27
FOUR MEN WERE dragging Loder’s body away and the
crowd was dispersing quietly. Reacher was left standing on the
courthouse steps with his six guards and Fowler. Fowler had finally
unlocked the handcuffs. Reacher was rolling his shoulders and
stretching. He had been cuffed all night and all morning and he was
stiff and sore. His wrists were marked with red weals where the
hard metal had bitten down.
“Cigarette?” Fowler asked.
He was holding his pack out. A friendly gesture.
Reacher shook his head.
“I want to see Holly,” he said.
Fowler was about to refuse, but then he thought
some more and nodded.
“OK,” he said. “Good idea. Take her out for some
exercise. Talk to her. Ask her how we’re treating her. That’s
something you’re sure to be asked later. It’ll be very important to
them. We don’t want you giving them any false impressions.”
Reacher waited at the bottom of the steps. The sun
had gone pale and watery. Wisps of mist were gathering in the
north. But some of the sky was still blue and clear. After five
minutes, Fowler brought Holly down. She was walking slowly, with a
little staccato rhythm as her good leg alternated with the thump of
her crutch. She walked through the door and stood at the top of the
steps.
“Question for you, Reacher,” Fowler called down.
“How far can you run in a half hour with a hundred and twenty
pounds on your back?”
Reacher shrugged.
“Not far enough, I guess,” he said.
Fowler nodded.
“Right,” he said. “Not far enough. If she’s not
standing right here in thirty minutes, we’ll come looking for you.
We’ll give it a two-mile radius.”
Reacher thought about it and nodded. A half hour
with a hundred and twenty pounds on his back might get him more
than two miles. Two miles was probably pessimistic. But he thought
back to the map on Borken’s wall. Thought about the savage terrain.
Where the hell would he run? He made a show of checking his watch.
Fowler walked away, up behind the ruined office building. The
guards slung their weapons over their shoulders and stood easy.
Holly smoothed her hair back. Stood face up to the pale sun.
“Can you walk for a while?” Reacher asked
her.
“Slowly,” she said.
She set off north along the middle of the deserted
street. Reacher strolled beside her. They waited until they were
out of sight. They glanced at each other. Then they turned and
flung themselves together. Her crutch toppled to the ground and he
lifted her a foot in the air. She wrapped her arms around him and
buried her face in his neck.
“I’m going crazy in there,” she said.
“I’ve got bad news,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“They had a helper in Chicago,” he said.
She stared up at him.
“They were only gone five days,” he said. “That’s
what Fowler said at the trial. He said Loder had been gone just
five days.”
“So?” she said.
“So they didn’t have time for surveillance,” he
said. “They hadn’t been watching you. Somebody told them where you
were going to be, and when. They had help, Holly.”
The color in her face drained away. It was replaced
by shock.
“Five days?” she said. “You sure?”
Reacher nodded. Holly went quiet. She was thinking
hard.
“So who knew?” he asked her. “Who knew where you’d
be, twelve o’clock Monday? A roommate? A friend?”
Her eyes were darting left and right. She was
racing through the possibilities.
“Nobody knew,” she said.
“Were you ever tailed?” he asked.
She shrugged helplessly. Reacher could see she
desperately wanted to say yes, I was tailed. Because he knew to say
no was too awful for her to contemplate.
“Were you?” he asked again.
“No,” she said quietly. “By a bozo like one of
these? Forget it. I’d have spotted them. And they’d have had to
hang around all day outside the Federal Building, just waiting.
We’d have picked them up in a heartbeat.”
“So?” he asked.
“My lunch break was flexible,” she said. “It
varied, sometimes by a couple of hours either way. It was never
regular.”
“So?” he asked again.
She stared at him.
“So it was inside help,” she said. “Inside the
Bureau. Had to be. Think about it, no other possibility. Somebody
in the office saw me leave and dropped a dime.”
He said nothing. Just watched the dismay on her
face. “A mole inside Chicago,” she said. A statement, not a
question. “Inside the Bureau. No other possibility. Shit, I don’t
believe it.”
