Nothing to Lose

"Would you have given me the combination?"

"Never."

"So what’s the difference?"

Vaughan said, "Reacher, what the hell is in your pockets?"

"Lots of things," Reacher said. "Things we’re going to need."

71

Reacher trudged through the mud and rolled Thurman’s men into what medics called the recovery position. On their sides, arms splayed, necks at a natural angle, one leg straight and the other knee drawn up. No danger of choking. A slight danger of drowning, if the puddles didn’t stop filling. The rain was still hard. It thrashed against their slickers and drummed on the sides of their boots.

Thurman poked and prodded at the shattered box where the keypad had been. No result. The gates stayed closed. He gave up and slipped and slid back to the center of the hidden area. Reacher and Vaughan fought their way across to the eighteen-wheeler. It was just standing there, shut down and silent and oblivious.

Vaughan said, "You really think this is a bomb?"

Reacher said, "Don’t you?"

"Thurman was mighty plausible. About the gifts for Afghanistan."

"He’s a preacher. It’s his job to be plausible."

"What if you’re wrong?"

"What if I’m right?"

"How much damage could it do?"

"If they built it right I wouldn’t want to be within three miles of it when it goes off."

"Threemiles?"

"Twenty tons of TNT, twenty tons of shrapnel. It won’t be pretty."

"How do we get out of here?"

"Where’s your truck?"

"Where we left it. They ambushed me. Opened the outer gate and drove me through the plant in Thurman’s SUV. It’s parked the other side of the inner gate. Which you just made sure will never open again."

"No big deal."

"You can’t climb the wall."

"But you can," Reacher said.

They talked for five fast minutes about what to do and how to do it. Knives, welds, the average size and thickness of a car’s roof panel, canvas straps, knots, trailer hitches, four-wheel-drive, low-range gearing. Thurman was pacing aimlessly a hundred yards away. They left him there and headed through the mud to the wall. They picked a spot ten feet left of the gate. Reacher took the two switchblades out of his pocket and handed them to Vaughan. Then he stood with his back to the wall, directly underneath the maximum radius of the horizontal cylinder above. Rain sheeted off it and soaked his head and shoulders. He bent down and curled his left palm and made a stirrup. Vaughan lined up directly in front of him, facing him, and put her right foot in the stirrup. He took her weight and she balanced with her wrists on his shoulders and straightened her leg and boosted herself up. He cupped his right hand under her left foot. She stood upright in his palms and her weight fell forward and her belt buckle hit him in the forehead.

"Sorry," she said.

"Nothing we haven’t done before," he said, muffled.

"I’m ready," she said.

Reacher was six feet five inches tall and had long arms. In modest motel rooms he could put his palms flat on an eight-foot ceiling. Vaughan was about five feet four. Arms raised, she could probably stretch just shy of seven feet. Total, nearly fifteen feet. And the wall was only fourteen feet high.

He lifted. Like starting a bicep curl with a free weights bar loaded with a hundred and twenty pounds. Easy, except that his hands were turned in at an unnatural angle. And his footing was insecure, and Vaughan wasn’t a free weights bar. She wasn’t rigid and she was wobbling and struggling to balance.

"Ready?" he called.

"Wait one," she said.

He felt her weight move in his hands, left to right, right to left, shifting, equalizing, preparing.

"Now go," she said.

He did four things. He boosted her sharply upward, used her momentary weightlessness to shift his hands flat under her shoes, stepped forward half a pace, and locked his arms straight.

She fell forward and met the bulge of the cylinder with the flats of her forearms. The hollow metal construction boomed once, then again, much delayed.

"OK?" he called.

"I’m there," she said.

He felt her go up on tiptoes in his palms. Felt her reach up and straighten her arms. According to his best guess her hands should right then have been all the way up on the cylinder’s top dead-center. He heard the first switchblade pop open. He swiveled his hands a little and gripped her toes. For stability. She was going to need it. He moved out another few inches. By then she should have been resting with her belly against the metal curve. Rain was streaming down all over him. He heard her stab downward with the knife. The wall clanged and boomed.

"Won’t go through," she called.

"Harder," he called back.

She stabbed again. Her whole body jerked and he dodged and danced underneath her, keeping her balanced. Like acrobats in a circus. The wall boomed.

"No good," she called.

"Harder," he called.

She stabbed again. No boom. Just a little metallic clatter, then nothing.

"The blade broke," she called.

Reacher’s arms were starting to ache.

"Try the other one," he called. "Be precise with the angle. Straight downward, OK?"

"The metal is too thick."

"It’s not. It’s from an old piece-of-shit Buick, probably. It’s like aluminum foil. And that’s a good Japanese blade. Hit it hard. Who do you hate?"

"The guy that pulled the trigger on David."

"He’s inside the wall. His heart is the other side of the metal."

He heard the second switchblade open. Then there was silence for a second. Then a convulsive jerk through her legs and another dull boom through the metal.

A different boom.

"It’s in," she called. "All the way."

"Pull on it," he called back.

He felt her take her weight on the wooden handle. He felt her twist as she wrapped both fists around it. He felt her feet pull up out of his hands. Then he felt them come back.

"It’s slicing through," she called. "It’s cutting the metal."

"It will," he called back. "It’ll stop when it hits a weld."

He felt it stabilize a second later. Called, "Where is it?"

"Right at the top."

"Ready?"

"On three," she called. "One, two,three. "

She jerked herself upward and he helped as much as he could, fingertips and tiptoes, and then her weight was gone. He came down in a heap and rolled away in case she was coming down on top of him. But she wasn’t. He got to his feet and walked away to get a better angle and saw her lying longitudinally on top of the cylinder, legs spread, both hands wrapped tight around the knife handle. She rested like that for a second and then shifted her weight and slid down the far side of the bulge, slowly at first, then faster, swinging around, still holding tight to the knife handle. He saw her clasped hands at the top of the curve, and then her weight started pulling the blade through the metal, fast at first where a track was already sliced and then slower as the blade bit through new metal. It would jam again at the next weld, which he figured was maybe five feet down the far side, allowing for the size of a typical car’s roof panel, minus a folded flange at both sides for assembly purposes, which would be about a quarter of the way around the cylinder’s circumference, which would mean she would be hanging off the wall at full stretch with about four feet of clear air under the soles of her shoes.