Worth Dying For (10 page)

NINETEEN

O
UR SHIP HAS COME IN
. A
N OLD
,
OLD PHRASE
,
FROM OLD SEA-
faring days, full of hope and wonder. An investor could spend all he had, building a ship, fitting it out, hiring a crew, or more than all he had, if he was borrowing. Then the ship would sail into a years-long void, unimaginable distances, unfathomable depths, incalculable dangers. There was no communication with it. No radio, no phone, no telegraph, no mail. No news at all. Then, maybe, just maybe, one chance day the ship would come back, weather-beaten, its sails heaving into view, its hull riding low in the channel waters, loaded with spices from India, or silks from China, or tea, or coffee, or rum, or sugar. Enough profit to repay the costs and the loans in one fell swoop, with enough left over to live generously for a decade. Subsequent voyages were all profit, enough to make a man rich beyond his dreams.
Our ship has come in
.

Jacob Duncan used that phrase, at eleven-thirty that morning. He was with his brothers, in a small dark room at the back of his house. His son Seth had gone home. Just the three elders were there, stoic, patient, and reflective.

‘I got the call from Vancouver,’ Jacob said. ‘Our man in the port. Our ship has come in. The delay was about weather in the Luzon Strait.’

‘Where’s that?’ Jasper asked.

‘Where the South China Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. But now our goods have arrived. They’re here. Our truck could be rolling tonight. Tomorrow morning, at the very latest.’

‘That’s good,’ Jasper said.

‘Is it?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘You were worried before, in case the stranger got nailed before the delay went away. You said that would prove us liars.’

‘True. But now that problem is gone.’

‘Is it? Seems to me that problem has merely turned itself inside out. Suppose the truck gets here before the stranger gets nailed? That would prove us liars, too.’

‘We could hold the truck up there.’

‘We couldn’t. We’re a transportation company, not a storage company. We have no facilities.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We think. That’s what we do. Where is that guy?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘We know he hasn’t slept or eaten since yesterday. We know we’ve had our boys out driving the roads all morning and they haven’t seen a damn thing. So where is he?’

Jonas Duncan said, ‘Either he’s snuck in a chicken coop somewhere, or he’s out walking the fields.’

‘Exactly,’ Jacob said. ‘I think it’s time to turn our boys off the nice smooth roads. I think it’s time they drove out across the land, big circles, sweeping and beating.’

‘We only have seven of them left.’

‘They all have cell phones. First sight of the guy, they can call the boys from the south and turn the problem over to the professionals. If they need to, that is. Or at least they can get some coordinated action going. Let’s turn them loose.’

*     *     *

By that point Reacher was starting to hurry. He was about four hundred yards due west of the three Duncan houses, which was about as close as he intended to get. He was walking parallel to the road. He could already see the wooden buildings ahead. They were tiny brown pinpricks on the far horizon. Nothing between him and them. Flat land. He was watching for trucks. He knew they would be coming. By now his hunters would have checked the roads, and found nothing. Therefore they would have concluded he was travelling cross-country. They would be putting trucks in the fields, and soon, if they hadn’t already. It was predictable. Fast, mobile patrols, cell phone communications, maybe even radios, the whole nine yards. Not good.

He slogged onward, another five minutes, then ten, then twenty. The three Duncan houses fell away behind his shoulder. The wooden buildings up ahead stayed resolutely on the horizon, but they got a little larger, because they were getting a little closer. Four hundred yards away was another bramble thicket, spreading wide and chest-high, but apart from that there was nothing in sight taller than an inch. Reacher was dangerously exposed, and he knew it.

In Las Vegas a Lebanese man named Safir took out his phone and dialled a number. The call was answered six blocks away by an Italian man named Rossi. There were no pleasantries. No time for any. The first thing Safir said was, ‘You’re making me angry.’

Rossi said nothing in reply. He couldn’t really afford to. It was a question of protocol. He was absolutely at the top of his own particular tree, and it was a big tree, high, wide, and handsome, with roots and branches spreading everywhere, but there were bigger trees in the forest, and Safir’s was one of them.

Safir said, ‘I favoured you with my business.’

Rossi said, ‘And I’m grateful for that.’

‘But now you’re embarrassing me,’ Safir said. Which, Rossi thought, was a mistake. It was an admission of weakness. It made it clear that however big Safir was, he was worried about someone bigger still. A food chain thing. At the bottom were the Duncans, then came Rossi, then came Safir, and at the top came someone else. It didn’t matter who. The mere existence of such a person put Safir and Rossi in the same boat. For all their graduated wealth and power and glory, they were both intermediaries. Both scufflers. Common cause.

Rossi said, ‘You know that merchandise of this quality is hard to source.’

Safir said, ‘I expect promises to be kept.’

