Die Trying by Lee Child

They left the jeep behind them next to the courthouse. The two guards

formed up. McGrath stumbled across the street and up onto the lumpy

knoll. He was pushed past the dead tree. He was pushed left until he

found the path. He followed it around behind the old building. The

rough ground bit up through the thin soles of his ruined city shoes. He

might as well have been walking barefoot.

“Faster, asshole,” Borken grunted at him.

The guards were behind him, prodding him forward with the muzzles of

their rifles. He picked up the pace and stumbled on through the woods.

He felt the blood clotting on his lip and nose. After a mile, he came

out into the clearing he recognized from the surveillance pictures. It

looked bigger. From seven miles overhead, it had looked like a neat

hole in the trees, with a tidy circle of buildings. From ground level,

it looked as big as a stadium. Rough shale on the floor of the

clearing, big wooden huts propped expertly on solid concrete piles.

“Wait here,” Borken said.

He walked away and the two guards took up station either side of

McGrath as he gazed around. He saw the communications hut, with the

phone wire and the whip antenna. He saw the other buildings. Smelled

stale institutional food coming out of the largest. Saw the farthest

hut, standing on its own. Must be their armory, he thought.

He glanced up and saw the vapor trails in the sky. The urgency of the

situation was written up there, white on blue. The planes had

abandoned their innocent east-west trawling. Their trails had

tightened into continuous circles, one just inside the other. They

were flying around and around, centered seven miles above his head. He

stared up at them and mouthed: help! He wondered if their lenses were

good enough to pick that out. Wondered if maybe Webster or Johnson or

Garber or Johnson’s gofer could lip read His best guess was: yes, and

no.

Reacher’s problem was a hell of an irony. For the first time in his

life, he wished his opponents were better shots. He was concealed in

the trees a hundred yards northwest of the courthouse. Looking down at

six sentries. They were ranged in a loose arc, to the south and east

beyond the big white building. Reacher’s rifle was trained on the

nearest man. But he wasn’t shooting. Because if he did, the six men

were going to shoot back. And they were going to miss.

Reacher was happy with an M-16 and a range of a hundred yards. He

could pretty much absolutely guarantee to hit what he wanted with that

weapon at that range. He would bet his life on it. Many times, he

had. And normally, the worse shots his opponents were, the happier

he’d be about it. But not in this situation.

He would be shooting from a northwest direction. His opponents would

be shooting back from the southeast. They would hear his shots, maybe

see some muzzle flash, they would take aim, and they would fire. And

they would miss. They would shoot high and wide. The targets on the

rifle range were mute evidence for that conclusion. There had been

some competent shooting at three and four hundred yards. The damaged

targets bore witness to that fact. But Reacher’s experience was that

guys who could shoot just about competently us at three or four hundred

yards on a range would be useless in a firefight. Lying still on a mat

and sighting in on a target in your own time was one thing. Shooting

into a noisy confused hailstorm of bullets was a very different thing.

A different thing entirely. The guy defending the missile trucks had

proved that. His salvos had been all over the place. And that was the

problem. Shooting back from the southeast, these guys’ stray rounds

were going to be all over the place, too. Up and down, left and right.

The down rounds and the left rounds were no problem. They were just

going to damage the scrubby vegetation. But the up rounds and the

right rounds were going to hit the courthouse.