“We figure we just switch it on,” he said. “That should put us straight through to the federal scum, person to person. This stage of the process, we need to talk direct. See if we can persuade them to restore our fax line.”
“Terrific plan,” Reacher said.
“The fax line is important, you see,” Fowler said. “Vital. The world must be allowed to know what we’re doing here. The world must be allowed to watch and witness. History is being made here. You understand that, right?”
Reacher stared at the wall.
“They’ve got cameras, you know,” Fowler said. “Surveillance planes are up there right now. Now it’s daylight again, they can see what we’re doing. So how can we exploit that fact?”
Reacher shook his head.
“You can leave me out of it,” he said.
Fowler smiled.
“Of course we’ll leave you out of it,” he said. “Why would they care about seeing you nailed to a tree? You’re nothing but a piece of shit, to us and to them. But Holly Johnson, there’s a different story. Maybe we’ll call them up on their own little transmitter and tell them to watch us do it with their own spy cameras. That might make them think about it. They might trade a fax line for her left breast.”
He ground out his cigarette. Leaned forward. Spoke quietly.
“We’re serious here, Reacher,” he said. “You saw what we did to Jackson. We could do that to her. We could do that to you. We need to be able to communicate with the world. We need that fax line. So we need the shortwave to confirm what the hell they’ve done with it. We need those things very badly. You understand that, right? So if you want to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain, for you and for her, you better tell me what you did to the radio.”
Reacher was twisted around, looking at the bookcase. Trying to recall the details of the inexpert translations of the Japanese Pearl Harbor texts he’d read.
“Tell me now,” Fowler said softly. “I can keep them away from you and from her. No pain for either of you. Otherwise, nothing I can do about it.”
He laid his Glock on the desk.
“You want a cigarette?” he asked.
He held out the pack. Smiled. The good cop. The friend. The ally. The protector. The oldest routine in the book. Requiring the oldest response. Reacher glanced around. Two guards, one on each side of him, the right-hand guard nearer, the left-hand guard back almost against the side wall. Rifles held easy in the crook of their arms. Fowler behind the desk, holding out the pack. Reacher shrugged and nodded. Took a cigarette with his free right hand. He hadn’t smoked in ten years, but when somebody offers you a lethal weapon, you take it.
“So tell me,” Fowler said. “And be quick.”
He thumbed his lighter and held it out. Reacher bent forward and lit his cigarette from the flame. Took a deep draw and leaned back. The smoke felt good. Ten years, and he still enjoyed it. He inhaled deeply and took another lungful.
“How did you disable our radio?” Fowler asked.
Reacher took a third pull. Trickled the smoke out of his nose and held the cigarette like a sentry does, between the thumb and forefinger, palm hooded around it. Take quick deep pulls, and the coal on the end of a cigarette heats up to a couple of thousand degrees. Lengthens to a point. He rotated his palm, like he was studying the glowing tip while he thought about something, until the cigarette was pointing straight forward like an arrow.
“How did you disable our radio?” Fowler asked again.
“You’ll hurt Holly if I don’t tell you?” Reacher asked back.
Fowler nodded. Smiled his lipless smile.
“That’s a promise,” he said. “I’ll hurt her so bad, she’ll be begging to die.”
Reacher shrugged unhappily. Sketched a listen-up gesture. Fowler nodded and shuffled on his chair and leaned close. Reacher snapped forward and jammed the cigarette into his eye. Fowler screamed and Reacher was on his feet, the chair cuffed to his wrist clattering after him. He wind-milled right and the chair swung through a wide arc and smashed against the nearer guard’s head. It splintered and jerked away as Reacher danced to his left. He caught the farther guard with a forearm smash to the throat as his rifle came up. Snapped back and hit Fowler with the wreckage of the chair. Used the follow-through momentum to swing back to the first guard. Finished him with an elbow to the head. The guy went down. Reacher grabbed his rifle by the barrel and swung straight back at the other guard. Felt skull bones explode under the butt. He dropped the rifle and spun and smashed the chair to pieces against Fowler’s shoulders. Grabbed him by the ears and smashed his face into the desktop, once, twice, three times. Took a leg from the broken chair and jammed it crossways under his throat. Folded his elbows around each exposed end and locked his hands together. Tested his grip and bunched his shoulders. Jerked hard, once, and broke Fowler’s neck against the chair leg with a single loud crunch.
