A Wanted Man

SEVENTY-ONE

THEIR GUNS WERE in the truck, dumped on the seats. Two Colt sub-machine guns, with canvas slings. Like M16 rifles, basically, but shorter and chambered for the nine-millimetre Parabellum. American made, nine hundred rounds a minute, twenty-round magazines, your choice of full auto or three-round bursts or single shots. Reacher didn’t like them much. America had never really gotten into the sub-machine gun business. Not in a convincing way. There were many better choices to be had from Europe. Steyr, or Heckler und Koch. Just ask Delta Force. Or Quantico, for that matter. The guys on the plane wouldn’t be armed with Colts. That was for damn sure.

But still. Something was better than nothing. Reacher checked them over. They were loaded and they seemed to work. He closed the passenger door and tracked around to the driver’s side. He pushed the seat back and got in. The engine was still running. The truck was a Ford. Nothing fancy. He wound both windows down and tucked his Glock under his right thigh and piled both Colts on the passenger seat.

Good to go.

He counted to three and put the truck in gear and moved off slowly. The ground that had felt churned up and lumpy and unreliable underfoot felt just as bad under the wheels. The truck shuddered and slipped and bounced on stiff, load-ready springs. He followed the same course the two guys had used on the way out. A straight line, basically, to the top corner of the building. Its huge bulk stayed shadowy and indistinct most of the way. But as he got closer he saw more of it. Then suddenly it was right there, out his open window. Like driving past a docked ocean liner. Poured concrete, no doubt reinforced inside by thick steel bars, and shaped by temporary wooden formwork. He could see the wood grain here and there, preserved for ever. The curves had been made by stepping flat planks around a radius. What looked smooth from a distance looked brutal and discontinuous up close. In places wet concrete had been forced out through gaps between boards. The building looked like it was lined with unfinished seams. The camouflage paint was thick and crosshatched with brush strokes. Not a tidy job. But then, camouflage talent was all about pattern, viewed from afar. Not application, viewed from up close.

He slowed and took a breath and hauled on the wheel and made the turn around the top corner and saw the north face of the building for the first time. It was a blank concrete wall with three giant protuberances coming out of it. Like squat semicircular concrete tunnels, parallel, each one straight and maybe a hundred feet long. Like elongated igloo entrances. For air raid protection. There would be blast doors at both ends of the tunnels, never to be open at the same time. Trucks would drive in through the first door, and then pause in a kind of quarantine. The first door would close behind them, and the second door would open in front of them. Then the trucks would drive on. Getting out would be the same procedure in reverse. The interior of the structure would never be exposed to external pressure waves.

Missile storage, Reacher thought. The Cold War. Anything, anywhere, any time. If the military wanted it, the military got it. In fact the military got it whether it wanted it or not.

First question: which of the three entrance tunnels was currently in use?

Which was an easy question to answer. The moonlight showed tyre tracks quite clearly. The soft earth was beaten down into two ruts, in and out of the centre tunnel. Practically a highway.

Reacher held his curve, wide and easy, and then he bumped down into an established track that would bring him head on to the centre door. Which was closed. It had a frame wider than the mouth of the tunnel. Like an airplane hangar. The door would open in two halves, like a theatre curtain, rolling on big iron wheels and rails.

Open how? There was no radio in the car. No surveillance camera near the door. No light beam to be tripped, no call button, no intercom. Reacher drove slowly forward, unsure, with the door ahead of him like a high steel wall. Behind the railing on the roof he could see sentries. Five of them, long guns over their shoulders on slings, peering out into the middle distance in what looked like a fairly desultory fashion. Sentry duty was arduous and boring. Not what the average adventurer signs up for. No excitement. No glamour.

Reacher came to a stop with the pick-up’s grille a yard from the door.

The door started to open.

The two halves broke some kind of a seal between them and set off grinding back along their tracks, driven by what sounded like truck engines straining under the load. The whole assembly must have weighed hundreds of tons. Blastproof. Whatever the military wanted. The gap widened. Two feet. Three. There was dim light in the tunnel. Weak bulbs, in wire cages, strung out along the ceiling. Reacher tugged the Glock out from under his leg. He held it, low down and out of sight.

The doors stopped when the gap got to be about seven feet wide. Enough for a passenger vehicle. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and put his left hand on the wheel and touched the gas and rolled inside.

And saw four things: a guy right next to him, right next to a big red button near the first door, and a guy a hundred feet away, right next to a big red button near the second door.

His earlier advice to Delfuenso: Shoot them in the face, before they even say hello.

Which he did, with the first guy. Although not technically in the face. He raised the Glock a little higher and drilled the guy through the centre of the forehead, about where Sorenson had gotten hers.

Save rounds. No double taps. Which was OK. The first one had worked just fine. The guy was in some kind of a baggy green uniform. He had a handgun on his belt, in a big flapped holster. Not like any military thing Reacher had ever seen. More like folk art.

Reacher looked up again. The second guy was too far away. A hundred feet was too long for a handgun. So he stepped out of the truck and hit the big red button. The giant door started to close again behind him. He waited. The second guy waited. Still a hundred feet away. Still too far for a handgun. So Reacher got back in the truck and put his seat belt on. Then he stamped on the gas and accelerated. Straight at the second guy. Who froze for a fatal second. Who fumbled with his big flapped holster. Who gave up on it and ran. Away from his door. No way to open it in a hurry. Not an escape hatch. The mechanism was too slow. The guy was going to take his chances loose inside the tunnel. Which was dumb. The guy wasn’t thinking strategically. He wasn’t thinking himself into his opponent’s frame of mind. He was going to duck and dive and dodge, and then dart away and hug the side wall. He was going to assume no driver would risk wrecking his vehicle against the concrete.

Reacher drove on, left handed.

And sure enough, the guy feinted one way, and feinted the other, and then slammed himself flat against the wall, like a bullfighter, assuming Reacher would swing close but swerve away before contact.

Mistake.

Reacher ran straight into him at about thirty miles an hour, smashing the front of the truck mercilessly into the concrete, taking the guy between the knees and the waist, crushing him, seeing the shock on his face, and then the hood panel folded up from the crash like a concertina and he didn’t see him any more. Reacher was slammed against his seat belt and the windshield shattered and the truck came up on its front wheels and then crashed back down and Reacher was thrown back hard against the cushion. All kinds of smoke and steam rose up. The noise had been short but loud and it had brought ferocious echoes off the concrete, tearing, crushing metal, breaking glass, harsh clangs from separating components. Bumpers, Reacher thought, and headlight bezels and hub caps. Things like that.

The tunnel went quiet. Reacher sat still for a second. He figured very little would have been heard beyond the second door. If anything at all. The door was designed to be effective against a hundred-megaton atom bomb. The pop of a single nine-millimetre round and the sound of a car crash would be nothing to it.

He forced open his distorted door and climbed out of the wreckage. He stepped around to what was left of the hood. The second guy was about cut in half. Bleeding badly from every hole he had. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned. Foreign, for sure. But we all bleed the same colour red. No doubt about that. The truth of that statement was plain to see. Reacher put the guy out of his misery. A single shot, close range, behind the ear. An unnecessary round expended, but good manners had a price.

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.