who had met them with the car and maybe eight soldiers near it. Big,
silent men, pitching tents on the shoulder in the lee of the rocks.
Brogan and Milosevic nodded a greeting to them and strolled back south.
They rejoined McGrath and waited.
Within forty minutes they all heard the faint roar of heavy diesels far
to the south. The noise built and then burst around the curve. There
was a small convoy of trucks. Big, boxy vehicles, mounted high on
exaggerated drive trains big wheels, huge tires, axles grinding around.
They roared nearer, moving slow in low gear. The officer from the car
ran to meet them. Pointed them up to where he wanted them. They
roared slowly past and stopped two abreast in the road where it
straightened into the rock cutting.
There were four vehicles. Black and green camouflage, rolls of netting
on the flanks, stenciled numbers and big single stars in white. The
front two trucks bristled with antennas and small dishes. The rear two
were accommodations. Each vehicle had hydraulic jacks at each corner.
The drivers lowered the jacks and the weight came up off the tires. The
jacks pushed against the camber of the road and leveled the floors.
Then the engines cut off and the loud diesel roaring died into the
mountain silence.
The four drivers vaulted down. They ran to the rear of their trucks
and opened the doors. Reached in and folded down short aluminum
ladders. Went up inside and flicked switches. The four interiors lit
up with green light. The drivers came back out. Regrouped and saluted
the officer.
“All yours, sir,” the point man said.
The officer nodded. Pointed to the Chevy.
“Drive back in that,” he said. “And forget you were ever here.”
The point man saluted again.
“Understood, sir,” he said.
The four drivers walked to the Chevy. Their boots were loud in the
silence. They got in the car and fired it up. Turned in the road and
disappeared south.
Back in his office, Webster found the Borken profile on his desk and a
visitor waiting for him. Green uniform under a khaki trenchcoat, maybe
sixty, sixty-five, iron-gray stubble on part of his head, battered
brown leather briefcase under his arm, battered canvas suit carrier on
the floor at his feet.
“I understand you need to talk to me,” the guy said. “I’m General
Garber. I was Jack Reacher’s CO for a number of years.”
Webster nodded.
“I’m going to Montana,” he said. “You can talk to me there.”
“We anticipated that,” Garber said. “If the Bureau can fly us out to
Kalispell, the air force will take us on the rest of the way by
helicopter.”
Webster nodded again. Buzzed through to his secretary. She was
off-duty.
“Shit,” Webster said.
“My driver is waiting,” Garber said. “He’ll take us out to Andrews.”
Webster called ahead from the car and the Bureau Lear was waiting
ready. Twenty minutes after leaving the White House Webster was in the
air heading west over the center of the city. He wondered if the
president could hear the scream of his engines through his thick
bulletproof glass.
The air force technicians arrived with the satellite trucks an hour
after the command post had been installed. There were two vehicles in
their convoy. The first was similar to the command post itself; big,
high, boxy, hydraulic jacks at each corner, a short aluminum ladder for
access. The second was a long flatbed truck with a big satellite dish
mounted high on an articulated mechanism. As soon as it was parked and
level, the mechanism kicked in and swung the dish up to find the
planes, seven miles up in the darkening sky. It locked on and the
delicate electronics settled down to tracking the moving signals. There
was a continuous motor sound as the dish moved through a subtle arc,
too slowly for the eye to detect. The techs hauled out a cable the
thickness of a sapling’s trunk from the flatbed and locked it into a
port on the side of the closed truck. Then they swarmed up inside and
fired up the monitors and the recorders.
McGrath hitched a ride with the soldiers in the armored carrier. They