by Lee Child
He faced front again and started to see detail up ahead. The building wasn’t black. Not exclusively. It was also dark brown and dark green. Dull flat non-reflective paint, thickly applied in giant random slashes and spikes and daggers.
Camouflage.
A U.S. Army pattern, dating back to the 1960s, to the best of Reacher’s recollection.
Delfuenso whispered, ‘What is it?’
‘Not sure,’ Reacher said. ‘An abandoned military installation, obviously. The fence is gone. Some farmer got a hundred extra acres. I don’t know what it was originally. It’s blastproof, clearly. Could have been for storage of air-defence missiles, possibly. Or it could have been an ammunition factory. In which case the concrete is protecting the outside from the inside, not the other way around. I would have to see the main doors to know more. Missile storage needs big doors, for the transporters. An ammunition factory would have smaller doors.’
‘Abandoned when?’
‘That’s a very old camouflage pattern. So the place hasn’t been painted in fifty years. It was abandoned after Vietnam, maybe. Which might make it more likely it was an ammunition factory. We didn’t need so many bullets or shells after that. But we cut back a little on missiles too. So it could be either.’
‘Why is it still here?’
‘These places can’t be demolished. How would you do it? They were built to take on a lot more than a wrecking ball.’
‘How do people get a place like this?’
‘Maybe they bought it. The DoD is happy to take what it can get. Or maybe they’re squatting. No one checks on places like this. Not any more. No manpower. There are too many of them. Your granddad’s tax dollars at work.’
‘It’s huge.’
‘I know it is. You want to revise your personnel estimate? You could get more than forty people in there. You could get four hundred.’
‘You could get four thousand in there.’
‘Didn’t McQueen give you a figure?’
‘A terrorist headcount is a moving target. He never saw everyone at once. I’m still betting on a couple of dozen, tops.’
‘They must be rattling around in there.’
‘How do we do this?’
‘Very carefully.’
‘Where do we start?’
Reacher glanced at her. And then at Sorenson. The guy in the field knew he was watched over by people who would react instantly if he ran into trouble. But instantly was a big word. They were very close to four hours into a mission launched because eight hours had seemed ludicrously long. Was four hours an instant? Not even close.
So was eight hours so much worse?
He said, ‘The smart money is on very careful surveillance. We need to study that place from all four sides.’
Delfuenso said, ‘That would take hours.’
‘So be it.’
‘You mean we should wait for Quantico.’
‘It’s an option.’
‘But not a good one,’ Delfuenso said. ‘Especially not for Don McQueen.’
‘I agree.’
‘So the dumb money is on attacking without adequate preparation. Is that our choice?’
‘Call it half-assed preparation.’
‘To be honest, in what way are we even minimally prepared?’
‘We’re tooled up,’ Reacher said. ‘We’re awake, and they might not be.’
Sorenson said, ‘If we don’t do something now, there’s no point doing anything at all. That’s our situation, right? And that’s a military kind of problem, isn’t it? Did you train for this stuff?’
‘I trained for all kinds of things. Usually by starting with a little history. Back in the day the Soviets had some pretty big missiles. That thing in front of us was built to stand up to one. We have three handguns.’
‘But suppose you were the inside man?’
‘I’m all in favour of helping McQueen.’
Delfuenso said, ‘Just not with us?’
‘There were certain things I never had to say to my own people. Because it was right there in the job description.’
‘What certain things?’
‘You could get killed or maimed, doing this.’
‘Is there a way we can reduce that risk? Without taking hours?’
‘Yes, there is,’ Reacher said.
They invested seven minutes in talking through the contingencies. There was no point in making a plan. No plan could survive the first exchange of fire. No plan ever did. Except in this case it was impossible to make a plan, anyway. Because there was no information.
They turned away from the building and sat down in a line in the dirt and talked. This might happen, that might happen. They agreed some rules of thumb. They nailed down some basic procedures. Reacher was reasonably optimistic about getting close to the concrete. Neither a missile hangar nor an ammunition factory needed gun ports. And there was no way to drill your own. Even with a missile. So the place was not bristling with guns. Therefore the approach from distance would be safe enough. After that, there would be plenty of things to worry about. There would be sentries on the roof, presumably. Behind the tubular steel railing. On a walkway. Or maybe a running track. But not many sentries. And all of them so far untested. Reacher knew his history. Sentries were sometimes more trouble than they were worth.
They ran out of things to say. There was an awkward silence. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private jokes. They don’t translate between cultures. So none were made. All three of them just stood up mute and turned around and paced off distances and got into their starting positions. They looked ahead through the dark and identified their personal targets.
‘Ready?’ Reacher said.
Sorenson said, ‘Good to go.’
Delfuenso said, ‘Yes.’
‘Remember, speed and direction. No deviation from either. Now go.’
They stood up.
They started walking.
All went well, until Sorenson was shot in the head.
