by Lee Child
Now the center of the bumper was six inches from Reacher’s chest.
And it kept on coming. The bumper flattened all the way to where the steel brackets bolted it to the frame. Sterner stuff. The engine roared louder and the truck dug in hard and squatted and strained on its suspension. One front tire lost traction for a second and spun wildly and spattered dirt and stones and shredded pieces of bramble into the wheel well. The whole truck rocked and bucked and danced in place and then the tire bit again and the tailpipes bellowed and the steel brackets collapsed and gave an inch and the truck lurched forward.
Four inches from Reacher’s chest.
Then three.
Then the brackets gave a little more and the hot metal touched Reacher’s coat.
Time to go.
He turned his head sideways and pushed up on the chrome with his hands and forced himself downward, like immersing himself in water. He got halfway there, and then the sheet metal itself behind the bumper started giving way, shrieking and bending and crushing, the curves inverting, the contours flattening. The engine roared and the pipes bellowed louder and the truck lurched forward another inch and the center of the bumper tapped Reacher on the side of his face. He scraped on down, one ear on the hot chrome and the other on the cold granite. He kicked and scrabbled with his heels and got his feet out from under him and he forced his butt through the brambles and got down on his back. Right above his face the last tiny triangle of clear air disappeared as the fenders gave way and what was left of the bumper folded violently into a forward-facing point and hit the granite.
The driver didn’t let up.
The guy kept his foot down hard. Clearly he didn’t know exactly where Reacher was. Because he couldn’t see. Clearly he hoped he had him pinned by the chest. The truck bucked and squatted and pushed. Reacher was flat on his back underneath it, straining tires to his left, straining tires to his right, throbbing exhaust pipes above him, all kinds of ribbed and dirty metal components inches from his face. Things were racing and whirring and turning. There were nuts and bolts and tubes and belts. Reacher didn’t know much about cars. Didn’t know how to fix them, didn’t know how to break them. And he had no tools, anyway.
Or did he?
He patted his pockets, out of habit and desperation, and felt hard metal inside. Dorothy’s silverware. From breakfast. The knife, the fork, the spoon. Heavy old items, hastily concealed, never returned. He pulled them out. They had long thick handles, some kind of early stainless steel.
Right above his nose was a broad flat pan, on the bottom of the engine block. Like a shallow square container, seen from below. Black and dirty. The sump, he figured. For the engine oil. He saw a hexagonal bolt head right in the center of it. For changing the oil. The guy at the service station would undo the bolt, and the oil would come out. The new oil would go in the top.
The guy at the service station would have a wrench.
Reacher didn’t.
The engine roared and strained. The truck shook and juddered. Reacher scuttled backward a yard and got his hands way up above his head and he clamped the knife handle on one side of the hex bolt and the fork handle on the other. He held them tight with thumbs and forefingers and used half his strength to keep them hard together and the other half to turn them counterclockwise.
Nothing.
He took a breath and clamped his teeth and ignored the pain in his arms and tried again. Still nothing. He changed his technique. He clamped the bolt with the very ends of the silverware handles held between his right thumb and forefingers, and he used his left hand to rotate the whole assembly.
The bolt moved.
Just a little. He took another breath and held it and clamped hard until the flesh on his fingers was crushed white and flat and he eased the knife and the fork around. The bolt was set very tight and it turned and grated reluctantly, and grit and dirt in the threads threatened to stick it fast, but he kept on going, smooth and steady, breathing hard, concentrating, and after two and a half turns the oil inside must have started seeping out and flushing the threads, because all of a sudden resistance gave way and the bolt started moving fast and smooth and easy. Reacher dropped the silverware and scooted farther out of the way and used his fingertips high above his head to spin the bolt right out. The engine was still revving hard and as soon as the bolt was out of the hole the enormous pressure inside just dumped the oil out on the ground in a half-inch jet. It hissed and hosed and splattered on the frozen dirt and bounced back up and coated the nearby brambles slick and black, hot and smoking.
Reacher got his arms back down by his sides and wriggled out under the rear of the truck, feetfirst, on his back, the undergrowth impeding him, tearing at him, scratching him. He grasped the rear bumper and hauled and pulled and twisted himself up in a crouch. He wanted a fist-sized rock to bust the rear window, but he couldn’t find one, so he contented himself with banging on it with his hand, once, twice, hard, and harder, and then he turned and ran.
Chapter 21
Reacher ran thirty yards across the winter dirt and stopped. Inside the truck the driver was twisted around in his seat, staring back at him, pawing and fumbling blindly at the wheel and the gearshift. The truck backed up, straining, still locked in low gear, the engine revving fast and the ground speed grinding slow. Reacher had no idea how long it would take for a hard-worked engine with no oil in it to seize up and die.
Not long, he hoped.
He danced sideways, left, and left, and left, and the truck tracked him all the way, coming on slow, the crushed bumper plastered across the front like an ugly afterthought, the axles locked up for maximum traction, the tires squirming and hopping and grinding out new ruts all their own. The driver hit the gas and jerked the wheel to his left, aiming to decode Reacher’s decoy dance and hit him after the inevitable sudden change of direction at its end, but Reacher double-bluffed him and jumped to his own left, and the truck missed him by ten whole feet.
