by Lee Child
He held her hand for five long minutes. Then she slowly pulled it away. Stood up and stepped to the door. Smiled.
“See you in the morning,” she said.
He slept badly and woke up at five, worried about the endgame. Complications crowded in on him. He threw back the covers and slipped out of bed. Dressed in the dark and walked down the stairs and out into the night. It was bitter cold and the snowflakes were blowing in faster. They looked wet and heavy. The weather was moving east. Which was good, he guessed.
There was no light. All the town’s windows were dark, there were no streetlights, there was no moon, there were no stars. The church tower loomed up in the middle distance, faint and gray and ghostly. He walked in the middle of the dirt road and crossed the graveyard. Found the church door and went inside. Crept up the tower stairs by feel. Found the ladder in the dark and climbed up into the bell chamber. The clock ticked loudly. Louder than in the daytime. It sounded like a mad blacksmith beating his iron hammer against his anvil once a second.
He ducked under the clock shaft and found the next ladder. Climbed up out of the darkness onto the roof. Crawled over to the west wall and raised his head. The landscape was infinitely dark and silent. The distant looming mountains were invisible. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing. The air was freezing. He waited.
He waited thirty minutes in the cold. It set his eyes watering and his nose running. He started shivering violently. If I’m cold, they’re nearly dead, he thought. And sure enough after thirty long minutes he heard the sound he had been listening for. The Tahoe’s engine started. It was far away, but it sounded deafening in the night silence. It was somewhere out there to the west, maybe a couple hundred yards distant. It idled for ten whole minutes, running the heater. He couldn’t fix an exact location by sound alone. But then they made a fatal mistake. They flicked the dome light on and off for a second. He saw a brief yellow glow deep down in the grass. The truck was down in a dip. Absolutely concealed, its roof well below the average grade level. A little south of west, but not by much. Maybe a hundred and fifty yards out. It was a fine location. They would probably use the truck itself as the shooting platform. Lie prone on the roof, aim, fire, jump down, jump in, drive away.
He put both arms flat along the wall and faced due west and fixed the memory of the brief yellow flash in his mind against the location of the tower. A hundred and fifty yards out, maybe thirty yards south of perpendicular. He crawled back into the bell tower, past the hammering clock, down to the nave. He retrieved the long guns from under the pew and left them on the cold ground underneath the Yukon. He didn’t want to put them inside. Didn’t want to answer their flash of light with one of his own.
Then he walked back to the boardinghouse and found Neagley coming out of her room. It was nearly six o’clock. She was showered and dressed. They went into his room to talk.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.
“I never sleep,” she said. “They still there?”
He nodded. “But there’s a problem. We can’t take them down where they are. We need to move them first.”
“Why?”
“Too close to home. We can’t start World War Three out there an hour before Armstrong gets here. And we can’t leave two corpses lying around a hundred and fifty yards from the town. People here have seen us. There’ll be early cops up from Casper. Maybe state troopers. You’ve got your license to think about. We need to drive them off and take them down somewhere deserted. West, where it’s snowing, maybe. This snow will be around until April. That’s what I want. I want to do it far away and I want it to be April before anybody knows that anything happened here.”
“OK, how?”
“They’re Edward Fox. They’re not John Malkovich. They want to live to fight another day. We can make them run if we do it right.”
They were back at the Yukon before six-thirty. The snowflakes were still drifting in the air. But the sky was beginning to lighten in the east. There was a band of dark purple on the horizon, and then a band of charcoal, and then the blackness of night. They checked their weapons. Laced their shoes, zipped their coats, swung their shoulders to check freedom of action. Reacher put his hat on, and his left glove. Neagley put her Steyr in her inside pocket and slung the Heckler & Koch over her back.
“See you later,” she whispered.
She walked west into the graveyard. He saw her step over the low fence and turn a little south and then she disappeared in the darkness. He walked to the base of the tower and stood flat against the middle of the west wall and recalculated the Tahoe’s position. Pointed his arm out straight toward it and walked back, moving his arm to compensate for his changes of position, keeping the target locked in. He laid the M16 on the ground with the muzzle pointing a little south of west. He stepped behind the Yukon and leaned on the tailgate and waited for the dawn.
