Die Trying

by Child, Lee

  “Why three copies?” Garber asked.

  “Three destinations,” McGrath said. “If we hadn’t intercepted them, they’d be all over the place by now.”

  “Where?” Webster asked.

  “First one is a D.C. number,” McGrath said. “I’m guessing it’s the White House.”

  Johnson’s aide scooted his chair to the computer terminal. McGrath read him the number. He tapped it in, and the screen scrolled down. He nodded.

  “The White House,” he said. “Next?”

  “New York somewhere,” McGrath said. Read out the number from the second sheet.

  “United Nations,” the aide said. “They want witnesses.”

  “Third one, I don’t know,” McGrath said. “Area code is 404.”

  “Atlanta, Georgia,” Garber said.

  “What’s in Atlanta, Georgia?” Webster asked.

  The aide was busy at the keyboard.

  “CNN,” he said. “They want publicity.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “Smart moves,” he said. “They want it all on live TV. Christ, can you imagine? The United Nations as umpires and round-the-clock coverage on the cable news? The whole world watching?”

  “So what do we do?” Webster asked.

  There was a long silence.

  “Why did they say airspace?” Garber asked out loud.

  “They were paraphrasing,” Webster said. “1776, there wasn’t any airspace.”

  “The missiles,” Garber said. “Is it possible they’ve disabled the IFF?”

  There was another long silence. They heard a car pull up. Doors slammed. Brogan and Milosevic rattled up the ladder and stepped into the hush. They carried brown bags and Styrofoam cups with plastic lids.

  THE GIANT SEARCH-AND-RESCUE Chinook made it north from Peterson in Colorado to Malmstrom Air Force Base outside of Great Falls in Montana without incident. It touched down there and fuel bowsers came out to meet it. The crew walked to the mess for coffee. Walked back twenty minutes later. Took off again and swung gently in the morning air before lumbering away northwest.

  38

  “WE’RE GETTING NO reaction,” Fowler said. “Makes us wonder why.”

  Reacher shrugged at him. They were in the command hut. Stevie had dragged him through the trees to the Bastion, and then Fowler had dragged him back again with two armed guards. The punishment hut was unavailable. Still occupied by Joseph Ray. They used the command hut instead. They sat Reacher down and Fowler locked his left wrist to the arm of the chair with a handcuff. The guards took up position on either side, rifles sloped, watchful. Then Fowler walked up to join Borken and Stevie for the ceremony on the parade ground. Reacher heard faint shouting and cheering in the distance as the proclamation was read out. Then he heard nothing. Ninety minutes later, Fowler came back to the hut alone. He sat down behind Borken’s desk and lit a cigarette, and the armed guards remained standing.

  “We faxed it an hour ago,” Fowler said. “No reaction.”

  Reacher smelled his smoke and gazed at the banners on the walls. Dark reds and dull whites, vivid crooked symbols in black.

  “Do you know why we’re getting no reaction?” Fowler asked.

  Reacher just shook his head.

  “You know what I think?” Fowler said. “They cut the line. Phone company is colluding with the federal agents. We were told it would happen at seven-thirty. It obviously happened earlier.”

  Reacher shrugged again. Made no reply.

  “We would expect to be informed about a thing like that,” Fowler said.

  He picked up his Glock, and propped it in front of him, butt on the desktop, swiveling it like naval artillery left and right.

  “And we haven’t been,” he said.

  “Maybe your pal from Chicago has given you up,” Reacher said.

  Fowler shook his head. His Glock came to rest, aimed at Reacher’s chest.

  “We’ve been getting a stream of intelligence,” he said. “We know where they are, how many of them there are, what their intentions are. But now, when we still need information, we aren’t getting it. Communication has been interrupted.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “We’re investigating,” Fowler said. “We’re checking the radio right now.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Anything you want to tell us about the radio?” Fowler asked.

  “What radio?” Reacher said.

  “It worked OK yesterday,” Fowler said. “Now it doesn’t work at all, and you were wandering around all night.”

  He ducked down and rolled open the drawer where Borken kept the Colt Marshal. But he didn’t come out with a revolver. He came out with a small black radio transmitter.

