Sea Knight. Search-and-rescue markings, not Marine Corps. It was
following the road up from the southeast, a mile away, a hundred feet
up, using its vicious downdraft to part the surrounding foliage and aid
its search. It looked slow and ponderous, hanging nose-down in the
air, yawing slightly from side to side as it approached. Reacher
guessed it must be pretty close to the town of Yorke itself.
Then he glanced into the clearing and saw a guy, fifty yards away. A
grunt, camouflage fatigues. A Stinger on his shoulder. Turning and
aiming through the crude open sight. He saw him acquire the target.
The guy steadied himself and stood with his feet apart. His hand
fumbled for the activator. The missile’s infrared sensor turned on.
Reacher waited for the IFF to shut it down. It didn’t happen. The
missile started squealing its high-pitched tone. It was locked on the
heat from the Chinook’s engines. The guy’s finger tightened on the
trigger.
Reacher dropped the rifle in his left hand. Swung the other one up and
clicked the safety off with his thumb as he did so. Stepped to his
left and leaned his shoulder on a tree. Aimed at the guy’s head and
fired.
But the guy fired first. A fraction of a second before Reacher’s
bullet killed him, he pulled the Stinger’s trigger. Two things
happened. The Stinger’s rocket motor lit up. It exploded along its
launch tube. Then the guy was hit in the head. The impact knocked him
sideways. The launcher caught the rear of the missile and flipped it.
It came out and stalled tail-down in the air like a javelin, cushioned
on the thrust of its launch, virtually motionless.
Then it corrected itself. Reacher watched in horror as it did exactly
what it was designed to do. Its eight little wings popped out. It
hung almost vertical until it acquired the helicopter again. Then its
second-stage rocket lit up and it blasted into the sky. Before the
guy’s body hit the ground it was homing in on the Chinook at a thousand
miles an hour.
The Chinook was lumbering steadily northwest. A mile away. Following
the road. The road ran straight up through the town. Between the
abandoned buildings. On the southeast corner the first building it
passed was the courthouse. The Chinook was closing on it at eighty
miles an hour. The Stinger was heading in to meet it at a thousand
miles an hour.
One mile at a thousand miles an hour. One thousandth of an hour. A
fraction over three and a half seconds. It felt like a lifetime to
Reacher. He watched the missile all the way. A wonderful, brutal
weapon. A simple, unshakable purpose. Designed to recognize the exact
heat-signature of aircraft exhaust, designed to follow it until it
either got there or ran out of fuel. A simple three-and-a-half-second
mission.
The Chinook pilot saw it early. He wasted the first second of its
flight, frozen. Not in horror, not in fear, just in simple disbelief
that a heat-seeking missile had been fired at him from a small wooded
clearing in Montana. Then his instinct and training took over. Evade
and avoid. Evade the missile, avoid crashing on settlements below.
Reacher saw him throw the nose down and the tail up. The big Chinook
wheeled away and spewed a wide fan of exhaust into the atmosphere. Then
the tail flipped the other way, engines screaming, superheated fumes
spraying another random arc. The missile patiently followed the first
curve. Tightened its radius. The Chinook dropped slowly and then rose
violently in the air. Spiraled upward and away from the town. The
missile turned and followed the second arc. Arrived at where the heat
had been a split-second before. Couldn’t find it. It turned a full
lazy circle right underneath the helicopter. Caught an echo of the new
maneuver and set about climbing a relentless new spiral.
The pilot won an extra second, but that was all. The Stinger caught
him right at the top of his desperate climb. It followed the trail of
heat all the way into the starboard engine itself. Exploded hard
against the exhaust nacelle.
Six and a half pounds of high explosive against ten tons of aircraft,