by Scott Blade
I turned to the girls and said, “Ladies, listen up. The plane isn’t going to land. We’ve got to jump.”
Faye was almost fully alert. The drugs had worn off for her. So at least I had her help.
Then one of the other girls seemed to be cognitive. It was Ann Gables. This was the first time that I had really looked at her. She was still alive. Skinny, but alive.
She asked, “Jump?”
“Ann. There’s no time to explain, but you’re going to have to jump and swim,” I said.
Faye grabbed her and said, “Remember me? It’s Faye. We’re free now, but we have to jump from this plane. Can you swim?”
Ann’s face came alive like she was also alert. She said, “We’re free? I can swim.”
I said, “Good.”
Then I said, “We’re ready.”
Hank took us down above the lake. Thunder rumbled above us.
He shouted back to us, “All right. Head all da way ta da back. Jump in ten seconds. No time ta waste.”
He flew low over the lake like he was going to land.
I pushed the ladies toward the rear. I grabbed the third girl who was still woozy.
Faye helped Ann.
At the rear of the plane we felt the starboard engine explode in a sudden wave of fire and wind. The plane lurched through the air and Faye and Ann both flew out the back before they were ready. I grabbed the other girl and leapt out after them.
We dropped through the air for not even three seconds and then crashed through the surface of the lake like bombs.
We sank several feet down and I started swimming with one arm. I pulled the girl with the other.
I swam and paddled through the water with all my strength. I kicked and kicked. After a long 13 seconds, I burst through the surface.
My lungs filled with hot, wet air. I sucked down the oxygen like it was my first time breathing.
The girl floated next to me, unconscious and then suddenly, she was awake and completely confused.
Second nature kicked in and she treaded water on her own. She coughed and gasped and stayed quiet. Then she started swimming away from me and toward the shore.
She might’ve thought that I had abducted her or that I was trying to drown her. Neither would’ve surprised me.
She was alive. That was all that mattered.
I turned and swam in the opposite direction toward the other shore. Not sure why. I just followed my instinct, which was to paddle to the other side.
I kicked and paddled and swam as hard as I could.
My muscles ached like nothing that I had ever felt before. But I stayed afloat.
Swimming through the lake, I thought of my mother. Her voice swept through my thoughts.
She said, “Do the right thing.”
That was all I heard over and over as I swam.
“Do the right thing.”
Eventually, I reached the shore.
I climbed up onto the rocks with my arms. I didn’t even stand up. I just spun over and lay on my back. I stared up at the sky.
The sun had broken through the storm clouds. Thunder still roared every other minute, but the sunlight was there. Then there was one loud, thunderous sound that was a little different from rumbling thunder. It was much closer and sounded like an explosion.
I looked up in the direction of the sound and saw that it was the seaplane.
It exploded above the town of Black Rock. Pieces of the plane fell to the earth in a rainstorm of shrapnel and broken metal fragments.
I thought about Hank and then I thought nothing else.
I sat up and looked around the lake for signs of Faye Matlind. I didn’t have to search long. Directly across from me, on the opposite shore, were all three of the women: the drugged one, Ann Gables, and Faye Matlind.
They were holding each other and hugging like long-lost sisters, like they had survived a horrible plane crash, which they had and more.
I smiled.
Do the right thing.
I lay back down on the stony, hard rocks and closed my eyes. I had never felt anything more comfortable in my life than that bed of rocks.
Chapter 59
It was well into the early morning hours. Cars had lined up to leave the town of Black Rock like it had the plague.
Traffic to leave was heavy and thick. The traffic of emergency vehicles from the neighboring towns, the state government, state cops, the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF were all lined up within 24 hours to get into the town of Black Rock. They had all set up their own traffic stops and perimeters and security stations.
The local motel, which had survived the fires, was fully booked.
The national media had cancelled all of their regularly scheduled programs to report on a small town in Mississippi that was on fire and to report about a missing international criminal named Oskar Tega. Now he was thought to have crashed his plane over Jarvis Lake.
They also reported that he hadn’t been a drug kingpin after all, but a human trafficker.
They reported that he and his gang had been responsible for any number of abductions of young women in the last five years along the highways and interstates in the county.
Much, much earlier, I had left Black Rock.
While all the government agencies were fighting to get into the town, I was already miles away. I stood on the side of Highway 82, just outside a small town called El Dorado.
The sun was out and it was hot. I had my thumb out when a little, bright red Scion pulled over to the shoulder.
I lowered my arm and started walking toward the car. I was extremely tired. I had slept for about an hour on a bed of rocks and my back was sore.
My shoulders hurt and I felt my bones with every step that I took, but I had to keep moving. I couldn’t explain it, but I was a Reacher and it was what Reachers did.
I stepped to the passenger door. I was so tired that without even leaning down to meet the driver, I opened the door and dumped myself into the seat.
I gazed over with sleepy eyes and then I started to laugh. I laughed louder and hardier than I ever had before because the driver was Maria from the diner.