It came slowly and gradually and magnificently. The purple color grew lighter and reddened at its base and spread upward and outward until half the sky was streaked with light. Then an orange halo appeared two hundred miles away in South Dakota and the earth tumbled toward it and the first slim arc of the sun burst up over the horizon. The sky blazed pink. Long high clouds burned red. Reacher watched the sun and waited until it climbed high enough to hurt his eyes and then he unlocked the Yukon and started the engine. He blipped it loud and turned the radio on full blast. He ran the tuning arrows up and down until he found some rock and roll and left the driver’s door open so the music beat against the dawn silence. Then he picked up the M16 and knocked the safety off and put it to his shoulder and fired a single burst of three, aiming a little south of west directly over the hidden Tahoe. He heard Neagley answer immediately with a triple of her own. The MP5 had a faster cyclic rate and a distinctive chattering sound. She was triangulated in the grass a hundred yards due south of the Tahoe, firing directly north over it. He fired again, three more from the east. She fired again, three more from the south. The four bursts of fire crashed and rolled and echoed over the landscape. They said: We . . . know . . . you’re . . . there.
He waited thirty seconds, as planned. There was no response from the Tahoe’s position. No lights, no movement, no return fire. He raised the rifle again. Aimed high. Squeezed the trigger. We. The Heckler & Koch chattered far away to his left. Know. He fired again. You’re. She fired again. There.
No response. He wondered for a second whether they’d already slipped away in the last hour. Or gotten really smart and moved through the town to the east. They were dumb to attack into the sun. He spun around and saw nothing behind him except lights snapping on in windows. Heard nothing anywhere except the ringing in his ears and the deafening rock and roll music from the car. He turned back ready to fire again and saw the Tahoe burst up out of the grass a hundred and fifty yards in front of him. The dawn sun flashed gold and chrome against its tailgate. It bucked over a rise with all four wheels off the ground and crashed back to earth and accelerated away from him into the west.
He threw the rifle into the Yukon’s backseat and slammed the door and killed the radio and accelerated straight across the graveyard. Smashed through the wooden fence and plunged into the grassland. Hung a fast curve south. The terrain was murderous. The car was crashing and bouncing over ruts and pitching wildly over long swells. He steered one-handed and clipped his belt with the other. Pulled it tight against the locking mechanism to keep him clamped to the seat. He saw Neagley racing toward him through the grass on his left. He jammed on the brakes and she wrenched the nearside rear door open and threw herself inside behind him. He took off again and she slammed the door and fought her way over into the front passenger seat. She belted herself in and jammed the Heckler & Koch down between her knees and braced herself with both hands on the dash like she was fighting a roller coaster ride.
“Perfect,” she said. She was panting hard. He raced on. Curved back to the north until he found the swath the Tahoe had blasted through the grass. He got himself cente
red in it and hit the gas. The ride was worse than any roller coaster. It was a continuous violent battering. The car was leaping and shuddering and going alternately weightless and then crashing back to earth and taking off again. The engine was screaming. The wheel was writhing in his hands and kicking back hard enough to break his thumbs. He kept his fingers sticking straight out and steered with his palms only. He was afraid they were going to shatter an axle.
“See them yet?” he shouted.
“Not yet,” she shouted back. “They could be three hundred yards ahead.”
“I’m afraid the car will break.”
He hit the gas harder. He was doing nearly fifty miles an hour. Then sixty. The faster he went, the better it rode. It spent less actual time on the ground.
“I see them,” Neagley called.
They were two hundred yards ahead, intermittently visible as they bucked up and down through the sea of grass like a manic gold dolphin riding the waves. Reacher pressed on and pulled a little closer. He had the advantage. They were clearing a path for him. He crept up to about a hundred yards back and held steady. The engine roared and the suspension bucked and crashed and banged.
“They can run,” he screamed.
“But they can’t hide,” Neagley screamed back.
