Echo Burning by Lee Child

by Echo Burning (com v2. 0) (lit)

  They were immobile a split second longer, and then they reacted. The driver flicked his own lights back on. The pick-up and the VW glared at each other like it was a contest. Reacher was dazzled by the light but he saw the figures in the load bed were wearing caps and blue jackets. One figure was smaller than the other. A woman, he thought. He fixed her position carefully in his mind. Shoot the women first. That was the standard counterterrorist doctrine. The experts figured they were more fanatical. And suddenly he knew she was the shooter. She had to be. Small hands, neat fingers. Carmen’s Lorcin could have been built for her. She was crouched low alongside her partner on his left.

  They both had handguns. They both stared sideways a half-second longer and then snapped forward into the glare and leaned on the pick-up’s roof and started shooting at the VW’s lights. Their caps said FBI on the front. He froze. What the hell? Then he relaxed. Beautiful. Fake apparel, fake ID, a tricked-up Crown Vic. They just went to Alice’s place in it. And that’s how they stopped Al Eugene on Friday. They were shooting continuously. He heard the flat dull thumps of powerful nine-millimeter pistols firing fast. He heard spent shells clattering out onto the pick-up’s roof. He saw the VW’s windshield explode and heard bullets punching through sheet metal and the tinkling of glass and then the VW’s lights were gone and he could see nothing at all behind the dazzle of the pick-up’s own lights. He sensed the pistols turning back to where they had Alice’s firing position fixed in their memories. He saw tiny oblique muzzle flashes and heard bullets whining away from him. The left-hand gun stopped. The woman. Reloading already. Only thirteen shots, his subconscious mind told him. Has to be a SIG Sauer P228 or a Browning Hi-Power.

  He crawled forward to the rim of the mesa and tracked fifteen feet left and found the rifle he had placed at twelve-seventeen. Winchester number two, full of Bobby Greer’s hand-loads. He fired without aiming and the recoil almost knocked him off his knees. A tremendous flame leapt out of the muzzle. It was like the strobe on a camera. He had no idea where the bullet went. He racked the lever slick-slick and hustled right, toward the wrecked VW. Fired again. Two huge visible flashes, moving progressively counterclockwise. From the pick-up’s vantage point it would look like a person traversing right-to-left. A smart shooter would fire ahead of the last flash and hope to hit the moving target. Deflection shooting. They went for it. He heard bullets whining off the rock near the car. Heard one hit it.

  But by then he was on the move in the opposite direction, clockwise again. He dropped the rifle and bent low and ran for the next one. It was there at two o’clock. The third Winchester, the one with the sequenced load. The first shot was a factory bullet. Worth some care. He steadied himself on the lip of the ledge and aimed into the blackness eight feet behind the pick-up’s headlights and four feet above them. Fired once. Now they think there are three riflemen out here, one behind them on the left, two ahead on the right. There was ringing in his ears and he couldn’t see where his bullet went but he heard the woman’s voice shout a faint command and the pick-up’s headlights promptly died. He fired again at the same spot with the next shell, which was a hand-load. The gout of flame spat out and lit up the mesa and he jinked five feet right. Tracked the frozen visual target in his mind and fired the next. The second factory bullet, neat and straight and true. He heard a sharp scream. Danced one pace to his right and fired the next hand-load. The muzzle flash showed him a body falling headfirst out of the pick-up bed. It was caught entirely motionless in midair. One down. But the wrong one. It was too big. It was the man. Factory round next. He concentrated hard and aimed again slightly left of the place the guy had fallen from. Racked the lever. It moved a quarter-inch and jammed solid on the worn cartridge case from the last hand-load.

