Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  “So what happens now?” Webster asked him.

  “We’re closing the bases down,” the guy said. “That’s why the General is here, gentlemen. We’re pulling the equipment and the personnel back here to Peterson, and there’s going to be some ceremonies, you know, end-of-an-era stuff.”

  “Where are these bases?” McGrath asked. “The Montana ones? Exactly?”

  The aide pulled the map closer and checked the references.

  “Southernmost one is hidden on some farmland near Missoula,” he said. “Northern one is hidden in a valley, about forty miles south of Canada, near a little place called Yorke. Why? Is there a problem?”

  McGrath shrugged.

  “We don’t know yet,” he said.

  THE AIDE SHOWED them where to get breakfast and left them to wait for the General. Johnson arrived after the eggs but before the toast, so they left the toast uneaten and walked back together to the crew room. Johnson looked a lot different from the glossy guy Webster had met with Monday evening. The early hour and three days’ strain made him look twenty pounds thinner and twenty years older. His face was pale and his eyes were red. He looked like a man on the verge of defeat.

  “So what do we know?” he asked.

  “We think we know most of it,” Webster answered.

  “Right now our operational assumption is your daughter’s been kidnapped by a militia group from Montana. We know their location, more or less. Somewhere in the northwestern valleys.”

  Johnson nodded slowly.

  “Any communication?” he asked.

  Webster shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “So what’s the reason?” Johnson asked. “What do they want?”

  Webster shook his head again.

  “We don’t know that yet,” he said.

  Johnson nodded again, vaguely.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  McGrath opened the envelope he was carrying.

  “We’ve got four names,” he said. “Three of the snatch squad, and there’s pretty firm evidence about who the militia leader is. A guy named Beau Borken. That name mean anything to you?”

  “Borken?” Johnson said. He shook his head. “That name means nothing.”

  “OK,” McGrath said. “What about this guy? His name’s Peter Bell.”

  McGrath passed Johnson the computer print of Bell at the wheel in the Lexus. Johnson took a long look at it and shook his head.

  “He’s dead,” McGrath said. “Didn’t make it back to Montana.”

  “Good,” Johnson said.

  McGrath passed him another picture.

  “Steven Stewart?” he said.

  Johnson paid the print some attention, but ended up shaking his head.

  “Never saw this guy before,” he said.

  “Tony Loder?” McGrath asked.

  Johnson stared at Loder’s face and shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  “Those three and Borken are all from California,” McGrath said. “There may be another guy called Odell Fowler. You heard that name?”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “And there’s this guy,” McGrath said. “We don’t know who he is.”

  He passed over the photograph of the big guy. Johnson glanced at it, then glanced away. But then his gaze drifted back.

  “You know this one?” McGrath asked him.

  Johnson shrugged.

  “He’s vaguely familiar,” he said. “Maybe somebody I once saw?”

  “Recently?” McGrath asked.

  Johnson shook his head.

  “Not recently,” he said. “Probably a long time ago.”

  “Military?” Webster asked.

  “Probably,” Johnson said again. “Most of the people I see are military.”

  His aide crowded his shoulder for a look.

  “Means nothing to me,” he said. “But we should fax this to the Pentagon. If this guy is military, maybe there’ll be somebody somewhere who served with him.”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “Fax it to the military police,” he said. “This guy’s a criminal, right? Chances are he was in trouble before, in the service. Somebody there will remember him.”

  25

  THEY CAME FOR him an hour after dawn. He was dozing on his hard chair, hands cuffed in his lap, Joseph Ray awake and alert opposite him. He had spent most of the night thinking about dynamite. Old dynamite, left over from abandoned mining operations. He imagined hefting a stick in his hand. Feeling the weight. Figuring the volume of the cavity behind Holly’s walls. Picturing it packed with old dynamite. Old dynamite, rotting, the nitroglycerin sweating out, going unstable. Maybe a ton of unstable old dynamite packed in all around her, still not so far gone it would explode with random movement, but gone bad enough it would explode under the impact of a stray artillery shell. Or a stray bullet. Or even a sharp blow with a hammer.

  Then there was a rattle of feet on shale as a detachment of men halted outside the hut. The door flung open and Reacher turned his head and saw six guards. The point man clattered inside and hauled him up by the arm. He was dragged outside into the bright morning sun to face five men, line abreast, automatic rifles at the slope. Camouflage fatigues, beards. He stood and squinted in the light. The rifle muzzles jerked him into rough formation and the six men marched him across the diameter of the clearing to a narrow path running away from the sun into the forest.

  Fifty yards in, there was another clearing. A rough scrubby rectangle, small in area. Two plywood-and-cedar structures. Neither had any windows. The guards halted him and the point man used his rifle barrel to indicate the left-hand building.

  “Command hut,” he said.

  Then he pointed to the right.

  “Punishment hut,” he said. “We try to avoid that one.”

  The six men laughed with the secure confidence of an elite detachment and the point man knocked on the command hut door. Paused a beat and opened it. Reacher was shoved inside with a rifle muzzle in the small of his back.

