by Lee Child
“They’ll take their chances.”
“Like Underwood did?”
“Underwood was a fool. I give them respirators. Underwood was too lazy to keep his on.”
“Did these guys wear theirs?”
“They don’t work in here. They’re perfectly healthy.”
Reacher glanced at the foreman, and then at the giant. Asked, “Is that right? You don’t work in here?”
Both guys shook their heads.
Reacher asked, “Are you healthy?”
Both guys nodded.
Reacher asked, “You want that state of affairs to last more than the next two minutes?”
Both guys smiled, and moved a step closer.
Vaughan said, “Just do it, Reacher. Turn out your pockets.”
“Still looking out for me?”
“It’s two against one. And one of them is the same size as you and the other one is bigger.”
“Two against two,” Reacher said. “You’re here.”
“I’m no use. Let’s just suck it up and move on.”
Reacher shook his head and said, “What’s in my pockets is my business.”
The two guys took another step. The foreman was on Reacher’s right and the big guy was on his left. Both of them close, but not within touching distance. The rain on their clothing was loud. Water was running out of Reacher’s hair into his eyes.
He said, “You know we don’t have to do this. We could walk out of here friends.”
The foreman said, “I don’t think so.”
“Then you won’t walk out of here at all.”
“Brave talk.”
Reacher said nothing.
The foreman glanced across at the big guy.
He said, “Let’s do it.”
Get your retaliation in first.
Reacher feinted left, toward the giant. The big guy rocked back, surprised, and the foreman rocked forward, toward the action. Momentum, moving west. A perfect little ballet. Reacher planted his heel very carefully in the mud and jerked the other way, to his right, to the east, and smashed the foreman in the stomach with his elbow. A five-hundred-pound collision. One guy moving left, one guy moving right, an elbow the size of a pineapple moving fast. The stomach is high in the midsection. Behind it lies the celiac plexus, the largest autonomic nerve center in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes called the solar plexus. A heavy blow can shut the whole thing down. Result, great pain and diaphragm spasms. Consequence, a fall to the ground and a desperate struggle to breathe.
The foreman went down.
He fell facefirst into a foot-wide rut filled with water. Reacher kicked him in the side to roll him out of it. He didn’t want the guy to drown. He stepped over the writhing form into clear air and glanced around through the bright blue light. Thurman had backed off twenty feet. Vaughan was rooted to the spot. The big guy was crouched eight feet away, holding his wrench like a clean-up hitter waiting on a high fastball.
Reacher kept his eyes on the big guy’s eyes and said, “Vaughan, step away. This guy is going to start swinging. He could hit you by mistake.” But he sensed Vaughan wasn’t moving. So he danced away east, dragging the fight with him. The big guy followed, big feet in rubber boots splashing awkwardly through standing water. Reacher dodged north, toward Thurman. Thurman backed off again, keeping his distance. Reacher stopped. The big guy wound up for a swing. The huge wrench slashed horizontal, at shoulder height. Reacher stepped back a pace and the wrench missed and its wild momentum carried the big guy through a complete circle.
Reacher backed off another pace.
The big guy followed.
Reacher stopped.
The big guy swung.
Reacher stepped back.
Thirty acres. Reacher wasn’t fast and he wasn’t nimble but he was a lot more mobile than anyone who outweighed him by a hundred pounds. And he had the kind of natural stamina that came from being exactly what he was born to be. He wasn’t on the downside of twenty years of weight rooms and steroids. Unlike his opponent. The big guy was breathing hard and every missed swing was jacking his fury and his adrenaline rush all the way up to carelessness. Reacher kept on moving and stopping and dodging and stopping again. Eventually the big guy learned. With his fifth swing he aimed for a spot three feet behind Reacher’s back. Reacher saw it coming in the guy’s crazed eyes and dodged the other way. Forward. The wrench hissed through empty air and Reacher rolled around the guy’s spinning back and bent his knees and smashed his elbow up into the guy’s kidney. Then he stepped away, two paces, three, and stood still and shook his arms loose and rolled his shoulders. The big guy turned. His back looked stiff and his knees were weakening. He charged and swung and missed and Reacher dodged away.
