The Colt sub-machine guns were all tangled in the passenger footwell, thrown there by the crash. Reacher lined them up straight and hung one on his left shoulder, and one on his right. He swapped out the Glock's two-gone magazine for the fresh one he had taken from Sorenson's belt. Two rounds can make a difference.
Then he walked the rest of the tunnel and pushed the big red button.
SEVENTY-TWO
REACHER HEARD A whine like a starter motor, and a cough, and then two huge truck engines burst into life and the second door started to open. Up close and on foot it was a different experience. The truck engines were as big and as loud as anything they put on a Mack or a Peterbilt. The doors were huge and thick, like buildings all their own.
And up close and on foot they seemed to move faster. Or maybe that was an illusion. Which would be understandable. Because the gap was going to be man-sized a long time before it was vehicle-sized. Everything was relative. Ten more seconds and the gap would be big enough to step out on stage.
The big diesels dug in, and the gap grew two feet wide.
Then two and a half.
Reacher raised the Glock.
He stepped through the gap.
No one there.
Reacher was in an empty garage. The space was maybe forty feet by forty. It had a sad old pick-up truck in one corner, grey primer, down at the front on a flat tyre, but that was it in terms of vehicle content. The rest was all empty space and oil stains. All the way to the back wall, which was a recent installation in plywood. The side walls and the ceiling were the original concrete. And in fact the side walls and the ceiling were all more or less the same thing. Like a tunnel, continuing on from the entrance tunnel, forty feet wide and probably four hundred feet long, but now interrupted by the new partition.
There were three ways out of the garage, not counting the door Reacher had just come in through, which would be a fourth. There was a new door dead ahead in the plywood partition, and there was an original door in each of the side walls. In those two original spots the tunnel's vaulted curve was straightened out by a door frame cast so thick and so deep it was almost a tunnel in itself. Reacher pictured the complexity of the lumber formwork, and the anxious DoD engineers inspecting it, and the immense stress it was under until the mass of concrete had set.
The original door on the right was taped over.
It had a sheet of heavy see-through plastic laid over it, fixed at the edges with what looked like a whole roll of duct tape.
Purpose unknown.
But Reacher's motto was if in doubt, turn left, so he went the other way. Through the other original door, in the left-hand side wall. The door itself was a stout old item faced in some kind of faded laminate. Probably a real big deal fifty years ago. Some kind of a new wonder material. The handle was a plain steel affair, but thick and solid. Probably cost a thousand dollars all on its own.
Reacher turned the thick steel handle and pushed the door and stepped into a square room made from two old walls and two new. Some kind of a crew room. Comfortable chairs, low to the ground. A man in one of the chairs. Not McQueen. He started to get up. He went back down easily enough. Centre mass, not a head shot. Safer. More to aim at. Instantaneous brain death not required. Not in that situation. The guy's finger was not on a launch button.
The crew room had a second door, and Reacher kept the Glock hard on it until he was sure no one was coming to the rescue. Then he moved on, through that second door, into a long narrow internal hallway that ran away from him to the right, four hundred feet or more. He was beginning to see the layout. The building inside was three parallel chambers, long and thin, like three cigars laid side by side. Corresponding with the three entrances. All full of missiles, way back when. Then empty, just three long echoing vaults. Now colonized and boxed off with plywood. Long central hallways, rooms to the left, rooms to the right, repeated three times over. Which was ironic. What goes around comes around. The modern DoD had started out exactly the same way. Massive expansion at the start of World War Two had left it scrambling. It burrowed into whatever unsuitable old building it could find.
The bad news was, there were a lot of new rooms. Possibly forty per chamber. A total of a hundred and twenty. Plus or minus. Quantico would arrive before he was halfway through the search. Which would be a problem. They would have gotten Delfuenso's call well before then. She would have told them to land at Whiteman and head north locked and loaded and ready to rock and roll. The crossfire was not going to be pretty.
And the even worse news was plywood was not a good insulator of sound. Which meant the last gunshot had been clearly audible throughout fully one-third of the facility. So Reacher ducked back the way he had come, through the crew room, past the dead guy in the low-slung chair, and into the garage again. The big mechanized doors were still standing open. Like pulled drapes. Beyond them was the hundred-foot entrance tunnel, still with the wrecked pick-up and the two dead guys in it. Reacher found the inside button and hit it. The starter whined and the big diesels caught and the doors began to close. The noise was deafening. Which was exactly what Reacher wanted. Given a choice he liked his rear flank protected, and he wanted plenty of audible warning if someone tried to come in after him.
Then he walked the depth of the garage space and tried the new door in the plywood end partition. It opened into the same kind of long, narrow central corridor. Rooms to the left, rooms to the right. The centre vault, colonized just like the first vault. Some of the doors had blue spots on them. Plastic circles, cut out and glued on. The second room on the left and the second room on the right both had one. That pattern repeated every three rooms as far as the eye could see.
Reacher checked behind him. The door he had come through had two blue spots.
He listened hard and heard nothing. He took a breath and counted to three and set off walking. To the second door on the right. A cheap store-bought item. With a thin chrome handle. And a blue spot, at eye level.
He turned the thin chrome handle. He pushed open the door. A room, of decent size. Empty. No people. No furniture. No nothing, except what had been there all along, which was another original door through the side wall. It was identical to the first two he had seen, with the complex cast frame like a tunnel all its own, and the pale old laminate facing, and the heavy steel handle. Clearly the blue spot meant a way through, side to side. A shortcut, from chamber to chamber. For busy people. The garage door got two blue spots because it had ways through both left and right. The lateral access was an efficiency measure. Both now, apparently, and certainly back when missiles roamed the earth. It would have been time-consuming for a technician to walk the whole length of the building and go outside and then come back in down a different tunnel. Far better to facilitate a little crosstown traffic. Maybe every sixty feet or so. Some guy with a clipboard would have figured that out, long ago. The architects would have gotten to work, with drafting tables and sharpened pencils, and load factors calculated with slide rules and guesswork.
Reacher was in a room on the right-hand side of the row. And just like the door he had seen on the right in the garage, this door on the right was also covered over with thick see-through plastic, which was also stuck down very carefully at the edges with duct tape. Lots of it.
Purpose unknown.
He had two motel keys in his pocket. One from the fat man's place in Iowa, and one from the FBI's quarantine spot in Kansas. The fat man's key was sharper. The tang at the end had been left pretty rough by the key-cutting process. Maybe the key was a replacement. Maybe some guest had headed home with the original still in his pocket, and maybe the fat man's policy was to use the cheapest services he could find.