Then she smiled. A brief, bitter smile.
“And we’ve got a mole inside here,” she said.
“Ironic, right? He identified himself to me. Young guy, big scar on
his forehead. He’s undercover for the Bureau. He says we’ve got
people in a lot of these groups. Deep undercover, in case of
emergency. He called it in when they put the dynamite in my
walls.”
He stared back at her.
“You know about the dynamite?” he said.
She grimaced and nodded.
“No wonder you’re going crazy in there,” he
said.
Then he stared at her in a new panic.
“Who does this undercover guy call in to?” he asked
urgently.
“Our office in Butte,” Holly said. “It’s just a
satellite office. One resident agent. He communicates by radio.
He’s got a transmitter hidden out in the woods. But he’s not using
it now. He says they’re scanning the frequencies.”
He shuddered.
“So how long before the Chicago mole blows his
cover?” he said.
Holly went paler.
“Soon, I guess,” she said. “Soon as somebody
figures we were headed out in this direction. Chicago will be
dialing up the computers and trawling for any reports coming out of
Montana. His stuff will be top of the damn pile. Christ, Reacher,
you’ve got to get to him first. You’ve got to warn him. His name is
Jackson.”
They turned back. Started hurrying south through
the ghost town.
“He says he can break me out,” Holly said.
“Tonight, by jeep.”
Reacher nodded grimly.
“Go with him,” he said.
“Not without you,” she said.
“They’re sending me anyway,” he said. “I’m supposed
to be an emissary. I’m supposed to tell your people it’s
hopeless.”
“Are you going to go?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Not if I can help it,” he said. “Not without
you.”
“You should go,” she said. “Don’t worry about
me.”
He shook his head again.
“I am worrying about you,” he said.
“Just go,” she said. “Forget me and get out.”
He shrugged. Said nothing.
“Get out if you get the chance, Reacher,” she said.
“I mean it.”
She looked like she meant it. She was glaring at
him.
“Only if you’re gone first,” he said finally. “I’m
sticking around until you’re out of here. I’m definitely not
leaving you with these maniacs.”
“But you can’t stick around,” she said. “If I’m
gone, they’ll go apeshit. It’ll change everything.”
He looked at her. Heard Borken say: she’s more than
his daughter.
“Why, Holly?” he said. “Why will it change
everything? Who the hell are you?”
She didn’t answer. Glanced away. Fowler strolled
into view, coming north, smoking. He walked up to them. Stopped
right in front of them. Pulled his pack.
“Cigarette?” he asked.
Holly looked at the ground. Reacher shook his
head.
“She tell you?” Fowler asked. “All the comforts of
home?”
The guards were standing to attention. They were in
a sort of honor guard on the courthouse steps. Fowler walked Holly
to them. A guard took her inside. At the door, she glanced back at
Reacher. He nodded to her. Tried to make it say: see you later, OK?
Then she was gone.
“NOW FOR THE grand tour,” Fowler said. “You stick
close to me. Beau’s orders. But you can ask any questions you want,
OK?”
Reacher glanced vaguely at him and nodded. Glanced
at the six guards behind him. He walked down the steps and paused.
Looked over at the flagpole. It was set dead center in the remains
of a fine square of lawn in front of the building. He walked across
to it and stood in Loder’s blood and looked around.
The town of Yorke was pretty much dead. Looked like
it had died some time ago. And it looked like it had never been
much of a place to begin with. The road came through north to
south, and there had been four developed blocks flanking it, two on
the east side and two on the west. The courthouse took up the whole
of the southeastern block and it faced what might have been some
kind of a county office on the southwestern block. The western side
of the street was higher. The ground sloped way up. The foundation
of the county office building was about level with the second floor
of the courthouse. It had started out the same type of structure,
but it had fallen into ruin, maybe thirty years before. The paint
was peeled and the siding showed through iron-gray. There was no
glass in any window. The sloping knoll surrounding it had returned
to mountain scrub. There had been an ornamental tree dead center.