  Then two things happened. First the pick-up moved. It lurched forward and peeled away fast in a tight desperate circle and headed back north, the way it had come. Then a handgun started firing close to the VW. The woman was out of the truck. She was on foot in the dark. She was firing fast. A hail of bullets. They were missing him by three or four feet. The truck raced away. Its lights flicked on again. He tracked them in the corner of his eye. They jerked and bounced and swerved and grew smaller. Then they disappeared off the end of the mesa. The truck just thumped down off the edge of the rock table and hurtled back toward the Red House. Its noise faded to nothing and its lights dimmed to a distant glow moving on the far black horizon. The handgun stopped firing. Reloading again. There was sudden total silence. Total darkness. A second later the insect chant swam back into focus. It sounded softer than usual. Less frantic. He realized the rain had changed. The heavy drops had stopped and in their place was an insistent patter of drizzle. He held his hand palm-up and felt it building. It grew perceptibly harder and harder within seconds like he was standing in a shower stall and an unseen hand was opening the faucet wider and wider.

  He wiped water off his forehead to keep it out of his eyes and laid the jammed rifle quietly in the dust. The dust was already wet under his fingers. It was turning to mud. He moved left, tracking back toward the hidden Jeep. It was maybe forty yards away. The rain got harder. It built and built like there was going to be no limit to its power. It hissed and roared on the mesquite bushes all around him. Good news and bad news. The good news was it took making noise out of the equation. He wouldn’t have backed himself to move as quietly as the woman could. Not through desert vegetation at night. A frame six feet five in height and two hundred fifty pounds in weight was good for a lot of things, but not for silent progress through unseen thorny plants. The noise of the rain would help him more than her. That was the good news. The bad news was visibility was soon going to be worse than zero. They could bump into each other back-to-back before either of them knew the other was there.

  So a lever-action repeater was not going to be the weapon of choice. Too slow for a snap shot. Too cumbersome to maneuver. And a Winchester throws the spent shell out of the top, not out of the side. Which means in a heavy rainstorm it can let water in through the ejection port. And this was going to be a heavy rainstorm. He could sense it. It was going to try to compensate for ten years of drought in a single night.

  He made it back to the Jeep at the four o’clock position. Found the fourth rifle propped against its door, full of factory shells. It was already soaked. He shook it off and aimed obliquely across the mesa toward the eleven. Pulled the trigger. It fired. It still worked fine. He fired four more spaced shots, at the twelve, the one, the two, the three. Fan fire. A gamble. The upside was he might get lucky and hit the woman. Downside was it would tell her he was on his own. One guy, more than one rifle. That was now an easy deduction. And it would tell her where he was. If she was counting it would suggest to her he was waiting there with the last two shells still in the magazine.

  So he slid the gun under the Jeep and waded west through the brush until he was forty feet from the edge of the rock. Pulled Alice’s Heckler & Koch out of his pocket and knocked the safety off. Knelt down and smeared mud over his hands and arms and face and waited for lightning to strike. Summer storms he had witnessed before in hot parts of the world always featured lightning. Gigantic thunderheads rubbed and jostled overhead and the voltage built to an unbearable level. Five more minutes, he guessed. Then lightning would fire in bolts or sheets and the landscape would flash with brightness. He was in khaki clothes and had smeared khaki mud on his skin. He doubted that she had.

  He worked south, away from the Jeep, back toward the wrecked VW, keeping forty feet in the undergrowth. The darkness was total. The rain was building relentlessly. It built to the point where it was absolutely impossible that it could build any harder, and then it just kept on building. The limestone sinkholes were already full of water. Rain was lashing their surfaces. Small rivers were running around his feet, gurgling into bottomless crevasses all around. The noise was astonishing. The rain was roaring against the ground so hard that it was impossible to imagine a louder sound. Then it fell harder and the so
und got louder.

  He realized the camouflage mud had rinsed straight off his skin. Impossible for it not to. Carmen’s shower was like a grudging trickle in comparison. He began to worry about breathing. How could there be air to breathe, with so much water? It was running down his face in solid streams and running straight into his mouth. He put his hand over his jaw and sucked air through his fingers and spat and spluttered the rainwater away.

