Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(101)

He was slow with his reload. His right elbow was slow to bend. Kind of awkward. Arthritis, maybe. He tried to compensate by scrabbling for the arrow early. He fumbled it. Patty breathed in. She felt she was at the head of a tight V-shaped formation, somehow now in motion, loud music playing, her loyal teammates marching at her shoulder, willing her on, bearing her forward, buoying her up, making her weightless.

The first teammate whispered, I think the thing to remember, when all is said and done, apart from anything else, is that this guy shot Shorty with an arrow. Which by any standards is completely out of order.

The second teammate said, the night vision device will protect his face. Better to aim for his throat.

Keep mine for a weapon, Shorty had said.

She did it beautifully. Despite very little prior experience. She felt it all happen, at a molecular level. She sensed every compound flooding her brain. Some were complex emotions. Mostly about Shorty. Primeval feelings. Much stronger than she expected. Some were simple software downloads. Dusty old how-to manuals, left behind from savage eras deep in prehistory. She absorbed them all, and they gave her animal grace, and strength, and speed, and cunning, and ferocity, plus some kind of serene human abandon over the top of it all, that made her surrender to instinct completely. She danced across the space, trailing the flashlight behind her, shuffling her stride to perfection, swinging the flashlight ahead of her, accelerating it hard, keeping it low, the Cyclops eye coming down to track it, then whipping it up in a savage U-shaped curve, into the narrowing angle between the dropping chin and the arching neck.

It hit with a crunch she felt all the way to her elbow. The guy went down like he ran into a clothes rope. He landed on his back. She grabbed his bow and threw it away. His night vision was bound to his head with thick rubber straps. She tore it off. He was a thin, pale, sour man, about seventy years old.

His mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish.

Panic in his eyes.

He couldn’t breathe.

He pointed to his throat, both hands, desperate urgent gestures.

Can’t breathe, he mouthed.

Tough shit, she thought.

Then she heard Shorty whimper.

Later she knew she would have no defense, if a lawyer accused her of flying into a murderous rage. Damn right she did. Or if he asked her, sternly, did you in fact beat the victim to death with the flashlight? Damn right she did. With blows to the head, exclusively. A lot to his face. With every ounce of her strength. Until his skull looked like a bag of nails.

Then she crawled back to Shorty.

Who was quiet.

He had seen.

First things first. She got her hands under his arms and dragged him deeper into the woods. She got him sitting upright against a tree. She got his legs straight out in front. Then she ran back to the guy she had killed. She took his night vision device. She strapped it on. She hated it. It smelled of his breath and his hair, and dirty metal, and perished military rubber.

But now she could see. Luminous green, in fantastic detail. Every vein in every leaf on every tree was sharp as a pin. As if lit from inside. Glowing softly. At her feet she saw every twig and every fallen flake of bark, with exquisite precision. In the far distance she saw trees just as bright as the trees close by. It was better than daylight. It was unnatural. It was amplified, and smoothed, and gated, and displayed. She felt like Superman.

She ran back to Shorty, and got to work.

—

Reacher took the dead guy’s night vision device. He strapped it on and adjusted the buckles. The world went bright and green and highly detailed. He took the whole quiver of arrows. He slung it over his shoulder. Twenty knives on sticks. Better than nothing.

He moved deeper into the woods. No danger of getting lost. The track was still visible through the trees, even though it was now thirty yards to his left. It still showed clearly. Its luminosity was exactly equal to everything else. The night vision ignored shadow and distance. Every single thing got the same green and meticulous attention.

He moved up four paces and stopped. He figured the second guy would be close, but not too close. Near enough for a rapid response, far enough to escape a train wreck. Within earshot, certainly.

He turned a long slow circle. He examined every detail. Night vision was not the same thing as thermal imaging. That was a different department entirely. If the guy lit a cigarette with a match, then sure, he would show up as a sudden bright flare. But solely because of the light, not the heat. Night vision didn’t know about heat. If the guy didn’t light a cigarette, he wouldn’t really show up at all. Certainly not as a fat orange sausage of body temperature. At best he would show up as a pale ghostly shape the same as every other pale ghostly shape. Or not show up. He was automatically camouflaged. Because everything was green.

No sign of him.

Reacher checked the other side of the track. He moved back and forth, to see through the trees. Fifty yards away, easy. Perfect detail. Better than daylight. No light and shade, no dappling, no near and far. Each tree glowed exactly the same, as if equally radioactive, in some nightmare future world. Each vine and bramble was a separate delicate line, impossibly thin, like engraving on a banknote.

He saw the guy.

Leaning on a tree, about six feet from the edge of the track. Skintight clothing, dark in color, bow in his hand, looking mostly forward up the track, but glancing back all the time, down the track, behind him. He was anxious. He couldn’t hear his partner. Now he had to choose. Respond, or dodge a train wreck?