“Understood,” she said. “Three minutes gone.”
Reacher grabbed Mauney’s collar and hauled him to his feet. Dragged him out from behind the desk, out of the office, down the hallway, into the open area. Over to the main doorway. And then a yard outside, into the night. The smell of wet ash was strong. The three Chryslers were moving again in the distance. They were turning tight circles on the open ground and their headlights were sweeping random patterns against the fence like searchlights in a prison movie.
“Wait for the starting gun,” Reacher said to Neagley.
He watched the gate. Saw the guard move in his booth, saw the concertina wire sway, heard the tortured screech of wheels on a metal rail. Saw the gate start to move. He put the Glock to Mauney’s temple and pulled the trigger. Mauney’s skull exploded and Neagley and Reacher took off at full speed, like sprinters out of their blocks.
Neagley was ahead after half a step. Reacher stopped dead and watched her go. She flew through the pool of light from the guard hut and dodged like a running back around the end of the moving gate. She raced out to the street. Then she was lost to sight.
Reacher turned and ran in the opposite direction. Fifteen seconds later he was back where he had started, behind the Bell’s long nose.
77
Maybe they had seen Neagley go, and assumed Reacher was ahead of her. Or maybe they had just seen the gate move, or heard its sound through their open windows. Certainly they must have heard the gunshot. Possibly they imagined the rest. But they took the bait. They reacted instantly. All three cars braked and maneuvered and turned and accelerated and headed for the street, fishtailing like crazy and spraying huge rooster tails of dirt high in the air. They went out through the gate like stock cars through a turn. Their headlights lit up the street like day.
Reacher watched them go.
He waited for the night to go dark and quiet again. Then he counted to ten and moved slowly along the Bell’s starboard flank. He ignored the cockpit door. He moved right past it and put his hand on the rear door’s handle.
He tried it.
It was unlocked.
He glanced over his shoulder at the pilot’s hut. No movement there. He eased the handle down. The latch came free. The door opened. It was wide and light and tinny. Like a panel van’s. Not at all what he was expecting. Not heavy and pneumatic like an airliner’s.
He held the door two feet open and looped around it and climbed inside. Pulled the door after him and paused and then closed it against the latch with one sudden decisive click. He ducked down and peered out the window and watched the pilot’s hut.
No reaction.
He turned around in a crouch and knelt on the cabin floor in the darkness. From the inside the Bell looked like a swelled-up version of a minivan. A little wider and a little longer than the kind of things soccer moms drove in television commercials. Less boxy. A little more contoured. Narrower at the front, wider at floor level, pinched in a little more at head height, narrower at the rear. There would have been seven seats, two in the cockpit, three in the center row, two way in back, except that the center row was missing. The seats were all bulky high-backed recliners, faced with black leather. They had headrests and arms. Captains’ chairs. They had safety harnesses. Below the waistline the bulkheads were lined with black carpet. Above, they were padded with black quilted vinyl. Very corporate. But a little out-of-date. Leased secondhand, Reacher guessed. The whole interior smelled faintly of jet fuel.
There was a space behind the rearmost seats. For bags, Reacher guessed. A luggage compartment. Just like a minivan. It wasn’t a huge space. But it was big enough. He found the levers and flopped the seat backs forward. Climbed over and sat down on the floor, sideways, with his legs out straight and his back jammed against the side bulkhead. He took the captured SIGs out of his waistband and laid them on the floor, next to his knees. He leaned forward and hauled the seat backs upright. They clicked and locked in place. Then he slumped down to test whether he could get low enough to keep his head out of sight.
Probably, he thought.
He raised his head again. The cabin windows were misted with dew. Dark and gray and featureless. Like television screens, turned off. Nothing was happening outside. Noises were dulled. Clearly the carpet and the quilting doubled as soundproofing layers.
He waited.
Five minutes.
Ten.