Like a bullfight. Except the big guy’s IQ was marginally higher than a bull’s. After a dozen fruitless swings he recognized that his tactics were futile. He sent the wrench spinning away into the marshy ground and got ready to charge. Reacher smiled. Because by then the damage was done. The guy was panting and staggering a little. The violent exertions and the adrenaline overload had spent him. He was going to lose. He didn’t know it. But Reacher knew it.
And Thurman knew it.
Thurman was hurrying back toward the gate. Hurrying, but slowly. An old man, a heavy coat, awkward footwear, mud on the ground. Reacher called, “Vaughan, don’t let him leave. He has to stay here.” He saw her move in the corner of his eye. A small soaked figure, darting north. Then he saw the giant launch himself. A crazed lunge, across fifteen feet of distance. Three hundred and fifty pounds, coming on like a train. Reacher felt small and static by comparison. The guy might have been fast on a football field but he was slow now. His boots churned in the liquid mud. No grip. No traction. He came in on a flailing run and Reacher feinted left and stepped right and tripped him. The guy splashed down in the water and slid a full yard and Reacher turned away and was hit in the back by what felt like a truck. He went down hard and got a mouthful of mud and reflexively rolled away and jacked himself back up and dodged and missed a punch from the plant foreman by about an inch and a half.
Two against one again.
Inefficient.
The foreman launched another big roundhouse swing and Reacher swatted it away and saw the giant struggling to get up. His hands and knees were scrabbling and sliding in the mud. Fifty feet north Vaughan had hold of Thurman’s collar. He was struggling to get free. Maybe winning. Then the foreman swung again and Reacher moved and the foreman’s fist glanced off his shoulder. But not before stinging a bruise from where he had been hit before, in the bar.
Which hurt.
OK, no more Mr. Nice Guy.
Reacher planted his back heel in the mud and leaned in and launched a flurry of heavy punches, a fast deadly rhythm, four blows, right, left, right, left, one to the gut, two to the jaw, three to the head, and four, a crushing uppercut under the chin, like he was his demented five-year-old self all over again, but five times heavier and eight times more experienced. The foreman was already on his way down when the uppercut landed. It lifted him back up and then dropped him like the earth had opened up. Reacher spun away and lined up and kicked the scrabbling giant in the head, like he was punting a football, instep against ear. The impact pinwheeled the guy’s body a whole two feet and dropped him back in the mud.
The foreman lay still.
The giant lay still.
Game over.
Reacher checked his hands for broken bones and found none. He stood still and got his breathing under control and glanced north through the light. Thurman had broken free of Vaughan’s grasp and was heading for the gate again, slipping and sliding and twisting and turning to fend her off. His hat was gone. His hair was wet and wild. Reacher set off in their direction. Paused to collect the giant wrench from where it had fallen. He hefted it up and carried it on his shoulder like an ax. He trudged onward, heavily. A slow-motion chase. He caught Vaughan ten yards from the gate and passed her and clamped a hand on Thurman’s
shoulder and pressed downward. The old guy folded up and went down on his knees. Reacher moved onward, to the gate. He found the little gray box. Flipped the lid. Saw the keypad. Swung the wrench and smashed it to splinters. Hit it again. And again. It fell out of its housing in small broken pieces. A small metal chassis hung up on thin trailing wires. Reacher chopped downward with the wrench until the wires tore and ruptured and the chassis fell to the ground.
Thurman was still on his knees. He said, “What are you doing? Now we can’t get out of here.”
“Wrong,” Reacher said. “You can’t, but we can.”
“How?”
“Wait and see.”
“It’s not possible.”
“Would you have given me the combination?”
“Never.”
“So what’s the difference?”
Vaughan said, “Reacher, what the hell is in your pockets?”
“Lots of things,” Reacher said. “Things we’re going to need.”
