Chapter 16
They stood for a moment in the shadows and the silence on the parking apron below Franklin's lighted windows. Then Yanni went to get the Sheryl Crow CD from her Mustang. She gave it to Cash. Cash unlocked the Humvee and leaned inside and put it in the player. Then he gave the keys to Franklin. Franklin climbed into the driver's seat. Cash got in next to him with his M24 across his knees. Reacher and Helen Rodin and Ann Yanni squeezed together in the back.
"Turn the heater up," Reacher said.
Cash leaned to his left and dialed in maximum temperature. Franklin started the engine. Backed out into the street. Swung the wheel and took off west. Then he turned north. The engine was loud and the ride was rough. The heater kicked in and the fan blew hard. The interior grew warm, and then hot. They turned west, turned north, turned west, turned north, lining up with the grid that would run through the fields. The drive was a series of long droning cruises punctuated by sharp right-angle corners. Then they made the final turn. Franklin sat up straight behind the wheel and accelerated hard.
"This is it," Yanni said. "Dead ahead, about three miles to go. "
"Start the music," Reacher said. "Track eight. "
Cash hit the button.
Every day is a winding road.
"Louder," Reacher said.
Cash turned it up. Franklin drove on, sixty miles an hour.
"Two miles," Yanni called. Then: "One mile. "
Franklin drove on. Reacher stared out the window to his right. Watched the fields flash past in the darkness. Random scatter from the headlights lit them up. The irrigation booms were turning so slowly they looked stationary. Mist filled the air.
"High beams," Reacher called.
Franklin flicked them on.
"Music all the way up," Reacher called.
Cash twisted the knob to maximum.
EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD.
"Half a mile," Yanni yelled.
"Windows," Reacher shouted.
Four thumbs hit four buttons and all four windows dropped an inch. Hot air and loud music sucked out into the night. Reacher stared right and saw the dark outline of the house flash past, isolated, distant, square, solid, substantial, dimly lit from inside. Flat land all around it. The limestone driveway, pale, very long, as straight as an arrow.
Franklin kept his foot hard down.
"Stop sign in four hundred yards," Yanni yelled.
"Stand by," Reacher shouted. "Showtime. "
"One hundred yards," Yanni yelled.
"Doors," Reacher shouted.
Three doors opened an inch. Franklin braked hard. Stopped dead on the line. Reacher and Yanni and Helen and Cash spilled out. Franklin didn't hesitate. He took off again like it was just a normal dead-of-night stop sign. Reacher and Yanni and Cash and Helen dusted themselves down and stood close together on the crown of the road and stared north until the glow of the lights and the sound of the engine and the thump of the music were lost in the distance and the darkness.
Sokolov had picked up the Humvee's heat signature on both the south and west monitors when it was still about half a mile shy of the house. Hard not to. A big powerful vehicle, traveling fast, trailing long plumes of hot air from open windows, what was to miss? On the screen it looked like a bottle rocket flying sideways. Then he heard it too, physically, through the walls. Big engine, loud music. Vladimir glanced his way.
"Passerby?" he asked.
"Let's see," Sokolov said.
It didn't slow down. It hurtled straight past the house and kept on going north. On the screen it trailed heat like a reentry capsule. Through the walls they heard the music Doppler-shift like an ambulance's siren as it went by.
"Passerby," Sokolov said.
"Some asshole," Vladimir said.
Upstairs on the third floor Chenko heard it, too. He stepped through an empty bedroom to a west-facing window and looked out. Saw a big black shape doing about sixty miles an hour, high-beam headlights, bright tail lights, music thumping and thudding so loud he could hear the door panels flexing from two hundred yards away. It roared past. Didn't slow down. He opened the window and leaned out and craned his neck and watched the bubble of light track north into the distance. It went behind the skeletal tangle of machinery in the stone-crushing plant. But it was still visible as a moving glow in the air. After a quarter-mile the glow changed color. Red now, not white. Brake lights, flaring for the stop sign. The glow paused for a second. Then the red color died and the glow turned back to white and took off again, fast.
The Zec called up from the floor below: "Was that him?"
"No," Chenko called back. "Just some rich kid out for a drive. "
Reacher led the way through the dark, four people single file on the edge of the blacktop with the gravel plant's high wire fence on their left and huge circular fields across the road on their right. After the roar of the diesel and the thump of the music the silence felt absolute. There was nothing to hear except the hiss of irrigation water. Reacher raised his hand and stopped them where the fence turned a right angle and ran away east. The corner post was double-thickness and braced with angled spars. Grass and weeds from the shoulder were clumped up high. He stepped forward and checked the view. He was on a perfect diagonal from the northwest corner of the house. He had an equal forty-five-degree line of sight to the north facade and the west. Because of the diagonal the distance was about three hundred yards. Visibility was very poor. There was a glimmer of cloudy moonlight, but beyond that there was nothing at all.
