The moonlight was showing vehicle tracks in the shale. There was a
mess of ruts in and out of one of the stone sheds. A couple of years’
worth. The motor pool. There were newer ruts into the other stone
shed. The bigger shed. Bigger ruts. Somebody had driven some large
vehicles into that shed. Recently.
He scrambled down out of the woods and onto the shale. His shoes on
the small flat stones sounded like rifle shots in the silent night. The
crunch of his steps came back off the sheer walls like thunder. He
felt tiny and exposed, like a man in a bad dream walking naked across a
football field. He felt like the surrounding mountains were a huge
crowd in the bleachers, staring silently at him. He stopped behind a
pile of rock and squatted and listened. The echo of his footsteps
crashed and died into silence. He heard nothing. Just a total absence
of sound.
He crept noisily to the doors of the smaller shed. Up close, it was a
big structure. Probably built to shelter giant machines and pumping
engines. The doors were twelve feet high. They were built out of
peeled logs, strapped together with iron. They were like the sides of
a log house, hinged into a mountainside.
There was no lock. It was hard to imagine how there could have been.
No lock Reacher had ever seen could have matched the scale of those
doors. He put his back against the right-hand door and levered the
left-hand one open a foot. The iron hinge moved easily on a thick film
of grease. He slid sideways through the gap and stepped inside.
It was pitch dark. He could see nothing. He stood and waited for his
night vision to build. But it never came. Your eyes can open wider
and wider, wide as they can get, but if there’s no light at all, you
won’t see anything. He could smell a strong smell of damp and decay.
He could hear the silence vanishing backward into the mountain, like
there was a long chamber or tunnel in front of him. He moved inward,
hands held out in front of him like a blind man.
He found a vehicle. His shin hit the front fender before his hands hit
the hood. It was high. A truck or a pickup. Civilian. Smooth gloss
automotive spray. Not matt military paint. He trailed his fingers
round the edge of the hood. Down the side. A pickup. He felt his way
around the back and up the other side. Felt for the driver’s door.
Unlocked. He opened it. The courtesy light blazed like a
million-candlepower searchlight. Bizarre shadows were thrown all
around. He was in a giant cavern. It had no back. It opened right
into the hillside. The rock roof sloped down and became a narrow
excavated seam, running far out of sight.
He reached into the pickup cab and switched the headlights on. The
beams were reflected off the rock. There were a dozen vehicles parked
in neat lines. Old sedans and pickups. Surplus jeeps with crude
camouflage. And the white Ford Econoline with the holes in the roof.
It looked sad and abandoned after its epic journey from Chicago. Worn
out and low on its springs. There were workbenches with old tools
hanging above them. Cans of paint and drums of oil. Bald tires in
piles and rusted tanks of welding gas.
He searched the nearest vehicles. Keys in all of them. A flashlight
in the glove box of the third sedan he checked. He took it. Stepped
back to the pickup and killed its headlights. Walked back to the big
wooden doors and out into the night.
He waited and listened. Nothing. He swung the motor-pool door closed
and set off for the larger shed. A hundred yards across the noisy
shale. The larger shed had the same type of log doors. Even bigger.
And they were locked. The lock was the crudest thing he had ever seen.
It was an old warped log laid across two iron brackets and chained into
place. The chains were fastened with two big padlocks. Reacher
ignored them. No need to fiddle with the padlocks. He could see that