Lee Child - Echo Burning

"I'm going to borrow your Jeep," he said.

Bobby shrugged, barefoot on the hot dirt.

"Keys are in it," he said.

"You and your mother stay in the house now," Reacher said. "Anybody seen out and about will be considered hostile, O.K.?"

Bobby nodded. Turned and walked to the foot of the steps. Glanced back once and went inside the house. Reacher leaned into the VW to talk to Alice.

"What are we doing?" she said.

"Getting ready."

"For what?"

"For whatever comes our way."

"Why do we need ten rifles?"

"We don't. We need one. I don't want to give the bad guys the other nine, is all."

"They're coming here?"

"They're about ten minutes behind us."

"So what do we do?"

"We're all going out in the desert."

"Is there going to be shooting?"

"Probably."

"Is that smart? You said yourself, they're good shots."

"With handguns. Best way to defend against handguns is hide a long way off and shoot back with the biggest rifle you can find."

She shook her head. "I can't be a part of this, Reacher. It's not right. And I've never even held a rifle."

"You don't have to shoot," he said. "But you have to be a witness. You have to identify exactly who comes for us. I'm relying on you. It's vital."

"How will I see? It's dark out there."

"We'll fix that."

"It's going to rain."

"That'll help us."

"This is not right," she said again. "The police should handle this. Or the FBI. You can't just shoot at people."

The air was heavy with storm. The breeze was blowing again and he could smell pressure and voltage building in the sky.

"Rules of engagement, Alice," he said. "I'll wait for an overtly hostile act before I do anything. Just like the U.S. Army. O.K.?"

"We'll be killed."

"You'll be hiding far away."

"Then you'll be killed. You said it yourself, they're good at this."

"They're good at walking up to somebody and shooting them in the head. What they're like out in the open in the dark against incoming rifle fire is anybody's guess."

"You're crazy."

"Seven minutes," he said.

She glanced backward at the road from the north. Then she shook her head and shoved the gearstick into first and held her foot on the clutch. He leaned in and squeezed her shoulder.

"Follow me close, O.K.?" he said.

He ran down to the motor barn and got into the Greer family's Cherokee. Racked the seat back and started the engine and switched on the headlights. Reversed into the yard and straightened up and looped around the motor barn and headed straight down the dirt track into open country. Checked the mirror and saw the VW right there behind him. Looked ahead again and saw the first raindrop hit his windshield. It was as big as a silver dollar.

They drove in convoy for five fast miles through the dark. There was no moonlight. No starlight. Cloud cover was low and thick but it held the rain to nothing more than occasional splattering drops, ten whole seconds between each of them, maybe six in every minute. They exploded against the windshield into wet patches the size of saucers. Reacher swatted each of them separately with the windshield wipers. He held steady around forty miles an hour and followed the track through the brush. It turned randomly left and right, heading basically south toward the storm. The ground was very rough. The Jeep was bouncing and jarring. The VW was struggling to keep pace behind him. Its headlights were swinging and jumping in his mirrors.

Five miles from the house the rain was still holding and the mesquite and the fractured limestone began to narrow the track. The terrain was changing under their wheels. They had started out across a broad desert plain that might have been cultivated grassland a century ago. Now the ground was rising slowly and shading into mesa. Rocky outcrops rose left and right in the headlight beams, channeling them roughly south and east. Taller stands of mesquite crowded in and funneled them tighter. Soon there was nothing more than a pair of deep ruts worn through the hardpan. Ledges and sinkholes and dense patches of thorny low brush meant they had no choice but to follow them. They curved and twisted and felt like a riverbed.

Then the track bumped upward and straightened and ran like a highway across a miniature limestone mesa. The stone was a raised pan as big as a football field, maybe a hundred twenty yards long and eighty wide, roughly oval in shape. There was no vegetation growing on it. Reacher swung the Jeep in a wide circle and used the headlights on bright to check the perimeter. All around the edges the ground fell away a couple of feet into rocky soil. Stunted bushes crowded anyplace they could find to put their roots. He drove a second circle, wider, and he liked what he saw. The miniature mesa was as bare as a dinner plate laid on a dead lawn. He smiled to himself. Timed out in his head what they needed to do. Liked the answer he came up with.

He drove all the way to the far end of the rock table and stopped where the track bumped down off it and disappeared onward. Alice pulled the VW alongside him. He jumped out of the Jeep and ducked down to her window. The night air was still hot. Still damp. The urgent breeze was back. Big raindrops fell lazily and vertically. He felt like he could have dodged each one of them individually. Alice used a switch and buzzed the window down.

"You O.K.?" he asked her.

"So far," she said.

"Turn it around and back it up to the edge," he said. "All the way back. Block the mouth of the track."

She maneuvered the car like she was parking on a city street and ran it backward until it was centered in the mouth of the track and the rear wheels were tight against the drop. She left the front facing exactly north, the way they had come. He nosed the Jeep next to her and opened the tailgate.

"Kill the motor and the lights," he called. "Get the rifles."

She passed him the big Winchesters, one at a time. He laid them sideways in the Jeep's load space. She passed him the .22s, and he pitched them away into the brush, as far as he could throw them. She passed him the two boxes of 30-30 ammunition. Winchester's own, and Bobby Greer's hand-loads. He laid them alongside the rifles. Ducked around to the driver's door and switched the engine off. The lumpy six-cylinder idle died. Silence fell. He listened hard and scanned the northern horizon. The mesquite sighed faintly in the wind. Unseen insects buzzed and chattered. Infrequent raindrops hit his shoulders. That was all. Nothing else. Absolute blackness and silence everywhere.

He came back to the tailgate and opened the ammunition boxes. They were both packed tight with cartridges standing on their firing pins, points upward. The factory shells were new and bright. Bobby's were a little scuffed. Recycled brass. He took one out and held it up to the Jeep's interior light and looked hard at it. I made them myself, Bobby had said. Extra power. Which was logical. Why else would a jerk like Bobby hand-load his own cartridges? Not for less power, that was for sure. Like, why do people tune hot-rod motors? Not to make them milder than stock. It's a boy thing. So Bobby had probably packed and tamped a whole lot of extra powder into each one, maybe thirty or forty extra grains. And maybe he had used hotter powder than normal. Which would give him a couple hundred extra foot-pounds of muzzle energy, and maybe a hundred miles an hour extra velocity. And which would give him the muzzle flash from hell, and which would ruin his breech castings and warp his barrels inside a couple of weeks. But Reacher smiled and took ten more of the shells out of the box anyway. They weren't his guns, and he had just decided muzzle flash was exactly what he was looking for.

He loaded the first Winchester with a single sample of Bobby's hand-loads. The second, he filled with seven more. The third, he loaded alternately one stock round, one of Bobby's, another stock round, until it was full with four stock and three hand-loads. The fourth rifle he filled entirely with factory ammo. He laid the guns left to right in sequence across the Jeep's load space and closed the tailgate on them.