Bad Luck and Trouble (47 page)

Then the struts bounced again and Lennox and Parker climbed aboard. They shut their doors and dumped themselves down in the rear seats. The seat back in front of Reacher sagged against a loose mechanism and touched him on the cheek. He jammed his head harder into the corner. His crew cut scraped across the carpet.

The rotor turned slowly,
whop, whop, whop.

The suspension knelt and rose, knelt and rose, front left corner, right rear corner, less than an inch, like dancing.

Reacher waited.

Then the door up front opposite the pilot wrenched open and Allen Lamaison dumped himself in the seat and said, “Go.” Reacher heard the turbines spin up and felt the thrill and shiver of vibration fill the cabin and heard the rotor note change to an urgent accelerating
whip-whip-whip
and felt the whole craft go light on its wheels.

Then they were airborne.

Reacher felt the floor come up at him. He heard the wheels pull upward into their wells. He felt rotation and drift and a long steady climb and then the floor tilted forward as the nose went down for speed. He braced himself against spread fingers to stop himself sliding into the seat in front of him. He heard the engine noise settle to a muted whine and then the unique pendulum sensation of helicopter transport came right back at him. He had done his fair share of fast miles in rotary aircraft, a lot of them sitting on the floor.

A familiar experience.

For now.

79

By the clock in Reacher’s head the cruise lasted exactly twenty minutes, which was about what he was expecting. He had figured modern corporate machines would be a little faster than the Hueys he had been accustomed to in the service. He figured a military AH-1 might have taken twenty-plus minutes to get itself beyond the mountains, so twenty dead seemed reasonable for something with black leather seats and a carpet.

He spent the twenty minutes with his head well down. Animal instinct, a million years old and still displayed by dogs and children:
If I can’t see them, they can’t see me.
He kept his arms and legs moving through silent fractions of an inch and kept his muscles tensing and relaxing in a bizarre miniaturized version of a gymnasium work-out. He was no longer cold, but he didn’t want to get any stiffer. The noise in the cabin was loud but not overwhelming. The engine whine was whipping away in the slipstream. The rotor noise was blending with the rush of air and could be tuned out. There was no conversation going on. No talking. Reacher heard nothing from anyone.

Until the twenty-minute cruise came to an end.

He felt the helicopter slow down. Felt the floor come level and then tip backward a couple of degrees as the nose flared upward. The craft rotated left a little. Like a horse reined in on a movie screen. The cabin got louder. Now they were moving slowly, trapped in a bubble of their own noise.

He bent forward from the waist and put an eye to the gap between the seats and saw Lamaison leaning over with his forehead pressed against his window. Saw him change direction and lean toward the pilot. Heard him speak. Or maybe he only imagined that he heard him speak. He had reconstructed the orders in his head a thousand times since opening Franz’s file days before. He felt that he knew them, word for word, in all their cruel inevitability.

“Where are we?” Lamaison asked, in Reacher’s mind, and maybe also in reality.

“The badlands,” the pilot said.

“What’s below us now?”

“Sand.”

“Height?”

“Three thousand feet.”

“What’s the air like up here?”

“Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”

“Safe?”

“Aeronautically.”

“So let’s do it.”

Reacher felt the helicopter come to a stationary hover. The engine note dropped down to a deeper key and the rotor thrashed loudly. The floor moved in tiny unstable circles, like a spinning top come to rest. Lamaison turned in his seat and nodded once to Parker and once to Lennox. Reacher heard the click of safety-harness catches and then the weight came up off the seats in front of him. Leather cushions inhaled and tired springs recovered and moved the seat backs a precious inch farther from his face. There was no light other than the orange glow from the cockpit. Parker was on the left and Lennox was on the right. They were both in strange half-crouches, knees bent and heads ducked because of limited headroom, feet apart for stability on the moving floor, arms thrust outward for balance. One of them was going to die easy and one of them was going to die hard.