  “This was Jackson’s,” he said. “He was most anxious to show us where it was hidden. In fact he was begging to show us. He screamed and cried and begged. Just about tore his fingernails off digging it up, he was so anxious.”

  He smiled and put the unit carefully in his pocket.

  “We figure we just switch it on,” he said. “That should put us straight through to the federal scum, person to person. This stage of the process, we need to talk direct. See if we can persuade them to restore our fax line.”

  “Terrific plan,” Reacher said.

  “The fax line is important, you see,” Fowler said. “Vital. The world must be allowed to know what we’re doing here. The world must be allowed to watch and witness. History is being made here. You understand that, right?”

  Reacher stared at the wall.

  “They’ve got cameras, you know,” Fowler said. “Surveillance planes are up there right now. Now it’s daylight again, they can see what we’re doing. So how can we exploit that fact?”

  Reacher shook his head.

  “You can leave me out of it,” he said.

  Fowler smiled.

  “Of course we’ll leave you out of it,” he said. “Why would they care about seeing you nailed to a tree? You’re nothing but a piece of shit, to us and to them. But Holly Johnson, there’s a different story. Maybe we’ll call them up on their own little transmitter and tell them to watch us do it with their own spy cameras. That might make them think about it. They might trade a fax line for her left breast.”

  He ground out his cigarette. Leaned forward. Spoke quietly.

  “We’re serious here, Reacher,” he said. “You saw what we did to Jackson. We could do that to her. We could do that to you. We need to be able to communicate with the world. We need that fax line. So we need the shortwave to confirm what the hell they’ve done with it. We need those things very badly. You understand that, right? So if you want to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain, for you and for her, you better tell me what you did to the radio.”

  Reacher was twisted around, looking at the bookcase. Trying to recall the details of the inexpert translations of the Japanese Pearl Harbor texts he’d read.

  “Tell me now,” Fowler said softly. “I can keep them away from you and from her. No pain for either of you. Otherwise, nothing I can do about it.”

  He laid his Glock on the desk.

  “You want a cigarette?” he asked.

  He held out the pack. Smiled. The good cop. The friend. The ally. The protector. The oldest routine in the book. Requiring the oldest response. Reacher glanced around. Two guards, one on each side of him, the right-hand guard nearer, the left-hand guard back almost against the side wall. Rifles held easy in the crook of their arms. Fowler behind the desk, holding out the pack. Reacher shrugged and nodded. Took a cigarette with his free right hand. He hadn’t smoked in ten years, but when somebody offers you a lethal weapon, you take it.

  “So tell me,” Fowler said. “And be quick.”

  He thumbed his lighter and held it out. Reacher bent forward and lit his cigarette from the flame. Took a deep draw and leaned back. The smoke felt good. Ten years, and he still enjoyed it. He inhaled deeply and took another lungful.

  “How did you disable our radio?” Fowler ask
ed.

  Reacher took a third pull. Trickled the smoke out of his nose and held the cigarette like a sentry does, between the thumb and forefinger, palm hooded around it. Take quick deep pulls, and the coal on the end of a cigarette heats up to a couple of thousand degrees. Lengthens to a point. He rotated his palm, like he was studying the glowing tip while he thought about something, until the cigarette was pointing straight forward like an arrow.

  “How did you disable our radio?” Fowler asked again.

  “You’ll hurt Holly if I don’t tell you?” Reacher asked back.

  Fowler nodded. Smiled his lipless smile.

  “That’s a promise,” he said. “I’ll hurt her so bad, she’ll be begging to die.”

