17 A Wanted Man

by Lee Child

  It was not empty.

  All along the centre of the space was a nose-to-tail line of enormous flatbed semi trailers. No tractor units. Just the trailers, one after the other, like a traffic jam on the highway. Each trailer was close to fifty feet long and twelve feet wide. There were eight of them. Each of them had four load-bearing axles at the rear, and two huge cantilevered arms at the front, first rearing up at a steep angle, and then reaching forward at a shallower angle, ready to latch into the tractor unit, like gigantic insect antennas.

  They were all painted the colour of sand. Desert camouflage base coat. Reacher knew exactly what they were. They were components from the army’s HET system. Heavy Equipment Transporter. This particular type of trailer was called the M747. Its matching tractor unit was called the M746. Both had been built by the Oshkosh Corporation in Wisconsin. Both had been taken out of front-line service after the Gulf War in 1991. Neither had proved sufficiently durable. Their task had been to haul Abrams battle tanks around. Battle tanks were built for tank battles, not for driving from A to B on public roads. Roads got ruined, tracks wore out, between-maintenance hours were wasted unproductively. Hence tank transporters. But Abrams tanks weighed more than sixty tons, and wear and tear on the HETs was prodigious. Back to the drawing board. The old-generation hardware was relegated to lighter duties.

  But in this case, not much lighter.

  Each of the eight trailers was loaded with a nose-to-tail pair of flasks or vats or containers. For some kind of liquid, clearly. But really big. Tens of thousands of gallons. Each unit was the size of four Volkswagens stacked two on two, like bricks. The size of a small room. They were made of steel, rolled and folded and hydroformed, and welded, like squat fat bottles, with a protective frame all around, the function of the bottle and the function of the frame so well integrated it was hard to see where one finished and the other began. Overall they were like rounded-off cubes, about twelve feet long, by twelve feet wide, by twelve feet high, reinforced in places for strength and durability. The steel looked thick and solid. Maybe it was backed with an extra mineral layer. An innovation.

  But not a recent invention. Because nothing in the chamber was recent. There was a thick layer of dust over everything. Over the massive containers, over the flatbed trailers, over the concrete floor. Grey, and spectral, and undisturbed. Under the trailers most of the tyres looked soft. Some of them were flat completely. There were cobwebs. The scene was archaeological. Like breaking through into a pharaoh’s tomb. The first to lay eyes on it for five thousand years.

  Or twenty years, maybe. The physical evidence was there. The age of the equipment. The dust. The perished rubber. The still air. The chill. It was perfectly possible to believe those trailers had been backed in two decades ago, and detached from their tractor units, never to move again, and then walled off, and left behind, and forgotten.

  Eight trailers. Sixteen containers. Sixty-four Volkswagens. The steel was painted bright yellow, now faded a little by dust and time. On the side of each one, at a modest size, no bigger than a basketball, was stencilled a design first sketched in 1946, by a bunch of smart guys at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. Smart guys with time on their hands, designing a symbol, coming up with what they thought was stuff coming out of an atom. Most people thought it was three fat propeller blades, black on yellow.

  Nuclear waste.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  REACHER KILLED THE lights and squeezed back through the slit in the plastic. He crossed the empty room and stepped out to the corridor. And saw three people. All men. They were walking away from him, talking as they went, piles of three-ring binders in their arms. Shirtsleeves. Dark pants. Unarmed. None of them was McQueen.

  Reacher let them go. The cost outweighed the gain. Too noisy, for no real reason. They opened a blue-spot door on the left, way far up the corridor. Clearly heading sideways into the first chamber. Four spots down, one room over, one room back. Or whatever. Like map coordinates. Not unlike getting around the Pentagon.

  They had come out of a room ahead and on the left of where Reacher was standing. Its door was open, and it hadn’t been before. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and walked the thirty feet. The room was an office, maybe twenty feet by seventeen, with one concrete wall and three plywood walls. All four walls were full of shelves. The floor was full of desks. Both desks and shelves were full of paper. Loose, in stacks, clipped together, in rubber bands, in binders. The paper was full of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figure numbers, of no great interest or appeal, just raw material to be added and subtracted and multiplied. Which they had been. Most of the papers were like ledger pages.

