Die Trying by Lee Child

from the roof. A full spectrum of noise. Holly lay down next to

Reacher. She put her head next to his. Her hair fanned out and

brushed his cheek and fell to his neck. She squirmed her hips and

straightened her leg. There was still space between their bodies. The

decorous V shape was still there. But the angle was a little tighter

than it had been before.

“But what can he do?” Reacher said. Talk me through it.”

“They’re going to make some kind of demand,” she said. “You know, do

this or do that, or we hurt your girl.”

She spoke slowly and there was a tremor in her voice. Reacher let his

hand drop into the space between them and found hers. He took it and

squeezed gently.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Think about it. What does your

father do? He implements long-term policy, and he’s responsible for

short-term readiness. Congress and the president and the defense

secretary thrash out the long-term policy, right? So if the joint

chairman tried to stand in their way, they’d just replace him.

Especially if they know he’s under this kind of pressure, right?”

“What about short-term readiness?” she said.

“Same sort of a thing,” Reacher said. “He’s only chairman of a

committee. There’s the individual chiefs of staff in there too.

Army,

inv navy, air force, Marines. If they’re all singing a different song

from what your father is reporting upwards, that’s not going to stay a

secret for long, is it? They’ll just replace him. Take him out of the

equation altogether.”

Holly turned her head. Looked straight at him.

“Are you sure?” she said. “Suppose these guys are working for Iraq or

something? Suppose Saddam wants Kuwait again. But he doesn’t want

another Desert Storm. So he has me kidnaped, and my father says sorry,

can’t be done, for all kinds of invented reasons?”

Reacher shrugged.

The answer’s right there in the words you used,” he said. The reasons

would be invented. Fact is, we could do Desert Storm again, if we had

to. No problem. Everybody knows that. So if your father started

denying it, everybody would know he was bullshitting, and everybody

would know why. They’d just sideline him. The military is a tough

place, Holly, no room for sentiment. If that’s the strategy these guys

are pursuing, they’re wasting their time. It can’t work.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then maybe this is about revenge,” she said slowly. “Maybe somebody is

punishing him for something in the past. Maybe I’m going to Iraq.

Maybe they want to make him apologize for Desert Storm. Or Panama, or

Grenada, or lots of things.”

Reacher lay on his back and rocked with the motion. He could feel

slight breaths of air stirring, because of the holes in the roof. He

realized the truck was now a lot cooler, because of the new

ventilation. Or because of his new mood.

Too arcane,” he said. “You’d have to be a pretty acute analyst to

blame the joint chairman for all that stuff. There’s a string of more

obvious targets. Higher-profile people, right? The president, the

defense secretary, foreign service people, field generals. If Baghdad

was looking for a public humiliation they’d pick somebody their people

could identify, not some paper-shuffler from the Pentagon.”

“So what the hell is this about?” Holly said.

Reacher shrugged again.

“Ultimately, nothing,” he said. They haven’t thought it through

properly. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They’re competent, but

they’re stupid.”

The truck droned on another six hours. Another three hundred and fifty

miles, according to Reacher’s guess. The inside temperature had

cooled, but Reacher wasn’t trying to estimate their direction by the

temperature anymore. The pellet holes in the roof had upset that

calculation. He was relying on dead reckoning instead. A total of

eight hundred miles from Chicago he figured, and not in an easterly

direction. That left a big spread of possibilities. He trawled

clockwise round the map in his head. Could be in Georgia, Alabama,

Mississippi, Louisiana. Could be in Texas, Oklahoma, the southwest

corner of Kansas. Probably no further west than that. Reacher’s

mental map had brown shading there, showing the eastern slopes of the