  The hut was blazing with light. Electric bulbs added to green daylight from mossy skylights set into the roof. There was a plain oak desk and matching chairs, big old round things like Reacher had seen in old movies about newspaper offices or country banks. There was no decor except flags and banners nailed to the walls. There was a huge red swastika behind the desk, and several similar black-and-white motifs on the other walls. There was a detailed map of Montana pinned to a board on the back wall. A tiny portion of the northwest corner of the state was outlined in black. There were bundles of pamphlets and manuals stacked on the bare floor. One was titled: Dry It, You’ll Like It. It claimed to show how food could be preserved to withstand a siege. Another claimed to show how guerrillas could derail passenger trains. There was a polished mahogany bookcase, incongruously fine, packed with books. The bar of daylight from the door fell across them and illuminated their cloth spines and gold-blocked titles. They were standard histories of the art of war, translations from German and Japanese. There was a whole shelf with texts about Pearl Harbor. Texts that Reacher himself had studied, elsewhere and a long time ago.

  He stood still. Borken was behind the desk. His hair gleamed white in the light. The black uniform showed up gray. Borken was just staring silently at him. Then he waved him to a chair. Motioned the guards to wait outside.

  Reacher sat heavily. Fatigue was gnawing at him and adrenaline was burning his stomach. The guards tramped across the floor and stepped outside. They closed the door quietly. Borken moved his arm and rolled open a drawer. Took out an ancient handgun. Laid it on the desktop with a loud clatter.

  “I made my decision,” he said. “About whether you live or die.”

  Then he pointed at the old revolver lying on the desk.

  “You know what this is?” he asked.

  Reacher glanced at it through the glare and nodded.

  “It’s a Marshal Colt,” he said.

  Borken nodded.r />
  “You bet your ass it is,” he said. “It’s an original 1873 Marshal Colt, just like the U.S. Cavalry were given. It’s my personal weapon.”

  He picked it up, right-handed, and hefted it.

  “You know what it fires?” he said.

  Reacher nodded again.

  “Forty-fives,” he said. “Six shots.”

  “Right first time,” Borken said. “Six forty-fives, nine hundred feet per second out of a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. You know what those bullets could do to you?”

  Reacher shrugged.

  “Depends if they hit me or not,” he said.

  Borken looked blank. Then he grinned. His wet mouth curled upward and his tight cheeks nearly forced his eyes shut.

  “They’d hit you,” he said. “If I’m firing, they’d hit you.”

  Reacher shrugged again.

  “From there, maybe,” he said.

  “From anywhere,” Borken said. “From here, from fifty feet, from fifty yards, if I’m firing, they’d hit you.”

  “Hold up your right hand,” Reacher said.

  Borken looked blank again. Then he put the gun down and held up his huge white hand like he was waving to a vague acquaintance or taking an oath.

  “Bullshit,” Reacher said.

  “Bullshit?” Borken repeated.

  “For sure,” Reacher said. “That gun’s reasonably accurate, but it’s not the best weapon in the world. To hit a man at fifty yards with it, you’d need to practice like crazy. And you haven’t been.”

  “I haven’t?” Borken said.

  “No, you haven’t,” Reacher said. “Look at the damn thing. It was designed in the 1870s, right? You seen old photographs? People were much smaller. Scrappy little guys, just immigrated from Europe, been starving for generations. Small people, small hands. Look at the stock on that thing. Tight curve, way too small for you. You grab that thing, your hand looks like a bunch of bananas around it. And that stock is hundred-and-twenty-year-old walnut. Hard as a rock. The back of the stock and the end of the frame below the hammer would be pounding you with the recoil. You used that gun a lot, you’d have a pad of callus between your thumb and forefinger I could see from here. But you haven’t, so don’t tell me you’ve been practicing with it, and don’t tell me you can be a marksman without practicing with it.”

  Borken looked hard at him. Then he smiled again. His wet lips parted and his eyes closed into slits. He rolled open the opposite drawer and lifted out another handgun. It was a Sig-Sauer nine-millimeter. Maybe five years old. Well used, but well maintained. A big boxy grip for a big hand.

  “I lied,” he said. “This is my personal weapon. And now I know something. I know my decision was the right one.”

  He paused, so Reacher could ask him about his decision. Reacher stayed silent. Clamped his lips. He wasn’t about to ask him about anything, not even if it would be the last sentence he would ever live to say.

  “We’re serious here, you know,” Borken said to him. “Totally serious. We’re not playing games. And we’re correct about what’s going on.”

  He paused again, so Reacher could ask him what was going on. Reacher said nothing. Just sat and stared into space.

  “America has got a despotic government,” Borken said. “A dictatorship, controlled from abroad by our enemies. Our current President is a member of a world government which controls our lives in secret. His federal system is a smokescreen for total control. They’re planning to disarm us and enslave us. It’s started already. Let’s be totally clear about that.”

  He paused. Picked up the old revolver again. Reacher saw him checking the fit of the stock in his hand. Felt the charisma radiating out of him. Felt compelled to listen to the soft, hypnotic voice.