‘So do I. We’re both victims here. The difference between us is that I’m doing something about it. I’ve got boots on the ground up in Nebraska.’

‘What’s the problem there?’

‘They claim a guy is poking around.’

‘What, a cop?’

‘No,’ Rossi said. ‘Absolutely not a cop. The chain is as secure as ever. Just a passer-by, that’s all. A stranger.’

‘Who?’

‘Nobody. Just a busybody.’

‘So how is this nobody busybody stranger holding things up?’

‘I don’t think he is, really. I think they’re lying to me. I think they’re just making excuses. They’re late, that’s all.’

‘Unsatisfactory.’

‘I agree. But this is a sellers’ market.’

‘Who have you got up there?’

‘Two of my boys.’

‘I’m going to send two of mine.’

‘No point,’ Rossi said. ‘I’m already taking care of it.’

‘Not to Nebraska, you idiot,’ Safir said. ‘I’m going to send two of my boys across town to babysit you. To keep the pressure on. I want you to be very aware of what happens to people who let me down.’

The Port of Vancouver had been combined with the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority and the shiny new three-in-one business had been renamed Port Metro Vancouver. It was the largest port in Canada, the largest port in the Pacific Northwest, the fourth largest port on the west coast of North America, and the fifth largest port in North America overall. It occupied 375 miles of coastline, and had twenty-five separate terminals, and handled three thousand vessel arrivals every year, for a total annual cargo throughput of a hundred million tons, which averaged out to considerably more than a quarter-million tons every day. Almost all of those tons were packed into intermodal shipping containers, which, like a lot of things, traced their origins all the way back to United States Department of Defense drawings made in the 1950s, because in the 1950s the U.S. DoD had been one of the few agencies in the world with the will and the energy to make drawings at all, and the only one with the power to make them stick.

Intermodal shipping containers were corrugated metal boxes. They could be easily swapped between different modes of transport, like ships, or railroad flatcars, or semi trucks. Hence, intermodal. They were all a little more than eight feet high and eight feet wide. The shortest and rarest were twenty feet long. Most were forty feet long, or forty-five, or forty-eight, or fifty-three. But traffic was always measured by reference to the basic minimum length, in multiples called twenty-foot-equivalent-units, or TEUs. A twenty-foot container was scored as a one, and a forty-foot as a two, and so on. Port Metro Vancouver handled two million TEUs a year.

The Duncans’ shipment came in a twenty-foot container. The smallest available. One TEU. Gross weight was 6,110 pounds, and net weight was 4,850 pounds, which meant that there were 1,260 pounds of cargo inside, in a space designed to handle more than sixty thousand. In other words, the box was about 98 per cent empty. But that proposition was not as wasteful or as inefficient as it first appeared. Each of the pounds that the container carried was worth more than gold.

It was lifted off a South Korean ship by a gantry crane, and it was placed gently on Canadian soil, and then it was immediately picked up again by another crane, which shuttled it to an inspection site where a camera read its BIC code. BIC was the Bureau International des Containers, which was headquartered in Paris, France, and the code was a combination of four letters from the Latin alphabet and seven numbers. Together they told Port Metro Vancouver’s computers who owned the container, and where it had come from, and what was in it, and that those contents had been pre-cleared by Canadian customs, none of which information was in the least little bit true. The code also told the computers where the container was going, and when, which was true, to a limited extent. It was going onward into the interior of Canada, and it was to be loaded immediately, without delay, on to a semi truck that was already waiting for it. So it was shuttled on ahead, through a sniffer designed to detect smuggled nuclear material, a test that it passed very easily, and then out to the marshalling yard. At that point the port computers generated an automatic text message to the waiting driver, who fired up his truck and swung into position. The container was lowered on to his flatbed and clamped down. A minute later it was rolling, and ten minutes after that it was through the port gates, heading east, sitting high and proud and alone on a trailer more than twice its length, its minimal weight barely noticed by the roaring diesel.

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.

TWENTY

R
EACHER DROPPED INTO A CROUCH
. H
E 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.

Reacher came to rest with his back against the boulder, on the east side, the bite a quarter-circle away, behind his right shoulder. The truck turned and drove out of the thicket and for a crazy moment Reacher thought the guy was giving up and going home, but then the truck turned again, a wide lazy circle out on the dirt, and it came back, slow and menacing, head-on, straight at him. The driver was smiling behind the windshield glass, a wide feral grin of triumph. The first of the brambles collapsed under the chrome bumper. The driver was holding the wheel carefully, two-handed, aiming precisely.

Aiming to pin Reacher by the legs against the rock.

