Lee Child: The Affair

No reply.

“Get out of the truck,” I said again.

And a minute later all three of them were standing on the road in my headlight beams, barefoot, pantless, in nothing but T-shirts and boxers. They were thirty miles from where they wanted to be, which under the best of conditions was a seven- or eight-hour walk, and going barefoot on a rural road was no one’s definition of the best of conditions. And even if by some miracle there was passing traffic, they stood no chance of hitching a ride. No chance at all. No one in his right mind would stop in the dark for three wildly gesticulating bare-legged men.

I climbed through to the driver’s seat and reversed a hundred yards and then turned around and headed back the way we had come, with nothing but engine noise and the sour smell of boots and socks for company. The clock in my head showed nine thirty-five, and I figured if the reduced payload let the Humvee hit sixty-five miles an hour I would be in Carter Crossing again at three minutes past ten.

In the event the big GM diesel gave me a little better thansixty-five miles an hour, and two minutes short of ten o’clock I pulled up and hid the truck in the last of the trees and walked the rest of the way. A man on foot can be a lot stealthier than a four-ton military vehicle, and safety is always the best policy.

But there was nothing to hide from. Main Street was quiet. There was nothing to see except light in the diner’s window and my borrowed Buick and Deveraux’s Caprice parked nose to tail in front of it. I guessed Deveraux was keeping half an eye on the situation but not worrying too much about it. The senator’s presence all but guaranteed a quiet and untypical night.

I stayed on the Kelham road and skipped Main Street itself and looped around behind it on a wide and cautious radius. I kept myself concealed behind the last row of parked cars and walked down level with Brannan’s bar. The crowd at the door was still there. I could see maybe fifty guys clustered in the same semicircle I had seen before. Past them I could see a big crowd inside the bar itself, some guys standing and some, I assumed, sitting at the tables further into the room, although I had no direct view of the latter group. I moved closer, squeezing between parked cars and pick-up trucks, with the hubbub ahead of me getting a little louder with each step. But not much louder. The noise was a lot lower in level and a lot more polite and restrained than it would have been on any other night. Best behavior.

I crossed an open lane between the first row of cars and the second and eased onward between a twenty-year-old Cadillac and a beat-up GMC Jimmy and a soft voice right next to me said, “Hello, Reacher.”

I turned and saw Munro leaning against the far side of the Jimmy, neatly in the shadow, nearly invisible, relaxed and patient and vigilant.

“Hello, Munro,” I said. “It’s good to see you. Although I have to say I didn’t expect to.”

He said, “Likewise.”

“Did Stan Lowrey call you?”

He nodded. “But a little too late.”

“Three guys?”

He nodded again. “Mortarmen from the 75th.”

“Where are they now?”

“Tied up with telephone wire, gagged with their own T-shirts, locked in my room.”

“Good work,” I said. Which it was. One against three, no warning, taken by surprise, but a satisfactory result nonetheless. I was impressed. Munro was nobody’s fool. That was clear.

He asked, “Who did you get?”

“An anti-aircraft crew.”

“Where are they?”

“Walking back from halfway to Memphis with no shoes and no pants.”

He smiled, white teeth in the dark.

He said, “I hope I never get posted to Benning.”

I asked, “Is Riley in the bar?”

“First to arrive, with his dad. They’re holding court big time. Tab must be three hundred bucks by now.”

“Curfew still in place?”

He nodded. “But it’s going to be a last-minute rush. You know how it is. The mood turned out to be pretty good, and no one will want to be the first to leave.”

“OK,” I said. “Your job is to make sure Riley is the last to leave. I need him to be the very last car out of here. And not by a second or two, either. By a minute at least. Do whatever it takes to make that happen, will you? I’m depending on it.”

With anyone else I might then have gone ahead and sketched out a few alternative ways to accomplish that goal, like suggestions, anything from puncturing a tire to asking for the old guy’s autograph, but by then I was beginning to realize Munro didn’t need help. He would think of all the same things I could, and maybe a few more besides.

He said, “Understood.”

“And then your job is to go sit on Elizabeth Deveraux. I need her to be under your eye throughout. In the diner, or wherever. Again, whatever it takes.”

“Understood,” he said again. “She’s in the diner right now, as it happens.”

“Keep her there,” I said. “Don’t let her go out on traffic patrol tonight. Tell her with the senator behind them the guys will behave.”

“She knows that. She gave her deputies the night off.”

“Good to know,” I said. “And good luck. And thanks.”

I squeezed back between the Cadillac and the Jimmy and crossed the open lane and threaded through the rearmost rank of cars and walked out of the lot the same way I had come in. Five minutes later I was just past the railroad crossing, hidden in the trees on the side of the road that led to Kelham, waiting again.

Munro’s assessmentof the collective mood turned out to be correct. No one left as early as ten-thirty, because of the weird dynamic surrounding the senator. I had seen similar things before. I was pretty sure no one from Bravo Company would have pissed on the guy if he was on fire, but everyone seemed fascinated by his alien presence, and no doubt everyone still had the base commander’s instructions ringing in his ears. Be nice to the VIP. Show him some respect . So no one peeled away early. No one wanted to go first. No one wanted to stand out. So ten-thirty came and went with no movement on the road. None at all.

As did ten thirty-five.

Ten-forty, likewise.

Then at ten forty-five the dam broke and they came in droves.

I heard noise like a muted version of an armored division firing up and I saw exhaust smoke and crisscross headlight beams far in the distance as they all started jockeying for position and funneling out of the lot. Lights swung toward me in an endless chain and thirty seconds later the lead car thumped over the crossing and sped on by. It was followed by all the others in sequence, too many to count, each just yards from the one in front, like stock cars on a racetrack straightaway. Engines roared and wheezed and worn tires pattered over the rails and I smelled the sweet sharp tang of unleaded gasoline. I saw the old Cadillac and the GMC sport utility I had squeezed between, and I saw Chevys and Dodges and Fords and Plymouths and Jeeps and Chryslers, sedans and pick-up trucks and four-wheel-drives and coupes and two-seaters. They kept on coming, an unbroken stream, heading home, relieved, exuberant, their duty done.

Ten minutes later the stream was thinning and the gaps between cars were lengthening and in the distance I could see late stragglers moving out. The last dozen vehicles took a whole minute to pass me by. None of them was a flat green staff car. The final tail-end charlie was an old Pontiac sedan, scarred and sagging. I watched it approach. As soon as he passes us, I guarantee we’re alone in the world , Deveraux had said. Then the old Pontiac thumped quietly over the track on soft tires, and then it was gone.