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.
They must have traveled for sixteen hours that day. Zula dozed occasionally, perhaps for twenty minutes, perhaps for three hours—there was no way to guess. They were traveling at highway speeds almost the entire time, which suggested that they were covering a vast distance—something on the order of a thousand miles. It was a long day but, in the end, not radically worse than flying between continents in an economy-class airline seat. And like such a flight, it seemed interminable when she was in the middle of it. At the end of the day, though, it seemed to have taken no time at all, since nothing really had happened.
They slowed suddenly, pulled off the highway onto gravel, and began to descend a relatively steep slope. Ershut scrambled over the backseat and hurriedly reinstated the gag; apparently this was a spur-of-the-moment excursion. The ground beneath the Suburban leveled off, and the vehicle eased through a series of maneuvers, then stopped. She heard a zipping noise as Jones stomped the parking brake down. The engine stopped. A door opened and one person—she assumed Jones—got out. She heard his feet crunching away across gravel. A few moments later, he greeted someone who gave him a cheerful greeting back.
Two greetings, actually, almost in unison: a man and a woman.
A conversation began. Zula could not make out words, but it all sounded cheerful enough. A friendly shooting-the-breeze type of chat. Zula could not hear anything else: no other vehicles, no traffic of any kind, none of the noises of a city. Just a low rushing sound that she was pretty sure came from a nearby river, a fast-flowing mountain stream.
After about ten minutes, the conversation paused, then resumed in much more subdued tones. Less than a minute later, she heard a door swing open and feet ascending a short stairway. Then the door thumped shut.
Two other jihadists got out of the Suburban and walked away over the gravel and there was a repetition of the door opening, the
