Die Trying Read online

  “Mississippi goes nowhere near San Francisco,” Holly said.

  Then she saw a giant smile spreading across Reacher’s face. A final gleam of triumph in his tired eyes.

  “What?” she said.

  “San Francisco was right,” he said.

  Webster grunted in irritation.

  “We’d have passed him already,” he said. “Miles back.”

  Reacher thumbed his mike. Shouted up to the pilot.

  “Turn back,” he said. “A big wide loop.”

  Then he smiled again. Smiled and closed his eyes.

  “We did pass him,” he said. “Miles back. Right over his damn head. They painted the truck green.”

  The Night Hawk swung away into a high banked loop. The passengers swung their gaze from window to window as the landscape rotated below.

  “There was paint in the motor pool,” Reacher said. “I tripped over the cans. Probably camouflage base coat. They slapped it on this morning. Damn stuff is probably still wet.”

  They saw a Kenworth they had passed minutes ago. It was snuffling along a thousand feet below. Then a long stretch of empty pavement. Then a white pickup. More empty road. Then a dark green panel truck, speeding south.

  “Down, down,” Reacher was calling through.

  “Is that it?” McGrath asked.

  The gap between the panel truck and the pickup in front was lengthening. The truck was falling back. There was nothing behind it, all the way to the horizon. The Night Hawk was losing height. It was dropping toward the truck the way an eagle heads for a baby rabbit.

  “Is that it?” McGrath asked again.

  “That’s it,” Reacher said.

  “It sure is,” Holly whooped.

  “You positive?” McGrath asked.

  “Look at the roof,” Holly told him.

  McGrath looked. The roof was streaked with dark green paint, but he could see it was peppered with tiny holes. Like somebody had fired a shotgun right through it.

  “We stared at those damn holes for two whole days,” Holly said. “I’ll remember them the rest of my life.”

  “There are a hundred and thirteen of them,” Reacher said. “I counted. It’s a prime number.”

  Holly laughed and leaned over. Smacked a joyous high five with him.

  “That’s our truck,” she said. “No doubt about it.”

  “Can you see the driver?” McGrath asked.

  The pilot tilted down and rocked sideways for a close look.

  “It’s Stevie,” Holly shouted back. “For sure. We’ve got him.”

  “This thing got weapons?” Webster asked.

  “Two big machine guns,” the pilot called through. “But I’m not going to use them. That I can’t do. Military can’t get involved in law enforcement.”

  “Can you fly this thing straight and level?” Reacher asked him. “Fifty miles an hour? Maybe sixty? Without asking too many questions?”

  The pilot laughed. It came through the headsets tinny and distorted.

  “I can fly this thing any old way you want me to,” he said. “With the General’s permission, of course.”

  Johnson nodded cautiously. Reacher leaned down and picked the Barrett up off the floor. Unfastened his harness and stood up into a crouch. Waved to Holly to change seats with him. She crawled across in front of McGrath and Reacher eased into her place. He could feel the Night Hawk slowing and dropping in the air. He put some length into Holly’s harness and fastened it loosely around his waist. Stretched back for the door release. Tugged at the handle and the door slid back on its runners.

  Then there was a gale of air coming in as the slipstream howled through the opening and the aircraft was turning half sideways, sliding through the air like a car skids through snow. The green truck was below and behind, maybe two hundred feet down. The pilot was stabilizing his speed until he matched the truck’s progress and tilting the aircraft so that Reacher’s eyeline was pointing straight down at the road.

  “How’s this?” the pilot asked.

  Reacher thumbed his mike button.

  “Dead on,” he said. “Anything up ahead?”

  “One vehicle coming north,” the copilot said. “When that’s through, you got nothing at all for ten miles.”

  “Anything behind?” Reacher asked. He saw the north-bound vehicle streak by below.

  McGrath stuck his head out into the gale. Ducked back in and nodded.

  “Clear behind,” he said.

