Then he froze. There was a crashing noise up ahead and a patrol of six
men burst around a tight thicket of pines and stopped dead in front of
them. They had M-16s in their hands, grenades on their belts, and
surprise and delight on their faces.
Borken had deployed every man he had to the search for Reacher, except
for the two he had retained to deal with Holly. He heard them start
down the courthouse stairs. He pulled the radio from his pocket and
flipped it open. Extended the stubby antenna and pressed the button.
“Webster?” he said. “Get focused in, OK? We’ll talk again in a
minute.”
He didn’t wait for any reply. Just snapped the radio off and turned
his head as he tracked the sound of the footsteps on their way
outside.
From seventy-five yards south, Garber saw them come out of the door and
down the steps. He had moved out of the woods. He had moved forward
and crouched behind the outcrop of rock. He figured that was safe
enough, now he had back-up of a sort. The Chinook crewmen were thirty
yards behind him, well separated, well hidden, instructed to yell if
anybody approached from the rear. So Garber was resting easy, staring
up the slope at the big white building.
He saw two armed men, bearded, starting down the steps. They were
dragging a smaller figure with a crutch. A halo of dark hair, neat
green fatigues. Holly Johnson. He had never seen her before. Only in
the photographs the Bureau men had showed him. The photographs had not
done her justice. Even from seventy-five yards, he could feel the glow
of her character. Some kind of radiant energy. He felt it, and pulled
his rifle closer.
The M-16 in Reacher’s hands was a 1987 product manufactured by the Colt
Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the A2 version. Its
principal new feature was the replacement of automatic fire with burst
fire. For the sake of economy, the trigger relocked after each burst
of three shells. The idea was to waste less ammunition.
Six targets, three shells each from the fresh magazine, a total of
eighteen shells and six trigger pulls. Each burst of three shells took
a fifth of a second, so the firing sequence itself amounted to just one
and a fifth seconds. It was pulling the trigger over and over again
which wasted the time. It wasted so much time for Reacher that he ran
into trouble after the fourth guy was down. He wasn’t aiming. He was
just tracking a casual left-to-right arc, close range into the bodies
in front of him. The opposing rifles were coming up as a unit. The
first four never got there. But the fifth and the sixth were already
raised horizontal by the time the fourth went back down,
two-and-a-quarter seconds into the sequence.
So Reacher gambled. It was the sort of instinctive gamble you take so
fast that to call it a split-second decision is to understate the speed
by an absurd factor. He skipped his M-16 straight to the sixth guy,
totally sure that McGrath would take the fifth guy with the Clock. The
sort of instinctive gamble you take based on absolutely nothing at all
except a feeling, which is itself based on absolutely nothing at all
except the look of the guy and how he compares with the look of other
people worth trusting in the past.
The flat crack of the Clock was lost under the rattle of the M-16 but
the fifth guy went down simultaneous with the sixth. Reacher and
McGrath crashed sideways together into the brush and flattened into the
ground. Stared through the sudden dead silence at the cordite smoke
rising gently through the shafts of sunlight. No movement. No
survivors. McGrath blew a big sigh and stuck out his hand, from flat
on the ground. Reacher twisted around and shook it.
“You’re pretty quick for an old guy,” he said.
That’s how I got to be an old guy,” McGrath said back.
They stood up slowly and ducked back farther into the trees. Then they
could hear more people moving toward them in the forest. A stream of