Lee Child - A Wanted Man

‘It’s huge.’

‘I know it is. You want to revise your personnel estimate? You could get more than forty people in there. You could get four hundred.’

‘You could get four thousand in there.’

‘Didn’t McQueen give you a figure?’

‘A terrorist headcount is a moving target. He never saw everyone at once. I’m still betting on a couple of dozen, tops.’

‘They must be rattling around in there.’

‘How do we do this?’

‘Very carefully.’

‘Where do we start?’

Reacher glanced at her. And then at Sorenson. The guy in the field knew he was watched over by people who would react instantly if he ran into trouble . But instantly was a big word. They were very close to four hours into a mission launched because eight hours had seemed ludicrously long. Was four hours an instant? Not even close.

So was eight hours so much worse?

He said, ‘The smart money is on very careful surveillance. We need to study that place from all four sides.’

Delfuenso said, ‘That would take hours.’

‘So be it.’

‘You mean we should wait for Quantico.’

‘It’s an option.’

‘But not a good one,’ Delfuenso said. ‘Especially not for Don McQueen.’

‘I agree.’

‘So the dumb money is on attacking without adequate preparation. Is that our choice?’

‘Call it half-assed preparation.’

‘To be honest, in what way are we even minimally prepared?’

‘We’re tooled up,’ Reacher said. ‘We’re awake, and they might not be.’

Sorenson said, ‘If we don’t do something now, there’s no point doing anything at all. That’s our situation, right? And that’s a military kind of problem, isn’t it? Did you train for this stuff?’

‘I trained for all kinds of things. Usually by starting with a little history. Back in the day the Soviets had some pretty big missiles. That thing in front of us was built to stand up to one. We have three handguns.’

‘But suppose you were the inside man?’

‘I’m all in favour of helping McQueen.’

Delfuenso said, ‘Just not with us?’

‘There were certain things I never had to say to my own people. Because it was right there in the job description.’

‘What certain things?’

‘You could get killed or maimed, doing this.’

‘Is there a way we can reduce that risk? Without taking hours?’

‘Yes, there is,’ Reacher said.

They invested seven minutes in talking through the contingencies. There was no point in making a plan. No plan could survive the first exchange of fire. No plan ever did. Except in this case it was impossible to make a plan, anyway. Because there was no information.

They turned away from the building and sat down in a line in the dirt and talked. This might happen, that might happen . They agreed some rules of thumb. They nailed down some basic procedures. Reacher was reasonably optimistic about getting close to the concrete. Neither a missile hangar nor an ammunition factory needed gun ports. And there was no way to drill your own. Even with a missile. So the place was not bristling with guns. Therefore the approach from distance would be safe enough. After that, there would be plenty of things to worry about. There would be sentries on the roof, presumably. Behind the tubular steel railing. On a walkway. Or maybe a running track. But not many sentries. And all of them so far untested. Reacher knew his history. Sentries were sometimes more trouble than they were worth.

They ran out of things to say. There was an awkward silence. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private jokes. They don’t translate between cultures. So none were made. All three of them just stood up mute and turned around and paced off distances and got into their starting positions. They looked ahead through the dark and identified their personal targets.

‘Ready?’ Reacher said.

Sorenson said, ‘Good to go.’

Delfuenso said, ‘Yes.’

‘Remember, speed and direction. No deviation from either. Now go.’

They stood up.

They started walking.

All went well, until Sorenson was shot in the head.

REACHER HEARD IT all in reverse order. Because of the speed of sound, and because of how close he was to Sorenson, and because of how far he was from the building. He heard the wet punch of the bullet finding its target, and a split second later he heard the supersonic crack of the bullet’s flight through the air, and a split second after that he heard the boom of the rifle that fired it from four hundred yards away. By which time he was already on the ground. He moved on the first sound, throwing himself down, and before he even hit the dirt he had some early conclusions, thoughts not so much developing as flashing fully formed in his mind: he knew it was a sniper rifle, probably an M14 or equivalent, probably a.308, and he knew it had no night scope, or he himself would have been the first target, given human nature, and therefore he knew Sorenson had been spotted simply because she was pale in the moonlight, her skin and her hair just marginally more visible than his or Delfuenso’s.

He knew all of that, instantly and instinctively. And he knew Sorenson was dead. He knew it for sure. There was no mistaking the sound. He had heard such sounds before. It had been a head shot, through and through, in and out, 168 grains at more than twenty-six hundred feet per second, hitting with more than twenty-six hundred foot-pounds of energy, dropping more than twenty-six inches from four hundred yards, like a curveball finding the strike zone.

Not survivable.

Not even remotely.

He waited.

There was no second shot.

He moved his hands. He rubbed dirt on them, front and back. He dragged dirt up to his face and smeared it on.

He moved his head.

He couldn’t see Delfuenso.

Which was good. She was on the ground somewhere, head down and invisible. He looked the other way. He saw a faint gleam in the dirt. Small and pale. Sorenson’s hand. Either her right or her left, depending on how she had fallen.

He knew there would be no answer, but even so, he whispered, ‘Julia?’

There was no answer.

So he whispered, ‘Delfuenso?’

No answer.

‘Delfuenso? Karen? Are you there?’

A breathy voice came back in the dark: ‘Reacher? Are you hit?’

He said, ‘Sorenson was.’

‘Bad?’

‘Worse than bad.’ He started crawling, elbows and knees, head down. The back part of his brain told him he must look like a bug on a bed sheet. The front part told him no, if he was visible he would be dead already. He risked a glance ahead, one eye, and adjusted course a fraction. He stopped an arm’s length from the pale gleam in the dirt. He reached out and found Sorenson’s hand. It was still warm. He found her wrist. He laid two fingers on it.

You could get killed or maimed, doing this .

I don’t need you to look after me .

There was no pulse. Just limp, clammy skin. All the invisible thousand muscular tensions of the living were gone . He crawled half a yard closer. He followed her arm, to her shoulder, to her neck.

No pulse.

Her neck was slick with slippery blood and gelatinous brain tissue and gritty with bone fragments. Her jaw was still there. And her nose. And her eyes, once blue and amused and quizzical. There was nothing left above her eyes. She had been hit in the centre of the forehead. The top of her head had come off. Hair and all. Her scalp would be hanging down somewhere, attached by a thread of skin. He had seen such things before.

He checked her neck one more time.