Lee Child - Worth Dying For

Reacher walked on through the dirt, another hundred yards, and then he stopped and turned a full circle and checked all around. There was no activity ahead of him. Nothing to the west. Nothing to the east. Just flat, empty land. But behind him, way far to the south, there was a truck. Maybe a mile away, maybe more. It was driving across the fields, bumping and lurching and pattering across the rough ground, faint light glinting off its dull chrome bumper.

REACHER DROPPED INTO A CROUCH. HE WAS DRESSED IN OLIVE and brown and tan, and the acres of winter dirt all around him were olive and brown and tan, too. Decomposing stalks and leaves, lumps of fertile earth, some of them cracked and powdered by frosts and winds. There was still mist in the air. It hung motionless and invisible, an atmospheric layer like the finest gauze.

The truck a mile to the south kept on moving. The field was immense and rectangular and the truck was roughly in the middle of it. It was following an endless series of S-shaped curves, steering sequentially half-left, then straight ahead, then half-right, then straight ahead, then half-left. Rhythmic and regular and relentless, the driver’s view sweeping the horizon like a searchlight beam.

Reacher stayed down in his crouch. Static targets attract the eye much less than moving targets. But he knew that sooner or later the truck was going to get close to him. That was inevitable. At some point he was going to have to move on. But where? There was no natural cover. No hills, no woods, no streams, no rivers. Nothing at all. And he was a slow runner, and not very agile. Not that anyone was fast enough or agile enough to win a game of man-versus-truck on flat and infinitely spacious land.

The truck kept on coming, tiny in the distance, slow and patient and methodical. Half-left, straight ahead, half-right. Its half-right turns aimed it directly at him. Now it was about a thousand yards away. He couldn’t make out the driver. Therefore in return the driver couldn’t make him out. Not yet, anyway. But it was only a matter of time. It would be at a distance of about two hundred yards, he figured, when his vague crouching shape resolved itself. Maybe a hundred and fifty, if the windshield was grimy. Maybe a hundred, if the driver was shortsighted or bored or lazy. Then there would be a blank moment of dawning realization, and then there would be acceleration. Maximum speed over the rough ground would be about thirty miles an hour. Somewhere between seven and fifteen seconds, he figured, between launch and arrival.

Not enough.

Better to go sooner than later.

But where?

He turned around, slow and cautious. Nothing to the east. Nothing to the west. But three hundred yards due north was the bramble thicket he had noted before. The second such thing he had seen within a two-mile span. A tangle of chest-high bushes, a miniature grove, wild raspberries or wild roses, bare and dormant, thick and dense with thorns. Spared by the ploughs. The first had been spared because of a large rock in its centre. There was no possible reason for the second to be any different. No farmer on earth would spare wild flowers year after year through a hundred seasons just for sentiment alone.

The thicket was the place to go.

Three hundred yards for Reacher. Slow as he was, maybe sixty seconds.

A thousand yards for the truck. Fast as it was, maybe seventy seconds.

A ten-second margin.

No brainer.

Reacher ran.

He came up out of his crouch and started pounding away, stiff clumsy strides, arms pumping, mouth open, breathing hard. Ten yards, twenty, then thirty. Then forty, then fifty. Far behind him he heard the sudden muffled roar of an engine. He didn’t look back. Just kept on going, slipping and sliding, feeling painfully slow.

Two hundred yards to go.

He kept on running, maximum speed. He heard the truck behind him all the way. Still muffled. Still comfortably distant. But moving fast. Revving motor, whistling belts, sucking air, juddering springs, pattering tyres.

A hundred yards to go.

He risked a glance back. Clearly the truck had gotten a late jump. It was still further away than it might have been. But even so it was gaining handily. It was coming on fast. It was an SUV, not a pick-up. Domestic, not foreign. GMC, maybe. Dark red. Not new. A high blunt snout and a chrome bumper the size of a bathtub.

Fifty yards to go. Ten seconds. He stopped twenty yards out and turned in place. Faced south. He stood still, panting hard. He raised his arms level with his shoulders.

Come and get me.

The truck hammered on. Straight at him. He sidestepped right, one long pace, two, three. He lined it up perfectly. The truck directly ahead of him, the hidden rock directly behind him. The truck kept on coming. He walked backward, then ran backward, up on his toes, dainty, watching all the way. The truck kept on coming, lurching, hopping, bouncing, roaring. Twenty yards away, then ten, then five. Reacher moved with it. Then when he felt the first brambles against the backs of his legs he jerked sideways and flung himself out of the truck’s path and rolled away and waited for the truck to smash through the thicket and wreck itself on the rock.

Didn’t happen.

The guy at the wheel braked hard and slewed to a stop with his front bumper a yard into the brush. A local boy. He knew what was in there. Reacher heard the gearbox smack into reverse and the truck backed up and the front wheels turned and the gear changed again and the truck came straight at him, fast and enormous. The tyres were big off-road items with dirty white letters and savage tread. They were squirming and churning and clods of earth were spattering up off all of them equally. Four-wheel-drive. The motor was roaring. A big V-8. Reacher was on the ground and he could see suspension members and shock absorbers and exhaust headers and differential casings the size of soccer balls. He got up and feinted right and flung himself left. He rolled away and the truck turned tight but missed him, crunching over the clods of earth a foot from his face. He could smell hot oil and gasoline and exhaust fumes. There was a cacophony of sound. The motor, grinding gears, yelping springs. The truck slammed into reverse again and came at Reacher backwards. By that point he was up on his knees, deciding. Where next? In or out? In the thicket, or out in the open?

No choice at all.

Out in the open was suicide. At close quarters the truck was relatively clumsy, but he couldn’t run and jink and dodge for ever. No one could. Exhaustion would tell in the end. So he got to his feet and waded into the brambles. The thorns tore at his pants. The truck came after him, driving backwards, narrowing its radius. The driver was staring over his shoulder. A big guy. Big neck. Big shoulders. Short hair. Reacher headed straight for the centre of the thicket. Long thorny tendrils latched together and tugged at his ankles. He ripped his way onward. The driver turned the wheel as far as it would go. The truck’s radius tightened, but not enough. Reacher ducked inside its turn and barged on.

He made it to the rock.

It was a hell of a rock. Much bigger than the first one he had seen. Maybe the parent of the first one he had seen. The first one had been wedge-shaped, as if it had been busted out of a larger boulder. This second rock looked like that larger boulder. It was shaped like a pie with a broad piece broken out of it, but not flat like a pie. It was humped and round. Like an orange, with three or four segments missing, half buried in the earth. Maybe fifty thousand years ago an Ice Age glacier had rolled it all the way down from Canada, and the weight of a billion tons of frozen snow had cracked it apart, and the smaller fragment had been pushed onward two more miles before grinding to a stop and weathering gently over the next countless centuries. The larger fragment had stayed right in place, and it was still there, waist-deep in the rich dirt, itself gently weathered, a huge granite ball with a worn and shallow triangular notch in it, like a bite, like an open mouth, facing south towards its smaller relation. The bite was maybe ten feet wide at the opening, and it narrowed down to a point maybe five feet later.