Die Trying by Lee Child

it. Makes no difference if Johnson knows in advance or not.”

McGrath intercepted Johnson and Webster ran over to the armored

vehicle. McGrath saw the Marine commander leaning down from the

turret. Saw him nodding and grimacing as Webster spoke. Then the

general’s aide fired up the army Chevrolet. Johnson and Garber crammed

into the front with him. McGrath jumped in back. Brogan and Milosevic

crushed in alongside him.

Webster finished up and raced back to the Chevy. Squeezed in next to

Milosevic. The LAV fired up its big diesel with a blast of black

smoke. Then it crunched into gear and lumbered off north. The Chevy

accelerated in its wake.

Four miles north they crested a slight rise and entered a curve. Slowed

and jammed to a stop in the lee of a craggy outcrop. The Marine

commander vaulted down from the turret and ran north on the road.

Webster and Johnson and McGrath got out and hurried after him. They

paused together in the lee of the rock face and crept around the curve.

Stared out and down into the ravine. It was an intimidating sight.

It ran left to right in front of them, more or less straight. And it

was not just a trench. It was a trench and a step. The whole crust of

the earth had fractured, and the southern plate had fallen below the

level of the northern plate. Like adjacent sections of an old concrete

highway where a car thumps up an inch at the seam. Expanded to

geological size, that inch was a fifty-foot disparity.

Where the earth had fractured and fallen, the edges had broken

Q9Q

up into giant boulders. The scouring of the glaciers had tumbled those

boulders south. The ice and the heave and the weather over a million

years had raked out the fracture and turned it into a trench. It had

cut back the rock plates to where they became solid again. Some

places, it had carved a hundred-yard width. Other places, tougher

seams of rock had kept the gap down to twenty yards.

Then the roots of a thousand generations of trees and the frozen water

of the winters had eroded the edges until there was a steep ragged

descent to the bottom and a steep ragged rise back up the northern side

to the top, fifty feet higher than the starting point. There were

stunted trees and tangled undergrowth and rock slides. The road itself

was lifted progressively on concrete trestles and rose gently across a

bridge. Then more concrete trestles set it down on the level ground to

the north and it snaked away through the forest into the mountains.

But the bridge was blown. Charges had been exploded against the two

center trestles. A twenty-foot section of the center span had fallen a

hundred feet into the trench. The four men in the lee of the outcrop

could see fragments of the road lying shattered in the bottom of the

ravine.

“What do you think?” Johnson asked urgently.

The Marine commander was giving it a fast sweep through his field

glasses. Left and right, up and down, examining the exact terrain.

“I think it’s shit, sir,” he said.

“Can you get through?” Johnson asked him.

The guy lowered his field glasses and shook his head.

“Not a hope in hell,” he said.

He stepped across, shoulder-to-shoulder with the general, so Johnson

could share the same line of sight. Started talking rapidly and

pointing as he did so.

“We could get down to the bottom,” he said. “We could go in right

there, where the rock slide gives us a reasonable descent. But getting

up the other side is the problem, sir. The LAV can’t climb much more

than forty-five degrees. Most of the north face looks a lot steeper

than that. Some places, it’s near enough vertical. Any gentle slopes

are overgrown. And they’ve felled trees. See there, sir?”

He pointed to a wooded area on the slope opposite. Trees had been

felled and left lying with their chopped ends facing south.

“Abatises,” the Marine said. The vehicle is going to stall against

them. No doubt about that. Coming uphill, slowly, those things would