The big guy helped Thurman up onto the wing and watched as he folded himself in through the small door. Then he passed the box up. Thurman took it and laid it on a rear seat. The big guy stood back and let Reacher climb up by himself. Reacher ducked low and led with his legs and made it into the co-pilot's seat. He slammed the door and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get, and then he buckled his harness. Beside him Thurman buckled his and hit a bunch of switches. Dials lit up and pumps whirred and the whole airframe tensed and hummed. Then Thurman hit the starter button and the exhaust coughed and the propeller blade jerked around a quarter of the way and then the engine caught with a roar and the prop spun up and the cabin filled with loud noise and furious vibration. The plane lurched forward, uncertain, earthbound, darting slightly left and right. It waddled forward out of the hangar. Dust blew up all over the place. The plane moved on, down the taxiway, the prop turning fast, the wheels turning slow. Reacher watched Thurman's hands. He was operating the controls the same way an old guy drives a car, leaning back in his seat, casual, familiar, automatic, using the kind of short abbreviated movements born of long habit.
The taxiway led through two clumsy turns to the north end of the runway. The lights were on. Thurman got centered on the graded strip and hit the power and the vibration leached forward out of the cabin into the engine and the wheels started thumping faster below. Reacher turned and saw the cardboard carton slide backward on the seat and nestle against the back cushion. He glanced ahead and saw lit dirt below and rushing darkness above. Then the plane went light and the nose lifted. The plane clawed its way into the night sky and climbed and turned and Reacher looked down and saw first the runway lights go off and then the hangar lights. Without them, there was little to see. The wall around the metal plant was faintly visible, a huge white rectangle in the gloaming.
The plane climbed hard for a minute and then leveled off and Reacher was dumped forward in his seat against his harness straps. He looked over at the dash and saw the altimeter reading two thousand feet. Airspeed was a little over a hundred and twenty. The compass reading was southeast. Fuel was more than half-full. Trim was good. The artificial horizon was level. There were plenty of green lights, and no reds.
Thurman saw him checking and asked, "Are you afraid of flying, Mr. Reacher?"
Reacher said, "No."
The engine was loud and the vibration was setting up a lot of buzzes and rattles. Wind was howling around the screens and whistling in through cracks. Altogether the little Piper reminded Reacher of the kind of old cars people used as taxis at suburban railroad stations. Sagging, worn out, clunky, but capable of making it through the ride. Maybe.
He asked, "Where are we going?"
"You'll see."
Reacher watched the compass. It was holding steady on south and east. There was an LED window below the compass with two green numbers showing. A GPS readout, latitude and longitude. They were below the fortieth parallel and more than a hundred degrees west. Both numbers were ticking downward, slowly and in step. South and east, at a modest speed. He called up maps in his mind. Empty land ahead, the corner of Colorado, the corner of Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle. Then the compass swung a little farther south, and Reacher realized that Thurman had been skirting the airspace around Colorado Springs. An Air Force town, probably a little trigger-happy. Better to give it a wide berth.
Thurman kept the height at two thousand feet and the speed at a hundred and a quarter and the compass stayed a little south of southeast. Reacher consulted his mental maps again and figured that if they didn't land or change course they were going to exit Colorado just left of the state's bottom right-hand corner. The time readout on the dash showed seventeen minutes past seven in the evening, which was two minutes fast. Reacher thought about Vaughan, alone in her car. She would have heard the plane take off. She would be wondering why he hadn't come back over the wall.
Thurman said, "You broke into a container last night."
Reacher said, "Did I?"
"It's a fair guess. Who else would have?"
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, "You saw the cars."
"Did I?"
"Let's assume so, like intelligent men."
"Why do they bring them to you?"
"There are some things any government feels it politic to conceal."
"What do you do with them?"
"The same thing we do with the wrecks towed off I-70. We recycle them. Steel is a wonderful thing, Mr. Reacher. It goes around and around. Peugeots and Toyotas from the Gulf might once have been Fords and Chevrolets from Detroit, and they in turn might once have been Rolls-Royces from England or Holdens from Australia. Or bicycles or refrigerators. Some steel is new, of course, but surprisingly little of it. Recycling is where the action is."
"And the bottom line."
"Naturally."
"So why don't you buy yourself a better plane?"
"You don't like this one?"
"Not much," Reacher said.
They flew on. There was nothing but darkness ahead, relieved occasionally by tiny clusters of yellow light far below. Hamlets, farms, gas stations. At one point Reacher saw brighter lights in the distance to the left and the right. Lamar, probably, and La Junta. Small towns, made larger by comparison with the emptiness all around them. Sometimes cars were visible on roads, tiny cones of blue light crawling slowly.
Reacher asked, "How is Underwood doing? The deputy?"
Thurman paused a moment. Then he said, "He passed on."
"In the hospital?"
"Before we could get him there."
"Will there be an autopsy?"
"He has no next of kin to request one."
"Did you call the coroner?"
"No need. He was old, he got sick, he died."
"He was about forty."
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's in store for all of us."
"You don't sound very concerned."
"A good Christian has nothing to fear in death. And I own a town, Mr. Reacher. I see births and deaths all the time. One door closes, another opens."
Thurman leaned back, his gut between him and the stick, his hands held low. The engine held fast on a mid-range roar and the whole plane shivered with vibration and bucked occasionally on rough air. The latitude number counted down slowly, and the longitude number slower still. Reacher closed his eyes. Flight time to the state line would be about seventy or eighty minutes. He figured they weren't going to land in Colorado itself. There wasn't much left of it. Just empty grassland. He figured they were going to Oklahoma, or Texas.
They flew on. The air got steadily worse. Reacher opened his eyes. Downdrafts dropped them into troughs like a stone. Then updrafts hurled them back up again. They were sideswiped by gusts of wind. Not like in a big commercial Boeing. No juddering vibration and bouncing wings. No implacable forward motion. Just violent physical displacement, like a pinball caught between bumpers. There was no storm outside. No rain, no lightning. No thunderheads. Just roiling evening thermals coming up off the plains in giant waves, invisible, compressing, decompressing, making solid walls and empty voids. Thurman held the stick loosely and let the plane buck and dive. Reacher moved in his seat and smoothed the harness straps over his shoulders.
Thurman said, "Youare afraid of flying."
"Flying is fine," Reacher said. "Crashing is another story."