SIXTY-NINE
REACHER HEARD IT all in reverse order. Because of the speed of sound, and because of how close he was to Sorenson, and because of how far he was from the building. He heard the wet punch of the bullet finding its target, and a split second later he heard the supersonic crack of the bullet’s flight through the air, and a split second after that he heard the boom of the rifle that fired it from four hundred yards away. By which time he was already on the ground. He moved on the first sound, throwing himself down, and before he even hit the dirt he had some early conclusions, thoughts not so much developing as flashing fully formed in his mind: he knew it was a sniper rifle, probably an M14 or equivalent, probably a .308, and he knew it had no night scope, or he himself would have been the first target, given human nature, and therefore he knew Sorenson had been spotted simply because she was pale in the moonlight, her skin and her hair just marginally more visible than his or Delfuenso’s.
He knew all of that, instantly and instinctively. And he knew Sorenson was dead. He knew it for sure. There was no mistaking the sound. He had heard such sounds before. It had been a head shot, through and through, in and out, 168 grains at more than twenty-six hundred feet per second, hitting with more than twenty-six hundred foot-pounds of energy, dropping more than twenty-six inches from four hundred yards, like a curveball finding the strike zone.
Not survivable.
Not even remotely.
He waited.
There was no second shot.
He moved his hands. He rubbed dirt on them, front and back. He dragged dirt up to his face and smeared it on.
He moved his head.
He couldn’t see Delfuenso.
Which was good. She was on the ground somewhere, head down and invisible. He looked the other way. He saw a faint gleam in the dirt. Small and pale. Sorenson’s hand. Either her right or her left, depending on how she had fallen.
He knew there would be no answer, but e
ven so, he whispered, ‘Julia?’
There was no answer.
So he whispered, ‘Delfuenso?’
No answer.
‘Delfuenso? Karen? Are you there?’
A breathy voice came back in the dark: ‘Reacher? Are you hit?’
He said, ‘Sorenson was.’
‘Bad?’
‘Worse than bad.’ He started crawling, elbows and knees, head down. The back part of his brain told him he must look like a bug on a bed sheet. The front part told him no, if he was visible he would be dead already. He risked a glance ahead, one eye, and adjusted course a fraction. He stopped an arm’s length from the pale gleam in the dirt. He reached out and found Sorenson’s hand. It was still warm. He found her wrist. He laid two fingers on it.
You could get killed or maimed, doing this.
I don’t need you to look after me.
There was no pulse. Just limp, clammy skin. All the invisible thousand muscular tensions of the living were gone. He crawled half a yard closer. He followed her arm, to her shoulder, to her neck.
No pulse.
Her neck was slick with slippery blood and gelatinous brain tissue and gritty with bone fragments. Her jaw was still there. And her nose. And her eyes, once blue and amused and quizzical. There was nothing left above her eyes. She had been hit in the centre of the forehead. The top of her head had come off. Hair and all. Her scalp would be hanging down somewhere, attached by a thread of skin. He had seen such things before.
He checked her neck one more time.
No pulse.
He wiped his hand in the dirt and patted around for her pistol. He couldn’t find it. It could have been anywhere. Black polycarbonate, in the dead of night. He gave up on it. He found her shoulder again, and the small of her back, and he slipped his hand under her sweater and moved it around and took the spare magazine off her belt. Her hip was still warm. A cotton shirt, and her body under it, somewhere between hard and soft. He lay on his belly and stuffed the magazine in his pocket. Then he backed away, elbows and knees, and he turned like a crab and crawled over to Delfuenso’s position. A long way. Thirty or forty yards.
Delfuenso whispered, ‘Is she dead?’
He said, ‘Instantaneous.’
There was a long, long pause.
Then Delfuenso said, ‘Shit, I really liked her.’
‘Me too,’ Reacher said.
‘A person like that is the best of the Bureau.’
Something wild in her voice.
‘Shit happens,’ Reacher said. ‘Get over it.’
‘Is that how you army people react to things?’
‘How do you FBI people react to things?’
She didn’t answer.
She said, ‘So what now?’
‘You should go back to the car,’ Reacher said. ‘Keep low all the way. Call Quantico and update them. Remember, tell them Whiteman Air Force Base is their best shot. Maybe you should call Omaha, too. Her SAC is a guy called Tony Perry. I talked to him once. And I think the night duty agent was a friend of hers. So break it gently. Also her tech guy. He should hear it personally.’
‘Aren’t you coming with me?’
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m going to find that sniper.’
‘You can’t do that alone.’
‘You can’t come with me. You have a kid.’
‘I can’t let you. I’m ordering you to withdraw.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Let Quantico take care of it.’
‘McQueen can’t wait that long.’
‘You’ll be killed. There could be hundreds of them in there.’
‘You said two dozen.’
‘Even so. Two dozen men. They’re trained for this kind of thing.’
‘And now we’re about to find out how well they’re trained. Maybe they were great in high school, but let’s see if they can hit a major league fastball.’
‘They could be vicious.’
‘They don’t know the meaning of the word. Not yet.’
‘I can’t let you do it. You won’t survive. I might as well shoot you now.’
‘You can’t stop me. I’m a civilian.’
‘Therefore McQueen and Sorenson are nothing to you. Let us look after our own.’