  No computers.

  All paper.

  More footsteps in the corridor.

  Reacher listened hard. He heard a door open. He heard it close. He heard nothing else. He stepped back out to the hallway. He figured if McQueen was being held prisoner somewhere, it would be deep in the bowels. Four hundred feet away, potentially. Way in the back, far from the outside world. In one of two chambers. A complex search pattern. And the long central hallways were deathtraps. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Apart from the rooms with blue spots. But there weren’t many of them. And worrying about sideways escape routes didn’t do much for sustained forward motion.

  That’s a military kind of problem, isn’t it? Did you train for this stuff?

  Not exactly. Not without people and ordnance and helicopters and radios and fire support. Which he didn’t have.

  He checked the room opposite. Another office, twenty feet by seventeen, shelves, desks, papers, numbers. Lots of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figures, all of them added and subtracted. All of them carefully recorded and accounted for. He checked the room next door. Same exact thing. Desks, shelves, papers, and numbers. He retraced his steps and headed back to the first room he had come from. The room with the lateral door.

  He heard more footsteps in the hallway.

  He stepped inside the room and closed the door.

  Now he heard lots of footsteps in the hallway.

  People, running.

  People, shouting.

  He went Glock-first through the slit in the plastic and closed the door behind him.

  The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. Reacher hustled the length of the third chamber, four hundred feet, past all the abandoned trailers, past all the huge sinister bottles. Dust came up from under his feet. It was like walking in thin snow. For the first time he was glad about his busted nose. His nasal passages were lined with scab tissue. Without it he would be sneezing like crazy.

  The last original door was ten feet from the end of the tunnel. Exactly in line with the last yellow bottle. Exactly in line with its radiation symbol. Reacher pulled it open and took out the fat man’s motel key and fought his way through the plastic skin. Cut, rip, cut, rip. Easier in that direction. The plastic bellied out into the room and he could keep plenty of tension on it. The space beyond was empty. It had been built like a room, but it was being used like a lobby.

  He listened at the door to the corridor. He heard sounds, but they were distant. They were the sounds of chaos and confusion. A hurried search, combing the length of the building, moving away from him. He was behind the front lines. Way in the back, far from the outside world.

  He opened the door. He peered out. Hundreds of feet to his left men were going room to room. Five of them, maybe, searching, in and out, in and out. Moving away from him.

  The door opposite had a blue spot. It would be empty. Built like a room, used like a lobby. So Reacher started one room down, across the corridor. No blue spot. He crept over to it, slow and silent. He opened the door. An office. Shelves, desks, paper. A man behind one of the desks. Reacher shot him in the head. The blast of the gunshot ripped through the chamber, barely muffled at all by the plywood partitions. Reacher stepped back to the door. He peered out. Hundreds of feet away the five searchers were frozen in place, bodies moving one
way, eyes the other. Reacher put the Glock in his pocket and took one of the Colts off his shoulder. A sub-machine gun. He clicked it to full auto and held it high and sighted down the barrel. He pulled the trigger and fought the muzzle climb. Twenty rounds at the rate of nine hundred a minute. Less than a second and a half. Smooth as a sewing machine. All five men went down. Probably three dead, one wounded, one panicking. Not that Reacher was keeping score. He already knew the score. He was winning. So far.

  He dropped the empty gun and slipped the other Colt off his other shoulder. He thought: Time to visit the first chamber. Time to keep them guessing. He ducked back to the door with the blue spot. He opened it. He went in. Built like a room, used like a lobby.

  But not empty.

  There was a staircase in it.

