Page 25 of The Oligarch's Daughter

The trail got steeper, rockier, more barren. He thought momentarily about turning himself in to the FBI, but then he flashed on images from long before, images that had been burned onto his brain. The spatter of blood on the walls and the carpet. That terrible coppery smell.

And he knew he could never turn himself in.

A few minutes later, he saw a sign:ELCAPITAN, 3,540FEET. He was nearing the peak. It wasn’t a mountain so much as a rock dome. Pulling out his map, he saw that El Capitan was a good bit north of where he’d wanted to go. He’d been walking not west but northwest. Hours out of the way. The wrong way.

Pulling out the compass, he realized that its needle pointed west no matter which way he turned it. It was broken.

For most of the day, he’d been heading in the wrong direction.

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But how could a compass malfunction? He had kept it in his go duffel, in a plastic Ziploc bag that also held several burner phones. And . . . of course there was a magnet in each of those phones, in its speaker. That magnet alone was probably enough to have changed the polarity of the compass. That had to be it. He had known this but hadn’t remembered, hadn’t thought about it, when he shoved the compass into the bag with the burner phones. When he’d checked out his equipment yesterday, the compass’s needle seemed to be moving okay, but he hadn’t bothered to check how accurate it was.

He had no other compass. Now he’d have to rely on his own sense of where the sun was in the sky. He wanted to go west, which meant following the sun as it set. The sun would soon be setting, and he could reliably point himself to the west.

He didn’t trust his sense of direction during the day, though. In effect, he was wandering aimlessly through an immense forest. Without water or food. People got lost in forests. He’d read in theUnion-Leaderabout one case: a couple, lost, was found starved to death in the woods. Apparently, without knowing it, they’d been walking in a big circle for days.

Then he half-remembered a trick his father had once shown him. He tried to recall how it worked. You laid your watch horizontally and pointed the hour hand toward the sun. And then? He couldn’t bring the next step to mind.

He was exhausted, but he knew he couldn’t stop here. Not at such a high point, where he could be seen from a great distance. Where he was exposed. He had to continue. But downhill, he was finding, was more difficult—treacherous, even, in places with loose soil and rocks that came away if he tried to use them as a foothold.

And he found himself increasingly losing feeling in his fingers and toes. His feet felt like they were carved out of wood or stone. Plus, the knuckles of his toes hurt badly, and when he stopped to take off one boot, he found huge blisters there.

He knew he had to stop and build a fire to warm up. If he was going to do it at all, he had to do it now. In a few hours it would be dark, and a fire would serve as a beacon, a flashing neon sign for his pursuers.

His father had indoctrinated in him the technique of making a fire in the wilderness.Build the smallest fire you need, and don’t build it at the foot of a rock face—which projects the firelight, acts like a movie screen, makes the fire, the light signature, detectable from a great distance. No, you want to build it in thicker vegetation.

You also want to make sure your fire isn’t easily detected by any searchers after you’re done. You must leave no trace. Paul recalled something called an H-fire, where you inscribe a bigHinto the ground, pull back the flaps of earth, and scoop dirt out of the middle. When you put your fire out, the flaps lie down like doors to cover evidence of the fire.

Paul took his fixed-blade knife and carved anHinto the moss and dirt of the forest floor, then peeled back flaps of sod. He had two knives in his bag. One was a fixed-blade Gerber knife. The blade was made of carbon steel, not stainless, so it was easier to sharpen on a rock, if need be. The other was a multi-tool.

Now he needed fuel. He gathered some dead pieces of birch tree and peeled off the bark. With the Gerber knife, he scraped at the bark until he had a small pile of paper-thin shavings. Birch bark contained an oil that made it light quickly, he remembered. The shavings crumbled in his hand like stale cigar wrapper. To that pile he added a handful of brown pine needles. Then a couple of handfuls of small twigs of varying sizes. With the fuel gathered, he searched for a flame. None of that ­ rub-two-sticks-together bullshit. That was a skill he’d never mastered. He’d freeze to death rubbing sticks together. They’d find him entombed in a block of ice like some cartoon character.

Rummaging through his go-bag, he found the lighter and pulled it out. Flicked it a few times.

Nothing happened. No flame.

He realized at once what must have taken place. The lighter’s ignition lever had been compressed against something else in the bag, and all the butane must have gassed off.

Shit. This goddamned go-bag.

He’d never trusted lighters, anyway. When they got cold, they wouldn’t spark a flame.

But he wasn’t out of options, and he wasn’t yet reduced to rubbing two sticks together. He rooted around in the bag until he found a flint and an old metal Band-Aid box. The box was full of cotton balls slathered with Vaseline. He rubbed the flint against the spine of the knife, but nothing happened. He could almost hear his father’s voice:You’re doing it wrong. He’d say,You’re doing it wrong,let me show youorYou’re doing it wrong, let me explain.

Eventually, muscle memory kicked in, and it came back to him how to hold the knife, how to rub the flint against the knife’s spine so that it crisply generated a spark. He did it again, and this time, a nice fat spark landed on the Vaseline-buttered cotton ball, the cotton ignited, and its flame caught the birch bark, and soon he had a crackling fire going.

He sat on a downed tree trunk before the fire. Now it was a matter of keeping it burning. He held his frost-nipped fingers close to the flames. As they warmed up, they throbbed with pain. He removed his boots, pulled off his damp socks, and placed them on the ground close to the fire, so they’d dry out, if only a little. He inched his feet closer to the fire. His toes felt like razor blades were slicing them. He rummaged through his bag until he found a second pair of socks, which he put on.

He was also almost faint from hunger. He had skipped lunch and had barely had anything for breakfast. He took a protein bar out of his bag, unwrapped it, and ate half of it. In his state of ravenous hunger, the bar tasted deliriously good. Then he stopped, realizing that this half of a protein bar was all he had to eat so long as he remained in the forest. He’d meant to add some more bars to the go-bag but had never gotten around to it. He’d better save the rest of the bar for later. He’d never been much good at foraging in the wild for food. Too many berries that looked edible turned out to be poisonous. And he wasn’t going to try to trap squirrels. No squirrel meat for him, thanks.

As he warmed himself by the fire, he debated his next move. He looked at his watch. Sunset was roughly twenty minutes away, which meant he had to find a place to rest for the night. He was bone-tired and nearly fell asleep sitting up. He was experiencing an adrenaline crash, he knew: the deep fatigue caused by the hours of adrenaline rush suddenly coming to an end. His body had been running on adrenaline so long that it couldn’t produce any more and had just stopped.

Also, he knew, it was dangerous to move through the woods in the dark—there was always the risk of a tree branch poking you in the eye—and using a flashlight was out of the question. That would attract attention from quite a ways off.

The shadows had grown long. He desperately needed a rest, if only a brief one, but he didn’t know if he had time to take one. In any case, it wasn’t safe to sleep for the night. He’d wake up with frostbitten toes and fingers, worse than he had already. He would also be giving up his head start. He remembered his father’s stern admonition:Don’t sleep. Power through. Stan used to boast that he once went for five days without sleep. “Not till the fifth day did I start hallucinating,” he’d say.

Fuck Stan Brightman, Paul thought coldly. As far as he was concerned, Stan was always hallucinating.

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