  He was opposite the two o’clock position and thirty feet from the ledge when the lightning started. Far to the south a ragged bolt exploded from the sky and hit the earth five miles away. It was pure intense white and shaped like a bare tree hurled upside down by a hurricane. He fell to a crouch and stared straight ahead, looking for peripheral vision. Saw nothing. The thunder followed the lightning five seconds later, a ragged tearing rumble. Where is she? Does she think she’s smarter than she thinks I am? In which case she’ll be behind me. But he didn’t turn around. Life is always about guessing and gambling, and he had her pegged as a slick operator, for sure. In her world. Put her out on the street face-to-face with Al Eugene, and she’s got the smarts to charm the birds out of the trees. But put her down all alone in open combat territory at night in a storm, and she’s struggling. I’m good at this. She’s not. She’s in front of me, clinging to the edge of the mesa somewhere, scared like she’s never been scared before. She’s mine.

  The storm was moving. The second lightning strike came three minutes later and a mile north and east of the first one. It was a jagged sheet that flickered insanely for eight or ten seconds before dying into darkness. Reacher craned upward and scanned ahead and right. Saw nothing. Turned and scanned left. Saw the woman seventy feet away, crouched in the lee of the ledge. He could see the white writing on her cap. FBI. Big letters. She was looking straight at him and her gun was rigid in her hand and her arm was fully extended from the shoulder. He saw the muzzle flash as she fired at him. It was a tiny dull spark completely overwhelmed by the storm.

  The storm drifted slowly north and east and pushed the leading edge of rain ahead of it. It reached the motel building and built steadily and quickly from a whisper to a patter to a hard relentless drumming on the roof. It was a metal roof and within thirty seconds the noise was very loud. It woke Ellie from a restless troubled sleep. She opened her eyes wide and saw the small dark man with hair on his arms. He was sitting very still in a chair near the bed, watching her.

  “Hi, kid,” he said.

  Ellie said nothing.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Ellie looked up at the ceiling.

  “Raining,” she said. “It’s noisy.”

  The man nodded, and checked his watch.

  She missed him. Impossible to tell by how much. The lightning died and plunged the world back into absolute darkness. Reacher fired once at the remembered target and listened hard. Nothing. Probably a miss. Seventy feet in heavy rain, not an easy shot. Then the thunderclap came. It was a shuddering bass boom that rocked the ground and rolled slowly away. He crouched again. He had nine bullets left. Then he threw the double-bluff dice. She’ll think I’ll move, so I won’t. He stayed right where he was. Waited for the next lightning bolt. It would tell him how good she was. An amateur would move away from him. A good pro would move closer. A really good pro would double-bluff the double-bluff and stay exactly where she was.

  By then the rain was as heavy as it was going to get. That was his guess. He had once been caught in a jungle storm in Central America and gotten wet faster than falling fully clothed into the sea. That was the hardest rain imaginable and this was easily comparable. He was completely soaked to the skin. Beyond soaked. Water was running in continuous torrents under his shirt. Pouring off him, not dripping. It sluiced out of his buttonholes like jets. He was cold. The temperature had plummeted twenty or thirty degrees in less than twenty minutes. As much water was bouncing upward around him as was lashing down. The noise was unbearable. Leaves and stalks were tearing off the bushes. They were flowing and eddying away and building tiny beaver dams against every rock on the ground. The hard hot grit had washed into slushy mud six inches deep. His feet were sinking in it. His gun was soaked. That’s O.K. A Heckler & Koch will fire wet. But so will a Browning or a SIG.

  The next lightning flash was still well to the south, but it was nearer. And brighter. It was a gigantic lateral bolt that hissed and crackled across the sky. He scanned left. The woman had moved closer. She was sixty feet away from him, still tight against the mesa. Good, but not really good. She fired at him and missed by four feet. It was a hasty shot and her arm was still swinging in from the south. The south? She figured I’d moved away. He felt mildly insulted and leveled his arm and fired back. The incoming thunderclap buried the sound of the shot. Probably a miss. Eight left.

  Then it was back to the calculations. What will she do? What will she figure I’ll do? She had been wrong the last time. So this time she’ll gamble. She’ll guess I’ll move in closer. So she’ll move in closer too. She’ll go for the killing shot immediately.