The truck stopped dead and Reacher saw the guy tugging on levers and heard the transmission change back to normal-speed road duty. The truck made a big forty-foot loop out on the dirt and headed back in. Reacher stood still and watched it and sidestepped right, and right, and right, and then he triple-bluffed and jumped right again while the truck slammed left and missed him again. The truck ended up with its battered nose deep in the thicket. All kinds of unpleasant noises were coming out of it. Deep banging sounds, like tuneless church bells. Bearings, Reacher thought. The big ends. He knew some terminology. He had heard car guys talking, on military bases. He saw the driver glance down in alarm, as if red warning lights were blazing on the dash. There was steam in the air. And blue smoke.
The truck backed up, one more time.
Then it died.
It swung through a short backward arc and stopped, ready for a change of gear, which happened, but it didn’t move on again. It just bounced forward a foot against the slack in its suspension and seized up solid. The engine noise shut off and Reacher heard wheezing and hissing and ticking and saw steam jetting out and a final fine black spray from underneath, like a cough, like a death rattle.
The driver stayed where he was, in his seat, behind locked doors.
Reacher looked again for a rock, and couldn’t find one.
Impasse.
But not for long.
Reacher saw them first. He had a better vantage point. Flames, coming out of the seams between the hood and the fenders, low down at the front of the vehicle. The flames were small and colorless at first, boiling the air above them, spreading fast, blistering the paint around them. Then they got bigger and turned blue and yellow and started spilling black smoke from their edges. The hood was a big square pressing and within a minute all four seams surrounding it were alive with flame and the paint all over it was cooking and bubbling and splitting from the heat underneath.
The driver just sat there.
Reacher ran over and tried his door. Still locked. He banged on the window glas
s, dull padded thumps from his fist, and he pointed urgently at the hood. But it was impossible that the guy didn’t already know he was on fire. His wiper blades were alight. Black smoke was rolling off them and swirling up the windshield in coils. The guy was looking right at them, then looking at Reacher, back and forth, panic in his eyes.
He was as worried about Reacher as he was about the fire.
So Reacher backed off ten feet and the door opened up and the guy jumped out, a big slabby white boy, very young, maybe six-six, close to three hundred pounds. He ran five feet and stopped dead. His hands bunched into fists. Behind him the flames started shooting out of the wheel wells at the front of the truck, starting downward, curling back up around the sheet metal, burning hard. The front tires were smoking. The guy just stood there, rooted. So Reacher ran in again, and the guy swung at him, and missed. Reacher ducked under the blow and popped the guy in the gut and then grabbed him by the collar. The guy went straight down in a crouch and cradled his head defensively. Reacher pulled him back to his feet and hauled him away across the field, fast, thirty feet, forty, then fifty. He stopped and the guy swung again and missed again. Reacher feinted with a left jab and threw in a huge right hook that caught the guy on the ear. The guy wobbled for a second and then went down on his ass. Just sat there, blinking, in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere. Twenty yards away the truck was burning fiercely, all the way back to the windshield pillars. The front tires were alight and the hood was buckled.
Reacher asked, “How much gas is in the tank?”
The guy said, “Don’t hit me again.”
“Answer my question.”
“I filled it this morning.”
So Reacher grabbed him again and pulled him up and hauled him farther away, another thirty feet, then ten more. The guy stumbled all the way and eventually resisted and said, “Please don’t hit me again.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You just tried to kill me with a truck.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You’re sorry about that?”
“I had to do it.”
“Just following orders?”
“I’m surrendering, OK? I’m out of the fight now. Like a POW.”
“You’re bigger than me. And younger.”
“But you’re a crazy man.”
“Says who?”
“We were told. About last night. You put three of us in the hospital.”
Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”
The guy said, “Brett.”
“What is this, the Twilight Zone? You’ve all got the same name?”
“Only three of us.”
“Out of ten, right?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty percent. What are the odds?”
The guy didn’t answer.
Reacher asked, “Who’s in charge here?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Who told you to come out this morning and kill me with a truck?”
“Jacob Duncan.”
“Seth Duncan’s father?”
“Yes.”
“You know where he lives?”
The guy nodded and pointed into the distance, south and east, beyond the burning vehicle. The flames had moved inside it. The glass had shattered and the seats were on fire. There was a column of black smoke in the air, thick and dirty. It was going straight up and then hitting a low atmospheric layer and spreading sideways. Like a miniature mushroom cloud.
Then the gas tank exploded.
An orange fireball kicked the rear of the truck clear off the ground and a split second later a dull boom rolled across the dirt on a pressure wave hard enough to make Reacher stagger a step and hot enough to make him flinch away. Flames leapt fifty feet in the air and died instantly and the truck crashed back to earth, now all black and skeletal inside a hot new fire that roiled the air a hundred feet above it.
Reacher watched for a second. Then he said, “OK, Brett, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to jog over to Jacob Duncan’s place, and you’re going to tell him three things. You listening to me?”
The big guy looked away from the fire and said, “Yes.”
