"I would prefer this place," McGrath said.
He tapped the northerly location with a pencil. The General pretended to study it. His aide pretended to be impressed.
"Good thinking," the General said. "We'll revise the rendezvous."
McGrath smiled. He knew damn well the trucks were already heading for that exact spot. Probably already there. The General grinned back. The ritual dance was completed.
"What can the spy planes show us?" Brogan asked.
"Everything," the General's aide said. "Wait until you see the pictures. The cameras on those babies are unbelievable."
"I don't like it," McGrath said. "It's going to make them nervous."
The aide shook his head.
"They won't even know they're there," he said. "We're using two of them, flying straight lines, east to west and west to east. They're thirty-seven thousand feet up. Nobody on the ground is even going to be aware of them."
"That's seven miles up," Brogan said. "How can they see anything from that sort of height?"
"Good cameras," the aide said. "Seven miles is nothing. They'll show you a cigarette pack lying on the sidewalk from seven miles. The whole thing is automatic. The guys up there hit a button, and the camera tracks whatever it's supposed to track. Just keeps pointing at the spot on the ground you chose, transmitting high-quality video by satellite, then you turn around and come back, and the camera swivels around and does it all again."
"Undetectable?" McGrath asked.
"They look like airliners," the aide said. "You look up and you see a tiny little vapor trail and you think it's TWA on the way somewhere. You don't think it's the Air Force checking whether you polished your shoes this morning, right?"
"Seven miles, you'll see the hairs on their heads," Johnson said. "What do you think we spent all those defense dollars on? Crop dusters?"
McGrath nodded. He felt naked. Time being, he had nothing to offer except a couple of rental jeeps, two years old, waiting at the sidewalk.
"We're getting a profile on this Borken guy," he said. "Shrinks at Quantico are working it up now."
"We found Jack Reacher's old CO," Johnson said. "He's doing desk duty in the Pentagon. He'll join us, give us the spread."
McGrath nodded.
"Forewarned is forearmed," he said.
The telephone rang. Johnson's aide picked it up. He was the nearest.
"When are we leaving?" Brogan asked.
McGrath noticed he had asked Johnson direct.
"Right now, I guess," Johnson said. "The Air Force will fly us up there. Saves six hours on the road, right?"
The aide hung up the phone. He looked like he'd been kicked in the gut.
"The missile unit," he said. "We lost radio contact, north of Yorke."
Chapter Thirty-One
HOLLY PAUSED IN the corridor. Smiled. The woman had left her weapon propped against the wall outside the door. That had been the delay. She had used the key, put the tray on the floor, unslung her weapon, propped it against the wall, and picked up the tray again before nudging open the door.
She swapped the iron tube for the gun. Not a weapon she had used before. Not one she wanted to use now. It was a tiny submachine gun. An Ingram MAC 10. Obsolete military issue. Obsolete for a reason. Holly's class at Quantico had laughed about it. They called it the phone booth gun. It was so inaccurate you had to be in a phone booth with your guy to be sure of hitting him. A grim joke. And it fired way too quickly. A thousand rounds per minute. One touch on the trigger and the magazine was empty.
But it was a better weapon than part of an old iron bed frame. She checked the magazine. It was full, thirty shells. The chamber was clean. She clicked the trigger and watched the mechanism move. The gun worked as well as it was ever going to. She smacked the magazine back into position. Straightened the canvas strap and slung it tight over her shoulder. Clicked the cocking handle to the fire position and closed her hand around the grip. Took a firm hold on her crutch and eased to the top of the stairs.
She stood still and waited. Listened hard. No sound. She went down the stairs, slowly, a step at a time, the Ingram out in front of her. At the bottom, she waited and listened again. No sound. She crossed the lobby and arrived at the doors. Eased them open and looked outside.
The street was deserted. But it was wide. It looked like a huge city boulevard to her. To reach safety on the other side was going to take her minutes. Minutes out there in the open, exposed to the mountain slopes above. She estimated the distance. Breathed hard and gripped her crutch. Jabbed the Ingram forward. Breathed hard again and took off at a lurching run, jamming the crutch down, leaping ahead with her good leg, swinging the gun left and right to cover both approaches.
She threw herself at the mound in front of the ruined county office. Scrabbled north around behind it and fought through grabbing undergrowth. Entered the forest parallel to the main track, but thirty yards from it. Leaned on a tree and bent double, gasping with exertion and fear and exhilaration.
This was the real thing. This was what the whole of her life had led her to. She could hear her father's war stories in her head. The jungles of Vietnam. The breathless fear of being hunted in the green undergrowth. The triumph of each safe step, of each yard gained. She saw the faces of the tough quiet men she had known on the bases as a child. The instructors at Quantico. She felt the disappointment of her posting to a safe desk in Chicago. All the training wasted, because of who she was. Now it was different. She straightened up. Took a deep breath. Then another. She felt her genes boiling through her. Before, they'd felt like resented intruders. Now they felt warm and whole and good. Her father's daughter? You bet your ass.
REACHER WAS CUFFED around the trunk of a hundred-foot pine. He had been dragged down the narrow track to the Bastion. Burning with fury. One punch and one kick was more than he had yielded since his early childhood. The rage was burying the pain. And blurring his mind. A life for a life, the fat bastard had said. Reacher had twisted on the floor and the words had meant nothing to him.
But they meant something now. They had come back to him as he stood there. Men and women had strolled up to him and smiled. Their smiles were the sort of smiles he had seen before, long ago. The smiles of bored children living on an isolated base somewhere, after they had been told the circus was coming to town.
SHE THOUGHT HARD. She had to guess where he was. And she had to guess where the parade ground was. She had to get herself halfway between those two unknown locations and set up an ambush. She knew the ground sloped steeply up to the clearing with the huts. She remembered being brought downhill to the courthouse. She guessed the parade ground had to be a large flat area. Therefore it had to be farther uphill, to the northwest, where the ground leveled out in the mountain bowl. Some distance beyond the huts. She set off uphill through the trees.
She tried to figure out where the main path was running. Every few yards, she stopped and peered south, turning left and right to catch a glimpse of the gaps in the forest canopy where the trees had been cleared. That way, she could deduce the direction of the track. She kept herself parallel to it, thirty or forty yards away to the north, and fought through the tough whippy stems growing sideways from the trunks. It was all uphill, and steep, and it was hard work. She used her crutch like a boatman uses a pole, planting it securely in the soil and thrusting herself upward against it.