Die Trying by Lee Child

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