by Lee Child
But still. Something was better than nothing. Reacher checked them over. They were loaded and they seemed to work. He closed the passenger door and tracked around to the driver’s side. He pushed the seat back and got in. The engine was still running. The truck was a Ford. Nothing fancy. He wound both windows down and tucked his Glock under his right thigh and piled both Colts on the passenger seat.
Good to go.
He counted to three and put the truck in gear and moved off slowly. The ground that had felt churned up and lumpy and unreliable underfoot felt just as bad under the wheels. The truck shuddered and slipped and bounced on stiff, load-ready springs. He followed the same course the two guys had used on the way out. A straight line, basically, to the top corner of the building. Its huge bulk stayed shadowy and indistinct most of the way. But as he got closer he saw more of it. Then suddenly it was right there, out his open window. Like driving past a docked ocean liner. Poured concrete, no doubt reinforced inside by thick steel bars, and shaped by temporary wooden formwork. He could see the wood grain here and there, preserved for ever. The curves had been made by stepping flat planks around a radius. What looked smooth from a distance looked brutal and discontinuous up close. In places wet concrete had been forced out through gaps between boards. The building looked like it was lined with unfinished seams. The camouflage paint was thick and crosshatched with brush strokes. Not a tidy job. But then, camouflage talent was all about pattern, viewed from afar. Not application, viewed from up close.
He slowed and took a breath and hauled on the wheel and made the turn around the top corner and saw the north face of the building for the first time. It was a blank concrete wall with three giant protuberances coming out of it. Like squat semicircular concrete tunnels, parallel, each one straight and maybe a hundred feet long. Like elongated igloo entrances. For air raid protection. There would be blast doors at both ends of the tunnels, never to be open at the same time. Trucks would drive in through the first door, and then pause in a kind of quarantine. The first door would close behind them, and the second door would open in front of them. Then the trucks would drive on. Getting out would be the same procedure in reverse. The interior of the structure would never be exposed to external pressure waves.
Missile storage, Reacher thought. The Cold War. Anything, anywhere, any time. If the military wanted it, the military got it. In fact the military got it whether it wanted it or not.
First question: which of the three entrance tunnels was currently in use?
Which was an easy question to answer. The moonlight showed tyre tracks quite clearly. The soft earth was beaten down into two ruts, in and out of the centre tunnel. Practically a highway.
Reacher held his curve, wide and easy, and then he bumped down into an established track that would bring him head on to the centre door. Which was closed. It had a frame wider than the mouth of the tunnel. Like an airplane hangar. The door would open in two halves, like a theatre curtain, rolling on big iron wheels and rails.
Open how? There was no radio in the car. No surveillance camera near the door. No light beam to be tripped, no call button, no intercom. Reacher drove slowly forward, unsure, with the door ahead of him like a high steel wall. Behind the railing on the roof he could see sentries. Five of them, long guns over their shoulders on slings, peering out into the middle distance in what looked like a fairly desultory fashion. Sentry duty was arduous and boring. Not what the average adventurer signs up for. No excitement. No glamour.
Reacher came to a stop with the pick-up’s grille a yard from the door.
The door started to open.
The two halves broke some kind of a seal between them and set off grinding back along their tracks, driven by what sounded like truck engines straining under the load. The whole assembly must have weighed hundreds of tons. Blastproof. Whatever the military wanted. The gap widened. Two feet. Three. There was dim light in the tunnel. Weak bulbs, in wire cages, strung out along the ceiling. Reacher tugged the Glock out from under his leg. He held it, low down and out of sight.
The doors stopped when the gap got to be about seven feet wide. Enough for a passenger vehicle. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and put his left hand on the wheel and touched the gas and rolled inside.
And saw four things: a guy right next to him, right next to a big red button near the first door, and a guy a hundred feet away, right next to a big red button near the second door.
His earlier advice to Delfuenso: Shoot them in the face, before they even say hello.
