by Lee Child
He stepped back. Pointed at Cash, pointed at the base of the corner post.
“This is your position,” he whispered. “Check it out.”
Cash moved forward and knelt down in the weeds. Six feet away he was invisible. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Tracked it slowly left and right, up and down.
“Three stories plus a basement,” he whispered. “High-pitched shingle roof, plank siding, many windows, one door visible to the west. No cover at all in any direction. They bulldozed everything flat, all around. Nothing’s growing. You’re going to look like a beetle on a bed-sheet out there.”
“Cameras?”
The rifle tracked a steady line from left to right. “Under the eaves. One on the north side, one on the west. We can assume the same on the sides we can’t see.”
“How big are they?”
“How big do you want them to be?”
“Big enough for you to hit.”
“Funny man. If they were spy cameras built into cigarette lighters I could hit them from here.”
“OK, so listen up,” Reacher whispered. “This is how we’re going to do it. I’m going to get to my starting position. Then we’re all going to wait for Franklin to get back and put the comms net on the air. Then I’m going to make a move. If I don’t feel good I’m going to call in fire on those cameras. I say the word, I want you to take them out. Two shots, bang, bang. That’ll slow them down, maybe ten or twenty seconds.”
“Negative,” Cash said. “I won’t direct live rounds into a wooden structure we know contains a noncombatant hostage.”
“She’ll be in the basement,” Reacher said.
“Or the attic.”
“You’d be firing at the eaves.”
“Exactly. She’s in the attic, she hears gunfire, she hits the deck, that’s exactly where I’m aiming. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”
“Spare me,” Reacher said. “Take the risk.”
“Negative. Won’t do it.”
“Christ, Gunny, you are one uptight Marine, you know that?”
Cash didn’t speak. Reacher stepped forward again and peered around the corner of the fence. Took a long hard look and pulled back.
“OK,” he said. “New plan. Just watch the west windows. You see muzzle flash, you put suppressing fire into the room it’s coming out of. We can assume the hostage won’t be in the same room as the sniper.”
Cash said nothing.
“Will you do that at least?” Reacher asked.
“You might be in the house already.”
“I’ll take my chances. Voluntary assumption of risk, OK? Helen can witness my consent. She’s a lawyer.”
Cash said nothing.
“No wonder you came in third,” Reacher said. “You need to lighten up.”
“OK,” Cash said. “I see hostile gunfire, I’ll return it.”
“Hostile is about the only kind you’re going to see, don’t you think? Since you only gave me a damn knife?”
“Army,” Cash said. “Always bitching about something.”
“What do I do?” Helen asked.
“New plan,” Reacher said. He touched the fence with his palm. “Keep low, follow the fence around the corner, stop opposite the house. Stay down. They won’t pick you up there. It’s too far. Listen to your phone. If I need a distraction I’ll ask you to run a little ways toward the house and then back again. A zigzag, or a circle. Out and back. Real fast. Just enough to put a blip on their screen. No danger. By the time they move a rifle around, you’ll be back at the fence.”
She nodded. Didn’t speak.
“And me?” Ann Yanni asked.
“You stay with Cash. You’re the ethics police. He gets cold feet about helping me out, you kick his ass, OK?”
Nobody spoke.
“All set?” Reacher asked.
“Set,” they said, one after the other.
Reacher walked away into the darkness on the other side of the road.
He kept on walking, off the blacktop, across the shoulder, across the stony margin of the field, onward, right into the field, all the way into the middle of the soaking crop. He waited until the irrigation boom rolled slowly around and caught up with him. Then he turned ninety degrees and walked south with it, directly underneath it, keeping pace, letting the ceaseless water rain down and soak his hair and his skin and his clothes. The boom pulled away as it followed its circular path and Reacher kept straight on at a tangent and walked into the next field. Waited once again for the boom to find him and then walked on under it, matching its speed, raising his arms high and wide to catch as much drenching as he could. Then that boom swung away and left him and he walked on to find the next one. And the next, and the next. When at last he was opposite the driveway entrance he simply walked in a circle, under the last boom, waiting for his cell phone to vibrate, like a man caught in a monsoon.
Cash’s cell phone vibrated against his hip and he pulled it out and clicked it on. Heard Franklin’s voice, quiet and cautious in his ear.
“Check in, please,” it said.
Cash heard Helen say: “Here.”
Yanni said, “Here,” from three feet behind him.
Cash said, “Here.”
Then he heard Reacher say: “Here.”
Franklin said, “OK, you’re all loud and clear, and the ball is in your court.”
Cash heard Reacher say: “Gunny, check the house.”
Cash lifted the rifle and swept left to right. “No change.”
Reacher said: “I’m on my way.”
Then there was nothing but silence. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. A whole minute. Two minutes.
Cash heard Reacher ask: “Gunny, do you see me?”
Cash lifted the rifle again and swept the length of the driveway from its mouth all the way to the house. “Negative. I don’t see you. Where are you?”
“About thirty yards in.”