It had died a long time ago, and it was now just a stump, maybe
seven feet high, like an execution post.
The northern blocks were rows of faded, boarded-up
stores. There had once been tall ornate frontages concealing simple
square buildings, but the decay of the years had left the frontages
the same dull brown as the boxy wooden structures behind. The signs
above the doors had faded to nothing. There were no people on the
sidewalks. No vehicle noise, no activity, no nothing. The place was
a ghost. It looked like an abandoned cowboy town from the Old
West.
“This was a mining town,” Fowler said. “Lead,
mostly, but some copper, and a couple of seams of good silver for a
while. There was a lot of money made here, that’s for damn
sure.”
“So what happened?” Reacher asked.
Fowler shrugged.
“What happens to any mining place?” he said. “It
gets worked out, is what. Fifty years ago, people were registering
claims in that old county office like there was no tomorrow, and
they were disputing them in that old courthouse, and there were
saloons and banks and stores up and down the street. Then they
started coming up with dirt instead of metal, and they moved on,
and this is what got left behind.”
Fowler was looking around at the dismal view and
Reacher was following his gaze. Then he transferred his eyes upward
a couple of degrees and took in the giant mountains rearing on the
horizon. They were massive and indifferent, still streaked with
snow on the third of July. Mist hung in the passes and floated
through the dense conifers. Fowler moved and Reacher followed him
up a track launching steeply northwest behind the ruined county
office. The guards followed in single file behind. He realized this
was the track he’d stumbled along twice in the dark the night
before. After a hundred yards, they were in the trees. The track
wound uphill through the forest. Progress was easier in the
filtered green daylight. After a mile of walking they had made
maybe a half mile of straight-line progress and they came out in
the clearing the white truck had driven into the previous night.
There was a small sentry squad, armed and immaculate, standing at
attention in the center of the space. But there was no sign of the
white truck. It had been driven away.
“We call this the Bastion,” Fowler said. “These
were the very first acres we bought.”
In the clear daylight, the place looked different.
The Bastion was a big tidy clearing in the brush, nestled in a
mountain bowl three hundred feet above the town itself. There was
no man-made perimeter. The perimeter had been supplied a million
years ago by the great glaciers grinding down from the Pole. The
north and west sides were mountainous, rearing straight up to the
high peaks. Reacher saw snow again, packed by the wind into the
high north-facing gullies. If it was there in July, it had to be
there twelve months of the year.
To the southeast, the town was just visible below
them through the gaps in the trees where the track had been carved
out. Reacher could see the ruined county building and the white
courthouse set below it like models. Directly south, the mountain
slopes fell away into the thick forest. Where there were no trees,
there were savage ravines. Reacher gazed at them, quietly. Fowler
pointed.
“Hundred feet deep, some of those,” he said. “Full
of elk and bighorn sheep. And we got black bears roaming. A few of
the folk have seen mountain lions on the prowl. You can hear them
in the night, when it gets real quiet.”
Reacher nodded and listened to the stunning
silence. Tried to figure out how much quieter the nights could be.
Fowler turned and pointed here and there.
“This is what we built,” he said. “So far.”
Reacher nodded again. The clearing held ten
buildings. They were all large utilitarian wooden structures, built
from plywood sheet and cedar, resting on solid concrete piles.
There was an electricity supply into each building from a loop of
heavy cable running between them.
“Power comes up from the town,” Fowler said. “A
mile of cable. Running water, too, piped down from a pure mountain
lake through plastic tubing, installed by militia labor.”
Reacher saw the hut he’d been locked into most of
the night. It was smaller than the others.
“Administration hut,” Fowler said.
One of the huts had a whip antenna on the roof,
maybe sixty feet high. Shortwave radio. And Reacher could see a
thinner cable, strapped to the heavy power line. It snaked into the
same hut, and didn’t come out again.
“You guys are on the phone?” he asked. “Unlisted,
right?”
He pointed and Fowler followed his gaze.
