EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD.
"Half a mile," Yanni yelled.
"Windows," Reacher shouted.
Four thumbs hit four buttons and all four windows dropped an inch. Hot air and loud music sucked out into the night. Reacher stared right and saw the dark outline of the house flash past, isolated, distant, square, solid, substantial, dimly lit from inside. Flat land all around it. The limestone driveway, pale, very long, as straight as an arrow.
Franklin kept his foot hard down.
"Stop sign in four hundred yards," Yanni yelled.
"Stand by," Reacher shouted. "Showtime."
"One hundred yards," Yanni yelled.
"Doors," Reacher shouted.
Three doors opened an inch. Franklin braked hard. Stopped dead on the line. Reacher and Yanni and Helen and Cash spilled out. Franklin didn't hesitate. He took off again like it was just a normal dead-of-night stop sign. Reacher and Yanni and Cash and Helen dusted themselves down and stood close together on the crown of the road and stared north until the glow of the lights and the sound of the engine and the thump of the music were lost in the distance and the darkness.
Sokolov had picked up the Humvee's heat signature on both the south and west monitors when it was still about half a mile shy of the house. Hard not to. A big powerful vehicle, traveling fast, trailing long plumes of hot air from open windows, what was to miss? On the screen it looked like a bottle rocket flying sideways. Then he heard it too, physically, through the walls. Big engine, loud music. Vladimir glanced his way.
"Passerby?" he asked.
"Let's see," Sokolov said.
It didn't slow down. It hurtled straight past the house and kept on going north. On the screen it trailed heat like a reentry capsule. Through the walls they heard the music Doppler-shift like an ambulance's siren as it went by.
"Passerby," Sokolov said.
"Some asshole," Vladimir said.
Upstairs on the third floor Chenko heard it, too. He stepped through an empty bedroom to a west-facing window and looked out. Saw a big black shape doing about sixty miles an hour, high-beam headlights, bright tail lights, music thumping and thudding so loud he could hear the door panels flexing from two hundred yards away. It roared past. Didn't slow down. He opened the window and leaned out and craned his neck and watched the bubble of light track north into the distance. It went behind the skeletal tangle of machinery in the stone-crushing plant. But it was still visible as a moving glow in the air. After a quarter-mile the glow changed color. Red now, not white. Brake lights, flaring for the stop sign. The glow paused for a second. Then the red color died and the glow turned back to white and took off again, fast.
The Zec called up from the floor below: "Was that him?"
"No," Chenko called back. "Just some rich kid out for a drive."
Reacher led the way through the dark, four people single file on the edge of the blacktop with the gravel plant's high wire fence on their left and huge circular fields across the road on their right. After the roar of the diesel and the thump of the music the silence felt absolute. There was nothing to hear except the hiss of irrigation water. Reacher raised his hand and stopped them where the fence turned a right angle and ran away east. The corner post was double-thickness and braced with angled spars. Grass and weeds from the shoulder were clumped up high. He stepped forward and checked the view. He was on a perfect diagonal from the northwest corner of the house. He had an equal forty-five-degree line of sight to the north facade and the west. Because of the diagonal the distance was about three hundred yards. Visibility was very poor. There was a glimmer of cloudy moonlight, but beyond that there was nothing at all.
He stepped back. Pointed at Cash, pointed at the base of the corner post.
"This is your position," he whispered. "Check it out."
Cash moved forward and knelt down in the weeds. Six feet away he was invisible. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Tracked it slowly left and right, up and down.
"Three stories plus a basement," he whispered. "High-pitched shingle roof, plank siding, many windows, one door visible to the west. No cover at all in any direction. They bulldozed everything flat, all around. Nothing's growing. You're going to look like a beetle on a bed- sheet out there."
"Cameras?"
The rifle tracked a steady line from left to right. "Under the eaves. One on the north side, one on the west. We can assume the same on the sides we can't see."
"How big are they?"
"How big do you want them to be?"
"Big enough for you to hit."
"Funny man. If they were spy cameras built into cigarette lighters I could hit them from here."
"OK, so listen up," Reacher whispered. "This is how we're going to do it. I'm going to get to my starting position. Then we're all going to wait for Franklin to get back and put the comms net on the air. Then I'm going to make a move. If I don't feel good I'm going to call in fire on those cameras. I say the word, I want you to take them out. Two shots, bang, bang. That'll slow them down, maybe ten or twenty seconds."
"Negative," Cash said. "I won't direct live rounds into a wooden structure we know contains a noncombatant hostage."
"She'll be in the basement," Reacher said.
"Or the attic."
"You'd be firing at the eaves."
"Exactly. She's in the attic, she hears gunfire, she hits the deck, that's exactly where I'm aiming. One man's ceiling is another man's floor."
"Spare me," Reacher said. "Take the risk."
"Negative. Won't do it."
"Christ, Gunny, you are one uptight Marine, you know that?"
Cash didn't speak. Reacher stepped forward again and peered around the corner of the fence. Took a long hard look and pulled back.
"OK," he said. "New plan. Just watch the west windows. You see muzzle flash, you put suppressing fire into the room it's coming out of. We can assume the hostage won't be in the same room as the sniper."
Cash said nothing.
"Will you do that at least?" Reacher asked.
"You might be in the house already."
"I'll take my chances. Voluntary assumption of risk, OK? Helen can witness my consent. She's a lawyer."
Cash said nothing.
"No wonder you came in third," Reacher said. "You need to lighten up."
"OK," Cash said. "I see hostile gunfire, I'll return it."
"Hostile is about the only kind you're going to see, don't you think? Since you only gave me a damn knife?"
"Army," Cash said. "Always bitching about something."
"What do I do?" Helen asked.
"New plan," Reacher said. He touched the fence with his palm. "Keep low, follow the fence around the corner, stop opposite the house. Stay down. They won't pick you up there. It's too far. Listen to your phone. If I need a distraction I'll ask you to run a little ways toward the house and then back again. A zigzag, or a circle. Out and back. Real fast. Just enough to put a blip on their screen. No danger. By the time they move a rifle around, you'll be back at the fence."
She nodded. Didn't speak.
"And me?" Ann Yanni asked.
"You stay with Cash. You're the ethics police. He gets cold feet about helping me out, you kick his ass, OK?"
Nobody spoke.
"All set?" Reacher asked.
"Set," they said, one after the other.