‘I would,’ Reacher said. ‘But I don’t hear any SWAT planes in the air.’
‘They’re close.’
‘They’re over Ohio. Maybe Indiana. That’s not close.’
‘How does it help if you get shot too?’
‘It doesn’t. But I might not.’
‘There’s a number of possible outcomes, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is.’
‘And that’s definitely one of them.’
‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘It is.’
‘So why?’
‘Because I liked Sorenson. I liked her a lot. She was fair and decent to me.’
‘So come to her memorial service. Write to the newspaper. Start a fund for a statue. You don’t have to go into battle for her.’
‘Battle offers me better odds.’
‘In what way?’
‘It gives me some kind of a chance to survive the night.’
‘How are those better odds? If you come back with me, you’re guaranteed to survive the night.’
‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘If I come back with you, I’m guaranteed to die of shame.’
There was no more conversation. No more argument. No more back and forth. Just an awkward silence. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private. So neither Reacher nor Delfuenso said anything. She just looked at his face. He wasn’t sure why. It was all smeared with dirt. With cowshit, probably. Maybe it was just as well his nose wasn’t working.
Delfuenso said, ‘Good luck.’
Then she backed away, elbows and knees, and she crabbed through a turn and set off back the way they had come, towards Lacey’s store. Reacher watched her until she was lost to sight. He waited a minute more, to be sure she wasn’t going to break her word and double back. He knew she wanted to. But she didn’t. Because of Lucy, presumably. You have a kid. It was about the only line she hadn’t argued with, in all of their long conversation.
He waited a minute more, to be doubly sure, and then he turned around the other way and crawled forward into the darkness.
SEVENTY
WEST POINT HAD talked for hundreds of hours about tactics and strategy, and Reacher had paid attention, in a theoretical way. But in a practical way he preferred his own methods. Which were based entirely on the other guys. No point in thinking about himself all the time. He knew his own strengths, which were few, and his own weaknesses, which were many. It was the other guys that mattered. What were their strengths?
Well, they were good shooters. Or at least one of them was. That was clear. A head shot at four hundred yards in the dark of night was by no means extraordinary, but it was thoroughly competent.
But apart from that, they wouldn’t have much. And their weaknesses would be significant. Mostly caused by fear. They would be so accustomed to secrecy and paranoia their perceptions would be permanently altered. As in: Reacher was betting that right then they were making two very bad decisions. First, they were overthinking his approach. They were assuming anyone originally with Sorenson would now either quit or track around ninety or more degrees and come at them from a different direction. They were briefly considering a double bluff from such a person, but paranoia prefers triple bluffs to doubles, so they were focusing their main attentions on the three new angles, not the one old angle. The southeast approach was now considered sterile, as far as they were concerned. No doubt they would post a guy or two anyway, but they wouldn’t be their best guys, and they would be spending most of their time craning over their shoulders towards where they thought the real action was.
And therefore second, they were about to send out a party into that safe and sterile corridor, to haul away Sor
enson’s body. Because they were worried about who she was. And because they couldn’t leave her lying out there. It wasn’t their land. Some farmer’s granddaddy had given it up to the DoD, way back in the day, and then these many years later the granddaddy’s grandson had gotten it back again, and he was working it, starting early every morning, like farmers do. So for secrecy’s sake the body had to go. And real soon. Paranoia waits for no man. Five or ten minutes, Reacher thought. They would come out one of the larger doors on the north side. Two of them, probably. In a vehicle. They would drive straight over.
They would stop ten feet from where Reacher had dug himself into the dirt.
It was eight minutes, and they did exactly what Reacher was expecting. A pick-up truck came looping around out of the north, on the same trajectory but at a tighter angle than McQueen’s upside-down-J-shape GPS tracks. It was a grey truck. Primer, maybe. Hard to see in the moonlight. But there. Not a crew cab. Just a regular pick-up. It headed straight over, bouncing on the dirt. It was showing no lights. Secrecy, and paranoia. The cab was dark and shadowed. No detail to be seen inside. But there would be two guys minimum. Maximum of three. More likely two.
The truck slowed and two guys hung their heads out the windows, looking for what they had come for. Sorenson’s hair was clotting black by then, but there was still enough white skin to guide them in. Still enough of a gleam in the pale moonlight. They acquired their target and rolled through the last twenty yards and backed up with their tailgate near where she lay. They got out together and stood still for a moment.
Two of them. Not three. The dome light in the cab proved it.
Unarmed. Nothing held in their hands, nothing slung on their backs.
They walked towards her.
Reacher was not a superstitious man, nor was he spiritual in any way, nor did he care for ancient taboos. But it was important to him they didn’t touch her.
They shuffled around and looked down, in a head-scratching kind of a way. Like any two grunts anywhere, handed a task. They were Syrians, Reacher figured. But pale. The alleged Italians. They looked stunted. Small, wiry frames. Thin necks.
They got themselves set. They planted their feet. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Their job was pretty obvious. The mechanics were self-evident. The geometry was what it was. The one on the left would do half the work, and the one on the right would do the other half. They would pick up what they could, and the dawn birds would take care of the rest.