Die Trying by Lee Child

She threw herself at the mound in front of the ruined county office.

Scrabbled north around behind it and fought through grabbing

undergrowth. Entered the forest parallel to the main track, but thirty

yards from it. Leaned on a tree and bent double, gasping with exertion

and fear and exhilaration.

This was the real thing. This was what the whole of her life had led

her to. She could hear her father’s war stories in her head. The

jungles of Vietnam. The breathless fear of being hunted in the green

undergrowth. The triumph of each safe step, of each yard gained. She

saw the faces of the tough quiet men she had known on the bases as a

child. The instructors at Quantico. She felt the disappointment of

her posting to a safe desk in Chicago. All the training wasted,

because of who she was. Now it was different. She straightened up.

Took a deep breath. Then another. She felt her genes boiling through

her. Before, they’d felt like resented intruders. Now they felt warm

and whole and good. Her father’s daughter? You bet your ass.

Reacher was cuffed around the trunk of a hundred-foot pine. He had

been dragged down the narrow track to the Bastion. Burning with fury.

One punch and one kick was more than he had yielded since his early

childhood. The rage was burying the pain. And blurring his mind. A

life for a life, the fat bastard had said. Reacher had twisted on the

floor and the words had meant nothing to him.

But they meant something now. They had come back to him as he stood

there. Men and women had strolled up to him and smiled. Their smiles

had been the sort of smiles he had seen before, long ago.

The smiles of bored children living on an isolated base somewhere,

after they had been told the circus was coming to town.

She thought hard. She had to guess where he was. And she had to guess

where the parade ground was. She had to get herself halfway between

those two unknown locations and set up an ambush. She knew the ground

sloped steeply up to the clearing with the huts. She remembered being

brought downhill to the courthouse. She guessed the parade ground had

to be a large flat area. Therefore it had to be further uphill, to the

northwest, where the ground leveled out in the mountain bowl. Some

distance beyond the huts. She set off uphill through the trees.

She tried to figure out where the main path was running. Every few

yards she stopped and peered south, turning left and right to catch a

glimpse of the gaps in the forest canopy where the trees had been

cleared. That way, she could deduce the direction of the track. She

kept herself parallel to it, thirty or forty yards away to the north,

and fought through the tough whippy stems growing sideways from the

trunks. It was all uphill, steep, and it was hard work. She used her

crutch like a boatman uses a pole, planting it securely in the soil and

thrusting herself upward against it.

In a way, her knee helped her. It made her climb slowly and carefully.

It made her quiet. And she knew how to do this. From old Vietnam

stories, not from Quantico. The Academy had concentrated on urban

situations. The Bureau had taught her how to stalk through a city

street or a darkened building. How to stalk through a forest came from

an earlier layer of memory.

Some people strolled up and strolled away, but some of them stayed.

After a quarter-hour, there was a small crowd of maybe fifteen or

sixteen people, mostly men, standing aimlessly in a wide semicircle

around him. They kept their distance, like rubber neckers at a car

wreck, behind an invisible police line. They stared at him, silently,

not much in their faces. He stared back. He let his gaze rest on each

one in turn, several seconds at a time. He kept his arms hitched as

high behind him as he could manage. He wanted to keep his feet free

for action, in case any of them felt like starting the show a little