Ten minutes later they were ten miles west of Grace and felt like they had been badly beaten in a fistfight. Reacher’s head was hitting the roof over every bump and his arms were aching. His shoulders were wrenched. The engine was still screaming. The only way he could keep his foot on the gas pedal was to mash it all the way down to the carpet. Neagley was bouncing around at his side and flailing back and forth. She had given up bracing herself with her arms in case she broke her elbows.
Over the next ten murderous miles the terrain shaded into something new. They were literally in the middle of nowhere. The town of Grace was twenty miles behind them and the highway was twenty miles ahead. The grade was rising. The land was breaking up into sharper ravines. There was more rock. There was still grass growing, and it was still tall, but it was thinner because the roots were shallower. And there was snow on the ground. The grass stalks were rigid with ice and they came up out of a six-inch white blanket. Both cars slowed, a hundred yards apart. Within another mile the chase had slowed to a ludicrous twenty-mile-an-hour procession. They were inching down forty-five-degree faces, plunging hood-deep through accumulated snow in the bottoms, clawing up the rises with their transmissions locked in four-wheel-drive. The crevasses ran maybe ten or fifteen feet deep. The endless wind from the west had packed the snow into them with the lee faces bare and the windward faces smooth and sheer. There were flakes in the air, whipping horizontally toward them.
“We’re going to get stuck,” Neagley said.
“They got in this way,” Reacher said. “Got to be able to get out.”
They lost sight of the Tahoe ahead of them every time it dropped away into a ravine. They glimpsed it only when they labored up a peak and caught sight of it up on a peak of its own three or four dips in front. There was no rhythm. No coordination. Both trucks were diving and then clawing upward randomly. They had slowed to walking pace. Reacher had the transmission locked in low range and the truck was slipping and sliding. Far to the west the snowstorm was wild. The weather was blowing in fast.
“It’s time,” Reacher said. “Any one of these ravines, the snow will hide them all winter.”
“OK, let’s go for it,” Neagley said.
She buzzed her window down and a flurry of snow blew in on a gale of freezing air. She picked up the Heckler & Koch and clicked it to full auto. Reacher accelerated hard and plunged through the next two dips as fast as the truck could take it. Then he jammed on the brakes at the top of the third peak and flicked the wheel left. The truck slewed sideways and slid to a stop with the passenger window facing forward and Neagley leaned all the way out and waited. The gold Tahoe reared up a hundred yards ahead and she loosed a long raking burst of fire aimed low at the rear tires and the fuel tank. The Tahoe paused fractionally and then rocked over the peak of its rise and disappeared again.
Reacher spun the wheel and hit the gas and crawled after it. The stop had cost them maybe another hundred yards. He plowed through three consecutive ravines and stopped again on the fourth peak. They waited. Ten seconds, fifteen. The Tahoe did not reappear. They waited twenty seconds. Thirty.
“Hell is it?” Reacher muttered.
He slid the truck down the windward face, through the snow, up the other side. Straight over the top into the next dip. Up the rise, over the top, down into the snow. No sign of the Tahoe. He powered on. The tires spun and the engine screamed. He made it up the next rise. Stopped dead at the top. The land fell away twenty feet into a broad gulch. It was thick with snow and the icy stalks of grass showed less than a foot above it. The Tahoe’s incoming tracks from the day before were visible straight ahead, almost obscured by wind and fresh snowfall. But its outgoing tracks were deep and new. They turned sharply right and ran away to the north, through a tight curve in the ravine, and then out of sight behind a snow-covered outcrop. There was silence all around. Snow was driving straight at them. It was coming upward at them, off the bottom of the dip.
Time and space, Reacher thought. Four dimensions. A classic tactical problem. The Tahoe might have U-turned and might be aiming to arrive back at the crucial place at the crucial time. It could retrace its path and be back near the church just before Armstrong touched down. But to chase it blind would be suicide. Because it might not be doubling back at all. It might be waiting in ambush around the next corner. But to spend too long thinking about it would be suicide, too. Because it might not be doubling back or waiting in ambush. It might be circling right around and aiming to come up behind them. A classic problem. Reacher glanced at his watch. Almost the point of no return. They had been gone nearly thirty minutes. Therefore it would take nearly thirty to get back. And Armstrong had been due in an hour and five.
