from the roof. A full spectrum of noise. Holly lay down next to
Reacher. She put her head next to his. Her hair fanned out and
brushed his cheek and fell to his neck. She squirmed her hips and
straightened her leg. There was still space between their bodies. The
decorous V shape was still there. But the angle was a little tighter
than it had been before.
“But what can he do?” Reacher said. Talk me through it.”
“They’re going to make some kind of demand,” she said. “You know, do
this or do that, or we hurt your girl.”
She spoke slowly and there was a tremor in her voice. Reacher let his
hand drop into the space between them and found hers. He took it and
squeezed gently.
“Doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Think about it. What does your
father do? He implements long-term policy, and he’s responsible for
short-term readiness. Congress and the president and the defense
secretary thrash out the long-term policy, right? So if the joint
chairman tried to stand in their way, they’d just replace him.
Especially if they know he’s under this kind of pressure, right?”
“What about short-term readiness?” she said.
“Same sort of a thing,” Reacher said. “He’s only chairman of a
committee. There’s the individual chiefs of staff in there too.
Army,
inv navy, air force, Marines. If they’re all singing a different song
from what your father is reporting upwards, that’s not going to stay a
secret for long, is it? They’ll just replace him. Take him out of the
equation altogether.”
Holly turned her head. Looked straight at him.
“Are you sure?” she said. “Suppose these guys are working for Iraq or
something? Suppose Saddam wants Kuwait again. But he doesn’t want
another Desert Storm. So he has me kidnaped, and my father says sorry,
can’t be done, for all kinds of invented reasons?”
Reacher shrugged.
The answer’s right there in the words you used,” he said. The reasons
would be invented. Fact is, we could do Desert Storm again, if we had
to. No problem. Everybody knows that. So if your father started
denying it, everybody would know he was bullshitting, and everybody
would know why. They’d just sideline him. The military is a tough
place, Holly, no room for sentiment. If that’s the strategy these guys
are pursuing, they’re wasting their time. It can’t work.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
Then maybe this is about revenge,” she said slowly. “Maybe somebody is
punishing him for something in the past. Maybe I’m going to Iraq.
Maybe they want to make him apologize for Desert Storm. Or Panama, or
Grenada, or lots of things.”
Reacher lay on his back and rocked with the motion. He could feel
slight breaths of air stirring, because of the holes in the roof. He
realized the truck was now a lot cooler, because of the new
ventilation. Or because of his new mood.
Too arcane,” he said. “You’d have to be a pretty acute analyst to
blame the joint chairman for all that stuff. There’s a string of more
obvious targets. Higher-profile people, right? The president, the
defense secretary, foreign service people, field generals. If Baghdad
was looking for a public humiliation they’d pick somebody their people
could identify, not some paper-shuffler from the Pentagon.”
“So what the hell is this about?” Holly said.
Reacher shrugged again.
“Ultimately, nothing,” he said. They haven’t thought it through
properly. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They’re competent, but
they’re stupid.”
The truck droned on another six hours. Another three hundred and fifty
miles, according to Reacher’s guess. The inside temperature had
cooled, but Reacher wasn’t trying to estimate their direction by the
temperature anymore. The pellet holes in the roof had upset that
calculation. He was relying on dead reckoning instead. A total of
eight hundred miles from Chicago he figured, and not in an easterly
direction. That left a big spread of possibilities. He trawled
clockwise round the map in his head. Could be in Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana. Could be in Texas, Oklahoma, the southwest
corner of Kansas. Probably no further west than that. Reacher’s
mental map had brown shading there, showing the eastern slopes of the