  Reacher raised the Barrett to his shoulder. Put a round in the breech. Shooting at a moving vehicle from another moving vehicle is not a great recipe for accuracy, but he was looking at a distance of less than seventy yards and a target about twenty feet long and seven feet wide, so he wasn’t worrying about it. He put the crosshairs on a point two-thirds of the way down the length of the roof. He figured the forward movement of the truck and the backward movement of the air might put the bullet dead center through the load compartment. He wondered vaguely whether the three-foot mattress was still in there.

  “Wait,” Webster shouted. “What if you’re wrong? What if it’s empty? You’re only guessing, right? This whole thing is guesswork. We need proof, Reacher. We need some kind of corroboration here.”

  Reacher didn’t glance back. Kept his eye on the scope.

  “Bullshit,” he said, quietly, concentrating. “This is going to be all the corroboration we need.”

  Webster grabbed his arm.

  “You can’t do this,” he said. “You could be killing an innocent man.”

  “Bullshit,” Reacher said again. “If he’s an innocent man, I won’t be killing him, will I?”

  He shook Webster’s hand off his arm. Turned to face him.

  “Think about it, Webster,” he said. “Relax. Be logical. The proof comes after I shoot, right? If he’s hauling a bomb, we’ll know all about it. If he’s hauling fresh air, nothing bad will happen to him. He’ll just get another hole in his damn truck. Number one hundred and fourteen.”

  He turned back to the door. Raised the rifle again. Acquired the target. Out of sheer habit, he waited for his breath to be out and his heart to be between beats. Then he pulled the trigger. It took a thousandth of a second for the sound of the shot to hit his ear, and seventy times as long as that for the big heavy bullet to hit the truck. Nothing happened for a second. Then the truck ceased to exist. It was suddenly a blinding fireball rolling down the highway like a hot white tumbleweed. A gigantic concussion ring blasted outward. The helicopter was hit by a violent shock wave and tossed sideways and five hundred feet higher in the air. The pilot caught it at the top and slewed back. Steadied it in the air and swung around. Dropped the nose. There was nothing to see on the highway except a roiling cloud of thin smoke slowing into a teardrop shape three hundred yards long. No debris, no metal, no hurtling wheels, no clattering wreckage. Nothing at all except microscopic invisible particles of vapor accelerating into the atmosphere way faster than the speed of sound.

  THE PILOT STUCK around at a hover for a long moment and then drifted east. Put his craft gently down on the scrub, a hundred yards from the shoulder. Shut the engines down. Reacher sat in the deafening silence and unclipped his belt. Laid the Barrett on the floor and vaulted out through the open door. Walked slowly toward the highway.

  A ton of dynamite. A whole ton. A hell of a bang. There was nothing left at all. He guessed there were flattened grasses for a half-mile all around, but that was it. The terrible energy of the explosion had blasted outward and met absolutely nothing at all in its path. Nothing soft, nothing vulnerable. It had blasted outward and then weakened and slowed and died to a puff of breeze miles away and it had hurt nothing. Nothing at all. He stood in the silence and closed his eyes.

  Then he heard footsteps behind him. It was Holly. He heard her good leg alternating with her bad leg. A long stride, then a shuffle. He opened his eyes and looked at the road. She walked around in front of him and stopped. Laid her head on his chest and put her arms arou
nd him. Squeezed him tight and held on. He raised his hand to her head and smoothed her hair behind her ear, like he had seen her do.

  “All done,” she said.

  “Get a problem, solve a problem,” he said. “That’s my rule.”

  She was quiet for a long time.

  “I wish it was always that easy,” she said.

  The way she said it, after the delay, it was like a long speech. Like a closely reasoned argument. He pretended not to know which problem she was talking about.

  “Your father?” he said. “You’re way, way out of his shadow now.”

