get banished, or he raves at you until you agree with him. Nobody can
stand up to him. He controls us, totally.”
Reacher nodded again. The woman sagged against him. Tears were on her
cheeks.
“And we can’t win, can we?” she said. “Not if they attack us. There’s
only a hundred of us, trained up. We can’t beat an army with a hundred
people, can we? We’re all going to die.”
Her eyes were wide and white and desperate. Reacher shrugged. Shook
his head and tried to make his voice sound calm and reassuring.
“It’ll be a siege,” he said. That’s all. A stand-off. They’ll
negotiate. It’s happened before. And it’ll be the FBI, not the army.
The FBI know how to do this kind of a thing. You’ll all be OK. They
won’t kill you. They won’t come here looking to kill anybody. That’s
just Borken’s propaganda.”
“Live free or die,” she said. That’s what he keeps saying.”
The FBI will handle it,” he said again. “Nobody’s looking to kill
you.”
The woman clamped her lips and screwed her wet eyes shut and shook her
head wildly.
“No, Borken will kill us,” she said. “He’ll do it, not them. Live
free or die, don’t you understand? If they come, he’ll kill us all. Or
else he’ll make us all kill ourselves. Like a mass suicide thing.
He’ll make us do it, I know he will.”
Reacher just stared at her.
“I heard them talking,” she said. “Whispering about it all the time,
making secret plans. They said women and children would die. They
said it was justifiable. They said it was historic and important. They
said the circumstances demanded it.”
“You heard them?” Reacher asked. “When?”
“All the time,” she whispered again. They’re always making plans.
Borken and the ones he trusts. Women and children have to die, they
said. They’re going to make us kill ourselves. Mass suicide. Our
families. Our children. At the mines.
I think they’re going to make us go in the mines and kill ourselves.”
He stayed in the woods until he was well north of the parade ground.
Then he tracked east until he saw the road, running up out of Yorke. It
was potholed and rough, gleaming gray in the moonlight. He stayed in
the shadow of the trees and followed it north.
The road wound up a mountainside in tight hairpin bends. A sure sign
it led to something worthwhile, otherwise the labor consumed in its
construction would have been meaningless. After a mile of winding and
a thousand feet of elevation, the final curve gave out onto a bowl the
size of a deserted stadium. It was part natural, part blasted, hanging
there in the belly of the giant peaks. The back walls of the bowl were
sheer rock faces. There were semicircular holes blasted into them at
intervals. They looked like giant mouse holes Some of them had been
built out with waste rock, to provide sheltered entrances. Two of the
entrances had been enlarged into giant stone sheds, roofed with
timber.
The bowl was floored with loose shale. There were piles of earth and
spoil everywhere. Ragged weeds and saplings were forcing their way
through. Readier could see the rusted remains of rail tracks, starting
nowhere and running a few yards. He squatted against a tree, well back
in the woods, and watched.
There was nothing happening. The whole place was deserted and silent.
Quieter than silent. It had that total absence of sound that gets left
behind when a busy place is abandoned. The natural sounds were long
gone. The swaying trees cleared, the rushing streams diverted, the
rustling vegetation burned off, replaced by clattering machines and
shouting men. Then when the men and the machines leave, there is
nothing left behind to replace their noise. Reacher strained his ears
but heard nothing at all. Silent as the moon.
He stayed in the woods. To approach from the south meant to approach
uphill. He skirted around to the west and gained an extra hundred feet
of height. Paused and looked down into the bowl from a new
perspective.
Still nothing. But there had been something. Some recent activity.