Then the misted windows lit up with bright moving shapes and shadows. The cars, coming back. Three sets of headlight beams, bouncing and turning. They played on the glass for a moment and then they stopped and stabilized. Then they died altogether. The cars, back in the lot. Parked.
Reacher strained to hear.
He heard nothing except slow footsteps and low voices. Agitation, not triumph. The unmistakable sound of failure.
The search was over.
No success.
He waited.
78
He waited and grew cold and cramped from sitting still. He pictured the scene forty yards away, Mauney’s body in the doorway, the empty Samsonite in the office, discussion, argument, pacing, panic, confusion, apprehension. The side of his face was inches from the seat back in front of him. The leather was close enough to smell. Normally he would have been in severe distress. He hated confinement. Claustrophobia was as close as he ever came to fear. But right then he had other things on his mind.
He waited.
Twenty long minutes.
Then a door opened up front and the helicopter dipped and settled as its undercarriage compressed and recovered. Someone had climbed aboard. The door closed. A seat creaked. A harness buckle clicked. Switches clicked. Faint orange light jumped from dozens of instrument faces and threw sudden shadows on the roof. A fuel pump whirred and chattered. Reacher leaned forward from the waist and moved his head until one eye was lined up with the gap between the seats. He saw the pilot’s leather sleeve. Nothing more. The rest of the guy was invisible behind his bulky chair. His hand was dancing over switches and touching the faces of dials one by one as he ran through preflight checks. He was talking to himself, quietly, reciting a long list of required technicalities like an incantation.
Reacher pulled his head back.
Then there was an incredibly loud noise.
It was halfway between a gunshot and a split-second blast of compressed air. It came again, and again, and again, faster and faster. The starter mechanism, forcing the rotor around. The floor shook. Then the engines fired up and gears meshed and the rotor caught and settled to a lazy whop-whop idle. The torque rocked and twisted the whole craft on its struts, just a little, rhythmically, like it was dancing. The interior was filled with a loud thrumming noise. Driveshafts whirred and spun overhead. Jet exhaust whined outside, high-pitched and piercing. Reacher jammed the muzzles of the captured SIGs under his legs so that they wouldn’t bounce and rattle and slide. He took his Glock from his pocket and held it down by his side.
He waited.
A minute later the rear door was wrenched open. A blast of louder noise flooded in. After the noise came the acrid smell of kerosene. After the kerosene came Karla Dixon. Reacher moved his head an inch and saw her dumped on the floor head first like a log. She came to rest on her side, facing away. Her wrists and ankles were tied with rough sisal rope. Her hands were behind her back. The last time he had seen her horizontal had been in his bed in Vegas.
Two minutes later O’Donnell was wrestled in, feet-first. He was bigger and heavier and landed harder. He was tied up the same way as Dixon. He rolled facedown alongside her, his feet next to her head. They lay there together like cordwood, moving a little, struggling against the ropes.
Then the struts bounced again and Lennox and Parker climbed aboard. They shut their doors and dumped themselves down in the rear seats. The seat back in front of Reacher sagged against a loose mechanism and touched him on the cheek. He jammed his head harder into the corner. His crew cut scraped across the carpet.
The rotor turned slowly, whop, whop, whop.
The suspension knelt and rose, knelt and rose, front left corner, right rear corner, less than an inch, like dancing.
Reacher waited.
Then the door up front opposite the pilot wrenched open and Allen Lamaison dumped himself in the seat and said, “Go.” Reacher heard the turbines spin up and felt the thrill and shiver of vibration fill the cabin and heard the rotor note change to an urgent accelerating whip-whip-whip and felt the whole craft go light on its wheels.
Then they were airborne.
Reacher felt the floor come up at him. He heard the wheels pull upward into their wells. He felt rotation and drift and a long steady climb and then the floor tilted forward as the nose went down for speed. He braced himself against spread fingers to stop himself sliding into the seat in front of him. He heard the engine noise settle to a muted whine and then the unique pendulum sensation of helicopter transport came right back at him. He had done his fair share of fast miles in rotary aircraft, a lot of them sitting on the floor.