  She shook her head against his chest.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Believe it,” he said. “That thing you did for me on the parade ground was the smartest, coolest, bravest thing I ever saw anybody do, man or woman, young or old. Better than anything I ever did. Better than anything your old man ever did. He’d give his front teeth for guts like that. So would I. You’re way out of anybody’s shadow now, Holly. Believe it.”

  “I thought I was,” she said. “I felt like it. I really did. For a while. But then when I saw him again, I felt just the same as I always did. I called him Dad.”

  “He is your dad,” Reacher said.

  “I know,” she replied. “That’s the problem.”

  He was quiet for a long moment.

  “So change your name,” he said. “That might do it.”

  He could feel her holding her breath.

  “Is that a proposal?” she asked.

  “It’s a suggestion,” he said.

  “You think Holly Reacher sounds good?” she asked.

  His turn to stay quiet for a long time. His turn to catch his breath. And finally, his turn to talk about the real problem.

  “It sounds wonderful,” he said. “But I guess Holly McGrath sounds better.”

  She made no reply.

  “He’s the lucky guy, right?” he said.

  She nodded. A small motion of her head against his chest.

  “So tell him,” he said.

  She shrugged in his arms.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m nervous.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “He might have something similar to tell you.”

  She looked up. He squinted down at her.

  “You think so?” she asked.

  “You’re nervous, he’s nervous,” Reacher said. “Somebody should say something. I’m not about to do it for either of you.”

  She squeezed him harder. Then she stretched up and kissed him. Hard and long on the mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For understanding,” she said.

  He shrugged. It wasn’t the end of the world. Just felt like it.

  “Coming?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  She left him on the shoulder of U.S. 93, right there in Idaho. He watched her all the way back to the Night Hawk. Watched her climb the short ladder. She paused and turned. Looked back at him. Then she ducked up and in. The door closed. The rotor thumped. He knew he would never see her again. His clothes tore at him and the dust swirled all around him as the helicopter took off. He waved it away. Watched it until it was lost to sight. Then he took a deep breath and looked left and right along the empty highway. Friday, the Fourth of July. Independence Day.

  SATURDAY THE FIFTH and Sunday the sixth, Yorke County was sealed off and secret Army units were moving in and out around the clock. Air Artillery squads recovered the missile unit. They took it south in four Chinooks. Quartermasters went in and recovered all the ordnance they could find. They collected enough for a small war.

  Medical corpsmen removed the bodies. They found the twenty men from the missile unit in the cave. They found the skeletons Reacher had crawled through. They found five mutilated bodies in another cave. Dressed like workmen. Like builders or carpenters. They took Fowler out of the command hut and Borken from the road in front of the courthouse. They brought Milosevic down from the mountain bowl and Brogan out of the small clearing west of the Bastion. They found Jackson’s rough grave in the forest and dug him up. They laid eighteen dead militiamen and one dead woman side by side on the rifle range and helicoptered them away.

  One of Garber’s military investigators flew in alone and took the hard disk out of the financial computer and put it on a chopper for transport to Chicago. Engineers moved in and dynamited the mine entrances. Sappers moved into the Bastion and disabled the water supply and tore down the power lines. They set fire to the huts and watched as they burned. Late Sunday night, when the last of the smoke was rising, they marched back to their choppers and lifted away south.

  Early Monday morning, Harland Webster was back in the off-white parlor inside the White House. Ruth Rosen was smiling at him and asking how his holiday weekend had been. He was smiling back at her and saying nothing. An hour later, the morning sun was rolling west to Chicago and three agents were arresting Brogan’s girlfriend. They grilled her for thirty minutes and advised her to get out of town, leaving behind anything he had ever bought her. Then the same agents took Milosevic’s brand-new Ford Explorer out of the Federal Building’s parking lot and drove it five miles south. They left it on a quiet street, doors unlocked, keys in. By the time it had been stolen, Holly Johnson was arriving at the knee clinic for an early appointment. An hour after that, she was back at her desk. Before lunch, the missing money from the bearer bond robbery was following a route of her own choosing out of the Caymans. Six o’clock Monday evening she was home and packing. She threw her bags into her car and drove north. Moved into McGrath’s house up in Evanston.