He stepped back. Pointed at Cash, pointed at the base of the corner post.
"This is your position," he whispered. "Check it out. "
Cash moved forward and knelt down in the weeds. Six feet away he was invisible. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Tracked it slowly left and right, up and down.
"Three stories plus a basement," he whispered. "High-pitched shingle roof, plank siding, many windows, one door visible to the west. No cover at all in any direction. They bulldozed everything flat, all around. Nothing's growing. You're going to look like a beetle on a bed- sheet out there. "
"Cameras?"
The rifle tracked a steady line from left to right. "Under the eaves. One on the north side, one on the west. We can assume the same on the sides we can't see. "
"How big are they?"
"How big do you want them to be?"
"Big enough for you to hit. "
"Funny man. If they were spy cameras built into cigarette lighters I could hit them from here. "
"OK, so listen up," Reacher whispered. "This is how we're going to do it. I'm going to get to my starting position. Then we're all going to wait for Franklin to get back and put the comms net on the air. Then I'm going to make a move. If I don't feel good I'm going to call in fire on those cameras. I say the word, I want you to take them out. Two shots, bang, bang. That'll slow them down, maybe ten or twenty seconds. "
"Negative," Cash said. "I won't direct live rounds into a wooden structure we know contains a noncombatant hostage. "
"She'll be in the basement," Reacher said.
"Or the attic. "
"You'd be firing at the eaves. "
"Exactly. She's in the attic, she hears gunfire, she hits the deck, that's exactly where I'm aiming. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. "
"Spare me," Reacher said. "Take the risk. "
"Negative. Won't do it. "
"Christ, Gunny, you are one uptight Marine, you know that?"
Cash didn't speak. Reacher stepped forward again and peered around the corner of the fence. Took a long hard look and pulled back.
"OK," he said. "New plan. Just watch the west windows. You see muzzle flash, you put suppressing fire into the room it's coming out of. We can assume the hostage won't be in the same room as the sniper. "
Cash said nothing.
"Will you do that at least?" Reacher a
sked.
"You might be in the house already. "
"I'll take my chances. Voluntary assumption of risk, OK? Helen can witness my consent. She's a lawyer. "
Cash said nothing.
"No wonder you came in third," Reacher said. "You need to lighten up. "
"OK," Cash said. "I see hostile gunfire, I'll return it. "
"Hostile is about the only kind you're going to see, don't you think? Since you only gave me a damn knife?"
"Army," Cash said. "Always bitching about something. "
"What do I do?" Helen asked.
"New plan," Reacher said. He touched the fence with his palm. "Keep low, follow the fence around the corner, stop opposite the house. Stay down. They won't pick you up there. It's too far. Listen to your phone. If I need a distraction I'll ask you to run a little ways toward the house and then back again. A zigzag, or a circle. Out and back. Real fast. Just enough to put a blip on their screen. No danger. By the time they move a rifle around, you'll be back at the fence. "
She nodded. Didn't speak.
"And me?" Ann Yanni asked.
"You stay with Cash. You're the ethics police. He gets cold feet about helping me out, you kick his ass, OK?"
Nobody spoke.
"All set?" Reacher asked.
"Set," they said, one after the other.
Reacher walked away into the darkness on the other side of the road.
He kept on walking, off the blacktop, across the shoulder, across the stony margin of the field, onward, right into the field, all the way into the middle of the soaking crop. He waited until the irrigation boom rolled slowly around and caught up with him. Then he turned ninety degrees and walked south with it, directly underneath it, keeping pace, letting the ceaseless water rain down and soak his hair and his skin and his clothes. The boom pulled away as it followed its circular path and Reacher kept straight on at a tangent and walked into the next field. Waited once again for the boom to find him and then walked on under it, matching its speed, raising his arms high and wide to catch as much drenching as he could. Then that boom swung away and left him and he walked on to find the next one. And the next, and the next. When at last he was opposite the driveway entrance he simply walked in a circle, under the last boom, waiting for his cell phone to vibrate, like a man caught in a monsoon.
Cash's cell phone vibrated against his hip and he pulled it out and clicked it on. Heard Franklin's voice, quiet and cautious in his ear.
"Check in, please," it said.
Cash heard Helen say: "Here. "
Yanni said, "Here," from three feet behind him.
Cash said, "Here. "
Then he heard Reacher say: "Here. "
Franklin said, "OK, you're all loud and clear, and the ball is in your court. "
Cash heard Reacher say: "Gunny, check the house. "
Cash lifted the rifle and swept left to right. "No change. "
Reacher said: "I'm on my way. "
Then there was nothing but silence. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. A whole minute. Two minutes.
Cash heard Reacher ask: "Gunny, do you see me?"