She smiled at me. She looked good in the morning. She also looked a little tired, but better than me for sure.
She said, “Hi.”
“Well, hello.”
“I never thought that I’d see you again.”
I nodded.
Then she said, “I called you.”
I shut my eyes tight and a deep frown fell across my face.
She asked, “What?”
“My phone.”
I pulled it out of my pocket. I was amazed because it was still in one piece and it was dry. My clothes and everything in my pockets had dried over an hour ago, but surely my phone was ruined.
“I swam in the lake earlier. I forgot to take it out of my pocket.”
She said, “Put it in rice. It’ll work again.”
I shrugged.
“Don’t you have it all backed up anyway?”
I nodded and smiled and then I said, “I have it all backed up.”
And I had. It was backed up inside my head. I didn’t need to keep the phone. I knew all of its secrets already.
I knew Jack Reacher’s face. I knew where he had been over the years. I knew who he was as best as anyone could from his files.
Most importantly, I remembered my mother. I didn’t need pictures of her. I had memories.
I asked, “Why are you here? Where are you going?”
Then I noticed that she had the backseat loaded up with her belongings.
She smiled and said, “There’s nothing for me in Black Rock, even when it wasn’t on fire. I’m headed home. Back to Austin. What about you? Where are you headed?”
I looked around the car and then I looked back at her.
I said, “Austin sounds great.”
She nodded and smiled.
“Mind if I sleep a while?”
She said, “Not at all.”
&
nbsp; Then she took her foot off the brake and merged with the traffic and drove off.
Before I dozed off, she asked, “Hey, you wanna meet my parents?”
I laughed again. This time I laughed so hard that it hurt.
She laughed too. Then she asked, “So, why are you going to Austin?”
I said, “I gotta be somewhere.”
I lay back and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
Chapter 60
Two days after I left Black Rock I sat in a generic Texas diner in Austin. The kind of diner that was all over the American landscape—plain, same kinds of food, same kinds of waitresses, same kind of patrons.
I had just sat down when a skinny waitress with glasses and a bright smile stepped over to me and asked what I wanted. I ordered a bottled water and a cheeseburger and fries.
“We don’t have fries. We have hash browns.”
I shrugged and said, “That’s fine. Whatever.”
“Want anything on them?”
“Cheese.”
She nodded, wrote down my order, and walked behind the counter.
She waited her turn and then called out my order to the cooks.
She went over to the beverage area. I turned my attention to the window.
Where to go from here? I had no idea.
I reached into my pocket and stared at my phone. It was still dead. I hadn’t tried the thing with the rice and I hadn’t tried to recharge it. Truth was, I wasn’t sure if I wanted it. But I held onto it like a souvenir from my past.
The waitress had returned and dropped something off in front of me. She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement because a young black couple walked in and sat in the booth behind me.
She immediately greeted them with a smile.
I smiled, thinking about the Matlinds. I was sad that Faye had to find out about Chris’s death from someone else. But telling her wasn’t my place. Saving her was my place.
I hoped that she would recover and find love again.
I turned back to my own table and minded my own business. That was when I saw that the waitress had brought me the wrong drink.
Instead of a bottle of water, she had delivered a hot, black coffee in a less than pristine white mug.
I stared at it.
I raised my hand to get her attention.
She came over and asked, “Is something wrong, sir?”
I paused and stared back at the cup of coffee.
She repeated her question.
I said, “No. Everything is fine.”
She smiled and walked away.
I stared at the coffee. Maybe I should try it before I dismiss it so quickly.
The waitress returned.
She delivered my food and asked, “Will that be all?”
I was so enthralled in the coffee that I stayed quiet.
She repeated the question.
“Sir, will there be anything else?”
I said nothing.
About the Author
I grew up in Mississippi, where Lee Child’s The Affair, one of my favorite books, is based. If you haven’t read it or any of his other books, I envy you because you get to start from the beginning and experience all 6’5” and 250 pounds of Jack Reacher’s adventures for the first time.
Winter Territory
A Cameron REACHER Novel
Scott Blade
(COMING NEXT MONTH!
THIS IS AN UNEDITED COPY AND MAY CHANGE)
The old guy’s watery eyes flicked all around the sunless room and came to rest on his daughter’s eighteen-year-old face (picture).
“Do you have a child?”
“Nah,” Reacher said. “I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” said the old man. “Not anymore.”
—Jack Reacher, Without Fail.
Chapter 1
The man was about twenty-years-old and freezing. The cold pierced through his skin and shot straight to his bones. The temperatures outside dipped into the low twenties and the winter hadn’t even come on yet. Not fully. It was still the middle of November, but the mountaintops were snowcapped and the sky was wet in that kind of cold dew feeling that came with high altitudes and cold skies. Which described exactly his location, a high altitude and stark cold weather. He was in the Absaroka Mountain Range, which is a part of the Rockies. The altitude was somewhere above 13,000 feet, but he wasn’t sure the exact number.
