inch of the territory, and they find out if the next man in line has
been ambushed and dumped on the floor. But these men were static. Just
standing there. Watching and listening. Bad tactic.
The selected man was wearing a forage cap. It was camouflaged with the
wrong camouflage. It was a black-and-gray interrupted pattern.
Carefully designed to be very effective in an urban environment.
Useless in a sun-dappled forest. Garber had come up behind the man and
swung the rock. Hit him neatly on the back of the head.
Hit him too hard. Problem was, people are different. There’s no set
amount of impact that will do it. Not like playing pool. You want to
roll the ball into the corner pocket, you know just about exactly how
hard you need to cue. But skulls are different. Some are hard. This
man’s wasn’t. It cracked like an eggshell and the spinal cord severed
right up at the top and the man was dead before he hit the ground.
“Shit,” Garber breathed.
He wasn’t worried about the ethics of the situation. Not worried about
that at all. Forty years of dealing with hard men gone bad had defined
a whole lot of points for him, ethically. He was worried about
buzzards. Unconscious men don’t attract them. Dead men do. Buzzards
circling overhead spread information. They tell the other sentries:
one of your number is dead.
So Garber changed his plan slightly. He took the dead man’s M-16 and
moved forward farther than he really wanted to. He moved up to within
twenty yards of where the trees petered out. He worked left and right
until he saw a rock outcrop, ten yards beyond the edge of the woods.
That would be the site of his next cautious penetration. He slipped
behind a tree and squatted down. Stripped the rifle and checked its
condition. Reassembled it, and waited.
Harland Webster rolled back the videotape for the fourth time and
watched the action again. The puff of pink mist, the guard going down,
the second guard taking off, the camera’s sudden jerked zoom out to
cover the whole of the clearing, the second guard silently sprawling.
Then a long pause. Then Reacher’s crazy sprint. Reacher tossing
bodies out of the way, slashing at the ropes, bundling McGrath to
safety.
“We made a mistake about that guy,” Webster said.
General Johnson nodded.
“I wish Garber was still here,” he said. “I owe him an apology.”
“Planes are low on fuel,” the aide said into the silence.
OCA
Johnson nodded again.
“Send one back,” he said. “We don’t need both of them up there
anymore. Let them spell each other.”
The aide called Peterson and within half a minute three of the six
screens in the vehicle went blank as the outer plane peeled off and
headed south. The inner plane relaxed its radius and zoomed its camera
out to cover the whole area. The close-up of the clearing fell away to
the size of a quarter and the big white courthouse swam into view,
bottom right-hand corner of the screens. Three identical views on
three glowing screens, one for each of them. They hunched forward in
their chairs and stared. The radio in Webster’s pocket started
crackling.
“Webster?” Borken’s voice said. “You there?”
“I’m here,” Webster replied.
“What’s with the plane?” Borken said. “You losing interest or
something?”
For a second, Webster wondered how he knew. Then he remembered the
vapor trails. They were like a diagram, up there in the sky.
“Who was it?” he asked. “Brogan or Milosevic?”
“What’s with the plane?” Borken asked again.
“Low fuel,” Webster said. “It’ll be back.”
There was a pause. Then Borken’s voice came back.
“OK,” he said.
“So who was it?” Webster asked again. “Brogan or Milosevic?”
But the radio just went dead on him. He clicked the button off and
caught Johnson looking at him. Johnson’s face was saying: the military
man turned out good and the Bureau guy turned out bad. Webster
shrugged. Tried to make it rueful. Tried to make it mean: we both
made mistakes. But Johnson’s face said: you should have known.
“Could be a problem, right?” the aide said. “Brogan and Milosevic?