“The phone line?” he said. “Runs up from Yorke with
the power cable. But there’s no telephone. World government would
tap our calls.”
He gestured for Reacher to follow him over to the
hut with the antenna, where the line terminated. They pushed in
together through the narrow door. Fowler spread his hands in a
proud little gesture.
“The communications hut,” he said.
The hut was dark and maybe twenty feet by twelve.
Two men inside, one crouched over a tape recorder, listening to
something on headphones, the other slowly turning the dial of a
radio scanner. Both long sides of the hut had crude wooden desks
built into the walls. Reacher glanced up at the gable and saw the
telephone wire running in through a hole drilled in the wall. It
coiled down and fed a modem. The modem was wired into a pair of
glowing desktop computers.
“The National Militia Internet,” Fowler said.
A second wire bypassed the desktops and fed a fax
machine. It was whirring away to itself and slowly rolling a curl
of paper out.
“The Patriotic Fax Network,” Fowler said.
Reacher nodded and walked closer. The fax machine
sat on the counter next to another computer and a large shortwave
radio.
“This is the shadow media,” Fowler said. “We depend
on all this equipment for the truth about what’s going on in
America. You can’t get the truth any other way.”
Reacher took a last look around and shrugged.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “That’s the truth about me.
No dinner and no breakfast. You got someplace with coffee?”
Fowler looked at him and grinned.
“Sure,” he said. “Mess hall serves all day. What do
you think we are? A bunch of savages?”
He dismissed the six guards and gestured again for
Reacher to follow him. The mess hall was next to the communications
hut. It was about four times the size, twice as long and twice as
wide. Outside, it had a sturdy chimney on the roof, fabricated from
bright galvanized metal. Inside, it was full of rough trestle
tables in neat lines, simple benches pushed carefully underneath.
It smelled of old food and the dusty smell that large communal
spaces always have.
There were three women working in there. They were
cleaning the tables. They were dressed in olive fatigues, and they
all had long, clean hair and plain, unadorned faces, red hands and
no jewelry. They paused when Fowler and Reacher walked in. They
stopped working and stood together, watching. Reacher recognized
one of them from the courtroom. She gave him a cautious nod of
greeting. Fowler stepped forward.
“Our guest missed breakfast,” he said.
The cautious woman nodded again.
“Sure,” she said. “What can I get you?”
“Anything,” Reacher said. “As long as it’s got
coffee with it.”
“Five minutes,” the woman said.
She led the other two away through a door where the
kitchen was bumped out in back. Fowler sat down at a table and
Reacher took the bench opposite.
“Three times a day, this place gets used for
meals,” Fowler said. “The rest of the time, afternoons and evenings
mainly, it gets used as the central meeting place for the
community. Beau gets up on the table and tells the folk what needs
doing.”
“Where is Beau right now?” Reacher asked.
“You’ll see him before you go,” Fowler said. “Count
on it.”
Reacher nodded slowly and focused through the small
window toward the mountains. The new angle gave him a glimpse of a
farther range, maybe fifty miles distant, hanging there in the
clear air between the earth and the sky. The silence was still
awesome.
“Where is everybody?” he asked.
“Working,” Fowler said. “Working, and
training.”
“Working?” Reacher said. “Working at what?”
“Building up the southern perimeter,” Fowler said.
“The ravines are shallow in a couple of places. Tanks could get
through. You know what an abatis is?”
Reacher looked blank. He knew what an abatis was.
Any conscientious West Pointer who could read knew what an abatis
was. But he wasn’t about to let Fowler know exactly how much he
knew about anything. So he just looked blank.