Cash moved the rifle. Estimated thirty yards from the road and stared through the scope. Saw nothing. Nothing at all. “Good work, soldier. Keep going.”
Yanni crawled forward. Whispered in Cash’s ear. “Why don’t you see him?”
“Because he’s nuts.”
“No, explain it to me. You’ve got a night scope, right?”
“The best money can buy,” Cash said. “And it works off heat, just like their cameras.” Then he pointed away to his right. “But my guess is Reacher walked through the fields. Soaked himself in water. It’s coming straight up from the aquifer, stone cold. So right now he’s close to ambient temperature. I can’t see him; they can’t see him.”
“Smart,” Yanni said.
“Brave,” Cash said. “But ultimately dumb. Because he’s drying out every step of the way. And getting warmer.”
Reacher walked through the dark in the dirt ten feet south of the driveway. Not fast, not slow. His shoes were soaked and they were sticking to the mud. Almost coming off. He was so cold he was shivering violently. Which was bad. Shivering is a physiological reaction designed to warm a cold body fast. And he didn’t want to be warm. Not yet.
Vladimir had gotten a rhythm going. He stared at the East monitor for four seconds, then the North for three. East, two, three, four, North, two, three. East, two, three, four, North, two, three. He didn’t move his chair. Just leaned a little one way, then the other. Beside him Sokolov had a similar thing going south and west. Slightly different intervals. Not perfectly synchronized. But just as good, Vladimir guessed. Maybe even better. Sokolov had spent a lot of time on surveillance.
Reacher walked on. Not fast, not slow. On the map the driveway had looked to be about two hundred yards long. On the ground it felt like an airport runway. Straight as a die. Wide. And long, long, long. He had been walking forever. And he was less than halfway to the house. He walked on. Just kept on going. Looking ahead every step of the way, watching the darkened windows far away in front of him.
He realized his hair wasn’t dripping any
more.
He touched one hand with the other. Dry. Not warm, but no longer cold.
He walked on. He was tempted to run. Running would get him there faster. But running would heat him up. He was approaching the point of no return. He was right out there in no-man’s-land. And he wasn’t shivering. He raised his phone.
“Helen,” he whispered. “I need that diversion.”
Helen took off her heels and left them neatly side by side at the base of the fence. For an absurd moment she felt like a person who piles all her clothes on the beach before she walks into the sea to drown. Then she put her palms down on the dirt like a sprinter in the blocks and took off forward. Just ran crazily, twenty feet, thirty, forty, and then she stopped dead and stood still, facing the house with her arms out wide like a target. Shoot me, she thought. Please shoot me. Then she got scared that maybe she really meant it and she turned and ran back in a wide zigzag loop. Threw herself down and crawled along the fence again until she found her shoes.
Vladimir saw her on the North monitor. Nothing recognizable. Just a brief flare that because of the phosphor technology was smeared and a little time-lagged. But he bent his head closer anyway and stared at the afterimage. One second, two. Sokolov sensed the interruption to his rhythm and glanced over. Three seconds, four.
“Fox?” Vladimir said.
“I didn’t see it,” Sokolov said. “But probably.”
“It ran away again.”
“OK, then.” Sokolov turned back to his own pair of monitors. Glanced at the West view, checked the South, and settled into his regular cadence again.
Cash had a cadence of his own. He was inching his night scope along at what he guessed was the speed of a walking man. But every five seconds he would sweep it suddenly forward and back in case his estimate was off. During one of those rapid traverses he picked up on what looked like a pale green shadow.
“Reacher, I can see you,” he whispered. “You’re visible, soldier.”
Reacher’s voice came back: “What scope have you got on that thing?”
“Litton,” Cash said.
“Expensive, right?”
“Thirty-seven hundred dollars.”
“Got to be better than a lousy thermal camera.”
Cash didn’t reply.
Reacher said: “Well, I’m hoping so, anyway.”
He walked on. Probably the most unnatural thing a human can force himself to do, to walk slowly and surely toward a building that likely has a rifle in it pointing directly at his center mass. If Chenko had any sense at all he would wait, and wait, and wait, until his target was pretty close. And Chenko seemed to have plenty of sense. Fifty yards would be good. Or thirty-five, like Chenko’s range out of the parking garage. Chenko was pretty good at thirty-five yards. That had been made very clear.
He walked on. Transferred the phone to his left and held it near his ear. Took the knife out of his pocket and unsheathed it and held it right-handed, low and easy. Heard Cash say: “You’re totally visible now, soldier. You’re shining like the north star. It’s like you’re on fire.”
Forty yards to go.
Thirty-nine.
Thirty-eight.
“Helen?” he said. “Do it again.”
He heard her voice: “OK.”
He walked on. Held his breath.
Thirty-five yards.
Thirty-four.
Thirty-three.
He breathed out. He walked on doggedly. Twenty-nine yards to go. He heard panting in his ear. Helen, running. He heard Yanni ask, off-mike: “How close is he?” Heard Cash answer: “Not close enough.”
