Die Trying by Lee Child

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,