“OK, first, if Duncan wants to, he can send his six remaining boys after me, and each one will delay me a couple of minutes, but then I’ll come right over and kick his ass. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“Second, if he prefers, he can skip getting the six boys hurt, and he can come out and meet with me face to face, right away. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“And third, if I see those two out-of-towners again, they’ll be going home in a bucket. Is that clear? Got all that?”
“Yes.”
“You got a cell phone?”
“Yes,” the guy said.
“Give it to me.”
The guy dug in a pocket and came back with a phone, black and tiny in his giant red paw. He handed it over and Reacher pulled it apart. He had seen cell phones dropped on sidewalks, and he knew what was in there. A battery, and a SIM card. He pulled off the cover and clipped out the battery and tossed it twenty feet in one direction, and he took out the SIM card and threw the rest of the phone twenty feet in the other direction. He balanced the SIM card on his palm and held it out, a tiny silicon wafer with gold tracks on it.
“Eat it,” he said.
The guy said, “What?”
“Eat it. That’s your forfeit. For being a useless tub of lard.”
The guy paused a second and then he took it, delicately, finger and thumb, and he opened his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He closed his mouth and worked up some saliva and swallowed.
“Show me,” Reacher said.
The guy opened his mouth again and stuck out his tongue. Like a kid at the clinic. The card was gone.
“Now sit down,” Reacher said.
“What?”
“Like you were before.”
“I thought you wanted me to head for the Duncans’ place.”
“I do,” Reacher said. “But not yet. Not while I’m still in the neighborhood.”
The guy sat down, a little worried, facing south, his legs straight out and his hands on his knees and his upper body curled forward a little.
“Arms behind you,” Reacher said. “Lean back on your hands.”
“Why?”
Enemy ordnance.
“Just do it,” Reacher said.
The guy got his arms behind him and put his weight on his hands. Reacher stepped behind him and crashed the sole of his boot through the guy’s right elbow. The guy went down flat and shrieked and rolled and whimpered. Then he sat up again and cradled his broken arm and stared at Reacher accusingly. Reacher stepped around behind him again and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The guy toppled slowly, forward at first, and then he twisted sideways as his gut got in the way of further progress. He sprawled out and landed softly on one shoulder and lay still, like a large letter L on a dirty brown page. Reacher turned away and slogged on north, toward the two wooden buildings on the horizon.
Chapter 22
The Canadian semitruck with the Duncans’ shipment aboard was making good time, heading due east on Route 3 in British Columbia, driving mostly parallel to the die-straight international border, with Alberta up ahead. Route 3 was a lonely road, mountainous, with steep grades and tight turns. Not ideal for a large vehicle. Most drivers took Route 1, which looped north out of Vancouver before turning east later. A better road, all things considered. Route 3 was quiet by comparison. It had long stretches of nothing but asphalt ribbon and wild scenery. And very little traffic. And occasional gravel turnouts, for rest and recuperation.
One of the gravel turn-outs was located a mile or so before Waterton Lakes National Park. In U.S. terms it was directly above the Washington-Idaho state line, about halfway between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, about a hundred miles north of both. The turn-out had an amazing view. Endless forest to the south, the snowy bulk of the Rockies to the
east, magnificent lakes to the north. The semitruck driver pulled off and parked there, but not for the view. He parked there because it was a prearranged location, and because a white panel van was waiting there for him. The Duncans had been in business a long time, because of luck and caution, and one of their cautionary principles was to transfer their cargo between vehicles as soon as possible after import. Shipping containers could be tracked. Indeed, they were designed to be tracked, by the BIC code. Better not to risk a delayed alert from a suspicious Customs agent. Better to move the goods within hours, into something anonymous and forgettable and untraceable, and white panel vans were the most anonymous and forgettable and untraceable vehicles on earth.
The semitruck parked and the panel van K-turned on the gravel and backed up to it and stopped rear-to-rear with it. Both drivers got out. They didn’t speak. They just stepped out into the roadway and craned their necks and checked what was coming, one east, one west. Nothing was coming, which was not unusual for Route 3, so they jogged back to their vehicles and got to work. The van driver opened his rear doors, and the truck driver climbed up on his flatbed and cut the plastic security seal and smacked the bolts and levers out of their brackets and opened the container’s doors.
One minute later the cargo was transferred, all 1,260 pounds of it, and another minute after that the white van had K-turned again and was heading east, and the semitruck was trailing behind it for a spell, its driver intending to turn north on 95 and then loop back west on Route 1, a better road, back to Vancouver for his next job, which was likely to be legitimate, and therefore better for his blood pressure but worse for his wallet.
In Las Vegas the Lebanese man named Safir selected his two best guys and dispatched them to babysit the Italian man named Rossi. An unwise decision, as it turned out. Its unwisdom was made clear within the hour. Safir’s phone rang and he answered it, and found himself talking to an Iranian man named Mahmeini. Mahmeini was Safir’s customer, but there was no transactional equality in their business relationship. Mahmeini was Safir’s customer in the same way a king might have been a boot maker’s customer. Much more powerful, imperious, superior, dismissive, and likely to be lethally angry if the boots were defective.