Which he did, with the first guy. Although not technically in the face. He raised the Glock a little higher and drilled the guy through the centre of the forehead, about where Sorenson had gotten hers.
Save rounds. No double taps. Which was OK. The first one had worked just fine. The guy was in some kind of a baggy green uniform. He had a handgun on his belt, in a big flapped holster. Not like any military thing Reacher had ever seen. More like folk art.
Reacher looked up again. The second guy was too far away. A hundred feet was too long for a handgun. So he stepped out of the truck and hit the big red button. The giant door started to close again behind him. He waited. The second guy waited. Still a hundred feet away. Still too far for a handgun. So Reacher got back in the truck and put his seat belt on. Then he stamped on the gas and accelerated. Straight at the second guy. Who froze for a fatal second. Who fumbled with his big flapped holster. Who gave up on it and ran. Away from his door. No way to open it in a hurry. Not an escape hatch. The mechanism was too slow. The guy was going to take his chances loose inside the tunnel. Which was dumb. The guy wasn’t thinking strategically. He wasn’t thinking himself into his opponent’s frame of mind. He was going to duck and dive and dodge, and then dart away and hug the side wall. He was going to assume no driver would risk wrecking his vehicle against the concrete.
Reacher drove on, left handed.
And sure enough, the guy feinted one way, and feinted the other, and then slammed himself flat against the wall, like a bullfighter, assuming Reacher would swing close but swerve away before contact.
Mistake.
Reacher ran straight into him at about thirty miles an hour, smashing the front of the truck mercilessly into the concrete, taking the guy between the knees and the waist, crushing him, seeing the shock on his face, and then the hood panel folded up from the crash like a concertina and he didn’t see him any more. Reacher was slammed against his seat belt and the windshield shattered and the truck came up on its front wheels and then crashed back down and Reacher was thrown back hard against the cushion. All kinds of smoke and steam rose up. The noise had been short but loud and it had brought ferocious echoes off the concrete, tearing, crushing metal, breaking glass, harsh clangs from separating components. Bumpers, Reacher thought, and headlight bezels and hub caps. Things like that.
The tunnel went quiet. Reacher sat still for a second. He figured very little would have been heard beyond the second door. If anything at all. The door was designed to be effective against a hundred-megaton atom bomb. The pop of a single nine-millimetre round and the sound of a car crash would be nothing to it.
He forced open his distorted door and climbed out of the wreckage. He stepped around to what was left of the hood. The second guy was about cut in half. Bleeding badly from every hole he had. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned. Foreign, for sure. But we all bleed the same colour red. No doubt about that. The truth of that statement was plain to see. Reacher put the guy out of his misery. A single shot, close range, behind the ear. An unnecessary round expended, but good manners had a price.
The Colt sub-machine guns were all tangled in the passenger footwell, thrown there by the crash. Reacher lined them up straight and hung one on his left shoulder, and one on his right. He swapped out the Glock’s two-gone magazine for the fresh one he had taken from Sorenson’s belt. Two rounds can make a difference.
Then he walked the rest of the tunnel and pushed the big red button.
&nb
sp; SEVENTY-TWO
REACHER HEARD A whine like a starter motor, and a cough, and then two huge truck engines burst into life and the second door started to open. Up close and on foot it was a different experience. The truck engines were as big and as loud as anything they put on a Mack or a Peterbilt. The doors were huge and thick, like buildings all their own.
And up close and on foot they seemed to move faster. Or maybe that was an illusion. Which would be understandable. Because the gap was going to be man-sized a long time before it was vehicle-sized. Everything was relative. Ten more seconds and the gap would be big enough to step out on stage.
The big diesels dug in, and the gap grew two feet wide.
Then two and a half.
Reacher raised the Glock.
He stepped through the gap.
No one there.