  “Two main methods,” Borken said. “The first is the attempt to disarm the civilian population. The Second Amendment guarantees our right to bear arms, but they’re going to abolish that. The gun laws, all this beefing about crime, homicides, drug wars, it’s all aimed at disarming people like us. And when we’re disarmed, they can do what they like with us, right? That’s why it was in the Constitution in the first place. Those old guys were smart. They knew the only thing that could control a government was the people’s willingness and ability to shoot them down.”

  Borken paused again. Reacher stared up at the swastika behind his head.

  “Second method is the squeeze on small business,” Borken said. “This is a personal theory of mine. You don’t hear it much around the Movement. But I spotted it. It puts me way ahead of the others in my understanding.”

  Borken waited, but Reacher still stayed silent. Looking away.

  “It’s obvious, right?” Borken said to him. “World government is basically a communistic type of government. They don’t want a strong small-business sector. But that’s what America had. Millions of people, all working hard for themselves and making a living. Too many just to murder out of hand, when the time comes. So the numbers have to be reduced in advance. So the federal government was instructed to squeeze the small businessman. They put on all kinds of regulations, all kinds of laws and taxes, they rig the markets, they bring the small guy to his knees, then they order the banks to come sniffing around with attractive loans, and as soon as the ink is dry on the loan papers they jack up the interest, and rig the market some more, until the poor guy defaults. Then they take away his business, and so that’s one less for the gas ovens when the time comes.”

  Reacher glanced at him. Said nothing.

  “Believe it,” Borken said. “It’s like they’re solving a corpse-disposal problem in advance. Get rid of the middle class now, they don’t need so many concentration camps later.”

  Reacher was just staring at Borken’s eyes. Like looking at a bright light. The fat red lips were smiling an indulgent smile.

  “I told you, we’re way ahead of the others,” he said. “We’ve seen it coming. What else is the Federal Reserve for? That’s the key to this whole thing. America was basically a nation founded on business, right? Control business, you control everything. How do you control business? You control the banks. How do you control the banks? You set up a bullshit Federal Reserve system. You tell the banks what to do. That’s the key. The world government controls everything, through the Fed. I’ve seen it happen.”

  His eyes were open wide. Shining with no color.

  “I saw them do it to my own father,” he screamed. “May his poor soul rest in peace. The Fed bankrupted him.”

  Reacher tore his gaze away. Shrugged at the corner of the room. Said nothing. He started trying to recall the sequence of titles in Borken’s fine mahogany bookcase. Warfare from ancient China through Renaissance Italy through Pearl Harbor. He concentrated on naming the titles to himself, left to right, trying to resist the glare of Borken’s attention.

  “We’re serious here,” Borken was saying again. “You may look at me and think I’m some kind of a despot, or a cult leader, or whatever the world would want to label me. But I’m not. I’m a good leader, I won’t deny that. Even an inspired leader. Call me intelligent and perceptive, I won’t argue with you. But I don’t need to be. My people don’t need any encouraging. They don’t need much leading. They need guidance, and they need discipline, but don’t let that fool you. I’m not coercing anybody. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating their will. Don’t ignore their desire for a change for the better.”

  Reacher was silent. He was still concentrating on the books, skimming in his mind through the events of December 1941, as seen from the Japanese point of view.

  “We’re not criminals here, you know,” Borken was saying. “When a government turns bad, it’s the very best people who stand up against it. Or do you think we should all just act like sheep?”

  Reacher risked another glance at him. Risked speaking.

  “You’re pretty selective,” he said. “About who’s here and who’s not.”

  Borken shrugged.

  “Like unto like,” he sai
d. “That’s nature’s way, isn’t it? Black people have got the whole of Africa. White people have got this place.”

  “What about Jewish dentists?” Reacher asked. “What place have they got?”

  Borken shrugged again.

  “That was an operational error,” he said. “Loder should have waited until he was clear. But mistakes happen.”

  “Should have waited until I was clear, too,” Reacher said.

  Borken nodded.

  “I agree with you,” he said. “It would have been better for you that way. But they didn’t, and so here you are among us.”

  “Just because I’m white?” Reacher said.

  “Don’t knock it,” Borken replied. “White people got precious few rights left.”

  Reacher stared at him. Stared around the bright, hate-filled room. Shuddered.

  “I’ve made a study of tyranny,” Borken said. “And how to combat it. The first rule is you make a firm decision, to live free or die, and you mean it. Live free or die. The second rule is you don’t act like a sheep. You stand up and you resist them. You study their system and you learn to hate it. And then you act. But how do you act? The brave man fights back. He retaliates, right?”

  Reacher shrugged. Said nothing.

  “The brave man retaliates,” Borken repeated. “But the man who is both brave and clever acts differently. He retaliates first. In advance. He strikes the first blows. He gives them what they don’t expect, when and where they don’t expect it. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re retaliating first. It’s their war, but we’re going to strike the first blows. We’re going to give them what they don’t expect. We’re going to upset their plans.”

  Reacher glanced back at the bookcase. Five thousand classic pages, all saying the same thing: don’t do what they expect you to do.

  “Go look at the map,” Borken said.