Page 127 of Chain Reaction

She checked her watch.

“Eighty minutes minimum,” she said.

—

With sixty minutes to go they hefted the bags back out to the truck. They put the leftovers in the far corner of the load bed and arranged their personal selections in a line under the cab’s rear window, in rank order, Turner’s closest, then Elwood’s, then Reacher’s. They climbed in and Elwood drove across the two-lane and into the diner’s lot. The road that looped around to the data centers ran down the right-hand side of the building, so Elwood went left. He drove through the lot to the far side and thumped down off the blacktop onto the dirt. He kept on going a hundred yards, and then he eased into a wide clockwise loop that brought him around from the other direction, behind the data centers, parallel with the back stretch of the curb, about ten feet out from it. He came to a stop behind the center building.

“Yes?” he said.

“Nice work,” Reacher said.

It was a big dark-colored truck parked on pale sandy scrub, but it was invisible from the two-lane, and from the approach road, and from the loop behind the diner, and there were no fresh tire tracks in the dirt anywhere near the route Hennessy would take. Reacher expected him to dismount his crew in the diner’s parking lot. That would be the Ranger way. They would like the parking lot as a staging area, and the diner itself for cover, and as a source of power and water, and as a somewhat defensible hole-up if they needed one. They would advance on foot, widely and unpredictably spaced apart, two men aiming for the left flank, two for the right, and two for the center.

Reacher lifted their bags out of the load bed and they carried them to where they wanted them. Turner set up to defend the left corner, Elwood to defend the right corner, and Reacher took the center. They had a strong position, he thought. They unpacked their weapons and laid them out.

“Forty-five minutes,” Turner said.

They waited.

—

A whole hour later no one had come. Turner and Elwood had moved to the back corners of the end units to watch the distant two-lane. No traffic. No two-car convoy. No arrivals. The sun moved overhead to mid-afternoon. They regrouped behind the center unit.

“They were in Crystal City,” Turner said. “Not Mountain View. They have another hour in the air and then an hour on the road. Two more hours total. We can stand down for a spell.”

She took out her phone and tried Julia again.

No answer.

Elwood stepped up on the gravel and walked ten feet to EEF’s back fence. He sat down and leaned against the steel. Turner sat on the curb. Reacher moved out of the angled shadows behind the giant sheds and lay down in the dirt in the sun. He linked his hands behind his head. He was good at waiting. He liked empty time. He closed his eyes. Sleep when you can.

—

Reacher was woken up by a faint noise in the far distance. The clock in his head said he had been out more than an hour. Seventy-two minutes, he thought. Maybe seventy-three. Still more than three-quarters of an hour to go. No rush. He opened his eyes. Saw nothing but sky. Deep blue, no cloud. The noise was a tiny high-pitched whine, dulled by distance to a muted whisper. Almost not there at all. Somewhere in the west. He propped up on his elbows and looked around. Turner had moved from the curb and was sitting like Elwood with her back against the fence. They were about ten feet apart. More comfortable there, probably. Maybe the gravel yielded to a sitting person’s shape. Both their heads were turned. They were squinting into the west, blinded by the sun. They had heard it too.

Reacher followed their gaze. Nothing to see. The sun was too bright. The noise was still there. Still almost not there. Still very faint. It was a high-pitched whine. Or a hiss. Either a quiet sound close by, or a loud sound far away. No way to tell.

Then came a second component, like a two-part harmony. A fluttering bass whisper, way down under the muted whine. Still very faint. But just about audible. And therefore unmistakable. A two-part harmony with a rhythm section. Under the hissing whine was a feathery whup-whup-whup.

“Helicopter,” Turner called out.

“Incoming,” Elwood called. “Due west of us.”

Nothing to see there, because of the sun.

The sound grew slowly clearer. Slowly louder. There were two faint hisses, fighting each other. The whup-whups were thrashing four beats to the bar. Therefore a four-blade rotary aircraft with twin turboshaft engines. Therefore a large machine. Room for six people, easy.

Reacher got up and walked over to where the weapons were laid out. He stuck the handgun in his waistband, under his shirt tail, against the small of his back. He carried the shotgun in his right hand and the rifle in his left.

The noise grew louder.

Still nothing to see, because of the sun.

They waited.

Louder still. Now distinct in every screaming, thrashing, clattering detail. The main rotor, the tail rotor, the howling engines. Beginning to get uncomfortable. But still invisible against the blazing sun.

Then suddenly it wheeled away south, out of the sun, and they saw it for the first time, big and obvious against the blue of the sky. It was an ugly, hunchbacked thing, painted white and red like a two-tone car. It had a split windshield and a cabin with three windows on the side, like a miniature bus. The noise was deafening. Jet engines and thrashing rotors. It came down to maybe a hundred feet, over the two-lane, centered in the gap between the solar fields. Right over the turn lane. The motel to the left, the diner to the right. It hovered there a moment, screaming and clattering, as if the pilot was getting his bearings. A furious storm of sand and dust blew up from the ground below.