It depended on which one of them was going to open the door.

Lennox was going to open the door.

He half-turned and grabbed his trailing safety harness and held on tight with his left hand. Then he crabbed sideways and used his right to grope for the interior door release. He got there and unlatched it and pushed. The door swung half-open and wind and noise howled in. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching over his shoulder, and he tilted the craft a little so the door fell the rest of the way open under its own weight. Then he brought it level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and inertia and air pressure held the door wide against its hinge.

Lennox turned back. Big, red-faced, meaty, crouched like an ape, his left hand tight on his harness strap, his right pawing the air like a man on ice.

Reacher leaned forward and used his left hand to find the seat-release lever. He put his thumb below the pivot and two fingers above it and twisted. The seat back flopped forward. He used his left hand to force it all the way horizontal. He held it there. The cushions exhaled again. He brought the Glock up in his right hand and twisted from the waist and laid his right forearm flat on the seat back. Closed one eye and picked a spot an inch above Lennox’s navel.

And pulled the trigger.

The blast was muted in the general roar. Audible, but not as bad as it would have been in a library. The bullet hit Lennox low in the midsection. Reacher figured it was an instant through-and-through. Inevitable, with a nine-millimeter from a range of about four feet. Which was why he was shooting at Lennox and not at Parker. Reacher was not remotely afraid of flying, but he preferred the aircraft he was in to be undamaged. A shot through Parker’s midsection might have hit a hydraulic line or an electrical cable. Through Lennox it went straight out the open door into the night, harmlessly.

Lennox stayed in his awkward half-crouch. A bloom of blood haloed the hole in his shirt. It looked black in the dim orange light. His left hand came off the harness and pawed the air, a perfect mirror image of his right. He crouched there, balanced, symmetrical, a foot from the door sill, nothing behind him except the void, catastrophic physical shock on his face.

Reacher moved the Glock a small fraction and shot him again, this time through the sternum. He figured that on a guy as big and as old as Lennox the sternum would be a well-calcified plate maybe three-eighths of an inch thick. The bullet would pass through it for sure, but not before the smashing and splintering of the bone had transferred a little forward momentum into the target. Like the effect of a tiny punch. Maybe enough effect and enough momentum to take the guy with it a little and put him down backward, rather than just dumping him in a vertical heap like a head shot would have. There was too much articulation in the human neck for a head shot to have done what Reacher wanted it to.

But it was his knees that did Lennox in, not his breastbone. He came down just a fraction in back of vertical, like a guy aiming to squat on his heels. But he was big and heavy and he was forty-one years old and his knees had stiffened. They bent a little more than ninety degrees and then they stopped bending. His upper-body mass was pitched backward by the sudden obstruction and his ass hit square on the door sill and the weight of his shoulders and his head rolled him over the pivot and took him right out the door into the night. The last Reacher saw of him was the soles of his shoes, still well apart, whipping away into the windy darkness like afterthoughts.

By that point it was much less than two seconds since he had dropped the seat, but to Reacher it seemed like two lifetimes. Franz’s and Orozco’s, maybe. He felt infinitely fluent and languid. He was floating in a state of grace and torment, planning his moves like chess, minutely aware of potentials and drawbacks and threats and opportunities. The others in the cabin had barely reacted at all. O’Donnell was facedown, trying to lift his head far enough to turn. Dixon was trying to roll onto her back. The pilot was half-turned, immobile in his seat. Parker was frozen in his absurd crouch. Lamaison was gazing at the empty air where Lennox had been, like he was completely unable to understand what had just happened.

Then Reacher stood up.

He dropped the second seat and climbed out over it like a nightmare apparition, a sudden giant figure from nowhere looming silently into the noisy orange glow. Then he stood still, close to fully upright, his head jammed up hard against the roof, his feet a yard apart, perfectly triangulated for maximum stability. His left hand held a SIG, pointing straight at Parker’s face. His right held his Glock, pointing straight at Lamaison’s. Both guns were motionless. His face was expressionless. The rotor thrashed on. The Bell continued its slow clockwise rotation. The door held wide open, pushed back like a sail. Gales of noise and wind and kerosene stink blew in.