  It was a metal thing, like a ladder, steep, like something from a warship. It led into a vertical tunnel through the roof concrete. At the top of the vertical tunnel was a square steel hatch, massive, with cantilevered arms and springs and a rotary locking wheel, like in a submarine. It was closed. Reacher figured it would be domed on the outside, designed to seat itself tighter under the pulsing pressure of a blast wave.

  The locking wheel drove pegs through a complicated sequence of gears, into clips all around the rim. The wheel was in the unlocked position. That was obvious. None of the pegs was engaged. Clearly the guys on the roof had closed the hatch behind them, to hide the light from below. To preserve their night vision, and for secrecy. But they had left it unlocked, so they could get back in. Common sense.

  The smart move would have been to shin up the ladder and spin the locking wheel so that whoever was out there stayed out there. That way Reacher could have continued his inside activities undisturbed.

  But the sniper was out there. With his M14, and his one-gone magazine, and probably a big smug smile on his face.

  Reacher turned out the lobby light. He waited four seconds in the dark, for his irises to open wide. Then another minute, for his retinal chemistry to kick in. Then he found the handrail by feel and started climbing.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  REACHER GOT TO the top of the ladder and felt around in the dark and used an after-image of what he had seen. He figured the hatch might weigh a few tons. Maybe more, if it was some kind of a sophisticated steel-and-concrete sandwich construction. Which it might be, because of radiation concerns. Those old-time architects would have been well schooled in such things. Possibly by the pointy-heads at the University of California. No point in designing a hatch to survive a blast if it was going to leak gamma rays afterwards. But no human could lift several tons while standing on a ladder. Which meant the bulk of the weight would be counterbalanced by the springs. Which meant the hatch should open with a decent push.

  He pushed.

  The hatch rose two inches. Accompanied by deep twanging and grinding from the springs.

  Loud.

  He waited.

  A band of not-quite-black showed around three sides of the rim. He figured the sentries would be standing at the edge railing. Which would put three-quarters of them some distance away. The roof was the size of Yankee Stadium. Only those on the south side were close.

  He pushed again, harder.

  The hatch rose another foot.

  More twanging and grinding.

  No reaction.

  He pushed again. The hatch opened all the way. Ninety degrees, like a door. He looked up and saw a square of dark Missouri sky. The hatch was hinged on the north side of the square. The ladder was bolted to the east side. Which meant he would come out with his front and his back and his right-hand side all vulnerable.

  Which meant he should come out fast. Which was not easy to do. No way of keeping his finger on the trigger. The moment of maximum danger. Every mission had one. He hated stairs. He hated leading with his head.

  He clamped the Colt in his right hand, between the flat of his thumb and his palm. He jumped his left hand up, rung by rung. He got the Colt out and put his knuckles on the roof, like an ape. He twisted at the waist and got his left hand flat on the concrete.

  He took a breath and counted to three and vaulted out.

  He got up in a crouch and held the Colt high, jerking it side to side as he scanned around. The house-storming shuffle, all over again.

  He was close to the edge of the roof, on the south side. To his half-left was the sterile southeastern corridor. No one there. To his right was the west, with a lone shadowy figure far away at the rail, looking away from him. He turned north and saw five figures staring out where Bale’s GPS had shown the two-lane. They thought Sorenson’s approach had been a cross-country diversion. They thought the main attack was coming from the road.

  Overthinking, and paranoia.

  He clicked the second Colt to single shots and moved behind the upright hatch. It would give him partial three-quarters cover from the west and the north. He rested his left elbow on it. He sighted in on the guy in the west. Two hundred feet, maybe. An easy shot with any kind of a rifle. An easy shot with any kind of an H&K sub, which were generally as good as rifles, at short-to-medium distances. Unknown, with the Colt. But better than the Glock. A handgun at two hundred feet was the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.

  Reacher was a good long-distance marksman. He had won competitions. But not under conditions like he faced at that moment. He needed to see two things at once. His current target, and the reaction from the other five guys three hundred feet and seventy degrees farther on, when they heard the shot. He needed to see their vague silhouettes turn towards the sound. He needed to identify the shape of the M14. He needed to know which one of them was the sniper.

