Lee Child - Make Me

Better.

Way to his left the backhoe rolled forward. The big slack tires gave and flexed. The three guys stood back-to, pressed up against the rear of the building. Rifles at port arms. Then the counterman rolled around the corner and inched along the end wall. He got to the next corner and took a cautious look. He raised his rifle.

Reacher aimed. The H&K was essentially a twelve-inch tube with a pistol grip at both ends. Very precise. Iron sights.

The counterman aimed at the backhoe. And waited. Behind him the one-eyed guy slid toward the opposite corner.

The backhoe rolled on. The tires squelched. The wheat brushed the bottom of the bucket, and sprang back up.

Reacher’s head hurt. Both sides. A cerebral contusion, contusio cerebri, in fact two, both coup and contre-coup . Arcing and sparking between them, like electricity.

Then Chang fired.

Full auto. Nine hundred rounds a minute. Impossibly fast. A brief blur of sound, like a manic sewing machine. Two seconds. A whole mag. Dirt stitched up in a line and a splinter of wood blew off the building.

The one-eyed guy ducked back.

The counterman craned further around his corner, looking for the new source of danger. Reacher’s gun tracked his move. Rear sight, front sight, target.

Reacher fired. Single shot. Range, eighty feet. Nine-millimeter Parabellum, 124 grains, full metal jacket. Muzzle velocity, more than eight hundred miles an hour. Time to target, less than a fifteenth of a second. Virtually instantaneous.

The round hit the guy high on the back, dead center, at the base of the neck. A spine shot. Lucky. Reacher had been aiming lower, at center mass. The biggest part of the target. Always safest. With an in-built advantage. Center meant center. There was stuff on the edges, side to side, and especially up and down. The legs and the head. Misses had somewhere to go. The guy went down. Just a slow fall forward into the corner of the building, which tipped him around and dumped him on the floor.

The hog farmer hit the deck. Out of sight. Behind the wheat. Smart guy. But the one-eyed clerk took a step. Raised his gun. Fired. The bullet cracked in the air and smashed through the wheat about thirty feet to Reacher’s right.

Chang fired again.

A second magazine. Good for her. Resolve and determination. The same manic purring. Dirt kicked up and splinters flew.

Then silence.

The one-eyed guy slid back to the corner and leaned around and aimed at where the sound had been.

The backhoe rolled closer.

Some small part of Reacher’s mind didn’t want to shoot at the one-eyed guy. He’s a poor old handicapped man . Didn’t seem fair. Except right then he was a poor old handicapped man pointing a lethal weapon at Chang. So Reacher aimed. About ninety feet. He kept his focus tight on the front sight. A needle post in a hooded ring. He stared at its paint. At its every molecular pit and detail. Razor sharp. The rear sight was a blur. The target was a blur. For maximum accuracy. How he was trained. The front sight was everything. Eventually it would all come together. Blur, post, blur. And it did. Three things merged. Linear. Rock steady.

He fired.

Same thing. A rising trajectory. This time ninety feet, not eighty. Twelve percent more time in the air. Twelve percent more rise. The round hit the one-eyed guy in the base of the skull. The medulla oblongata. The first tentative swelling of intelligence. A tiny bud, from a hundred million years ago. The lizard brain. About an inch thick. The round went through it in a thousandth of a second. Full metal jacket. The hydrostatic pressure blew it apart. The guy was dead before the sound of the gunshot even cleared the fence. He went down like a slamming door.

The backhoe rolled closer.

The hog farmer ran.

Reacher clicked up to full auto and stood straight and fired, whipping the muzzle through the guy, like flicking paint. The rest of the mag, twenty-eight rounds, a sewing machine of his own. But he missed with all of them. All low. No steady footing. Off balance. Dizzy. Temporarily. He shook his head and came back fine.

Chang fired again. A third magazine. Full auto. But way high. Roof shingles blew off the building. The guy ran full speed out of sight.

The backhoe rolled closer.

Then Reacher ran, plunging through the wheat, smashing through the stalks, striding, wading, floundering, angling toward the backhoe’s path. Westwood saw him through the side glass and stopped. Chang ran in from the other side and didn’t stop. She looped all the way around and hugged Reacher tight.

She said, “You OK?”

He said, “I’m hanging in there.”

“You got two.”

“With two to go. There were four in the crew-cab.”

“How do we do it?”

“First we find them.”

“You said a safe room.”

They got back in the cab, left and right, flanking Westwood, standing sideways. No view out the front. Westwood said, “Where would they build a safe room?”

“They didn’t build one,” Reacher said. “They already had one. I’m sure every farm in the state has one. Hardened against tremendous impacts.”

Chang said, “A tornado shelter.”

“Exactly. Under the house. With a secondary exit somewhere else. In case the house falls down on the trapdoor. Every basement should have one. I’m sure these guys do. They need the versatility. Probably a tunnel to another location entirely. With a hidden escape hatch. That’s what we need to find first. So we can park a truck on it.”

Westwood kicked the engine to life again and pulled the same levers, but in reverse order, and the front bucket tilted backward, and came down, until he could just about see over the top of it. A narrow slot. No longer completely safe, but a reasonable compromise.

He waited.

Reacher said, “No time like the present.”

The backhoe lurched, and settled to a moderate speed. Bucking on its clumsy tires. A hundred and fifty yards out. A hundred. Heading for the fence. Closer. And closer. And then smashing through it, rails tossed aside, left and right, hickory splinters in the air, and then onward, around the first outbuilding, on its left, past the dead one-eyed guy, into the beaten-earth compound. Where they slowed down, and then stopped. And waited. No longer a predator above a water hole. Now a combatant in an arena.

No one shot at them.

No response.

Reality was pretty much the same as the Google image. Except looking across, not down. Dead ahead was the house, and closer by on the right was the suicide suite. On the left was the generator shed and a small building the size of the place the three guys had hidden behind. Way beyond the house in the east were the hog shelter and the barn. Kind of separate. The driveway let out before them. Where the phone line came in on poles.

No exhaust pipe.

No movement.

Westwood took his gun out of his boot.

Reacher said, “The next part is strictly voluntary.”

“I know.”

“Stick together and start at the house.”

They climbed down from the cab.

No one shot at them.

No response.

Nothing at all, except the stink of the hog pen.

They walked across the beaten dirt, toward the house, three in a line, Chang on the left, Westwood in the middle, and Reacher on the right, his head hurting like someone was sticking an ice pick in his ear.

Reacher stood guard on the front porch while Chang and Westwood went inside to search. He kept a close watch. The secondary exit could be anywhere. Sudden surprises could come from any direction. But they didn’t. Nothing happened. Two minutes later Chang came back out and said, “We found the main entrance. Westwood has it covered. It’s a zoo in there.”