“You fell some trees,” Fowler said. “Every fifth or
sixth tree, you chop it down. You drop it facing away from the
enemy. The trees around here, they’re mostly wild pines, the
branches face upward, right? So when they’re felled, the branches
are facing away from the enemy. Tank runs into the chopped end of
the tree, tries to push it along. But the branches snag against the
trees you left standing. Pretty soon, that tank is trying to push
two or three trees over. Then four or five. Can’t be done. Even a
big tank like an Abrams can’t do it. Fifteen-hundred-horsepower gas
turbine on it, sixty-three tons, it’s going to stall when it’s
trying to push all those trees over. Even if they ship the big
Russian tanks in against us, it can’t be done. That’s an abatis,
Reacher. Use the power of nature against them. They can’t get
through those damn trees, that’s for sure. Soviets used it against
Hitler, Kursk, World War Two. An old Commie trick. Now we’re
turning it around against them.”
“What about infantry?” Reacher said. “Tanks won’t
come alone. They’ll have infantry right there with them. They’ll
just skip ahead and dynamite the trees.”
Fowler grinned.
“They’ll try,” he said. “Then they’ll stop trying.
We’ve got machine gun positions fifty yards north of the abatises.
We’ll cut them to pieces.”
The cautious woman came back out of the kitchen
carrying a tray. She put it down on the table in front of Reacher.
Eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, beans, all on an enamel plate. A metal
pint mug of steaming coffee. Cheap flatware.
“Enjoy,” she said.
“Thank you,” Reacher said.
“I don’t get coffee?” Fowler said.
The cautious woman pointed to the back.
“Help yourself,” she said.
Fowler tried a man-to-man look at Reacher and got
up. Reacher kept on looking blank. Fowler walked back to the
kitchen and ducked in the door. The woman watched him go and laid a
hand on Reacher’s arm.
“I need to talk to you,” she whispered. “Find me
after lights-out, tonight. I’ll meet you outside the kitchen door,
OK?”
“Talk to me now,” Reacher whispered back. “I could
be gone by then.”
“You’ve got to help us,” the woman whispered.
Then Fowler came back out into the hall and the
woman’s eyes clouded with terror. She straightened up and hurried
away.
THERE WERE SIX bolts through each of the long
tubes in the bed frame. Two of them secured the mesh panel which
held up the mattress. Then there were two at each end, fixing the
long tube to the right-angle flanges attached to the legs. She had
studied the construction for a long time, and she had spotted an
improvement. She could leave one flange bolted to one end. It would
stand out like a rigid right-angled hook. Better than separating
the flange and then jamming it into the open end. More
strength.
But it still left her with six bolts. She would
have to take the flange off the leg. An improvement, but not a
shortcut. She worked fast. No reason to believe Jackson would fail,
but his odds had just worsened. Worsened dramatically.
NEXT TO THE mess hall were the dormitories. There
were four large buildings, all of them immaculate and deserted. Two
of them were designated as barracks for single men and single
women. The other two were subdivided by plywood partitions.
Families lived there, the adults in pairs in small cubicles behind
the partitions, the children in an open dormitory area. Their beds
were three-quarter-size iron cots, lined up in neat rows. There
were half-size foot-lockers at the ends of the cots. No drawings on
the walls, no toys. The only decor was a tourist poster from
Washington, D.C. It was an aerial photograph taken from the north
on a sunny spring day, with the White House in the right
foreground, the Mall in the middle and the Capitol end-on to the
left. It was framed in plastic and the tourist message had been
covered over with paper and a new title had been hand-lettered in
its place. The new title read: This Is Your Enemy.
“Where are all the kids right now?” Reacher
asked.
“In school,” Fowler said. “Winter, they use the
mess hall. Summer, they’re out in the woods.”
“What do they learn?” Reacher asked.
Fowler shrugged.
“Stuff they need to know,” he said.
“Who decides what they need to know?” Reacher
asked.
“Beau,” Fowler said. “He decides everything.”
“So what has he decided they need to know?” Reacher
asked.
“He studied it pretty carefully,” Fowler said.
“Comes down to the Bible, the Constitution, history, physical
training, woodsmanship, hunting, weapons.”
“Who teaches them all that stuff?” Reacher
asked.
“The women,” Fowler replied.
“The kids happy here?” Reacher asked.
Fowler shrugged again.
“They’re not here to be happy,” he said. “They’re
here to survive.”
