Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  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,” F
owler 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.