would be pressing on them with all the torque of a big diesel engine,
but it wouldn’t be enough. He couldn’t imagine how much force it would
take to shatter that old log.
He thought about using a missile. Gave it up. Too noisy and it
wouldn’t work anyway. They didn’t arm themselves until they were
thirty feet into the air. And they only carried six and a half pounds
of explosive. Enough to smash a jet engine in flight, but six and a
half pounds of explosive against those old timbers would be like
scratching at them with a nail file He was trapped inside, and Holly
was waiting.
It was not in his nature to panic. Never had been. He was a calm man,
and his long training had made him calmer. He had been taught to
assess and evaluate, and to use pure force of will to prevail. You’re
Jack Readier, he had been told. You can do anything. First his mother
had told him, then his father, then the quiet deadly men in the
training schools. And he had believed them.
But, at the same time, he hadn’t believed them. Part of his mind
always said: you’ve just been lucky. Always lucky. And, in the quiet
times, he would sit and wait for his luck to run out. He sat on the
stony ground with his back against the timbers of the door and asked
himself: has it run out now?
He flicked the flashlight beam around the cavern. The rats were
staying away from him. They were interested in the darkness in back.
They’re deserting me, he thought. Deserting the sinking ship. Then
his mind clicked in again. No, they’re interested in the tunnels, he
thought. Because tunnels lead places. He remembered the giant mouse
holes blasted into the rock face, north wall of the bowl. Maybe all
interconnected by these narrow seams in back.
He ran back into the depth of the cavern, past the trucks, past the
grotesque heap of corpses. Back to where he could no longer stand. A
rat disappeared into the seam to his left. He dropped to his stomach
and flicked the flashlight on. Crawled after it.
He crawled into a skeleton. He scrabbled with his feet and came face
to face with a grinning skull. And another. There were four or five
skeletons jammed into the excavated seam. Jumbled bones in a pile. He
gasped in shock and backed off a foot. Looked carefully. Used the
flashlight close up.
All males. He could see that from the five pelvises. The skulls
showed gunshot wounds. All in the temples. Neat entry wounds, neat
exit holes. Jacketed high-velocity handgun bullets. Fairly recent,
certainly within a year. The flesh hadn’t decayed. It had been eaten
off. He could see the parallel scrape marks on the bones from rodent
teeth.
The bones were all disturbed. The rats had hauled them away to eat.
There were scraps of clothing material here and there. Some of the
ribcages were still covered. Rats don’t disturb clothing much. Not on
the torso. Why should they? They eat their way in through the inside.
The soft parts first. They come to the ribs from the back.
The clothing material was khaki and olive green. Some black and gray
camouflage. Reacher saw a colored thread. Traced it back to a
shoulder flash hidden under a gnawed shoulder blade. It was a curved
felt badge embroidered in silk. It said: Northwestern Freemen. He
pulled at the skeleton’s jacket. The ribcage collapsed. The breast
pocket had three chromium stars punched through.
Reacher made a thorough search, lying on his stomach, up to his armpits
in bones. He pieced together five separate uniforms. He found two
more badges. One said: White Christian Identity. The other said:
Montana Constitutional Militia. He lined up the five splintered
skulls. Checked the teeth. He was looking at five men, middle-aged,
maybe between forty and fifty. Five leaders. The leaders who had
disappeared. The leaders who could not stand the pace. The leaders
who had abandoned their members to Beau Borken.
The roof was too low for Reacher to climb over the bones. He had to
push them aside and crawl through them. The rats showed no interest.