Die Trying by Lee Child

the warp in the old log would let him in.

He forced the doors apart where they met at the bottom. The curve in

the log in the brackets let them gap by about a foot. He put his arms

inside, then his head, then his shoulders. He scrabbled with his feet

and pushed his way through. Stood up inside and flicked the flashlight

on.

It was another giant cavern. Same darkness. Same strong smell of damp

and decay. Same sloping roof running backward to a low seam. The same

hush, like all the sound was sucking back deep into the mountain. The

same purpose. A vehicle store. But these vehicles were all identical.

Five of them. Five current-issue US army trucks. Marked with the

white stencils of the army air artillery. Not new trucks, but

well-maintained. Neat canvas siding at the rear.

Reacher walked around to the back of the first truck. Stepped up onto

the tow-hitch and looked over the tailgate. Empty. It had slatted

wooden benches running forward along each side. A troop carrier.

Reacher couldn’t begin to count the miles he’d traveled on benches like

those, swaying, staring at the steel floor, waiting to get where he was

going.

The steel floor was stained. At odds with the clean exterior. There

OQfi were black stains on the floor. Some kind of a thick liquid,

dried into pools. Readier stared at them. Couldn’t begin to count the

number of stains like that he’d seen. He jumped down and ran to the

second vehicle. Stepped up and leaned in with the flashlight.

There were no benches in the rear of the second vehicle. Instead,

there were racks bolted to both sides. Precisely constructed racks,

welded up out of angle-iron and fitted with steel clips and thick

rubber pads to hold their delicate cargo. The left hand rack held five

missile launchers. Slim steel tubes, six feet long, dull black metal,

with a large box of electronics and an open sight and a pistol grip

bolted to the forward end. Five of them, precisely parallel, neatly

aligned.

The right hand rack held twenty-five Stinger missiles. Inches apart,

side by side in their rubber mountings, control surfaces folded back,

ready to load. Dull alloy, with batch numbers stenciled on, and a

broad band of garish orange paint wrapping the fuel section.

He ran to the other three trucks. Each was the same. Five launchers,

twenty-five missiles. A total of twenty launchers and one hundred

missiles. The entire ordnance requirement of a whole air artillery

mobile unit. A unit which deployed twenty men. He walked back to the

first truck and stared in at the blood on the floor. Then he heard the

rats. At first he thought it was footsteps outside on the shale. He

snapped the flashlight off. Then he realized the sounds were nearer,

and behind him. There were rats scuffling at the rear of the cavern.

He lit the flashlight up again and jogged into the cave and found the

twenty men.

They were heaped into a large pile of corpses just before the roof got

too low for a man to stand. Twenty dead soldiers. A hell of a mess.

They had all been shot in the back. Reacher could see that. They had

been standing together in a group somewhere, and they had been mown

down with heavy machine gun fire from the rear. He bent and grunted

and turned a couple of them over. Not the toughest guys he’d ever

seen. Docile, reservist types, deployed to a lonely base deep inside

friendly territory. Ambushed and murdered for their weapons.

But how? He knew how. An old ground-to-air unit, nearing

obsolescence, stationed in the far north of Montana. A leftover from

Cold War paranoia. Certainly due for decommissioning. Probably

already in the process of decommissioning. Probably on its way south

to Peterson in Colorado. Final orders probably transmitted in clear by

radio. He remembered the radio scanner back in the communications hut.

The operator beside it, patiently turning the dial. He imagined the

recall order being accidentally intercepted, the operator running to

Borken, Borken’s bloated face lighting up with an opportunistic smile.

Then some hasty planning and a brutal ambush somewhere in the hills.