Reacher was in an empty garage. The space was maybe forty feet by forty. It had a sad old pick-up truck in one corner, grey primer, down at the front on a flat tyre, but that was it in terms of vehicle content. The rest was all empty space and oil stains. All the way to the back wall, which was a recent installation in plywood. The side walls and the ceiling were the original concrete. And in fact the side walls and the ceiling were all more or less the same thing. Like a tunnel, continuing on from the entrance tunnel, forty feet wide and probably four hundred feet long, but now interrupted by the new partition.
There were three ways out of the garage, not counting the door Reacher had just come in through, which would be a fourth. There was a new door dead ahead in the plywood partition, and there was an original door in each of the side walls. In those two original spots the tunnel’s vaulted curve was straightened out by a door frame cast so thick and so deep it was almost a tunnel in itself. Reacher pictured the complexity of the lumber formwork, and the anxious DoD engineers inspecting it, and the immense stress it was under until the mass of concrete had set.
The original door on the right was taped over.
It had a sheet of heavy see-through plastic laid over it, fixed at the edges with what looked like a whole roll of duct tape.
Purpose unknown.
But Reacher’s motto was if in doubt, turn left, so he went the other way. Through the other original door, in the left-hand side wall. The door itself was a stout old item faced in some kind of faded laminate. Probably a real big deal fifty years ago. Some kind of a new wonder material. The handle was a plain steel affair, but thick and solid. Probably cost a thousand dollars all on its own.
Reacher turned the thick steel handle and pushed the door and stepped into a square room made from two old walls and two new. Some kind of a crew room. Comfortable chairs, low to the ground. A man in one of the chairs. Not McQueen. He started to get up. He went back down easily enough. Centre mass, not a head shot. Safer. More to aim at. Instantaneous brain death not required. Not in that situation. The guy’s finger was not on a launch button.
The crew room had a second door, and Reacher kept the Glock hard on it until he was sure no one was coming to the rescue. Then he moved on, through that second door, into a long narrow internal hallway that ran away from him to the right, four hundred feet or more. He was beginning to see the layout. The building inside was three parallel chambers, long and thin, like three cigars laid side by side. Corresponding with the three entrances. All full of missiles, way back when. Then empty, just three long echoing vaults. Now colonized and boxed off with plywood. Long central hallways, rooms to the left, rooms to the right, repeated three times over. Which was ironic. What goes around comes around. The modern DoD had started out exactly the same way. Massive expansion at the start of World War Two had left it scrambling. It burrowed into whatever unsuitable old building it could find.
The bad news was, there were a lot of new rooms. Possibly forty per chamber. A total of a hundred and twenty. Plus or minus. Quantico would arrive before he was halfway through the search. Which would be a problem. They would have gotten Delfuenso’s call well before then. She would have told them to land at Whiteman and head north locked and loaded and ready to rock and roll. The crossfire was not going to be pretty.
And the even worse news was plywood was not a good insulator of sound. Which meant the last gunshot had been clearly audible throughout fully one-third of the facility. So Reacher ducked back the way he had come, through the crew room, past the dead guy in the low-slung chair, and into the garage again. The big mechanized doors were still standing open. Like pulled drapes. Beyond them was the hundred-foot entrance tunnel, still with the wrecked pick-up and the two dead guys in it. Reacher found the inside button and hit it. The starter whined and the big diesels caught and the doors began to close. The noise was deafening. Which was exactly what Reacher wanted. Given a choice he liked his rear flank protected, and he wanted plenty of audible warning if someone tried to come in after him.
Then he walked the depth of the garage space and tried the new door in the plywood end partition. It opened into the same kind of long, narrow central corridor. Rooms to the left, rooms to the right. The centre vault, colonized just like the first vault. Some of the doors had blue spots on them. Plastic circles, cut out and glued on. The second room on the left and the second room on the right both had one. That pattern repeated every three rooms as far as the eye could see.
Reacher checked behind him. The door he had come through had two blue spots.
He listened hard and heard nothing. He took a breath and counted to three and set off walking. To the second door on the right. A cheap store-bought item. With a thin chrome handle. And a blue spot, at eye level.
