again and she slammed the door and fought her way over into
the front passenger seat. She belted herself in and jammed the
Heckler & Koch down between her knees and braced herself
with both hands on the dash like she was fighting a roller
coaster ride.
‘Perfect,’ she said. She was panting hard. He raced on.
Curved back to the north until he found the swath the Tahoe
had blasted through the grass. He got himself centred in it
and hit the gas. The ride was worse than any roller coaster. It
was a continuous violent battering. The car was leaping and
shuddering and going alternately weightless and then crashing
back to earth and taking off again. The engine was screaming.
The wheel was writhing in his hands and kicking back hard
enough to break his thumbs. He kept his fingers sticking
straight out and steered with his palms only. He was afraid they
were going to shatter an axle.
‘See them yet?’ he shouted.
‘Not yet,’ she shouted back. qhey could be three hundred
yards ahead.’
‘I’m afraid the car will break.’
He hit the gas harder. He was doing nearly fifty miles an
hour. Then sixty. The faster he went, the better it rode. It spent
less actual time on the ground.
‘I see them,’ Neagley called.
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They were two hundred yards ahead, intermittently visible as
they bucked up and down through the sea of grass like a manic
gold dolphin riding the waves. Reacher pressed on and pulled a
little closer. He had the advantage. They were clearing a path
for him. He crept up to about a hundred yards back and held
steady. The engine roared and the suspension bucked and
crashed and banged.
I’hey can run,’ he screamed.
‘But they can’t hide,’ Neagley screamed back.
Ten minutes later they were ten miles west of Grace and felt
like they had been badly beaten in a fistfight. Reacher’s head
was hitting the roof over every bump and his arms were aching.
His shoulders were wrenched. The engine was still screaming.
The only way he could keep his foot on the gas pedal was to
mash it all the way down to the carpet. Neagley was bouncing
around at his side and flailing back and forth. She had given up
bracing herself with her arms in case she broke her elbows.
Over the next ten murderous miles the terrain shaded into
something new. They were literally in the middle of nowhere.
The town of Grace was twenty miles behind them and the
highway was twenty miles ahead. The grade was rising. The
land was breaking up into sharper ravines. There was more
rock. There was still grass growing, and it was still tall, but it
was thinner because the roots were shallower. And there was
snow on the ground. The grass stalks were rigid with ice and
they came up out of a six-inch white blanket. Both cars slowed,
a hundred yards apart. Within another mile the chase had
slowed to a ludicrous twenty-mile-an-hour procession. They
were inching down forty-five-degree faces, plunging hood-deep
through accumulated snow in the bottoms, clawing up the
rises with their transmissions locked in four-wheel-drive. The
crevasses ran maybe ten or fifteen feet deep. The endless wind
from the west had packed the snow into them with the lee faces
bare and the windwd faces smooth and sheer. There were
flakes in the air, whipping horizontally towards them.
‘We’re going to get stuck,’ Neagley said.
q’hey got in this way,’ Reacher said. ‘Got to be able to get
out.’
They lost sight of the Tahoe ahead of them every time it
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dropped away into a ravine. They glimpsed it only when they
laboured up a peak and caught sight of it up on a peak of
its own three or four dips in front. There was no rhythm.
No co-ordination. Both trucks were diving and then clawing
randomly upward. They had slowed to walking pace. Reacher
had the transmission locked in low-range and the truck was
slipping and sliding. Far to the west the snowstorm was wild.
The weather was blowing in fast.
‘It’s time,’ Reacher said. ‘Any one of these ravines, the snow