Vladimir leaned forward and said, “There it is again.” He put his fingertip on the screen, as if touch might tell him something. Sokolov glanced across. Sokolov had spent many more hours with the screens than Vladimir. Primarily surveillance had been his job. His, and Raskin’s.
“That’s no fox,” he said. “It’s way too big.”
He watched for five more seconds. The image was weaving left and right at the very limit of the camera’s range. Recognizable size, recognizable shape, inexplicable motion. He stood up and walked to the door. Braced his hands on the frame and leaned out into the hallway.
“Chenko!” he called. “North!”
Behind his back on the West screen a shape as big as his thumb grew larger. It looked like a painting-by-numbers figure done in fluorescent colors. Lime green on the outside, then a band of chrome yellow, with a core of hot red.
Chenko walked through an empty bedroom and opened the window as high as it would go. Then he backed away into the darkness. That way he was invisible from below and invulnerable except to a shot taken from the third story of an adjacent building, and there were no adjacent buildings. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Quartered the open ground two hundred yards out, up and down, left and right.
He saw a woman.
She was running crazily, barefoot, darting left and right, out and back, like she was dancing or playing a phantom game of soccer. Chenko thought: What? He squeezed the slack out of his trigger and tried to anticipate her next pirouette. Tried to guess where her chest would be a third of a second after he fired. He waited. Then she stopped moving. She stood completely still, facing the house, arms out wide like a target.
Chenko pulled the trigger.
Then he understood. He stepped back to the hallway.
“Decoy!” he screamed. “Decoy!”
Cash saw the muzzle flash and called, “Shot fired,” and jumped his scope to the north window. The lower pane was raised, the upper pane was fixed. No point in putting a round through the opening. The upward trajectory would guarantee a miss. So he fired at the glass. He figured if he could get a hail of jagged shards going, then that might ruin somebody’s night.
Sokolov was watching the crazy heat image on Vladimir’s screen when he heard Chenko’s shot and his shouted warning. He glanced back at the door and turned to the South monitor. Nothing there. Then he heard return fire and shattering glass upstairs. He pushed back from the table and stepped to the door.
“Are you OK?” he called.
“Decoy,” Chenko called back. “Has to be.”
Sokolov turned and checked all four screens, very carefully.
“No,” he called. “Negative. Definitely nothing incoming.”
Reacher touched the front wall of the house. Old plank siding, painted many times. He was ten feet south of the driveway, ten feet south of the front door, near a window that looked into a dark empty room. The window was a tall rectangle with a lower pane that slid upward behind the upper pane. Maybe the upper pane slid down over the lower pane, too. Reacher didn’t know the name for the style. He had rarely lived in houses and had never owned one. Sash? Double-hung? He wasn’t sure. The house was much older than it had looked from a distance. Maybe a hundred years. Hundred-year-old house, hundred-year-old window. But did the window still have a hundred-year-old catch? He pressed his cheek against the lower pane and squinted upward.
He couldn’t see. Too dark.
Then he heard the shooting. Two rounds, one close, one not, shattering glass.
Then he heard Cash in his ear: “Helen? You OK?”
He heard no reply.
Cash asked again: “Helen? Helen?”
No reply.
Reacher put the phone in his pocket. Worked the blade of his knife up into the gap where the bottom of the upper casement overlapped the top of the lower casement. He moved the blade right to left, slowly, carefully, feeling for a catch. He found one, dead-center. Tapped it gently. It felt like a heavy brass tongue. It would pivot through ninety degrees, in and out of a socket.
But which way?
He pushed it right to left. Solid. He pulled the knife out and worked it back in an inch left of center. Slid it back until he found the tongue again. Pushed it left to right.
It moved.
He pushed it hard, and knocked it right out of its socket.
Easy.
Cash eased forward and swung his rifle through ninety degrees until it was sighted due east along the fence. He stared through the scope. Saw nothing. He moved back into cover. Raised his phone.
“Helen?” he whispered.
No response.
Reacher moved through the empty room to the door. It was closed. He put his ear against it. Listened hard. Heard nothing. He turned the handle slowly, carefully. Opened the door very slowly. Leaned out. Checked the hallway.
Empty.
There was light from an open doorway fifteen feet ahead on his left. He paused. Lifted one foot at a time and wiped the soles of his shoes on his pants. Wiped his palms. He took a single step. Tested the floor. No sound. He moved ahead slowly, silently. Boat shoes. Good for something. He kept close to the wall, where the floor would be strongest. He stopped a yard shy of the lighted doorway. Took a breath. Moved on.
Stopped in the doorway.
He was looking at two guys from behind. They were seated side by side with their backs to him at a long table. Staring at TV monitors. At ghostly green images of darkness. On the left, Vladimir. On the right, a guy he hadn’t seen before. Sokolov? Must be. To Sokolov’s right, a yard away from him, a handgun rested on the very end of the table. A Smith & Wesson Model 60. The first stainless steel revolver produced anywhere in the world. Two-and-a-half-inch barrel. A five-shooter.