The man was hiding out in a familiar place. A place that he used to hide out in when he was young. He felt safe there.
Outside the night wind blew and batted up against the old ruggedly-built wooden structure, but a structure that had endured the cold winters for many, many years. For the moment nothing and no one would find him. He was safe, but it wouldn’t be long. And he figured that that was the case, but he had nowhere else to go. The man had run out of options and out of time.
They were coming for him. They were coming and they would come in hot, guns blazing. They would kill him dead for sure. No doubt about it. But that wasn’t even the thing that worried the man at the moment. He had been running for days and he knew that he would come face to face with them soon enough. His cover had been blown all to hell and back. There was no changing that now. There was no changing the past.
The thing that was the immediate danger wasn’t the guys coming to kill him for betraying them. It wasn’t the fact that they had trusted him and he had turned on them. It wasn’t the dangerous enemies that he used to be terrified of.
The immediate danger wasn’t the contents of his stolen bulletproof briefcase that was covered in dirt and grim and still damp from being dragged through the snowy terrain.
The immediate danger that ate away at him was that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten in days, so many days that he had no idea when the last time that he had eaten was.
Five or six or seven days or longer ago he had been on a military stealth chopper on his way into Mexico or back from Mexico across the Mexican and United States border. He couldn’t remember for sure. The details were fuzzy now because he was slipping in and out of cognitive thinking. Five or six or seven days without food will do that to a man. He tried to remember his training, his tradecraft, but for some reason all that he could focus on was the stealth chopper.
He had thought that it was such a cool thing. It was a Comanche RAH-70. It had been the most beautiful and terrifying machine that he had ever witnessed. Reports from around the world had claimed that highly modified Black Hawk UH-60s were the stealth choppers used in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011. The man hadn’t been there in 2011 and he had been far too young at the time to have been involved in that operation, but he did have top secret clearance and was privy to knowledge that the choppers used were in fact Comanche’s RAH-70s, which were cousins of the RAH-66.
Public knowledge says that the Comanche choppers were cancelled way back in 2004. The programs were too expensive for the U.S. military, but not for his employer.
The man’s employer had found use of them and financed dozens of them to be created for stealth missions. They were housed in strategic military installations all around the world. Military service personal were restricted from accessing them. Authorized persons were told never to reveal any details about them to anyone.
The chopper was a beautiful machine with deadly and accurate machine guns attached.
It was equipped with special side turret style machine guns that fired M50 ammunition at 1500 rounds per minute. The design was based on the Vulcan style gun. The ammunition housed 500 rounds and could be reloaded in fifteen minutes.
The man had known this information not because of his military training, but because of his tradecraft.
Although, he questioned the statics and details of the information that he knew because he also knew one more thing and he knew that for certain, he was starving and the lack of substance in his body was causing him to lose focus and reasoning.
He tried desperately to concentrate on the detail of the stealth ch
opper. It helped. But the one other thought that taunted him was the irony that he was starving, but he was in one of the richest states in the country and at that moment he was a rich man. He had been richer than he had been five or six or seven days ago because of the value of the contents of the security briefcase that was in his possession.
Next to the man was a Beretta 9mm, which was a service weapon that was given to him just before his secret mission. It rested on top of a closed shoebox next to him, in close grabbing distance. Safety on, but that could change quickly. The shoebox was stacked on top of a large old appliance box that now held old items from a childhood long past.
The room that the man was in was dark and dank and not well insulated. Spiders indigenous to the region crawled along the far corner of the ceiling. They crawled in the shadows of a swinging bulb that hung down on a long cord and blew slightly back and forth in a curved arc from west to north.
Somewhere in the room, blowing in from cracks in the roof or unsecured windows, was a wind tunnel that chilled the room and blew the bulb around.
The man could hear a faint whistle that blew in with the gusts of wind from the outside terrain.
The man was sitting down on the floor with his back to the wall. He craned up and looked out of a snow-covered shuttered window above his head. He had to stretch his body back up against the wall to see down.
Billions of stars shimmered across the stretch of sky. The ground was covered in snow, but the night sky was clear and dark blue and picturesque like the wallpaper on someone’s desktop computer somewhere. Perhaps back at Langley Virginia, which was where he had lived for the last year of his life.
The man leaned forward some more and looked straight down at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door from his position, but he was more than two stories up and he could see more than a hundred yards down the steep land in front of him. Behind him were dense trees and then the edge of a rugged mountain. He wasn’t much worried about the men coming for him from behind because these guys would just come straight up the long, wide driveway. If they could find it. The snow had covered over it and left no signs of where it had used to be. More than likely his enemies would be coming in by snowmobile, which he would hear in the dead silence around him. The engines would echo and bounce off of the far off trees or the sides of the mountains. No way would anyone surprise him on a snowmobile. The alternative means of transportation would’ve been on horseback. The snow-covered ground wasn’t dense enough to prevent horses from riding up the track, but it would’ve been slower.