Reacher scrambled up on to the granite slope, backward, palms and soles, like a crab. He worked and scuffled and stood upright on the top of the dome, balanced uneasily maybe five feet in the air. The truck came to rest with its front bumper an inch from the rock, its hood a little below the level of Reacher’s feet, its roof a little above. The motor calmed to an idle and Reacher heard four ragged thumps as the doors locked from the inside. The driver was worried. Didn’t want to be dragged out of his seat for a fistfight. Smart guy. Now Reacher’s options were reduced. He could step down on the hood and try to kick the windshield in, but automotive glass was tougher than it looked, and all the guy had to do was take off suddenly and Reacher would be thrown clear, unless he grabbed the roof bars, but his arms were hurting too much to survive a wild-ass ride all the way across Nebraska, clinging to the top of a bouncing truck at thirty or more miles an hour.

Impasse.

Or maybe not. The guy had laid out his tactics for all to see. He hadn’t used his phone. He wanted to capture Reacher all by himself, for the glory of it. He intended to do it by using his truck like a hammer and the rock like an anvil. But he wouldn’t wait for ever. He would dial his buddies just as soon as frustration got the better of him.

Time to go.

Reacher scrambled down the far side of the rock and waded into the thorny growth. He heard the truck back up and swing around after him. It appeared on his right, crunching through the brambles, holding a tight curve as if it was rounding a traffic circle, driving slow, staying deliberate. Reacher faked a break for the open land and the driver bought it and steered maybe ten degrees out of the circle, and then Reacher ducked back towards the rock and slid around the granite circumference and tucked himself into the shallow triangular bite, right at the point of the V, shoulders tight against the converging walls. The truck paused a second and then leapt ahead and steered a tight loop out on the dirt and came right back at him, head-on again, the same low gear, the same low menacing speed, closer and closer, ten feet, five feet, three feet, then two feet.

Then simultaneously the left end and the right end of the truck’s front bumper jammed hard against the narrowing walls of rock, and the truck came to a stop, immobile, right where Reacher wanted it, the big chrome bumper making a new boundary, closing off the shallow triangle a foot from Reacher’s thighs. He could feel the heat from the radiator, and the idling beat of the motor resonated in his chest. He could smell oil and gas and rubber and exhaust fumes. He put his hands on the bulbous chrome and started easing down towards a sitting position, intending to slide feet-first underneath the vehicle and wriggle away on his back.

Didn’t work.

The driver wanted Reacher more than he wanted an undamaged front bumper.

Reacher got halfway to the ground and then he heard a snick and a crunch as the transfer box changed down to low-range gearing. Ideal for pulling stumps. Or for crushing chrome. The engine roared and all four tyres bit down hard and the truck pushed forward against nothing except the resistance of its own sheet metal. Both ends of the bumper shrieked and deformed and then crumpled and flattened and the truck kept on coming, one inch, then two, then three. The tyres turned slowly but relentlessly, one knob of tread at a time. The bumper crushed from the outside in, grinding and scraping, as the massive V-8 torque turned the bulbous cosmetic panel into a piece of flattened junk.

Now the centre of the bumper was six inches from Reacher’s chest.

And it kept on coming. The bumper flattened all the way to where the steel brackets bolted it to the frame. Sterner stuff. The engine roared louder and the truck dug in hard and squatted and strained on its suspension. One front tyre lost traction for a second and spun wildly and spattered dirt and stones and shredded pieces of bramble into the wheel well. The whole truck rocked and bucked and danced in place and then the tyre bit again and the tailpipes bellowed and the steel brackets collapsed and gave an inch and the truck lurched forward.

Four inches from Reacher’s chest.

Then three.

Then the brackets gave a little more and the hot metal touched Reacher’s coat.

Time to go.

He turned his head sideways and pushed up on the chrome with his hands and forced himself downward, like immersing himself in water. He got halfway there, and then the sheet metal itself behind the bumper started giving way, shrieking and bending and crushing, the curves inverting, the contours flattening. The engine roared and the pipes bellowed louder and the truck lurched forward another inch and the centre of the bumper tapped Reacher on the side of his face. He scraped on down, one ear on the hot chrome and the other on the cold granite. He kicked and scrabbled with his heels and got his feet out from under him and he forced his butt through the brambles and got down on his back. Right above his face the last tiny triangle of clear air disappeared as the fenders gave way and what was left of the bumper folded violently into a forward-facing point and hit the granite.

The driver didn’t let up.

The guy kept his foot down hard. Clearly he didn’t know exactly where Reacher was. Because he couldn’t see. Clearly he hoped he had him pinned by the chest. The truck bucked and squatted and pushed. Reacher was flat on his back underneath it, straining tyres to his left, straining tyres to his right, throbbing exhaust pipes above him, all kinds of ribbed and dirty metal components inches from his face. Things were racing and whirring and turning. There were nuts and bolts and tubes and belts. Reacher didn’t know much about cars. Didn’t know how to fix them, didn’t know how to break them. And he had no tools, anyway.

Or did he?