One Shot (57 page)

'This is your position,' he whispered. 'Check it out'

Cash moved forward and knelt down in the weeds. Six
feet away he was invisible. He switched on his night
scope and raised his rifle. Tracked it slowly left and
right, up and down. 'Three storeys plus a basement,' he
whispered. 'High-pitched shingle roof, plank siding,
many windows, one door visible to the west. No cover
at all in any direction. They bulldozed everything flat, all
around. Nothing's growing. You're going to look like a
beetle on a bed sheet out there.' 'Cameras?'

The rifle tracked a steady line from left to right. 'Under
the eaves. One on the north side, one on the west. We
can assume the same on the sides we can't see.' 'How
big are they?'

'How big do you want them to be?'

'Big enough for you to hit.'

'Funny man. If they were spy cameras built into
cigarette lighters I could hit them from here.'

'OK, so listen up,' Reacher whispered. 'This is how
we're going to do it. I'm going to get to my starting
position. Then we're all going to wait for Franklin to get
back and put the comms net on the air. Then I'm going
to make a move. If I don't feel good I'm going to call in
fire on those cameras. I say the word, I want you to take
them out. Two shots, bang, bang. That'll slow them
down, maybe ten or twenty seconds.' 'Negative,' Cash
said. 'I won't direct live rounds into a wooden structure
we know contains a noncombatant hostage.' 'She'll be
in the basement,' Reacher said.

'Or the attic'

'You'd be firing at the eaves.'

'Exactly. She's in the attic, she hears gunfire, she hits
the deck, that's exactly where I'm aiming. One man's
ceiling is another man's floor.' 'Spare me,' Reacher said.

'Take the risk.'

'Negative. Won't do it.'

'Christ, Gunny, you are one uptight Marine, you know
that?'

Cash didn't speak. Reacher stepped forward again
and peered round the corner of the fence. Took a long
hard look and pulled back. 'OK,' he said. 'New plan. Just
watch the west windows. You see muzzle flash, you put
suppressing fire into the room it's coming out of. We
can assume the hostage won't be in the same room as
the sniper.' Cash said nothing.

'Will you do that at least?' Reacher asked.

'You might be in the house already.'

'I'll take my chances. Voluntary assumption of risk,
OK? Helen can witness my consent. She's a lawyer.'

Cash said nothing.

'No wonder you came in third,' Reacher said. 'You
need to lighten up.'

'OK,' Cash said. 'I see hostile gunfire, I'll return it'

'Hostile is about the only kind you're going to see,
don't you think? Since you only gave me a damn knife?'

'Army,' Cash said. 'Always bitching about something.'

'What do I do?' Helen asked.

'New plan,' Reacher said. He touched the fence with
his palm. 'Keep low, follow the fence around the corner,
stop opposite the house. Stay down. They won't pick
you up there. It's too far. Listen to your phone. If I need a
distraction I'll ask you to run a little ways towards the
house and then back again. A zigzag, or a circle. Out
and back. Real fast. Just enough to put a blip on their
screen. No danger. By the time they move a rifle around
you'll be back at the fence.' She nodded. Didn't speak.

'And me?' Ann Yanni asked.

'You stay with Cash. You're the ethics police. He gets
cold feet about helping me out, you kick his ass, OK?'

Nobody spoke.

'All set?' Reacher asked. 'Set,' they said, one after the
other.

Reacher walked away into the darkness on the other
side of the road.

He kept on walking, off the blacktop, across the
shoulder, across the stony margin of the field, onward,
right into the field, all the way into the middle of the
soaking crop. He waited until the irrigation boom rolled
slowly round and caught up with him. Then he turned
ninety degrees and walked south with it, directly
underneath it, keeping pace, letting the ceaseless water
rain down and soak his hair and his skin and his
clothes. The boom pulled away as it followed its circular
path and Reacher kept straight on at a tangent and
walked into the next field. Waited once again for the
boom to find him and then walked on under it, matching
its speed, raising his arms high and wide to catch as
much drenching as he could. Then that boom swung
away and left him and he walked on to find the next one.

And the next, and the next. When at last he was
opposite the driveway entrance he simply walked in a
circle, under the last boom, waiting for his cell phone to
vibrate, like a man caught in a monsoon.

Cash's cell phone vibrated against his hip and he
pulled it out and clicked it on. Heard Franklin's voice,
quiet and cautious in his ear. 'Check in, please,' it said.

Cash heard Helen say: 'Here.'

Yanni said, 'Here,' from three feet behind him.

Cash said, 'Here.'

Then he heard Reacher say: 'Here.'

Franklin said, 'OK, you're all loud and clear, and the
ball is in your court.'

Cash heard Reacher say: 'Gunny, check the house.'

Cash lifted the rifle and swept left to right. 'No change.'

Reacher said: 'I'm on my way.'

Then there was nothing but silence. Ten seconds.

Twenty. Thirty. A whole minute. Two minutes.