The next hut was empty, apart from another computer
terminal, standing alone on a desk in a corner. Reacher could see a
big keyboard lock fastened to it.
“I guess this is our Treasury Department,” Fowler
said. “All our funds are in the Caymans. We need some, we use that
computer to send it anywhere we want.”
“How much you got?” Reacher asked.
Fowler smiled, like a conspirator.
“Shitloads,” he said. “Twenty million in bearer
bonds. Less what we’ve spent already. But we got plenty left. Don’t
you worry about us getting short.”
“Stolen?” Reacher asked.
Fowler shook his head and grinned.
“Captured,” he said. “From the enemy. Twenty
million.”
The final two buildings were storehouses. One stood
in line with the last dormitory. The other was set some distance
away. Fowler led Reacher into the nearer shed. It was crammed with
supplies. One wall was lined with huge plastic drums filled with
water.
“Beans, bullets and bandages,” Fowler said. “That’s
Beau’s motto. Sooner or later we’re going to face a siege. That’s
for damn sure. And it’s pretty obvious the first thing the
government is going to do, right? They’re going to fire artillery
shells armed with plague germs into the lake that feeds our water
system. So we’ve stockpiled drinking water. Twenty-four thousand
gallons. That was the first priority. Then we got canned food,
enough for two years. Not enough if we get a lot of people coming
in to join us, but it’s a good start.”
The storage shed was crammed. One floor-to-ceiling
bay was packed with clothing. Familiar olive fatigues, camouflage
jackets, boots. All washed and pressed in some Army laundry, packed
up and sold off by the bale.
“You want some?” Fowler asked.
Reacher was about to move on, but then he glanced
down at what he was wearing. He had been wearing it continuously
since Monday morning. Three days solid. It hadn’t been the best
gear to start with, and it hadn’t improved with age.
“OK,” he said.
The biggest sizes were at the bottom of the pile.
Fowler heaved and shoved and dragged out a pair of pants, a shirt,
a jacket. Reacher ignored the shiny boots. He liked his own shoes
better. He stripped and dressed, hopping from foot to foot on the
bare wooden floor. He did up the shirt buttons and shrugged into
the jacket. The fit felt good enough. He didn’t look for a mirror.
He knew what he looked like in fatigues. He’d spent enough years
wearing them.
Next to the door, there were medical supplies
ranged on shelves. Trauma kits, plasma, antibiotics, bandages. All
efficiently laid out for easy access. Neat piles, with plenty of
space between. Borken had clearly rehearsed his people in rushing
around and grabbing equipment and administering emergency
treatment.
“Beans and bandages,” Reacher said. “What about the
bullets?”
Fowler nodded toward the distant shed.
“That’s the armory,” he said. “I’ll show
you.”
The armory was bigger than the other storage shed.
Huge lock on the door. It held more weaponry than Reacher could
remember seeing in a long time. Hundreds of rifles and machine guns
in neat rows. The stink of fresh gun oil everywhere.
Floor-to-ceiling stacks of ammo boxes. Familiar wooden crates of
grenades. Shelves full of handguns. Nothing heavier than an
infantryman could carry, but it was still a hell of an impressive
sight.
THE TWO BOLTS securing the mesh base were the
easiest. They were smaller than the others. The big bolts holding
the frame together took all the strain. The mesh base just rested
in there. The bolts holding it down were not structural. They could
have been left out altogether, and the bed would have worked just
the same.
She flaked and scraped the paint back to the bare
metal. Heated the bolt heads with the towel. Then she pulled the
rubber tip off her crutch and bent the end of the aluminum tube
into an oval. She used the strength in her fingers to crush the
oval tight over the head of the bolt. Used the handle to turn the
whole of the crutch like a giant socket wrench. It slipped off the
bolt. She cursed quietly and used one hand to crush it tighter.
Turned her hand and the crutch together as a unit. The bolt
moved.
THERE WAS A beaten earth path leading out north
from the ring of wooden buildings. Fowler walked Reacher down it.
