Not a Drill: A Jack Reacher Short Story (4 page)

Reacher said, “Soldiers?”

She nodded. “Lots of them.”

“Weird.”

“That’s not the worst of it. They’re holding them for questioning afterward. They want to know if they saw anything.”

“Soldiers are doing that, too?”

“Men in suits. My friend thinks they’re the FBI.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“She works at the motel in Cripps.”

“What are people supposed to have seen?”

“All we have is rumors. A bear gone rogue, maybe. A man-eater. Packs of wild
coyotes, mountain lions, bigfoot monsters. Or some vicious murderer escaped from the penitentiary. Or wolves. Or vampires.”

“You believe in vampires?”

“I watch the television, same as anyone else.”

“It’s not vampires,” Reacher said.

“There’s something in those woods, mister.”

Reacher ate a tuna melt and drank coffee and water, and then he headed back to the arch for a second look. The sawhorses were in place, ten yards upstream of the parked Humvees. Four grunts were standing easy, weapons shouldered. A show of force.
No entry
. Not a drill. Pleasant duty, overall, given the season. Winter would have been much worse.

Reacher walked back to town. Just as he hit Main Street the colorless minivan came around the corner. Helen was at the wheel. She pulled over next to him and buzzed her window down.

She said, “Have you seen Henry and Suzanne?”

He said, “Not since breakfast time.”

“People say the trail is closed.”

“It is.”

“So I came to pick them up.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Where are they?”

“I think Henry is a hard man to dissuade.”

“They went anyway?”

“That’s my guess.”

“After it was closed?”

“There was a brief window of opportunity. After the tape went up, before the soldiers arrived.”

“I heard about the soldiers.”

“What else have you heard?”

“There’s something bad in the woods.”

“Vampires, maybe,” Reacher said.

“This isn’t funny. I heard it might be escaped prisoners or rogue military units. Something very dangerous. Everyone is talking. It’s on the local AM station. There are anchors in Cripps already.”

“You want a cup of coffee?”

Helen parked in front of the diner, and they went in together, to the same table Reacher had used before. The waitress brought coffee, and then hustled away and got on the wall phone again. To her friend in Cripps, presumably. For updates, and gossip, and rumor.

Helen said, “Henry is an idiot.”

“He likes the woods,” Reacher said. “Can’t blame him for that.”

“But there’s something in there now, obviously.”

“I guess there is.”

“Which he must have known. It’s not brain surgery. He’s an idiot, but he’s not an
idiot
. But he went in anyway. And dragged Suzanne in with him. He is an idiot. Both sorts.”

“Suzanne could have said no.”

“Actually, she’s just as bad. No impulse control. I heard they have search parties moving south from Cripps.”

Reacher nodded. “I heard that, too. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Or slightly secondhand, I suppose. Our waitress has a friend up there.”

“What are they searching for?”

“People like Henry and Suzanne. They’re getting them out and asking questions about what they saw.”

“But they’ll miss Henry and Suzanne. Won’t they? It’s inevitable. They’re expecting a three-day pipeline. They’ll stop when they get all the people who started out yesterday morning. Henry and Suzanne will be twenty-four hours behind them. They’ll
leave them in there. With whatever else is in there. This is not good.”

“It’s a big woods.”

“The thing could be roaming and hunting. Or if it’s escaped prisoners they’ll stick close to the trail anyway. They would have to. Henry and Suzanne will be in there alone with them.”

Reacher said, “It’s not escaped prisoners.”

“How do you know?”

“I went to see the soldiers at the arch. They’re military police, like I was. But technically what they’re doing isn’t entirely kosher. The military can’t perform civilian law enforcement duties. There are all kinds of rules about that. But their sergeant told me his unit number with no hesitation at all. And then he told me his name, just as fast. He even spelled it out for me.
Cain
, with no
e
.”

“What does all that mean?”

“It means he’s not afraid of anything. So he can get right in my face. Which means he has a solid gold get-out-of-jail-free card. Which must be urgent orders from somewhere very high up. From an unimpeachable source. As in, if some citizen like me makes a fuss, I’m going to get crushed by the machine. He’s going to get a medal. Which makes this a national security issue. It’s showing all the signs. And people escaped from the penitentiary isn’t national security. That’s a state affair.”

Helen was quiet for a second.

Then she said, “A national security issue could be a rogue military unit. Or a band of terrorists. Or escaped prisoners from Homeland Security. Or some kind of mutant has gotten free. Like a genetic experiment. Or someone else’s genetic experiment,
set
free. On purpose. Maybe this is an attack. And they’re right there in it.”