Cash lifted the rifle again and swept the length of the driveway from its mouth all the way to the house. "Negative. I don't see you. Where are you?"
"About thirty yards in. "
Cash moved the rifle. Estimated thirty yards from the road and stared through the scope. Saw nothing. Nothing at all. "Good work, soldier. Keep going. "
Yanni crawled forward. Whispered in Cash's ear. "Why don't you see him?"
"Because he's nuts. "
"No, explain it to me. You've got a night scope, right?"
"The best money can buy," Cash said. "And it works off heat, just like their cameras. " Then he pointed away to his right. "But my guess is Reacher walked through the fields. Soaked himself in water. It's coming straight up from the aquifer, stone cold. So right now he's close to ambient temperature. I can't see him; they can't see him. "
"Smart," Yanni said.
"Brave," Cash said. "But ultimately dumb. Because he's drying out every step of the way. And getting warmer. "
Reacher walked through the dark in the dirt ten feet south of the driveway. Not fast, not slow. His shoes were soaked and they were sticking to the mud. Almost coming off. He was so cold he was shivering violently. Which was bad. Shivering is a physiological reaction designed to warm a cold body fast. And he didn't want to be warm. Not yet.
Vladimir had gotten a rhythm going. He stared at the East monitor for four seconds, then the North for three. East, two, three, four, North, two, three. East, two, three, four, North, two, three. He didn't move his chair. Just leaned a little one way, then the other. Beside him Sokolov had a similar thing going south and west. Slightly different intervals. Not perfectly synchronized. But just as good, Vladimir guessed. Maybe even better. Sokolov had spent a lot of time on surveillance.
Reacher walked on. Not fast, not slow. On the map the driveway had looked to be about two hundred yards long. On the ground it felt like an airport runway. Straight as a die. Wide. And long, long, long. He had been walking forever. And he was less than halfway to the house. He walked on. Just kept on going. Looking ahead every step of the way, watching the darkened windows far away in front of him.
He realized his hair wasn't dripping anymore.
He touched one hand with the other. Dry. Not warm, but no longer cold.
He walked on. He was tempted to run. Running would get him there faster. But running would heat him up. He was approaching the point of no return. He was right out there in no-man's-land. And he wasn't shivering. He raised his phone.
"Helen," he whispered. "I need that diversion. "
Helen took off her heels and left them neatly side by side at the base of the fence. For an absurd moment she felt like a person who piles all her clothes on the beach before she walks into the sea to drown. Then she put her palms down on the dirt like a sprinter in the blocks and took off forward. Just ran crazily, twenty feet, thirty, forty, and then she stopped dead and stood still, facing the house with her arms out wide like a target. Shoot me, she thought. Please shoot me. Then she got scared that maybe she really meant it and she turned and ran back in a wide zigzag loop. Threw herself down and crawled along the fence again until she found her shoes.
Vladimir saw her on the North monitor. Nothing recognizable. Just a brief flare that because of the phosphor technology was smeared and a little time-lagged. But he bent his head closer anyway and stared at the afterimage. One second, two. Sokolov sensed the interruption to his rhythm and glanced over. Three seconds, four.
"Fox?" Vladimir said.
"I didn't see it," Sokolov said. "But probably. "
"It ran away again. "
"OK, then. " Sokolov turned back to his own pair of monitors. Glanced at the West view, checked the South, and settled into his regular cadence again.
Cash had a cadence of his own. He was inching his night scope along at what he guessed was the speed of a walking man. But every five seconds he would sweep it suddenly forward and back in case his estimate was off. During one of those rapid traverses he picked up on what looked like a pale green shadow.
"Reacher, I can see you," he whispered. "You're visible, soldier. "
Reacher's voice came back: "What scope have you got on that thing?"
"Litton," Cash said.
"Expensive, right?"
"Thirty-seven hundred dollars. "
"Got to be better than a lousy thermal camera. "
Cash didn't reply.
Reacher said: "Well, I'm hoping so, anyway. "
He walked on. Probably the most unnatural thing a human can force himself to do, to walk slowly and surely toward a building that likely has a rifle in it pointing directly at his center mass. If Chenko had any sense at all he would wait, and wait, and wait, until his target was pretty close. And Chenko seemed to have plenty of sense. Fift
y yards would be good. Or thirty-five, like Chenko's range out of the parking garage. Chenko was pretty good at thirty-five yards. That had been made very clear.
He walked on. Transferred the phone to his left and held it near his ear. Took the knife out of his pocket and unsheathed it and held it right-handed, low and easy. Heard Cash say: "You're totally visible now, soldier. You're shining like the north star. It's like you're on fire. "
Forty yards to go.
Thirty-nine.
Thirty-eight.
"Helen?" he said. "Do it again. "