Die Trying

The pilot won an extra second, but that was all. The Stinger caught him right at the top of his desperate climb. It followed the trail of heat all the way into the starboard engine itself. Exploded hard against the exhaust nacelle.

Six and a half pounds of high explosive against ten tons of aircraft, but the explosive always wins. Reacher saw the starboard engine disintegrate, then the rear rotor housing blow off. Shattered fragments of the drivetrain exploded outward like shrapnel and the rotor detached and spun away in terrible slow motion. The Chinook stalled in the air and fell, tail down, checked only by the screaming forward rotor, and slowly spun to the earth, like a holed ship slips slowly below the sea.

HOLLY HEARD THE helicopter. She heard the low-frequency beat pulsing faintly through her walls. She heard it grow louder. Then she heard the explosion and the shriek of the forward rotor grabbing the air. Then she heard nothing.

She jammed her elbow into her crutch and limped across to the diagonal partition. The prison room was completely empty except for the mattress. So her search was going to have to start again in the bathroom.

“ONLY ONE QUESTION,”Webster said. “How long can we keep the lid on this?”

General Johnson said nothing in reply. Neither did his aide. Webster moved his gaze across to Garber. Garber was looking grim.

“Not too damn long,” he said.

“But how long?” Webster asked. “A day? An hour?”

“Six hours,” Garber said.

“Why?” McGrath asked.

“Standard procedure,” Garber said. “They’ll investigate the crash, obviously. Normally they’d send another chopper out. But not if there’s a suspicion of ground fire. So they’ll come by road from Malmstrom. Six hours.”

Webster nodded. Turned to Johnson.

“Can you delay them, General?” he asked.

Johnson shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. His voice was low and resigned. “They just lost a Chinook. Crew of two. I can’t call them and say, do me a favor, don’t investigate that. I could try, I guess, and they might agree at first, but it would leak, and then we’d be back where we started. Might gain us an hour.”

Webster nodded.

“Seven hours, six hours, what’s the difference?” he said.

Nobody replied.

“We’ve got to move now,” McGrath said. “Forget the White House. We can’t wait any longer. We need to do something right now, people. Six hours from now, the whole situation blows right out of control. We’ll lose her.”

Six hours is three hundred and sixty minutes. They wasted the first two sitting in silence. Johnson stared into space. Webster drummed his fingers on the table. Garber stared at McGrath, a wry expression on his face. McGrath was staring at the map. Milosevic and Brogan were standing in the silence, holding the brown bags of breakfast and the Styrofoam cups.

“Coffee here, anybody wants it,” Brogan said.

Garber waved him over.

“Eat and plan,” he said.

“Map,” Johnson said.

McGrath slid the map across the table. They all sat forward. Back in motion. Three hundred and fifty-eight minutes to go.

“Ravine’s about four miles north of us,” the aide said. “All we got is eight Marines in a LAV- 25.”

“That tank thing?” McGrath asked.

The aide shook his head.

“Light armored vehicle,” he said. “LAV. Eight wheels, no tracks.”

“Bulletproof?” Webster asked.

“For sure,” the aide said. “They can drive it all the way to Yorke.”

“If it gets through the ravine,” Garber said.

Johnson nodded.

“That’s the big question,” he said. “We need to go take a look.”

THE LIGHT ARMORED vehicle looked just like a tank to McGrath’s hasty civilian glance, except there were eight wheels on it instead of tracks. The hull was welded up out of brutal sloping armor plates and there was a turret with a gun. The driver sat forward, and the commander sat in the turret. In the rear, two rows of three Marines sat back to back, facing weapon ports. Each port had its own periscope. McGrath could visualize the vehicle rumbling into battle, invulnerable, weapons bristling out of those ports. Down into the ravine, up the other side, along the road to Yorke to the courthouse. He pulled Webster to one side and spoke urgently.

“We never told them,” he said. “About the dynamite in the walls.”

“And we’re not going to,” Webster said quietly. “The old guy would freak out. He’s close to falling apart right now. I’m going to tell the Marines direct. They’re going in there. They’ll have to deal with it. Makes no difference if Johnson knows in advance or not.”

McGrath intercepted Johnson and Webster ran over to the armored vehicle. McGrath saw the Marine commander leaning down from the turret. Saw him nodding and grimacing as Webster spoke. Then the General’s aide fired up the Army Chevrolet. Johnson and Garber crammed into the front with him. McGrath jumped in back. Brogan and Milosevic crushed in alongside him.

Webster finished up and raced back to the Chevy. Squeezed in next to Milosevic. The LAV fired up its big diesel with a blast of black smoke. Then it crunched into gear and lumbered off north. The Chevy accelerated in its wake.

FOUR MILES NORTH, they crested a slight rise and entered a curve. Slowed and jammed to a stop in the lee of a craggy outcrop. The Marine commander vaulted down from the turret and ran north on the road. Webster and Johnson and McGrath got out and hurried after him. They paused together in the lee of the rock face and crept around the curve. Stared out and down into the ravine. It was an intimidating sight.

It ran left to right in front of them, more or less straight. And it was not just a trench. It was a trench and a step. The whole crust of the earth had fractured, and the southern plate had fallen below the level of the northern plate. Like adjacent sections of an old concrete highway, where a car thumps up an inch at the seam. Expanded to geological size, that inch was a fifty-foot disparity.

Where the earth had fractured and fallen, the edges had broken up into giant boulders. The scouring of the glaciers had tumbled those boulders south. The ice and the heave and the weather over a million years had raked out the fracture and turned it into a trench. It had cut back the rock plates to where they became solid again. Some places, it had carved a hundred-yard width. Other places, tougher seams of rock had kept the gap down to twenty yards.

Then the roots of a thousand generations of trees and the frozen water of the winters had eroded the edges until there was a steep ragged descent to the bottom and a steep ragged rise back up the northern side to the top, fifty feet higher than the starting point. There were stunted trees and tangled undergrowth and rock slides. The road itself was lifted progressively on concrete trestles and rose gently across a bridge. Then more concrete trestles set it down on the level ground to the north and it snaked away through the forest into the mountains.

But the bridge was blown. Charges had been exploded against the two center trestles. A twenty-foot section of the center span had fallen a hundred feet into the trench. The four men in the lee of the outcrop could see fragments of the road lying shattered in the bottom of the ravine.

“What do you think?” Johnson asked urgently.

The Marine commander was giving it a fast sweep through his field glasses. Left and right, up and down, examining the exact terrain.

“I think it’s shit, sir,” he said.

“Can you get through?” Johnson asked him.

The guy lowered his field glasses and shook his head.

“Not a hope in hell,” he said.

He stepped across shoulder to shoulder with the General, so Johnson could share the same line of sight. Started talking rapidly and pointing as he did so.