He turned the thin chrome handle. He pushed open the door. A room, of decent size. Empty. No people. No furniture. No nothing, except what had been there all along, which was another original door through the side wall. It was identical to the first two he had seen, with the complex cast frame like a tunnel all its own, and the pale old laminate facing, and the heavy steel handle. Clearly the blue spot meant a way through, side to side. A shortcut, from chamber to chamber. For busy people. The garage door got two blue spots because it had ways through both left and right. The lateral access was an efficiency measure. Both now, apparently, and certainly back when missiles roamed the earth. It would have been time-consuming for a technician to walk the whole length of the building and go outside and then come back in down a different tunnel. Far better to facilitate a little crosstown traffic. Maybe every sixty feet or so. Some guy with a clipboard would have figured that out, long ago. The architects would have gotten to work, with drafting tables and sharpened pencils, and load factors calculated with slide rules and guesswork.
Reacher was in a room on the right-hand side of the row. And just like the door he had seen on the right in the garage, this door on the right was also covered over with thick see-through plastic, which was also stuck down very carefully at the edges with duct tape. Lots of it.
Purpose unknown.
He had two motel keys in his pocket. One from the fat man’s place in Iowa, and one from the FBI’s quarantine spot in Kansas. The fat man’s key was sharper. The tang at the end had been left pretty rough by the key-cutting process. Maybe the key was a replacement. Maybe some guest had headed home with the original still in his pocket, and maybe the fat man’s policy was to use the cheapest services he could find.
Reacher pressed the see-through plastic against the faded old laminate behind it, and he scratched at it with the tip of the key. The key snagged and jumped and made pulls and blisters. The blisters went thin and puffy and the second go-round with the key started a hole in one of them. Reacher got the tip of the key in the hole and sawed away at it, cutting where he could, stretching and tearing where he couldn’t. When the slit reached three inches long he put the key back in his pocket and hooked his fingers in the slit, palms out, and forced his hands apart.
The plastic was tough. Some kind of heavy grade. Not like the tissue-thin stuff he had seen painters use as drop cloths. More like shrink wrap. He had seen people st
ruggling with it. Supermarkets should sell switchblades, right next to the salami. He got the slit about twelve inches long and the tension went out of it. He had to start a new cut with the key. He learned from that experience. He changed his technique, to a rhythmic cut-yank-cut-yank sequence, with the key in his mouth between cuts. Eventually he got it done, more or less all the way from top to bottom, very stretched and ragged, but big enough to force himself through.
He put his arm through the hole and turned the heavy steel handle and pushed the door with his fingertips. Nothing but darkness beyond. And cold air. And a silent acoustic suggestive of vast space and hard walls.
He turned sideways and forced himself through the slit in the plastic, leading with the Glock, then his right foot, then his right shoulder, ducking his head, pulling his left arm and his left foot after him. He used touch and feel, tracing the shape of the cast frame around the door, closing the door behind him, searching for a light switch. He knew there would be one. Those old-time architects with their drafting tables and their sharpened pencils would have been plenty thorough. The electrical plans would have been a whole separate sheaf of blueprints.
He found an electric conduit on the wall. Steel pipe, thickly painted, cold to the touch, covered in dust. He traced it back to a square metal box, maybe four inches by four, with a dimple on its front face, and a cold brass toggle in the dimple.
He turned the lights on.
SEVENTY-THREE
THE THIRD CHAMBER was not subdivided. It was in its original state. It was a tunnel, roughly semicircular in section, forty feet wide, maybe four hundred feet long, just over head high at the side walls, perhaps thirty feet tall at the peak of the vaulted ceiling. It was formed from concrete, poured and cast like the outside, with wood grain showing here and there, with stepped curves, with thin ragged ribs and seams where the formwork had leaked. It was unpainted, but no longer raw. It was mellow and faded and dusty, after many patient decades. It had a blank wall at the far end, and it had blastproof doors at the near end, with a mechanism exactly like the one Reacher had used in the centre chamber.