71
Reacher trudged through the mud and rolled Thurman’s men into what medics called the recovery position. On their sides, arms splayed, necks at a natural angle, one leg straight and the other knee drawn up. No danger of choking. A slight danger of drowning, if the puddles didn’t stop filling. The rain was still hard. It thrashed against their slickers and drummed on the sides of their boots.
Thurman poked and prodded at the shattered box where the keypad had been. No result. The gates stayed closed. He gave up and slipped and slid back to the center of the hidden area. Reacher and Vaughan fought their way across to the eighteen-wheeler. It was just standing there, shut down and silent and oblivious.
Vaughan said, “You really think this is a bomb?”
Reacher said, “Don’t you?”
“Thurman was mighty plausible. About the gifts for Afghanistan.”
“He’s a preacher. It’s his job to be plausible.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“What if I’m right?”
“How much damage could it do?”
“If they built it right I wouldn’t want to be within three miles of it when it goes off.”
“Three miles?”
“Twenty tons of TNT, twenty tons of shrapnel. It won’t be pretty.”
“How do we get out of here?”
“Where’s your truck?”
“Where we left it. They ambushed me. Opened the outer gate and drove me through the plant in Thurman’s SUV. It’s parked the other side of the inner gate. Which you just made sure will never open again.”
“No big deal.”
“You can’t climb the wall.”
“But you can,” Reacher said.
They talked for five fast minutes about what to do and how to do it. Knives, welds, the average size and thickness of a car’s roof panel, canvas straps, knots, trailer hitches, four-wheel-drive, low-range gearing. Thurman was pacing aimlessly a hundred yards away. They left him there and headed through the mud to the wall. They picked a spot ten feet left of the gate. Reacher took the two switchblades out of his pocket and handed them to Vaughan. Then he stood with his back to the wall, directly underneath the maximum radius of the horizontal cylinder above. Rain sheeted off it and soaked his head and shoulders. He bent down and curled his left palm and made a stirrup. Vaughan lined up directly in front of him, facing him, and put her right foot in the stirrup. He took her weight and she balanced with her wrists on his shoulders and straightened her leg and boosted herself up. He cupped his right hand under her left foot. She stood upright in his palms and her weight fell forward and her belt buckle hit him in the forehead.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Nothing we haven’t done before,” he said, muffled.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Reacher was six feet five inches tall and had long arms. In modest motel rooms he could put his palms flat on an eight-foot ceiling. Vaughan was about five feet four. Arms raised, she could probably stretch just shy of seven feet. Total, nearly fifteen feet. And the wall was only fourteen feet high.
He lifted. Like starting a bicep curl with a free weights bar loaded with a hundred and twenty pounds. Easy, except that his hands were turned in at an unnatural angle. And his footing was insecure, and Vaughan wasn’t a free weights bar. She wasn’t rigid and she was wobbling and struggling to balance.
“Ready?” he called.
“Wait one,” she said.
He felt her weight move in his hands, left to right, right to left, shifting, equalizing, preparing.
“Now go,” she said.
He did four things. He boosted her sharply upward, used her momentary weightlessness to shift his hands flat under her shoes, stepped forward half a pace, and locked his arms straight.
She fell forward and met the bulge of the cylinder with the flats of her forearms. The hollow metal construction boomed once, then again, much delayed.
“OK?” he called.
“I’m there,” she said.
He felt her go up on tiptoes in his palms. Felt her reach up and straighten her arms. According to his best guess her hands should right then have been all the way up on the cylinder’s top dead-center. He heard the first switchblade pop open. He swiveled his hands a little and gripped her toes. For stability. She was going to need it. He moved out another few inches. By then she should have been resting with her belly against the metal curve. Rain was streaming down all over him. He heard her stab downward with the knife. The wall clanged and boomed.
“Won’t go through,” she called.
“Harder,” he called back.
She stabbed again. Her whole body jerked and he dodged and danced underneath her, keeping her balanced. Like acrobats in a circus. The wall boomed.