  Because the sniper was next.

  He rested the front sight on the guy in the west. He breathed out and kept his lungs empty. Calm and quiet. Calm and quiet. He could feel his heart, but the front sight wasn’t moving. He was good to go.

  He eased his trigger finger tighter. And tighter. Smooth, microscopic, relentless. Flesh on metal on metal. He felt the break coming.

  The gun fired.

  Bright flash, loud sound.

  Bull’s eye.

  The guy in the west jerked slightly and fell down vertically.

  The five guys in the north spun around.

  The sniper was the middle guy. Third from the left, third from the right. Reacher saw the M14 in his hands. Slope arms, out in front of him, turning with him. A familiar shape. Forty-seven inches long, the dull gleam of walnut in the moonlight. Almost four hundred feet away. Reacher moved around the raised hatch lid, slow and easy, no rush at all, and he sighted in, and he breathed in and breathed out, and out, and out, and he fired again.

  A miss.

  But not a disaster. The round drifted a little left and down and caught the next guy low in the throat.

  Reacher leaned a fraction clockwise to compensate and fired again. But by that point the four survivors were all moving. A nine-millimetre Parabellum takes a third of a second to travel four hundred feet, and a third of a second is long enough for a guy to move enough.

  A miss.

  No one went down.

  One in the chamber, seventeen in the box. Reacher moved his thumb and switched to triples. His preferred option, with a B-grade weapon. Quantity, not quality. A random little triangle, like jabbing with a three-legged stool. He aimed generally right and fired.

  The right-hand guy went down.

  Three survivors. From left to right, numbers one, three, and four. They all knelt and fired back. Wild misses, except for the M14. The .308 came close. But not very. Which was telling. The guy was OK with no pressure at all. But in the heat of the moment he wasn’t the best in the world. Reacher figured they could put that on the guy’s tombstone: Great against unresisting women in the dark. Otherwise, not so much.

  Reacher fired again, at numbers three and four, the sniper and his immediate neighbour, like a composite target. A triple.

  Number four went down.

 
Not the sniper.

  Two survivors.

  Reacher had one in the chamber, and eleven in the box. Plus the Glock and two spare magazines, one of them full and one of them two short. He could use the Glock’s rounds in the Colt, if he had to. Same nine-millimetre Parabellums. The magic of standardization. He had no idea what the two survivors had left. The M14 was most likely using a twenty-round magazine. The other guy’s gun might have been anything. A long duel was a possibility. Up close and personal. Within sight. An infantry slugfest. The real kings of battle. A vulgar brawl, which was the kind of fight Reacher liked best.

  Numbers one and three were still kneeling. Not close together. Reacher heaved the hatch lid closed and lay down behind it. He clicked back to singles. He wrapped himself around the dome of the hatch and got himself comfortable. The sniper fired at him. Better this time. The round hit the hatch and clanged away, a giant ricochet that might have made it all the way to Lacey’s store.

  Reacher lay still, calm and quiet, and comfortable.

  He fired back.

  And hit the sniper.

  Very low on the left side, he thought. Maybe in the hip. Nothing but a flesh wound. Not fatal, but certainly a distraction. The guy spun away and went down prone. Smaller target. The other guy followed suit. He went down flat and started blazing away. Some kind of an attempt at covering fire. Dangerous only to people in the next county, but at least the guy was showing some kind of solidarity. Reacher sighted in on the muzzle flash, and took his time. He aimed a little high and a little right, to allow for what seemed like persistent drift, and he tried to skip one off the concrete and up into the guy’s face. Too dark to see if it worked, but certainly the guy stopped firing. Maybe he was only reloading. Or taking a nap. But he looked very still. Then a distant car drove left to right on the two-lane, maybe six hundred yards away, with its lights on bright, and the moving bubble in the mist backlit the situation for a second, and Reacher came to the conclusion the guy was permanently out of action. He was sprawled in an odd position.