A familiar experience.
For now.
79
By the clock in Reacher’s head the cruise lasted exactly twenty minutes, which was about what he was expecting. He had figured modern corporate machines would be a little faster than the Hueys he had been accustomed to in the service. He figured a military AH-1 might have taken twenty-plus minutes to get itself beyond the mountains, so twenty dead seemed reasonable for something with black leather seats and a carpet.
He spent the twenty minutes with his head well down. Animal instinct, a million years old and still displayed by dogs and children: If I can’t see them, they can’t see me. He kept his arms and legs moving through silent fractions of an inch and kept his muscles tensing and relaxing in a bizarre miniaturized version of a gymnasium work-out. He was no longer cold, but he didn’t want to get any stiffer. The noise in the cabin was loud but not overwhelming. The engine whine was whipping away in the slipstream. The rotor noise was blending with the rush of air and could be tuned out. There was no conversation going on. No talking. Reacher heard nothing from anyone.
Until the twenty-minute cruise came to an end.
He felt the helicopter slow down. Felt the floor come level and then tip backward a couple of degrees as the nose flared upward. The craft rotated left a little. Like a horse reined in on a movie screen. The cabin got louder. Now they were moving slowly, trapped in a bubble of their own noise.
He bent forward from the waist and put an eye to the gap between the seats and saw Lamaison leaning over with his forehead pressed against his window. Saw him change direction and lean toward the pilot. Heard him speak. Or maybe he only imagined that he heard him speak. He had reconstructed the orders in his head a thousand times since opening Franz’s file days before. He felt that he knew them, word for word, in all their cruel inevitability.
“Where are we?” Lamaison asked, in Reacher’s mind, and maybe also in reality.
“The badlands,” the pilot said.
“What’s below us now?”
“Sand.”
“Height?”
“Three thousand feet.”
“What’s the air like up here?”
“Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”
“Safe?”
“Aeronautically.”
“So let’s do it.”
Reacher felt the helicopter come to a stationary hover. The engine note dropped down to a deeper key and the rotor thrashed loudly. The floor moved in tiny unstable circles, like a spinning top come to rest. Lamaison turned in his seat and nodded once to Parker and once to Lennox. Reacher heard the click of safety-harness catches and then the weight came up off the seats in front of him. Leather cushions inhaled and tired springs recovered and moved the seat backs a precious inch farther from his face. There was no light other than the orange glow from the cockpit. Parker was on the left and Lennox was on the right. They were both in strange half-crouches, knees bent and heads ducked because of limited headroom, feet apart for stability on the moving floor, arms thrust outward for balance. One of them was going to die easy and one of them was going to die hard.
It depended on which one of them was going to open the door.
Lennox was going to open the door.
He half-turned and grabbed his trailing safety harness and held on tight with his left hand. Then he crabbed sideways and used his right to grope for the interior door release. He got there and unlatched it and pushed. The door swung half-open and wind and noise howled in. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching over his shoulder, and he tilted the craft a little so the door fell the rest of the way open under its own weight. Then he brought it level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and inertia and air pressure held the door wide against its hinge.
Lennox turned back. Big, red-faced, meaty, crouched like an ape, his left hand tight on his harness strap, his right pawing the air like a man on ice.
Reacher leaned forward and used his left hand to find the seat-release lever. He put his thumb below the pivot and two fingers above it and twisted. The seat back flopped forward. He used his left hand to force it all the way horizontal. He held it there. The cushions exhaled again. He brought the Glock up in his right hand and twisted from the waist and laid his right forearm flat on the seat back. Closed one eye and picked a spot an inch above Lennox’s navel.
And pulled the trigger.