“No good,” she called.
“Harder,” he called.
She stabbed again. No boom. Just a little metallic clatter, then nothing.
“The blade broke,” she called.
Reacher’s arms were starting to ache.
“Try the other one,” he called. “Be precise with the angle. Straight downward, OK?”
“The metal is too thick.”
“It’s not. It’s from an old piece-of-shit Buick, probably. It’s like aluminum foil. And that’s a good Japanese blade. Hit it hard. Who do you hate?”
“The guy that pulled the trigger on David.”
“He’s inside the wall. His heart is the other side of the metal.”
He heard the second switchblade open. Then there was silence for a second. Then a convulsive jerk through her legs and another dull boom through the metal.
A different boom.
“It’s in,” she called. “All the way.”
“Pull on it,” he called back.
He felt her take her weight on the wooden handle. He felt her twist as she wrapped both fists around it. He felt her feet pull up out of his hands. Then he felt them come back.
“It’s slicing through,” she called. “It’s cutting the metal.”
“It will,” he called back. “It’ll stop when it hits a weld.”
He felt it stabilize a second later. Called, “Where is it?”
“Right at the top.”
“Ready?”
“On three,” she called. “One, two, three.”
She jerked herself upward and he helped as much as he could, fingertips and tiptoes, and then her weight was gone. He came down in a heap and rolled away in case she was coming down on top of him. But she wasn’t. He got to his feet and walked away to get a better angle and saw her lying longitudinally on top of the cylinder, legs spread, both hands wrapped tight around the knife handle. She rested like that for a second and then shifted her weight and slid down the far side of the bulge, slowly at first, then faster, swinging around, still holding tight to the knife handle. He saw her clasped hands at the top of the curve, and then her weight started pulling the blade through the metal, fast at first where a track was already sliced and then slower as the blade bit thro
ugh new metal. It would jam again at the next weld, which he figured was maybe five feet down the far side, allowing for the size of a typical car’s roof panel, minus a folded flange at both sides for assembly purposes, which would be about a quarter of the way around the cylinder’s circumference, which would mean she would be hanging off the wall at full stretch with about four feet of clear air under the soles of her shoes.
A survivable fall.
Probably.
He waited what seemed like an awful long time, and then he heard two hard thumps on the outside of the wall. They each sounded twice, once immediately and then again as the sound raced around the hollow circle and came back. He closed his eyes and smiled. Their agreed signal. Out, on her feet, no broken bones.
“Impressive,” Thurman said, from ten yards away.
Reacher turned. The old guy was still hatless. His blow-dried waves were ruined. Ninety yards beyond him his two men were still down and inert.
Four minutes, Reacher thought.
Thurman said, “I could do what she did.”
“In your dreams,” Reacher said. “She’s fit and agile. You’re a fat old man. And who’s going to boost you up? Real life is not like the movies. Your guys aren’t going to wake up and shake their heads and get right to it. They’re going to be puking and falling down for a week.”
“Are you proud of that?”
“I gave them a choice.”
“Your lady friend can’t open the gate, you know. She doesn’t have the combination.”
“Have faith, Mr. Thurman. A few minutes from now you’re going to see me ascend.”
Reacher strained to hear sounds from the main compound, but the rain was too loud. It hissed in the puddles and pattered on the mud and clanged hard against the metal of the wall. So he just waited. He took up station six feet from the wall and a yard left of where Vaughan had gone over. Thurman backed off and watched.
Three minutes passed. Then four. Then without warning a long canvas strap snaked up and over the wall and the free end landed four feet to Reacher’s right. The kind of thing used for tying down scrap cars to a flat-bed trailer. Vaughan had driven Thurman’s Tahoe up to the security office and had found a strap of the right length in the pile near the door and had weighted its end by tying it around a scrap of pipe. He pictured her after the drive back, twenty feet away through the metal, swinging the strap like a cowgirl with a rope, building momentum, letting it go, watching it sail over.