Die Trying by Lee Child

get banished, or he raves at you until you agree with him. Nobody can

stand up to him. He controls us, totally.”

Reacher nodded again. The woman sagged against him. Tears were on her

cheeks.

“And we can’t win, can we?” she said. “Not if they attack us. There’s

only a hundred of us, trained up. We can’t beat an army with a hundred

people, can we? We’re all going to die.”

Her eyes were wide and white and desperate. Reacher shrugged. Shook

his head and tried to make his voice sound calm and reassuring.

“It’ll be a siege,” he said. That’s all. A stand-off. They’ll

negotiate. It’s happened before. And it’ll be the FBI, not the army.

The FBI know how to do this kind of a thing. You’ll all be OK. They

won’t kill you. They won’t come here looking to kill anybody. That’s

just Borken’s propaganda.”

“Live free or die,” she said. That’s what he keeps saying.”

The FBI will handle it,” he said again. “Nobody’s looking to kill

you.”

The woman clamped her lips and screwed her wet eyes shut and shook her

head wildly.

“No, Borken will kill us,” she said. “He’ll do it, not them. Live

free or die, don’t you understand? If they come, he’ll kill us all. Or

else he’ll make us all kill ourselves. Like a mass suicide thing.

He’ll make us do it, I know he will.”

Reacher just stared at her.

“I heard them talking,” she said. “Whispering about it all the time,

making secret plans. They said women and children would die. They

said it was justifiable. They said it was historic and important. They

said the circumstances demanded it.”

“You heard them?” Reacher asked. “When?”

“All the time,” she whispered again. They’re always making plans.

Borken and the ones he trusts. Women and children have to die, they

said. They’re going to make us kill ourselves. Mass suicide. Our

families. Our children. At the mines.

I think they’re going to make us go in the mines and kill ourselves.”

He stayed in the woods until he was well north of the parade ground.

Then he tracked east until he saw the road, running up out of Yorke. It

was potholed and rough, gleaming gray in the moonlight. He stayed in

the shadow of the trees and followed it north.

The road wound up a mountainside in tight hairpin bends. A sure sign

it led to something worthwhile, otherwise the labor consumed in its

construction would have been meaningless. After a mile of winding and

a thousand feet of elevation, the final curve gave out onto a bowl the

size of a deserted stadium. It was part natural, part blasted, hanging

there in the belly of the giant peaks. The back walls of the bowl were

sheer rock faces. There were semicircular holes blasted into them at

intervals. They looked like giant mouse holes Some of them had been

built out with waste rock, to provide sheltered entrances. Two of the

entrances had been enlarged into giant stone sheds, roofed with

timber.

The bowl was floored with loose shale. There were piles of earth and

spoil everywhere. Ragged weeds and saplings were forcing their way

through. Readier could see the rusted remains of rail tracks, starting

nowhere and running a few yards. He squatted against a tree, well back

in the woods, and watched.

There was nothing happening. The whole place was deserted and silent.

Quieter than silent. It had that total absence of sound that gets left

behind when a busy place is abandoned. The natural sounds were long

gone. The swaying trees cleared, the rushing streams diverted, the

rustling vegetation burned off, replaced by clattering machines and

shouting men. Then when the men and the machines leave, there is

nothing left behind to replace their noise. Reacher strained his ears

but heard nothing at all. Silent as the moon.

He stayed in the woods. To approach from the south meant to approach

uphill. He skirted around to the west and gained an extra hundred feet

of height. Paused and looked down into the bowl from a new

perspective.

Still nothing. But there had been something. Some recent activity.