ranges that sprawled over large reaches of territory. That crossed national borders. That were high and rugged enough to discourage casual visitors and impede the operations of police and of military forces, but not so high as to be devoid of tree cover or bitterly cold all the time. Many of the features that tourists liked, insurgents found positively undesirable — most of all, the presence of tourists. But Seamus could see at a glance that tourists would not choose to visit these mountains when the Rockies were a few hours’ drive to the east and the Cascades an equal distance to the west. These were low, forgettable mountains, no good for skiing, carved up by logging roads, partly deforested in a way that provided employment to the locals but was considered unsightly by tourists.

No wonder all the right-wing wack jobs came here. No wonder smugglers loved it.

Seamus felt weird. It wasn’t hard to understand why. He always felt this way when he was riding a chopper into mountains like this. Because it usually meant going into combat. He had to keep reminding himself that all the adrenaline flooding into his system was going to be wasted. That if it weren’t wasted — if something actually did happen — it would be a very bad thing given that the people he was with were not geared, physically or mentally, for combat.

Assuming, reasonably enough, that these tourists would want to see the highest mountains, the pilot carved a long sweeping turn up a valley with a white thread snaking down its bottom: a river violent with snowmelt. After a few minutes, this frayed into several tributaries draining a few miles of high Selkirk crest. All the mountains along the crest proper were above the tree line and presented a bleak prospect of barren rocky snags and crags reaching high above vast talus fields where nothing would grow except the occasional freak tree. They burned a lot of fuel in a short time gaining altitude and thudded over a low saddle between peaks, suddenly giving them a view of many more insurgent-friendly mountains beyond, stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by a long north-south lake in the middle distance. Turning north again, the pilot made for the border, following the slow curve of the ridgeline, passing some especially prominent peaks. But during the last few miles to the border, the ridgeline lost a couple of thousand feet of altitude and plunged back below the tree line again. One bald peak jutted out of it a few miles south of the border — Abandon Mountain, the pilot called it — but other than that, it was scrub trees, patchy snowfields, and talus ranging northward well into Canada. In the far distance, the Selkirks leaped upward and became a truly magnificent range, but that was in British Columbia, where, plainly enough, everything was bigger and better.

Seamus, though, had eyes only for the dark valleys that wriggled through the lower country below. This was out-and-out wilderness. A few old roads wandered through it, connecting to widely spaced mineheads or logging camps. But it was as wild and as untouched by humans as anything you could expect to see in the Lower Forty-Eight. And as the pilot, responding to Seamus’s directions, slowed the chopper down and allowed it to shed altitude, those valleys began to take on depth that he hadn’t noticed from farther above. As if he had just put on a pair of 3D glasses at a movie theater, he saw into the gorges of the rivers now and understood the steepness of the terrain. The fury of the rivers told the same story.

“What would you like to see?” the pilot asked him. For they had just been hovering there for a couple of minutes, admiring a jewel-like waterfall set in a deep misty bowl.

Seamus had been looking for paths. The spoor of insurgents sneaking along secret ways through the forest.

“The border,” he answered.

“You’re looking at it,” said the pilot, pointing northward. “I don’t want to cross it, but I’ll take you right up to it if you want.”

“Sure.”

They passed over a partially forested slope rising up from the waterfall toward a wildly uneven plateau of boulders and snowfields and clustered trees. Above that rose a much broader and higher talus slope that, according to the pilot, was a mile or two north of the border and roughly parallel to it. The rock wall rising out of that was pierced in one place by a man-made opening, evidently the adit of an old mine.

“Someone painted the rock,” Yuxia observed.

“Where?” Seamus asked.

“Right below us,” Yuxia said.

Seamus’s gaze had been directed horizontally and north, but he now looked straight down and saw that Yuxia was right. What he had identified, a few moments ago, as a gnarled tree, branches covered with brilliant green sprigs of new leaves, was, on closer examination, a snarl of acid-green spray paint on a rock. Like graffiti. Except impossible to make sense of.

He could see now the faint traces of a trail, leading down to the graffiti from the north, coming from the approximate direction of that old mine tunnel. On the talus it was nearly imperceptible, but from place to place he saw tufts of fresh litter, and in one location it was absolutely clear that someone had glissaded down a snowfield, carving two parallel tracks, still crisp at the edges, not yet blurred by a day’s, or even an hour’s, exposure to the warmth of the sun.

He followed the track upward and was shocked to see, some distance above it, a dead man spread-eagled on a rock.

“Holy shit,” the pilot said, seeing it too.

“Let’s get a better look at that,” Seamus said, feeling that weird sensation again: the adrenaline coming back into his system. The chopper pointed its nose down and accelerated north.

They were passing over that grooved snowfield when Yuxia let out a gasp that was almost a scream. “He’s waving at us!” she called.

“Who’s waving at us?” Seamus returned skeptically. For the man on the boulder definitely wasn’t doing any waving, and that was the only man Seamus could see.

“I think it’s Zula’s uncle,” Yuxia answered. “I saw him on Wikipedia.”