O’Donnell arched his back and got his head high enough to turn. His eyes tracked left to Reacher’s boots and closed for a second. Dixon toppled onto her back and rolled over on her bound arms and settled on her other shoulder, facing the rear.

The pilot stared. Parker stared. Lamaison stared.

The time of maximum danger.

Reacher could not afford to fire forward. The chance of hitting some essential cockpit avionics was far too great. He couldn’t afford to put a gun down and work on freeing O’Donnell or Dixon, because Parker was loose in the cabin not more than four feet away. He couldn’t take Parker down hand to hand, because he couldn’t even move. There was no floor space. O’Donnell and Dixon were occupying it all.

Whereas Lamaison was still strapped in his seat. The pilot was still strapped in his. All the pilot had to do was throw the Bell all over the sky until everyone in the back fell out. They would sacrifice Parker that way, but Reacher couldn’t see Lamaison losing sleep over that decision.

Stalemate, if they understood.

Victory, if they seized the moment.

80

They didn’t understand. They didn’t seize the moment. Instead O’Donnell got his head and his feet off the floor and porpoised desperately six inches closer to Reacher and Dixon rolled back the other way and a precious foot of free space opened up between them. Reacher stepped gratefully into it and smashed Parker in the gut with the SIG’s muzzle. The breath punched out of Parker’s lungs and he folded up at the waist and staggered one instinctive step, straight into the channel that O’Donnell and Dixon had created. Reacher dodged past him like a bullfighter and planted the sole of his boot flat on Parker’s ass and shoved him hard from behind and sent him stumbling on stiff legs straight across the cabin and blindly out the door into the night. Before his scream had died Reacher had his left arm hooked around Lamaison’s throat with the SIG pointing straight at the pilot and the Glock jammed hard into the back of Lamaison’s neck.

After that, it got easier.

The pilot stayed frozen at the controls. The Bell hung there in its noisy hover. The rotor beat loud and the whole craft kept on turning slow. The door stayed open, wide and inviting, pinned back by the airflow. Reacher clamped his elbow and hauled backward on Lamaison’s neck and pulled him up out of the seat until his shoulder straps went tight. Then he put the Glock on the floor and fished in his pocket for O’Donnell’s knuckleduster. He held it between his fingers like a tool and glanced behind him. He extended his arm and pushed Dixon onto her front and used the knuckleduster’s wicked spines to rub at the bonds on her wrists. She tensed her arms and the sisal fibers ruptured slowly, one by one. Reacher felt each success quite clearly through the hard ceramic material, tiny dull harmonic pings, sometimes two at once. Lamaison started to struggle and Reacher tightened his elbow, which had the advantage of choking Lamaison into submission but the disadvantage of aiming the SIG behind the pilot instead of straight at him. But the pilot made no attempt to take advantage. He didn’t react at all. He just sat there, hands on the stick, feet on the pedals, keeping the Bell turning slow.

Reacher kept on sawing away, blindly. One minute. Two. Dixon kept on moving her arms, offering new strands, testing progress. Lamaison struggled harder. He was a big guy, strong and powerful, thick neck, broad shoulders. And he was scared. But Reacher was bigger, and Reacher was stronger, and Reacher was angry. More angry than Lamaison was scared. Reacher tightened his arm. Lamaison struggled on. Reacher debated taking time out to hit him, but he wanted him conscious, for later. So he just worried on at the ropes and suddenly a whole skein of sisal fibers unraveled and Dixon’s wrists came free and she pushed herself up into a kneeling position. Reacher gave her the knuckleduster and his Glock and swapped the SIG from his left hand to his right.

After that, it got a whole lot easier.