  Reacher shrugged unhappily. Sketched a listen-up gesture. Fowler nodded and shuffled on his chair and leaned close. Reacher snapped forward and jammed the cigarette into his eye. Fowler screamed and Reacher was on his feet, the chair cuffed to his wrist clattering after him. He wind-milled right and the chair swung through a wide arc and smashed against the nearer guard’s head. It splintered and jerked away as Reacher danced to his left. He caught the farther guard with a forearm smash to the throat as his rifle came up. Snapped back and hit Fowler with the wreckage of the chair. Used the follow-through momentum to swing back to the first guard. Finished him with an elbow to the head. The guy went down. Reacher grabbed his rifle by the barrel and swung straight back at the other guard. Felt skull bones explode under the butt. He dropped the rifle and spun and smashed the chair to pieces against Fowler’s shoulders. Grabbed him by the ears and smashed his face into the desktop, once, twice, three times. Took a leg from the broken chair and jammed it crossways under his throat. Folded his elbows around each exposed end and locked his hands together. Tested his grip and bunched his shoulders. Jerked hard, once, and broke Fowler’s neck against the chair leg with a single loud crunch.

  He took both rifles and the Glock and the handcuff key. Out the door and around to the back of the hut. Straight into the trees. He put the Glock in his pocket. Took the handcuff off his wrist. Put a rifle in each hand. Breathing hard. He was in pain. Swinging the heavy wooden chair had opened the red weal on his wrist into a wound. He raised it to his mouth and sucked at it and buttoned the cuff of his shirt over it.

  Then he heard a helicopter. The faint bass thumping of a heavy twin-rotor machine, a Boeing, a Sea Knight or a Chinook, far to the southeast. He thought: last night Borken talked about eight Marines. They’ve only got eight Marines, he said. The Marines use Sea Knights. He thought: they’re going for a frontal assault. Holly’s paneled walls flashed into his mind and he set off racing through the trees.

  He got as far as the Bastion. The thumping from the air built louder. He risked stepping out onto the stony path. It was a Chinook. Not a Sea Knight. Search-and-rescue markings, not Marine Corps. It was following the road up from the southeast, a mile away, a hundred feet up, using its vicious downdraft to part the surrounding foliage and aid its search. It looked slow and ponderous, hanging nose down in the air, yawing slightly from side to side as it approached. Reacher guessed it must be pretty close to the town of Yorke itself.

  Then he glanced into the clearing and saw a guy, fifty yards away. A grunt, camouflage fatigues. A Stinger on his shoulder. Turning and aiming through the crude open sight. He saw him acquire the target. The guy steadied himself and stood with his feet apart. His hand fumbled for the activator. The missile’s infrared sensor turned on. Reacher waited for the IFF to shut it down. It didn’t happen. The missile started squealing its high-pitched tone. It was locked on the heat from the Chinook’s engines. The guy’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  Reacher dropped the rifle in his left hand. Swung the other one up and clicked the safety off with his thumb as he did so. Stepped to his left and leaned his shoulder on a tree. Aimed at the guy’s head and fired.

  But the guy fired first. A fraction of a second before Reacher’s bullet killed him, he pulled the Stinger’s trigger. Two things happened. The Stinger’s rocket motor lit up. It exploded along its launch tube. Then the guy was hit in the head. The impact knocked him sideways. The launcher caught the rear of the missile and flipped it. It came out and stalled tail down in the air like a javelin, cushioned on the thrust of its launch, virtually motionless.

  Then it corrected itself. Reacher watched in horror as it did exactly what it was designed to do. Its eight little wings popped out. It hung almost vertical until it acquired the helicopter again. Then its second-stage rocket lit up and it blasted into the sky. Before the guy’s body hit the ground, it was homing in on the Chinook at a thousand miles an hour.

  The Chinook was lumbering steadily northwest. A mile away. Following the road. The road ran straight up through the town. Between the abandoned buildings. On the southeast corner the first building it passed was the courthouse. The Chinook was closing on it at eighty miles an hour. The Stinger was heading in to meet it at a thousand miles an hour.

  One mile at a thousand miles an hour. One thousandth of an hour. A fraction over three and a half seconds. It felt like a lifetime to Reacher. He watched the missile all the way. A wonderful, brutal weapon. A simple, unshakable purpose. Designed to recognize the exact heat signature of aircraft exhaust, designed to follow it until it either got there or ran out of fuel. A simple three-and-a-half-second mission.

