Lee Child: Worth Dying For

But time was on their side. They had all day. And the terrain was on their side. They had forty thousand unobstructed acres. And the Duncans’ fence was on their side. The fence, built a quarter of a century before, as an alibi, still strong and sturdy. The law of unintended consequences. The fence was about to come right back and bite the Duncans in the ass.

Reacher put the Leica to his eye again. Nothing was happening in the compound. It was still and quiet. Nothing was moving, except smoke coming from the chimneys on the first house and the last. The smoke was curling south. A breeze, not a wind, but the air was definitely in motion.

Reacher waited.

Fifteen minutes later Reacher checked the Tahoe’s mirror and saw a little convoy heading straight for him. First in line was Dorothy Coe’s truck, and then came the gold Yukon Reacher had taken from the kid called John. It had the doctor at the wheel. Last in line was the doctor’s wife, driving the black pickup the first Cornhusker of the morning had arrived in. They all slowed and parked nose to tail behind the Tahoe. They all looked left, away from the Duncan compound, studiously averting their eyes. Old habits.

Reacher climbed out of the Tahoe and the other three gathered around and he told them what they had to do. He told Dorothy Coe to keep the sawn-off, and he gave the Leica scope to the doctor’s wife, and he took her scarf and her cell phone in exchange. As soon as they understood their roles, he waved them away. They climbed into Dorothy Coe’s truck and headed south. Reacher was left alone on the shoulder of the two-lane, with the white Tahoe, and the gold Yukon, and the black pick-up, with the keys for all of them in his pocket. He counted to ten, and then he got to work.

The black pick-up truck was the longest of the three vehicles, by about a foot, so Reacher decided to use it second. The white Tahoe had the most gas in it, so Reacher decided to use it first. Which left John’s gold Yukon to use third, which Reacher was happy about, because he knew it drove OK.

He walked back and forth along the line and started all three vehicles and left them running. Then he started leapfrogging them forward, moving them closer to the mouth of the Duncan driveway, a hundred yards at a time, getting them in the right order, hoping to delay detection for as long as possible. Without the scope, his view of the compound was much less detailed, but it still looked quiet. He got the black pick-up within fifty yards, and he left the gold Yukon waiting right behind it, and then he jogged back and got in the white Tahoe and drove it all the way forward. He turned it into the mouth of the driveway and lined it up straight and eased it to a stop.

He slid out of the seat and crouched down and clamped the jaws of his adjustable wrench across the width of the gas pedal. He corrected the angle so that the stem of the wrench stuck up above the horizontal, and then he turned the knurled knob tight. He ducked back and hustled around the tailgate and opened the fuel filler door and took off the gas cap. He poked the end of the borrowed scarf down the filler neck with the longer screwdriver, and then he lit the free end of the scarf with his matches. Then he hustled back to the driver’s door and leaned in and put the truck in gear. The engine’s idle speed rolled it forward. He kept pace and put his finger on the button and powered the driver’s seat forward. The cushion moved, slowly, an inch at a time, through its whole range, past the point where a person of average height would want it, on towards where a short person would want it, and then the front of the cushion touched the end of the wrench, and the engine note changed and the truck sped up a little. Reacher kept pace and kept his finger where it was and the seat kept on moving, and the truck kept on accelerating, and Reacher started running alongside, and then the seat arrived at the limit of its travel and Reacher stepped away and let the truck go on without him. It was rolling at maybe ten miles an hour, maybe less, not very fast at all, but enough to overcome the wash of gravel under its tyres. The ruts in the driveway were holding it reasonably straight. The scarf in the filler neck was burning pretty well.

Reacher turned and jogged back to the road, to the black pickup, and he got in and drove it forward beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he backed it up and in and parallel-parked it across the width of the space, between the fences, sawing it back and forth until he had it at a perfect ninety degrees, with just a couple of feet of open space at either end. The white Tahoe was rolling steadily, already halfway to its target, tramlining left and right in the ruts, trailing a bright plume of flame. Reacher pulled the black pick-up’s keys and jogged back to the road. He leaned on the blind side of the gold Yukon’s hood and watched.

The white Tahoe was well ablaze. It rolled on through its final twenty yards, dumbly, unflinchingly, and it hit the front of the centre house and stopped dead. Two tons, some momentum, but no kind of a major crash. The wood on the house split and splintered, and the front wall bowed inward a little, and glass fell out of a ground floor window, and that was all.

But that was enough.

The flames at the rear of the truck swayed forward and came back and settled in to burn. They roiled the air around them and licked out horizontally under the sills and climbed up the doors. They spilled out of the rear wheel wells and fat coils of black smoke came off the tyres. The smoke boiled upward and caught the breeze and drifted away south and west.

Reacher leaned into the Yukon and took the rifle off the seat.

The flames crept onward towards the front of the Tahoe, slow but urgent, busy, seeking release, curling out and up. The rear tyres started to burn and the front tyres started to smoke. Then the fuel line must have ruptured because suddenly there was a wide fan of flame, a new colour, a fierce lateral spray that beat against the front of the house and rose up all around the Tahoe’s hood, surging left and right, licking the house, lighting it, bubbling the paint in a fast black semicircle. Then finally flames started chasing the bubbling paint, small at first, then larger, like a map of an army swarming through broken defences, fanning out, seeking new ground. Air sucked in and out of the broken window and the flames started licking at its frame.

Reacher dialled his borrowed cell.

He said, ‘The centre house is alight.’

Dorothy Coe answered, from her position half a mile west, out in the fields.

She said, ‘That’s Jonas’s house. We can see the smoke.’

‘Anyone moving?’

‘Not yet.’ Then she said, ‘Wait. Jonas is coming out his back door. Turning left. He’s going to head around to the front.’

‘Positive ID?’

‘A hundred per cent. We’re using the telescope.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Stay on the line.’

He laid the open cell phone on the Yukon’s hood and picked up the rifle. It had a rear iron sight just ahead of the scope mount, and a front iron sight at the muzzle. Reacher raised it to his eye and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the sheet metal and aimed at the gap between the centre house and the southernmost house. Distance, maybe a hundred and forty yards.

He waited.

He saw a stocky figure enter the gap from the rear. A man, short and wide, maybe sixty years old or more. Round red face, thinning grey hair. Reacher’s first live sighting of a Duncan elder. The guy hustled stiffly between the blank ends of the two homes and came out in the light and stopped dead. He stared at the burning Tahoe and started towards it and stopped again and then turned and faced front and stared at the pick-up truck parked across the far end of the driveway.