It led to a shooting range. The range was a long, flat alley
painstakingly cleared of trees and brush. It was silent and
unoccupied. It was only twenty yards wide, but over a half-mile
long. There was matting laid at one end for the shooters to lie on,
and far in the distance Reacher could see the targets. He set off
on a slow stroll toward them. They looked like standard
military-issue plywood cutouts of running, crouching soldiers. The
design dated right back to World War II. The crude screen-printing
depicted a German infantryman, with a coal-scuttle helmet and a
savage snarl. But as he got closer Reacher could see these
particular targets had crude painted additions of their own. They
had new badges daubed on the chests in yellow paint. Each new badge
had three letters. Four targets had: FBI. Four had: ATF. The
targets were staggered backward over distances ranging from three
hundred yards right back to the full eight hundred. The nearer
targets were peppered with bullet holes.
“Everybody has to hit the three-hundred-yard
targets,” Fowler said. “It’s a requirement of citizenship
here.”
Reacher shrugged. Wasn’t impressed. Three hundred
yards was no kind of a big deal. He kept on strolling down the
half-mile. The four-hundred-yard targets were damaged, the
five-hundred-yard boards less so. Reacher counted eighteen hits at
six hundred yards, seven at seven hundred, and just two at the full
eight hundred.
“How old are these boards?” he asked.
Fowler shrugged.
“A month,” he said. “Maybe two. We’re working on
it.”
“You better,” Reacher said.
“We don’t figure to be shooting at a distance,”
Fowler replied. “Beau’s guess is the UN forces will come at night.
When they think we’re resting up. He figures they might succeed in
penetrating our perimeter to some degree. Maybe by a half-mile or
so. I don’t think they will, but Beau’s a cautious guy. And he’s
the one with all the responsibility. So our tactics are going to be
nighttime outflanking maneuvers. Encircle the UN penetration in the
forest and mow it down with cross fire. Up close and personal,
right? That training’s going pretty well. We can move fast and
quiet in the dark, no lights, no sound, no problem at all.”
Reacher looked at the forest and thought about the
wall of ammunition he’d seen. Thought about Borken’s boast:
impregnable. Thought about the problems an army faces fighting
committed guerrillas in difficult terrain. Nothing is ever really
impregnable, but the casualties in taking this place were going to
be spectacular.
“This morning,” Fowler said. “I hope you weren’t
upset.”
Reacher just looked at him.
“About Loder, I mean,” Fowler said.
Reacher shrugged. Thought to himself: it saved me a
job of work.
“We need tough discipline,” Fowler said. “All new
nations go through a phase like this. Harsh rules, tough
discipline. Beau’s made a study of it. Right now, it’s very
important. But it can be upsetting, I guess.”
“It’s you should be upset,” Reacher said. “You
heard of Joseph Stalin?”
Fowler nodded.
“Soviet dictator,” he said.
“Right,” Reacher said. “He used to do that.”
“Do what?” Fowler asked.
“Eliminate his potential rivals,” Reacher said. “On
trumped-up charges.”
Fowler shook his head.
“The charges were fair,” he said. “Loder made
mistakes.”
Reacher shrugged.
“Not really,” he said. “He did a reasonable
job.”
Fowler looked away.
“You’ll be next,” Reacher said. “You should watch
your back. Sooner or later, you’ll find you’ve made some kind of a
mistake.”
“We go back a long way,” Fowler said. “Beau and
me.”
“So did Beau and Loder, right?” Reacher said.
“Stevie will be OK. He’s no threat. Too dumb. But you should think
about it. You’ll be next.”
Fowler made no reply. Just looked away again. They
walked together back down the grassy half-mile. Took another beaten
track north. They stepped off the path to allow a long column of
children to file past. They were marching in pairs, boys and girls
together, with a woman in fatigues at the head of the line and
another at the tail. The children were dressed in cut-down military
surplus gear and they were carrying tall staffs in their right
hands. Their faces were blank and acquiescent. The girls had
untrimmed straight hair, and the boys had rough haircuts done with
bowls and blunt shears. Reacher stood and watched them pass. They
stared straight ahead as they walked. None of them risked a
sideways glance at him.
