Lee Child - Die Trying

He got as far as the Bastion. The thumping from the air built louder. He risked stepping out onto the stony path. It was a Chinook. Not a Sea Knight. Search-and-rescue markings, not Marine Corps. It was following the road up from the southeast, a mile away, a hundred feet up, using its vicious downdraft to part the surrounding foliage and aid its search. It looked slow and ponderous, hanging nose down in the air, yawing slightly from side to side as it approached. Reacher guessed it must be pretty close to the town of Yorke itself.

Then he glanced into the clearing and saw a guy, fifty yards away. A grunt, camouflage fatigues. A Stinger on his shoulder. Turning and aiming through the crude open sight. He saw him acquire the target. The guy steadied himself and stood with his feet apart. His hand fumbled for the activator. The missile’s infrared sensor turned on. Reacher waited for the IFF to shut it down. It didn’t happen. The missile started squealing its high-pitched tone. It was locked on the heat from the Chinook’s engines. The guy’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Reacher dropped the rifle in his left hand. Swung the other one up and clicked the safety off with his thumb as he did so. Stepped to his left and leaned his shoulder on a tree. Aimed at the guy’s head and fired.

But the guy fired first. A fraction of a second before Reacher’s bullet killed him, he pulled the Stinger’s trigger. Two things happened. The Stinger’s rocket motor lit up. It exploded along its launch tube. Then the guy was hit in the head. The impact knocked him sideways. The launcher caught the rear of the missile and flipped it. It came out and stalled tail down in the air like a javelin, cushioned on the thrust of its launch, virtually motionless.

Then it corrected itself. Reacher watched in horror as it did exactly what it was designed to do. Its eight little wings popped out. It hung almost vertical until it acquired the helicopter again. Then its second-stage rocket lit up and it blasted into the sky. Before the guy’s body hit the ground, it was homing in on the Chinook at a thousand miles an hour.

The Chinook was lumbering steadily northwest. A mile away. Following the road. The road ran straight up through the town. Between the abandoned buildings. On the southeast corner the first building it passed was the courthouse. The Chinook was closing on it at eighty miles an hour. The Stinger was heading in to meet it at a thousand miles an hour.

One mile at a thousand miles an hour. One thousandth of an hour. A fraction over three and a half seconds. It felt like a lifetime to Reacher. He watched the missile all the way. A wonderful, brutal weapon. A simple, unshakable purpose. Designed to recognize the exact heat signature of aircraft exhaust, designed to follow it until it either got there or ran out of fuel. A simple three-and-a-half-second mission.

The Chinook pilot saw it early. He wasted the first second of its flight, frozen. Not in horror, not in fear, just in simple disbelief that a heat-seeking missile had been fired at him from a small wooded clearing in Montana. Then his instinct and training took over. Evade and avoid. Evade the missile, avoid crashing on settlements below. Reacher saw him throw the nose down and the tail up. The big Chinook wheeled away and spewed a wide fan of exhaust into the atmosphere. Then the tail flipped the other way, engines screaming, superheated fumes spraying another random arc. The missile patiently followed the first curve. Tightened its radius. The Chinook dropped slowly and then rose violently in the air. Spiraled upward and away from the town. The missile turned and followed the second arc. Arrived at where the heat had been a split second before. Couldn’t find it. It turned a full lazy circle right underneath the helicopter. Caught an echo of the new maneuver and set about climbing a relentless new spiral.

The pilot won an extra second, but that was all. The Stinger caught him right at the top of his desperate climb. It followed the trail of heat all the way into the starboard engine itself. Exploded hard against the exhaust nacelle.

Six and a half pounds of high explosive against ten tons of aircraft, but the explosive always wins. Reacher saw the starboard engine disintegrate, then the rear rotor housing blow off. Shattered fragments of the drivetrain exploded outward like shrapnel and the rotor detached and spun away in terrible slow motion. The Chinook stalled in the air and fell, tail down, checked only by the screaming forward rotor, and slowly spun to the earth, like a holed ship slips slowly below the sea.

HOLLY HEARD THE helicopter. She heard the low-frequency beat pulsing faintly through her walls. She heard it grow louder. Then she heard the explosion and the shriek of the forward rotor grabbing the air. Then she heard nothing.

She jammed her elbow into her crutch and limped across to the diagonal partition. The prison room was completely empty except for the mattress. So her search was going to have to start again in the bathroom.

“ONLY ONE QUESTION,”Webster said. “How long can we keep the lid on this?”

General Johnson said nothing in reply. Neither did his aide. Webster moved his gaze across to Garber. Garber was looking grim.

“Not too damn long,” he said.

“But how long?” Webster asked. “A day? An hour?”

“Six hours,” Garber said.

“Why?” McGrath asked.

“Standard procedure,” Garber said. “They’ll investigate the crash, obviously. Normally they’d send another chopper out. But not if there’s a suspicion of ground fire. So they’ll come by road from Malmstrom. Six hours.”

Webster nodded. Turned to Johnson.

“Can you delay them, General?” he asked.

Johnson shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. His voice was low and resigned. “They just lost a Chinook. Crew of two. I can’t call them and say, do me a favor, don’t investigate that. I could try, I guess, and they might agree at first, but it would leak, and then we’d be back where we started. Might gain us an hour.”

Webster nodded.

“Seven hours, six hours, what’s the difference?” he said.

Nobody replied.

“We’ve got to move now,” McGrath said. “Forget the White House. We can’t wait any longer. We need to do something right now, people. Six hours from now, the whole situation blows right out of control. We’ll lose her.”

Six hours is three hundred and sixty minutes. They wasted the first two sitting in silence. Johnson stared into space. Webster drummed his fingers on the table. Garber stared at McGrath, a wry expression on his face. McGrath was staring at the map. Milosevic and Brogan were standing in the silence, holding the brown bags of breakfast and the Styrofoam cups.

“Coffee here, anybody wants it,” Brogan said.

Garber waved him over.

“Eat and plan,” he said.

“Map,” Johnson said.

McGrath slid the map across the table. They all sat forward. Back in motion. Three hundred and fifty-eight minutes to go.

“Ravine’s about four miles north of us,” the aide said. “All we got is eight Marines in a LAV- 25.”

“That tank thing?” McGrath asked.

The aide shook his head.

“Light armored vehicle,” he said. “LAV. Eight wheels, no tracks.”

“Bulletproof?” Webster asked.

“For sure,” the aide said. “They can drive it all the way to Yorke.”

“If it gets through the ravine,” Garber said.

Johnson nodded.

“That’s the big question,” he said. “We need to go take a look.”

THE LIGHT ARMORED vehicle looked just like a tank to McGrath’s hasty civilian glance, except there were eight wheels on it instead of tracks. The hull was welded up out of brutal sloping armor plates and there was a turret with a gun. The driver sat forward, and the commander sat in the turret. In the rear, two rows of three Marines sat back to back, facing weapon ports. Each port had its own periscope. McGrath could visualize the vehicle rumbling into battle, invulnerable, weapons bristling out of those ports. Down into the ravine, up the other side, along the road to Yorke to the courthouse. He pulled Webster to one side and spoke urgently.