“Feel like getting cold?” he said.
“No alternative,” Neagley said back. She opened her door and slid out into the snow. Ran clumsily to her right, fighting through the drifts, over the rocks, aiming to connect the legs of the U. He took his foot off the brake and nudged the wheel and eased down the slope. Turned hard right in the ravine bottom and followed the Tahoe’s tracks. It was the best solution he could improvise. If the Tahoe was doubling back, he couldn’t wait forever. No point in driving cautiously back to the church and arriving there after Armstrong was already dead. And if he was driving straight into an ambush, he was happy enough to do it with Neagley standing behind his opponents with a submachine gun in her hands. He figured that would pretty much guarantee his survival.
But there was no ambush. He came around the rocks and turned back east and saw nothing at all except empty wheel tracks in the snow and Neagley standing fifty yards farther on with the sun on her back and her gun raised over her head. The all clear signal. He hit the gas and raced up toward her. The truck slipped and slid and skidded in the Tahoe’s impacted ruts. He bounced over hidden rocks. He touched the brake. The truck lurched and drifted sideways and stopped with the front wheels down in a snow-filled trench. Neagley fought her way through the drifts and pulled the door. Icy air followed her inside.
“Hit it,” she said. She was panting again. “They must be at least five minutes ahead of us by now.”
He touched the gas. All four wheels spun uselessly. The truck stayed motionless and all four tires whined in the snow and the front end dug in deeper.
“Shit,” he said.
He tried again. Same result. The truck shuddered and rocked and didn’t go anywhere. He switched the transmission out of locked low range and tried again. Same result. He let the engine idle and put the transmission in reverse, then drive, then reverse, then drive. The truck rocked urgently back and forth, back and forth, six inches, a foot. But it didn’t climb out of the trench.
Neagley glanced at her watch. “They
’re out there ahead of us. They could get back there in time.”
Reacher nodded and touched the gas and kept on banging the transmission lever into reverse, into drive, into reverse. The truck bucked and bounced. But it didn’t climb out of the trench. The tire treads howled on the glassy snow. The front end dodged left and right with the engine torque and the rear end squirmed with it.
“Armstrong’s in the air now,” Neagley said. “And our car isn’t parked next to the church anymore. So he’s going to go ahead and land.”
Reacher looked at his own watch. Fought his rising panic.
“You do it,” he said. “Keep it rocking back and forward.”
He twisted around and grabbed his gloves. Unclipped his belt and opened his door and slid out into the snow.
“And if it goes, don’t stop for anything,” he said.
He floundered around to the rear of the truck. Stamped and kicked at the snow until he got his feet braced against rock. Neagley slid across into the driver’s seat. She built up a rhythm, drive and reverse, drive and reverse, little taps on the gas as the gears slid home. The truck rocked on its springs and began to roll back and forth along a foot and a half of impacted ice. Reacher put his back against the tailgate and hooked his hands under the rear bumper. Moved with the truck as it pushed back at him. Straightened his legs and heaved as it moved away. The tire treads were full of snow. They flung little white hieroglyphs into the air as they spun. The exhaust fumes burbled out near his knees and hung in the air. He stumbled forward and pushed backward, again, and again. Now the truck was moving two feet at a time. He clamped his hands harder. Snow was blowing straight out of the west into his face. He started counting. One, two . . . three. One, two . . . three. He started walking the truck backward and heaving it forward. Now it was moving three feet with each change of direction. He stamped a chain of footholds. One, two . . . three. On the last three he shoved with all his strength. He felt the truck climb up out of the trench. Felt it fall back in again. The tailgate butted him hard in the back. He stumbled forward and floundered for grip. Rebuilt his rhythm. He was sweating in the cold. He was out of breath. One, two . . . three. He heaved again and the truck disappeared out from behind him and he fell backward into the snow.