Cash heard Reacher ask: 'Gunny, do you see me?'

Cash lifted the rifle again and swept the length of the
driveway from its mouth all the way to the house.

'Negative. I don't see you. Where are you?'

'About thirty yards in.'

Cash moved the rifle. Estimated thirty yards from the
road and stared through the scope. Saw nothing.

Nothing at all. 'Good work, soldier. Keep going.'

Yanni crawled forward. Whispered in Cash's ear. 'Why
don't you see him?'

'Because he's nuts.'

'No, explain it to me. You've got a night scope, right?'

'The best money can buy,' Cash said. 'And it works off
heat, just like their cameras.' Then he pointed away to
his right. 'But my guess is Reacher walked through the
fields. Soaked himself in water. It's coming straight up
from the aquifer, stone cold. So right now he's close to
ambient temperature. I can't see him, they can't see him.'

'Smart,' Yanni said.

'Brave,' Cash said. 'But ultimately dumb. Because he's
drying out every step of the way. And getting warmer.'

Reacher walked through the dark in the dirt ten feet
south of the driveway.

Not fast, not slow. His shoes were soaked and they
were sticking to the mud.

Almost coming off. He was so cold he was shivering
violently. Which was bad.

Shivering is a physiological reaction designed to warm
a cold body fast. And he didn't want to be warm. Not yet.

Vladimir had got a rhythm going. He stared at the east
monitor for four seconds, then the north for three. East,
two, three, four, north, two, three.

East, two, three, four, north, two, three. He didn't move
his chair. Just leaned a little one way, then the other.

Beside him Sokolov had a similar thing going south and
west.

Slightly

different

intervals.

Not

perfectly

synchronized. But just as good, Vladimir guessed.

Maybe even better. Sokolov had spent a lot of time on
surveillance.

Reacher walked on. Not fast, not slow. On the map the
driveway had looked to be about two hundred yards
long. On the ground it felt like an airport runway.

Straight as a die. Wide. And long, long, long.

He had been walking for ever. And he was less than
halfway to the house. He walked on. Just kept on going.

Looking ahead every step of the way, watching the
darkened windows far away in front of him.

He realized his hair wasn't dripping any more.

He touched one hand with the other. Dry. Not warm,
but no longer cold.

He walked on. He was tempted to run. Running would
get him there faster. But running would heat him up. He
was approaching the point of no return. He was right
out there in no-man's-land. And he wasn't shivering. He
raised his phone.

'Helen,' he whispered. 'I need a diversion.'

Helen took off her heels and left them neatly side by
side at the base of the fence. For an absurd moment she
felt like a person who piles all her clothes on the beach
before she walks into the sea to drown. Then she put
her palms down on the dirt like a sprinter in the blocks
and took off forward. Just ran crazily, twenty feet, thirty,
forty, and then she stopped dead and stood still facing
the house with her arms out wide like a target. Shoot
me, she thought.

Please shoot me. Then she got scared that maybe she
really meant it and she turned and ran back in a wide
zigzag loop. Threw herself down and crawled along the
fence again until she found her shoes.

Vladimir saw her on the north monitor. Nothing
recognizable. Just a brief flare that because of the
phosphor technology was smeared and a little time-lagged. But he bent his head close anyway and stared
at the after-image.

One second, two. Sokolov sensed the interruption to
his rhythm and glanced over. Three seconds, four.

'Fox?' Vladimir said.

'I didn't see it,' Sokolov said. 'But probably.'

'It ran away again.'

'OK, then.' Sokolov turned back to his own pair of
monitors. Glanced at the west view, checked the south,
and settled into his regular cadence again.

Cash had a cadence of his own. He was inching his
night scope along at what he guessed was the speed of
a walking man. But every five seconds he would sweep
it suddenly forward and back in case his estimate was
off. During one of those rapid traverses he picked up on
what looked like a pale green shadow.

'Reacher, I can see you,' he whispered. You're visible,
soldier.'

Reacher's voice came back: 'What scope have you got
on that thing?'

'Litton,' Cash said.

'Expensive, right?'

'Thirty-seven hundred dollars.'

'Got to be better than a lousy thermal camera.'

Cash didn't reply.

Reacher said: 'Well, I'm hoping so, anyway.'

He walked on. Probably the most unnatural thing a
human can force himself to do, to walk slowly and
surely towards a building that probably has a rifle in it
pointing directly at his centre mass. If Chenko had any
sense at all he would wait, and wait, and wait, until his
target was pretty close. And Chenko seemed to have
plenty of sense. Fifty yards would be good. Or thirty-five, like Chenko's range out of the parking garage.

Chenko was pretty good at thirty-five yards. That had
been made very clear. He walked on. Took the knife out
of his pocket and unsheathed it and held it right-

handed, low and easy. Transferred the phone to his left
and held it near his ear. Heard Cash say: You're totally
visible now, soldier. You're shining like the north star.

It's like you're on fire.' Forty yards to go.

Thirty-nine.

Thirty-eight.