“It’s none of the above,” Reacher said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I sat in a chair all morning and watched the sky.”

“Which told you what?”

“No circling spotter planes, no drones, no helicopters. If they were hunting a warm-blooded creature or creatures, they’d have been up there all day with heat-seeking cameras. And air-to-ground radar, and whatever other fancy things they have now.”

“So what do you think they’re looking for?”

“They aren’t looking. I told you that. No aerial surveillance.”

“Then what aren’t they looking for?”

“Something with no heat signature, and too small to show up on radar.”

“Which would be what?”

“I have no idea.”

“But something they don’t want us to see, obviously. Something we can’t know about.”

“Evidently.”

“It could be a cold-blooded creature. Like a snake.”

“Or a vampire. Are they cold-blooded?”

“This isn’t funny. But OK, maybe it’s not a creature at all. Maybe it’s a piece of secret equipment. Inert, somehow.”

“Possibly.”

“How did it get in there?”

“That’s a great question,” Reacher said. “I think it must have fallen off an airplane.”

They got refills of coffee, and Helen worried away at the problem in her mind, and eventually she said, “This is very bad indeed.”

Reacher said, “Not really. Henry and Suzanne don’t have much to fear from a piece of inert equipment. It’s not going to jump up and bite them in the ass.”

“But it is. That’s exactly what it’s going to do. Figuratively speaking. They’re in the woods illegally, twenty-four hours behind anyone else. That looks secretive. Like their job is to find the thing and smuggle it out. Suppose it’s a bomb or a missile? That happens, right? Bombs and missiles fall off airplanes. Accidently. Sometimes, right? I read it in a book. But more likely deliberately. Like it’s one big conspiracy. What do we do if Henry and Suzanne are taken to be the designated retrieval party? It wouldn’t take much imagination. They sneak in through the tape, they’re all alone in a deserted twenty-four-hour
time window, their job is to grab the missile ahead of your government, and pass it on down the chain, until one day an airliner comes down at JFK and it’s 9/11 all over again.”

“Henry and Suzanne are hikers. Wilderness enthusiasts. It’s the summer vacation. They’re Canadians, for God’s sake.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nicest people in the world. Almost as good as being Swiss.”

“But whatever, they’ll check them out.”

“Names and numbers, in a couple of databases. Nearest thing to doing nothing at all.”

“Suzanne has a history.”

Reacher said, “What kind?”

“She’s a lovely person. You have to understand that. She has sympathy for everybody.”

“Is that a problem?”

Helen said, “Of course it is. Because
everybody
means everybody. Plain English. Which means if you focus the spotlight one particular way, you can see sympathies going where your country doesn’t want them to go. Out of context and more than balanced by other things elsewhere and not at all fair, but facts are facts.”

Reacher said nothing.

Helen said, “And she’s very passionate politically. And very active.”

“How active is very active?”

“It’s what she does. Like a job. Henry runs the bike shop on his own most of the time.”

“So she’s in more than a couple of databases. A couple hundred, at least.”

“Red-flagged in most of them, probably. I mean, she’s not Che Guevara or Chairman Mao, but computer memory is very cheap these days, and they have to fill it up with something. She’s in the top million, I’m sure. And I’m equally sure they have preprogrammed responses ready. The screens will light up like a Christmas tree and she’ll be hauled off to Egypt or Syria. She’ll be in the system. They might let her come home in a year or so, all weird and slightly off. If she lives through it.”

Reacher said, “It might not be a missile. It might be some boring black box full of coded data. Maybe it fell off a satellite, not an airplane. No possible use to anyone else. Which makes the idea of a retrieval party insane to them. They’re not going to be chasing shadows. If they see Henry and Suzanne coming around the corner, dressed like hikers, walking like hikers, and sounding like hikers, then they’re going to call them hikers. They’re going to give them a drink of water and send them on their way.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“It’s one of a number of possibilities.”

“What are all the others?”

“I guess some of them could come uncomfortably close to the kind of thing you’re worried about.”

“How many of them?”

“Practically all of them, really. Bottom line is she’s a foreign national with a history in the middle of a national-security lockdown.”

Helen said, “We have to go get them out.”

Resistance was futile. Reacher knew that right away. He was a realistic man. A Stoic, in the original meaning of the name. A guy who accepted circumstances for what they were, and didn’t seek to change them. He asked, “How fast do they walk?”