The blast was muted in the general roar. Audible, but not as bad as it would have been in a library. The bullet hit Lennox low in the midsection. Reacher figured it was an instant through-and-through. Inevitable, with a nine-millimeter from a range of about four feet. Which was why he was shooting at Lennox and not at Parker. Reacher was not remotely afraid of flying, but he preferred the aircraft he was in to be undamaged. A shot through Parker’s midsection might have hit a hydraulic line or an electrical cable. Through Lennox it went straight out the open door into the night, harmlessly.
Lennox stayed in his awkward half-crouch. A bloom of blood haloed the hole in his shirt. It looked black in the dim orange light. His left hand came off the harness and pawed the air, a perfect mirror image of his right. He crouched there, balanced, symmetrical, a foot from the door sill, nothing behind him except the void, catastrophic physical shock on his face.
Reacher moved the Glock a small fraction and shot him again, this time through the sternum. He figured that on a guy as big and as old as Lennox the sternum would be a well-calcified plate maybe three-eighths of an inch thick. The bullet would pass through it for sure, but not before the smashing and splintering of the bone had transferred a little forward momentum into the target. Like the effect of a tiny punch. Maybe enough effect and enough momentum to take the guy with it a little and put him down backward, rather than just dumping him in a vertical heap like a head shot would have. There was too much articulation in the human neck for a head shot to have done what Reacher wanted it to.
But it was his knees that did Lennox in, not his breastbone. He came down just a fraction in back of vertical, like a guy aiming to squat on his heels. But he was big and heavy and he was forty-one years old and his knees had stiffened. They bent a little more than ninety degrees and then they stopped bending. His upper-body mass was pitched backward by the sudden obstruction and his ass hit square on the door sill and the weight of his shoulders and his head rolled him over the pivot and took him right out the door into the night. The last Reacher saw of him was the soles of his shoes, still well apart, whipping away into the windy darkness like afterthoughts.
By that point it was much less than two seconds since he had dropped the seat, but to Reacher it seemed like two lifetimes. Franz’s and Orozco’s, maybe. He felt infinitely fluent and languid. He was floating in a state of grace and torment, planning his moves like chess, minutely aware of potentials and drawbacks and threats and opportunities. The others in the cabin had barely reacted at all. O’Donnell was facedown, t
rying to lift his head far enough to turn. Dixon was trying to roll onto her back. The pilot was half-turned, immobile in his seat. Parker was frozen in his absurd crouch. Lamaison was gazing at the empty air where Lennox had been, like he was completely unable to understand what had just happened.
Then Reacher stood up.
He dropped the second seat and climbed out over it like a nightmare apparition, a sudden giant figure from nowhere looming silently into the noisy orange glow. Then he stood still, close to fully upright, his head jammed up hard against the roof, his feet a yard apart, perfectly triangulated for maximum stability. His left hand held a SIG, pointing straight at Parker’s face. His right held his Glock, pointing straight at Lamaison’s. Both guns were motionless. His face was expressionless. The rotor thrashed on. The Bell continued its slow clockwise rotation. The door held wide open, pushed back like a sail. Gales of noise and wind and kerosene stink blew in.
O’Donnell arched his back and got his head high enough to turn. His eyes tracked left to Reacher’s boots and closed for a second. Dixon toppled onto her back and rolled over on her bound arms and settled on her other shoulder, facing the rear.
The pilot stared. Parker stared. Lamaison stared.
The time of maximum danger.
Reacher could not afford to fire forward. The chance of hitting some essential cockpit avionics was far too great. He couldn’t afford to put a gun down and work on freeing O’Donnell or Dixon, because Parker was loose in the cabin not more than four feet away. He couldn’t take Parker down hand to hand, because he couldn’t even move. There was no floor space. O’Donnell and Dixon were occupying it all.
Whereas Lamaison was still strapped in his seat. The pilot was still strapped in his. All the pilot had to do was throw the Bell all over the sky until everyone in the back fell out. They would sacrifice Parker that way, but Reacher couldn’t see Lamaison losing sleep over that decision.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 446