The new path ran uphill through a thin belt of
trees and came out on a flat area fifty yards long and fifty yards
wide. It had been leveled by hand. Discarded fieldstone had been
painted white and laid at intervals around the edge. It was quiet
and deserted.
“Our parade ground,” Fowler said, sourly.
Reacher nodded and scanned around. To the north and
west, the high mountains. To the east, thick virgin forest. South,
he could see over the distant town, across belts of trees, to the
fractured ravines beyond. A cold wind lifted his new jacket and
grabbed at his shirt, and he shivered.
THE BIGGER BOLTS were much harder. Much more
contact area, metal to metal. Much more paint to scrape. Much more
force required to turn them. The more force she used, the more the
crushed end of the crutch was liable to slip off. She took off her
shoe and used it to hammer the end into shape. She bent and folded
the soft aluminum around the head of the bolt. Then she clamped it
tight with her fingers. Clamped until the slim tendons in her arm
stood out like ropes and sweat ran down her face. Then she turned
the crutch, holding her breath, waiting to see which would give
first, the grip of her fingers or the grip of the bolt.
THE WIND GRABBING at Reacher’s shirt also carried
some faint sounds to him. He glanced at Fowler and turned to face
the western edge of the parade ground. He could hear men moving in
the trees. A line of men, bursting out of the forest.
They crashed out of the trees, six men line
abreast, automatic rifles at the slope. Camouflage fatigues,
beards. The same six guards who had stood in front of the judge’s
bench that morning. Borken’s personal detail. Reacher scanned
across the line of faces. The younger guy with the scar was at the
left-hand end of the line. Jackson, the FBI plant. They paused and
reset their course. Rushed across the leveled ground toward
Reacher. As they approached, Fowler stood back, leaving Reacher
looking like an isolated target. Five of the men fanned out into a
loose arc. Five rifles aimed at Reacher’s chest. The sixth man
stepped up in front of Fowler. No salute, but there was a deference
in his stance which was more or less the same thing.
“Beau wants this guy back,” the soldier said.
“Something real urgent.”
Fowler nodded.
“Take him,” he said. “He’s beginning to piss me
off.”
The rifle muzzles jerked Reacher into a rough
formation and the six men hustled him south through the thin belt
of trees, moving fast. They passed through the shooting range and
followed the beaten earth path back to the Bastion. They turned
west and walked past the armory and on into the forest toward the
command hut. Reacher lengthened his stride and sped up. Pulled
ahead. Let his foot hit a root and went down heavily on the stones.
First guy to reach him was Jackson. Reacher saw the scarred
forehead. He grabbed Reacher’s arm.
“Mole in Chicago,” Reacher breathed.
“On your feet, asshole,” Jackson shouted
back.
“Hide out and run for it tonight,” Reacher
whispered. “Maximum care, OK?”
Jackson glanced at him and replied with a squeeze
of his arm. Then he pulled him up and shoved him ahead down the
path into the smaller clearing. Beau Borken was framed in his
command hut doorway. He was dressed in huge baggy camouflage
fatigues, dirty and disheveled. Like he had been working hard. He
stared at Reacher as he approached.
“I see we gave you new clothes,” he said.
Reacher nodded.
“So let me apologize for my own appearance,” Borken
said. “Busy day.”
“Fowler told me,” Reacher said. “You’ve been
building abatises.”
“Abatises?” Borken said. “Right.”
Then he went quiet. Reacher saw his big white
hands, opening and closing.
“Your mission is canceled,” Borken said
quietly.
“It is?” Reacher said. “Why?”
Borken eased his bulk down out of the doorway and
stepped close. Reacher’s gaze was fixed on his blazing eyes and he
never saw the blow coming. Borken hit him in the stomach, a big
hard fist on the end of four hundred pounds of body weight. Reacher
went down like a tree and Borken smashed a foot into his
back.