  Tuesday morning, there were three separate stories on the National Militia Internet. Refugees from an isolated valley in Montana had drifted south and west to new settlements with reports of a recent world government maneuver. Foreign troops had wiped out a band of militia heroes. The foreign battalion had been led by a French mercenary. He had succeeded only because he had used classified SDI technology, including satellites and lasers and microchips. Journalists picked up on the story and called the Hoover Building. Late Tuesday evening, in a prepared statement, an FBI spokesperson denied all knowledge of any such events.

  Early Wednesday morning, after five hitched rides and four buses through seven states, Reacher was finally in Wisconsin. It was where he had aimed to be exactly a week before. He liked it there. It struck him as a fine place to be in July. He stayed until Friday afternoon.

  Turn the page for a preview of

  Lee Child’s novel

  Tripwire

  Available in paperback from Jove Books

  Prologue

  HOOK HOBIE OWED the whole of his life to a secret nearly thirty years old. His liberty, his status, his money, everything. And like any cautious guy in his particular situation, he was ready to do what was necessary to protect his secret. Because he had a lot to lose. The whole of his life.

  The protection he relied on for nearly thirty years was based on just two things. The same two things anybody uses to protect against any danger. The same way a nation protects itself against an enemy missile, the same way an apartment dweller protects himself against a burglar, the same way a boxer guards against a knockout blow. Detection and response. Stage one, stage two. First you spot the threat, and then you react.

  Stage one was the early-warning system. It had changed over the years, as other circumstances had changed. Now it was well rehearsed and simplified. It was made up of two layers, like two concentric trip wires. The first trip wire was eleven thousand miles from home. It was an early early warning. A wake-up call. It would tell him they were getting close. The second trip wire was five thousand miles nearer, but still six thousand miles from home. A call from the second location would tell him they were about to get very close. It would tell him stage one was over, and stage two was about to begin.

  Stage two was the response. He was very cl
ear on what the response had to be. He had spent nearly thirty years thinking about it, but there was only ever one viable answer. The response would be to run. To disappear. He was a realistic guy. The whole of his life, he had been proud of his courage and his cunning, and his toughness and his fortitude. He had always done what was necessary, without a second thought. But he knew when he heard the warning sounds from those distant trip wires he had to get out. Because no man could survive what was coming after him. No man. Not even a man as ruthless as he was.

  The danger had ebbed and flowed like a tide for years. He had spent long periods certain it was about to wash over him at any time. And then long periods certain that it would never reach him at all. Sometimes, the deadening sensation of time made him feel safe, because thirty years is an eternity. But other times it felt like the blink of an eye. Sometimes he waited for the first call on an hourly basis. Planning, sweating, but always knowing he could be forced to run at any moment.

  He had played it through his head a million times. The way he expected it, the first call would come in maybe a month before the second call. He would use that month to prepare. He would tie up loose ends, close things down, cash in, transfer assets, settle scores. Then when the second call came in, he would take off. Immediately. No hesitation. Just get the hell out, and stay the hell out.

  But the way it happened, the two calls came in on the same day. The second call came first. The nearer trip wire was breached an hour before the farther one. And Hook Hobie didn’t run. He abandoned thirty years of careful planning and stayed to fight it out.

  1

  JACK REACHER SAW the guy step through the door. Actually, there was no door. The guy just stepped in through the part of the front wall that wasn’t there. The bar opened straight out onto the sidewalk. There were tables and chairs out there under a dried-up old vine that gave some kind of nominal shade. It was an inside-outside room, passing through a wall that wasn’t there. Reacher guessed there must be some kind of an iron grille they could padlock across the opening when the bar closed. If it closed. Certainly Reacher had never seen it closed, and he was keeping some pretty radical hours.