  He stayed in a crouch, exactly where he was. Triple-bluff. He tracked his gun hand left-to-right along the theoretical direction she must be moving. Waited for the precious lightning. It came sooner than he expected. The storm was ripping in fast. It exploded not more than a half-mile away and was followed almost immediately by a bellow of thunder. The flash was brighter than the sun. He squinted ahead. The woman was gone. He jerked left and saw a smudge of vivid blue backtracking away in the opposite direction. He fired instinctively just ahead of it and the lightning died and darkness and noise and chaos collapsed around him. Seven left. He smiled. But now I only need one more.

  The sound of thunder frightened her. It sounded like when Joshua and Billy had put a new roof on the motor barn. They had used big sheets of tin and they boomed and flexed when they were carrying them and made a horrible noise when they hammered the nails through. Thunder was like a hundred million billion sheets of roofing tin all flexing and booming in the sky. She ducked her head under the sheets and watched the room light up with bright wobbling flashes of lightning outside the window.

  “Are you scared?” the man asked.

  She nodded, under the sheets. It scrubbed her hair, but she was sure the man could see her head moving.

  “Don’t be scared,” the man said. “It’s only a storm. Big girls aren’t scared of storms.”

  She said nothing. He checked his watch again.

  Her tactics were transparent. She was good, but not good enough to be unreadable. She was working close in to the rim of the mesa, because it offered an illusion of safety. She was working an in-out-in-in move. Double-bluffing, triple-bluffing, aiming to be unpredictable. Smart, but not smart enough. She had moved close, and then moved away. Now she would move close again, and then the next time not away again, but closer still. She figured he would begin to read the pattern and anticipate the yo-yo outward. But she would come inward instead. To wrong-foot him. And because she wanted to be close. She liked close. A head-shot artiste like her, he guessed her preferred range would be something less than ten feet.

  He jumped out of his crouch and ran as hard as he could, like a sprinter, backward and left, curving around in a fast wide circle. He crashed through the brush like a panicked animal, big leaping strides, hurdling mesquite, splashing through puddles, sliding through the mud. He didn’t care how much noise he was making. He would be inaudible a yard away. All that mattered was how fast he was. He needed to outflank her before the next lightning bolt.

  He ran wildly in a big looping curve and then slowed and skidded and eased in close to the limestone ledge maybe twenty feet north of where he had first seen her. She had moved south, and then back, so now she would be on her way south again. She ought to be thirty feet ahead by now. Right in front of him. He walked after her, fast and easy, like he was on a sidewalk somewhere. Kept loose, trying to second-guess the rhythm of the lightning, staying ready to hit the wet dirt.

  The
small dark man checked his watch again. Ellie hid under the sheet.

  “Over three hours,” the man said.

  Ellie said nothing.

  “Can you tell the time?”

  Ellie straightened up in the bed and pulled the sheet down slowly, all the way past her mouth.

  “I’m six and a half,” she said.

  The man nodded.

  “Look,” he said.

  He held out his arm and twisted his wrist.

  “One more hour,” he said.

  “Then what?”

  The man looked away. Ellie watched him a long moment more. Then she pulled the sheet back over her head. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed.

  The flash lit up the whole landscape for miles ahead. The crash of thunder crowded in on top of it. Reacher dropped to a crouch and stared. She wasn’t there. She was nowhere in front of him. The lightning died and the thunder rolled on. For a second he wondered whether he would hear her gun over it. Would he? Or would the first he knew be the sickening impact of the bullet? He dropped full length into the mud and lay still. Felt the rain lashing his body like a thousand tiny hammers. O.K., rethink. Had she outflanked him? She could have attempted an exact mirror-image of his own move. In which case they had each sprinted a wide fast circle in opposite directions and essentially exchanged positions. Or she could have found a sinkhole or a crevasse and gone to ground. She could have found the Jeep. If she’d glanced backward during a lightning strike she would have seen it. It was an easy conclusion that he’d have to get back to it eventually. How else was he going to get out of the desert? So maybe she was waiting there. Maybe she was inside it, crouching low. Maybe she was under it, in which case he had just presented her with a Winchester rifle with two factory rounds still in the magazine.