Die Trying by Lee Child

Then he froze. There was a crashing noise up ahead and a patrol of six

men burst around a tight thicket of pines and stopped dead in front of

them. They had M-16s in their hands, grenades on their belts, and

surprise and delight on their faces.

Borken had deployed every man he had to the search for Reacher, except

for the two he had retained to deal with Holly. He heard them start

down the courthouse stairs. He pulled the radio from his pocket and

flipped it open. Extended the stubby antenna and pressed the button.

“Webster?” he said. “Get focused in, OK? We’ll talk again in a

minute.”

He didn’t wait for any reply. Just snapped the radio off and turned

his head as he tracked the sound of the footsteps on their way

outside.

From seventy-five yards south, Garber saw them come out of the door and

down the steps. He had moved out of the woods. He had moved forward

and crouched behind the outcrop of rock. He figured that was safe

enough, now he had back-up of a sort. The Chinook crewmen were thirty

yards behind him, well separated, well hidden, instructed to yell if

anybody approached from the rear. So Garber was resting easy, staring

up the slope at the big white building.

He saw two armed men, bearded, starting down the steps. They were

dragging a smaller figure with a crutch. A halo of dark hair, neat

green fatigues. Holly Johnson. He had never seen her before. Only in

the photographs the Bureau men had showed him. The photographs had not

done her justice. Even from seventy-five yards, he could feel the glow

of her character. Some kind of radiant energy. He felt it, and pulled

his rifle closer.

The M-16 in Reacher’s hands was a 1987 product manufactured by the Colt

Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the A2 version. Its

principal new feature was the replacement of automatic fire with burst

fire. For the sake of economy, the trigger relocked after each burst

of three shells. The idea was to waste less ammunition.

Six targets, three shells each from the fresh magazine, a total of

eighteen shells and six trigger pulls. Each burst of three shells took

a fifth of a second, so the firing sequence itself amounted to just one

and a fifth seconds. It was pulling the trigger over and over again

which wasted the time. It wasted so much time for Reacher that he ran

into trouble after the fourth guy was down. He wasn’t aiming. He was

just tracking a casual left-to-right arc, close range into the bodies

in front of him. The opposing rifles were coming up as a unit. The

first four never got there. But the fifth and the sixth were already

raised horizontal by the time the fourth went back down,

two-and-a-quarter seconds into the sequence.

So Reacher gambled. It was the sort of instinctive gamble you take so

fast that to call it a split-second decision is to understate the speed

by an absurd factor. He skipped his M-16 straight to the sixth guy,

totally sure that McGrath would take the fifth guy with the Clock. The

sort of instinctive gamble you take based on absolutely nothing at all

except a feeling, which is itself based on absolutely nothing at all

except the look of the guy and how he compares with the look of other

people worth trusting in the past.

The flat crack of the Clock was lost under the rattle of the M-16 but

the fifth guy went down simultaneous with the sixth. Reacher and

McGrath crashed sideways together into the brush and flattened into the

ground. Stared through the sudden dead silence at the cordite smoke

rising gently through the shafts of sunlight. No movement. No

survivors. McGrath blew a big sigh and stuck out his hand, from flat

on the ground. Reacher twisted around and shook it.

“You’re pretty quick for an old guy,” he said.

That’s how I got to be an old guy,” McGrath said back.

They stood up slowly and ducked back farther into the trees. Then they

could hear more people moving toward them in the forest. A stream of