south.
“Down, down,” Reacher was calling through.
“Is that it?” McGrath asked.
The gap between the panel truck and the pickup in front was lengthening. The truck was falling back. There was nothing behind it, all the way to the horizon. The Night Hawk was losing height. It was dropping toward the truck the way an eagle heads for a baby rabbit.
“Is that it?” McGrath asked again.
“That’s it,” Reacher said.
“It sure is,” Holly whooped.
“You positive?” McGrath asked.
“Look at the roof,” Holly told him.
McGrath looked. The roof was streaked with dark green paint, but he could see it was peppered with tiny holes. Like somebody had fired a shotgun right through it.
“We stared at those damn holes for two whole days,” Holly said. “I’ll remember them the rest of my life.”
“There are a hundred and thirteen of them,” Reacher said. “I counted. It’s a prime number.”
Holly laughed and leaned over. Smacked a joyous high five with him.
“That’s our truck,” she said. “No doubt about it.”
“Can you see the driver?” McGrath asked.
The pilot tilted down and rocked sideways for a close look.
“It’s Stevie,” Holly shouted back. “For sure. We’ve got him.”
“This thing got weapons?” Webster asked.
“Two big machine guns,” the pilot called through. “But I’m not going to use them. That I can’t do. Military can’t get involved in law enforcement.”
“Can you fly this thing straight and level?” Reacher asked him. “Fifty miles an hour? Maybe sixty? Without asking too many questions?”
The pilot laughed. It came through the headsets tinny and distorted.
“I can fly this thing any old way you want me to,” he said. “With the General’s permission, of course.”
Johnson nodded cautiously. Reacher leaned down and picked the Barrett up off the floor. Unfastened his harness and stood up into a crouch. Waved to Holly to change seats with him. She crawled across in front of McGrath and Reacher eased into her place. He could feel the Night Hawk slowing and dropping in the air. He put some length into Holly’s harness and fastened it loosely around his waist. Stretched back for the door release. Tugged at the handle and the door slid back on its runners.
Then there was a gale of air coming in as the slipstream howled through the opening and the aircraft was turning half sideways, sliding through the air like a car skids through snow. The green truck was below and behind, maybe two hundred feet down. The pilot was stabilizing his speed until he matched the truck’s progress and tilting the aircraft so that Reacher’s eyeline was pointing straight down at the road.
“How’s this?” the pilot asked.
Reacher thumbed his mike button.
“Dead on,” he said. “Anything up ahead?”
“One vehicle coming north,” the copilot said. “When that’s through, you got nothing at all for ten miles.”
“Anything behind?” Reacher asked. He saw the north-bound vehicle streak by below.
McGrath stuck his head out into the gale. Ducked back in and nodded.
“Clear behind,” he said.
Reacher raised the Barrett to his shoulder. Put a round in the breech. Shooting at a moving vehicle from another moving vehicle is not a great recipe for accuracy, but he was looking at a distance of less than seventy yards and a target about twenty feet long and seven feet wide, so he wasn’t worrying about it. He put the crosshairs on a point two-thirds of the way down the length of the roof. He figured the forward movement of the truck and the backward movement of the air might put the bullet dead center through the load compartment. He wondered vaguely whether the three-foot mattress was still in there.
“Wait,” Webster shouted. “What if you’re wrong? What if it’s empty? You’re only guessing, right? This whole thing is guesswork. We need proof, Reacher. We need some kind of corroboration here.”
Reacher didn’t glance back. Kept his eye on the scope.
“Bullshit,” he said, quietly, concentrating. “This is going to be all the corroboration we need.”
Webster grabbed his arm.
“You can’t do this,” he said. “You could be killing an innocent man.”
“Bullshit,” Reacher said again. “If he’s an innocent man, I won’t be killing him, will I?”
He shook Webster’s hand off his arm. Turned to face him.
“Think about it, Webster,” he said. “Relax. Be logical. The proof comes after I shoot, right? If he’s hauling a bomb, we’ll know all about it. If he’s hauling fresh air, nothing bad will happen to him. He’ll just get another hole in his damn truck. Number one hundred and fourteen.”
He turned back to the door. Raised the rifle again. Acquired the target. Out of sheer habit, he waited for his breath to be out and his heart to be between beats. Then he pulled the trigger. It took a thousandth of a second for the sound of the shot to hit his ear, and seventy times as long as that for the big heavy bullet to hit the truck. Nothing happened for a second. Then the truck ceased to exist. It was suddenly a blinding fireball rolling down the highway like a hot white tumbleweed. A gigantic concussion ring blasted outward. The helicopter was hit by a violent shock wave and tossed sideways and five hundred feet higher in the air. The pilot caught it at the top and slewed back. Steadied it in the air and swung around. Dropped the nose. There was nothing to see on the highway except a roiling cloud of thin smoke slowing into a teardrop shape three hundred yards long. No debris, no metal, no hurtling wheels, no clattering wreckage. Nothing at all except microscopic invisible particles of vapor accelerating into the atmosphere way faster than the speed of sound.
THE PILOT STUCK around at a hover for a long moment and then drifted east. Put his craft gently down on the scrub, a hundred yards from the shoulder. Shut the engines down. Reacher sat in the deafening silence and unclipped his belt. Laid the Barrett on the floor and vaulted out through the open door. Walked slowly toward the highway.
A ton of dynamite. A whole ton. A hell of a bang. There was nothing left at all. He guessed there were flattened grasses for a half-mile all around, but that was it. The terrible energy of the explosion had blasted outward and met absolutely nothing at all in its path. Nothing soft, nothing vulnerable. It had blasted outward and then weakened and slowed and died to a puff of breeze miles away and it had hurt nothing. Nothing at all. He stood in the silence and closed his eyes.
Then he heard footsteps behind him. It was Holly. He heard her good leg alternating with her bad leg. A long stride, then a shuffle. He opened his eyes and looked at the road. She walked around in front of him and stopped. Laid her head on his chest and put her arms around him. Squeezed him tight and held on. He raised his hand to her head and smoothed her hair behind her ear, like he had seen her do.
“All done,” she said.
“Get a problem, solve a problem,” he said. “That’s my rule.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“I wish it was always that easy,” she said.
The way she said it, after the delay, it was like a long speech. Like a closely reasoned argument. He pretended not to know which problem she was talking about.
“Your father?” he said. “You’re way, way out of his shadow now.”
She shook her head against his chest.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Believe it,” he said. “That thing you did for me on the parade ground was the smartest, coolest, bravest thing I ever saw anybody do, man or woman, young or old. Better than anything I ever did. Better than anything your old man ever did. He’d give his front teeth for guts like that. So would I. You’re way out of anybody’s shadow now, Holly. Believe it.”
“I thought I was,” she said. “I felt like it. I really did. For a while. But then when I saw him again, I felt just the same as I always did. I called him Dad.”