  The Chinook pilot saw it early. He wasted the first second of its flight, frozen. Not in horror, not in fear, just in simple disbelief that a heat-seeking missile had been fired at him from a small wooded clearing in Montana. Then his instinct and training took over. Evade and avoid. Evade the missile, avoid crashing on settlements below. Reacher saw him throw the nose down and the tail up. The big Chinook wheeled away and spewed a wide fan of exhaust into the atmosphere. Then the tail flipped the other way, engines screaming, superheated fumes spraying another random arc. The missile patiently followed the first curve. Tightened its radius. The Chinook dropped slowly and then rose violently in the air. Spiraled upward and away from the town. The missile turned and followed the second arc. Arrived at where the heat had been a split second before. Couldn’t find it. It turned a full lazy circle right underneath the helicopter. Caught an echo of the new maneuver and set about climbing a relentless new spiral.

  The pilot won an extra second, but that was all. The Stinger caught him right at the top of his desperate climb. It followed the trail of heat all the way into the starboard engine itself. Exploded hard against the exhaust nacelle.

  Six and a half pounds of high explosive against ten tons of aircraft, but the explosive always wins. Reacher saw the starboard engine disintegrate, then the rear rotor housing blow off. Shattered fragments of the drivetrain exploded outward like shrapnel and the rotor detached and spun away in terrible slow motion. The Chinook stalled in the air and fell, tail down, checked only by the screaming forward rotor, and slowly spun to the earth, like a holed ship slips slowly below the sea.

  HOLLY HEARD THE helicopter. She heard the low-frequency beat pulsing faintly through her walls. She heard it grow louder. Then she heard the explosion and the shriek of the forward rotor grabbing the air. Then she heard nothing.

  She jammed her elbow into her crutch and limped across to the diagonal partition. The prison room was completely empty except for the mattress. So her search was going to have to start again in the bathroom.

  “ONLY ONE QUESTION,”Webster said. “How long can we keep the lid on this?”

  General Johnson said nothing in reply. Neither did his aide. Webster moved his gaze across to Garber. Garber was looking grim.

  “Not too damn long,” he said.

  “But how long?” Webster asked. “A day? An hour?”

  “Six hours,” Garber said.

  “Why?” McGrath asked.

  “Standard procedure,” Garber said. “They’ll investigate the crash, obviously. Normally they’d send another chopper out. But not if there’s a suspicion of ground fire. So they’ll come by
road from Malmstrom. Six hours.”

  Webster nodded. Turned to Johnson.

  “Can you delay them, General?” he asked.

  Johnson shook his head.

  “Not really,” he said. His voice was low and resigned. “They just lost a Chinook. Crew of two. I can’t call them and say, do me a favor, don’t investigate that. I could try, I guess, and they might agree at first, but it would leak, and then we’d be back where we started. Might gain us an hour.”

  Webster nodded.

  “Seven hours, six hours, what’s the difference?” he said.

  Nobody replied.

  “We’ve got to move now,” McGrath said. “Forget the White House. We can’t wait any longer. We need to do something right now, people. Six hours from now, the whole situation blows right out of control. We’ll lose her.”

  Six hours is three hundred and sixty minutes. They wasted the first two sitting in silence. Johnson stared into space. Webster drummed his fingers on the table. Garber stared at McGrath, a wry expression on his face. McGrath was staring at the map. Milosevic and Brogan were standing in the silence, holding the brown bags of breakfast and the Styrofoam cups.

  “Coffee here, anybody wants it,” Brogan said.

  Garber waved him over.

  “Eat and plan,” he said.

  “Map,” Johnson said.

  McGrath slid the map across the table. They all sat forward. Back in motion. Three hundred and fifty-eight minutes to go.

  “Ravine’s about four miles north of us,” the aide said. “All we got is eight Marines in a LAV-25.”

  “That tank thing?” McGrath asked.

  The aide shook his head.

  “Light armored vehicle,” he said. “LAV. Eight wheels, no tracks.”

  “Bulletproof?” Webster asked.

  “For sure,” the aide said. “They can drive it all the way to Yorke.”

  “If it gets through the ravine,” Garber said.

  Johnson nodded.

  “That’s the big question,” he said. “We need to go take a look.”