The little box was a hide-a-key, with a magnet on one side. She slid it open and found two keys linked together by a split ring. One of them looked like a spare ignition key for the truck. The other was much smaller and looked like it belonged to a padlock. She tried it on the lock that was holding the chain around her ankle, but it would not even slide into the keyhole; this was made for a different brand.
Her eyes went to the toolbox padlock that Jones had discarded on the ground yesterday.
Voices were approaching from down the slope. This was probably what the bear had been reacting to. Zula pocketed the keys, then retreated beneath the truck again and put the box back in its place against the frame.
It was Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif.
The open padlock had been half trodden into the ground. Zula pulled it out, dusted it off, and looked at it for a few moments. Then she hooked its hasp through the last link on the chain and snapped it shut.
Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif were upon her. She expected them to notice the disturbance to their camouflage, the shredded MRE tray with huge fang holes in it. They didn’t. They were exhausted and they were in a hurry. And they only wanted her. They came in through the gap in the camouflage that the bear had made. Sharif dropped to one knee and undid the padlock that held her captive. He released the loop of chain that passed around the frame of the trailer hitch, then snapped it shut again so that it stayed fixed to her ankle. His eyes snagged for a moment on the other lock, the one from the toolbox, dangling from the end of the chain, but he made nothing of it. He didn’t have the key and had no time or need to trifle with it anyway. Zipping the long end of the chain loose from the frame, he stood up, backed away from the truck, and gave the chain a preliminary tug, like a dog’s leash. “Let’s go,” he said in Arabic.
Zula stood up, then turned and bent down as if to collect her sleeping bag. “I’ll do it! Just go!” said Abdul-Wahaab. So she turned back toward Sharif. He turned his back on her and began walking out of the woods and down the open slope toward the river. On the opposite bank, between the water and the highway, a green Suburban was waiting for them. On its door was a picture of a bear.
Day 9
She didn’t have time for a good look at the Suburban before they shoved her into its open rear doors. What came through to her was, for lack of a better term, its art direction: forest green and blazoned with a logo that incorporated a bear’s head and a pair of crossed firearms. She inferred that it belonged to a hunting guide company. This was confirmed by the cargo stored in its back: sleeping bags, tents, camp stove, and the like.
To this, her captors added some of the cargo from the pickup truck camouflaged up in the woods. Much of what they had scavenged from the mining camp was trash, usable only in desperate circumstances; now that the jihadists had gotten themselves an upgrade, they were happy to leave most of the junk behind, taking only the weapons and a few other choice items.
Jones was very keen to get going. They closed the rear doors on her, took seats up front, and peeled out. The five jihadists had all survived the night, but they were dirty and exhausted and had a kind of staring gaze that made Zula not want to meet their eyes. She had the strong feeling that they had committed murder very recently, and she wondered if they were on some kind of drug. As usual, nothing was explained to her, but much could be guessed. They had flagged this Suburban down on the road, or crept up on a campsite where it had been parked, and they had murdered the hunters and the guides, concealed the bodies, and then come back to fetch her. Now they were wondering how much time they had before the victims’ failure to check in would be noticed. They might have no more than a few hours, or as much as several days. It was impossible to know, and so they had to put as many miles as possible between themselves and the scene of the crime without drawing attention to themselves.
They drove in silence for a quarter of an hour, just getting used to their situation. Then Jones, who was driving, got the attention of Ershut, who was in the middle of the backseat, and talked to him over his shoulder for a little while. Zula could tell that he was talking about her.
Ershut turned around and made it clear that he wished to trade places with Zula. There was some awkward moving around, not made any simpler by the long chain trailing from Zula’s ankle.
He rummaged for a while in toolboxes and equipment chests and found, among other things, a roll of black duct tape and some heavy black plastic sheeting. He cut the latter into a strip about an arm’s length wide and a few meters long, then arranged this horizontally like a curtain around the side and rear windows of the cargo area, taping its edges to the head liner and the window frames. The entire back half of the Suburban was now hidden behind black plastic. Anyone looking at it from the outside would probably just assume that the glass had been deeply tinted.
She could see where this was going. They were going to be driving on public highways now. The time would come when they would find themselves close to other vehicles and then they didn’t want Zula gesticulating for help in the rear window.
Or, for that matter, kicking the windows out. As she was easily capable of doing, whether or not the windows had plastic over them.
They took the chain off her ankle and obliged her to climb into a sleeping bag. Then they wrapped duct tape tightly around the outside of the bag, binding first her ankles and then her knees together. “I suppose going to the powder room is out of the question?” she called, as they were doing this.
“You’ll have to just go inside the bag,” Jones announced. “It’s distasteful, but it won’t hurt you.”
They duct-taped her wrists together on the outside of the bag, in front of her waist, and then wrapped more tape around her arms, pinning them down to her sides. Sharif had found a watch cap, or perhaps taken it off a dead hunter, so they pulled this down over her eyes and then sealed it with a blindfold of more tape.
Then they drove forever.
Zula tried to think of some way to gauge the progress of time, but she had nothing other than stops for gas. These occurred three times. Before each one, Ershut climbed into the backseat and jammed a sock into Zula’s mouth and then bound it in place with a bridle of duct tape. He remained poised over her as, just a few inches away from her head, someone — probably Jones, since he could pass for a Canadian or an American of African descent — jacked the nozzle into the fuel filler pipe and pumped in another thirty gallons of fuel. An absence of electronic beeps suggested that Jones was going inside and paying in cash, rather than using credit cards.
Where would they have obtained Canadian cash?
Probably from dead hunters.
Only a few minutes after the second of these fuel stops, the Suburban pulled off the road into a flat paved space, presumably a parking lot, and Zula heard typing and clicking from the front. Jones had apparently found a truck stop or coffee shop with Wi-Fi and was messing about on the Internet. Perhaps seeing if any missing persons reports had been filed.
The web surfing lasted for about fifteen minutes. They got back on the road again, and Ershut removed the gag from Zula’s mouth. Maybe fifteen minutes later, she finally went ahead and pissed herself. This was no picnic, but she felt better — well, less bad, anyway — when she compared it to what had happened to friends in Xiamen: Yuxia’s head in the bucket, Csongor pistol-whipped, Peter dead.
This in a strange way helped her feel better about the gory images of Khalid — half remembered and half dreamed — that kept appearing before her blindfolded eyes. Like it or not, this was the league she was playing in now. Her friends — assuming they were still alive — were playing in it too. And she at least had the advantage that she’d been in it before, or at least in its junior auxiliary, back in Eritrea.