He took both rifles and the Glock and the handcuff key. Out the door and around to the back of the hut. Straight into the trees. He put the Glock in his pocket. Took the handcuff off his wrist. Put a rifle in each hand. Breathing hard. He was in pain. Swinging the heavy wooden chair had opened the red weal on his wrist into a wound. He raised it to his mouth and sucked at it and buttoned the cuff of his shirt over it.
Then he heard a helicopter. The faint bass thumping of a heavy twin-rotor machine, a Boeing, a Sea Knight or a Chinook, far to the southeast. He thought: last night Borken talked about eight Marines. They’ve only got eight Marines, he said. The Marines use Sea Knights. He thought: they’re going for a frontal assault. Holly’s paneled walls flashed into his mind and he set off racing through the trees.
He got as far as the Bastion. The thumping from the air built louder. He risked stepping out onto the stony path. It was a Chinook. Not a Sea Knight. Search-and-rescue markings, not Marine Corps. It was following the road up from the southeast, a mile away, a hundred feet up, using its vicious downdraft to part the surrounding foliage and aid its search. It looked slow and ponderous, hanging nose down in the air, yawing slightly from side to side as it approached. Reacher guessed it must be pretty close to the town of Yorke itself.
Then he glanced into the clearing and saw a guy, fifty yards away. A grunt, camouflage fatigues. A Stinger on his shoulder. Turning and aiming through the crude open sight. He saw him acquire the target. The guy steadied himself and stood with his feet apart. His hand fumbled for the activator. The missile’s infrared sensor turned on. Reacher waited for the IFF to shut it down. It didn’t happen. The missile started squealing its high-pitched tone. It was locked on the heat from the Chinook’s engines. The guy’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Reacher dropped the rifle in his left hand. Swung the other one up and clicked the safety off with his thumb as he did so. Stepped to his left and leaned his shoulder on a tree. Aimed at the guy’s head and fired.
But the guy fired first. A fraction of a second before Reacher’s bullet killed him, he pulled the Stinger’s trigger. Two things happened. The Stinger’s rocket motor lit up. It exploded along its launch tube. Then the guy was hit in the head. The impact knocked him sideways. The launcher caught the rear of the missile and flipped it. It came out and stalled tail down in the air like a javelin, cushioned on the thrust of its launch, virtually motionless.
Then it corrected itself. Reacher watched in horror as it did exactly what it was designed to do. Its eight little wings popped out. It hung almost vertical until it acquired the helicopter again. Then its second-stage rocket lit up and it blasted into the sky. Before the guy’s body hit the ground, it was homing in on the Chinook at a thousand miles an hour.
The Chinook was lumbering steadily northwest. A mile away. Following the road. The road ran straight up through the town. Between the abandoned buildings. On the southeast corner the first building it passed was the courthouse. The Chinook was closing on it at eighty miles an hour. The Stinger was heading in to meet it at a thousand miles an hour.
One mile at a thousand miles an hour. One thousandth of an hour. A fraction over three and a half seconds. It felt like a lifetime to Reacher. He watched the missile all the way. A wonderful, brutal weapon. A simple, unshakable purpose. Designed to recognize the exact heat signature of aircraft exhaust, designed to follow it until it either got there or ran out of fuel. A simple three-and-a-half-second mission.
The Chinook pilot saw it early. He wasted the first second of its flight, frozen. Not in horror, not in fear, just in simple disbelief that a heat-seeking missile had been fired at him from a small wooded clearing in Montana. Then his instinct and training took over. Evade and avoid. Evade the missile, avoid crashing on settlements below. Reacher saw him throw the nose down and the tail up. The big Chinook wheeled away and spewed a wide fan of exhaust into the atmosphere. Then the tail flipped the other way, engines screaming, superheated fumes spraying
