Bad Luck and Trouble

aboard. They shut their doors and dumped themselves down in the rear seats. The seat back in front of Reacher sagged against a loose mechanism and touched him on the cheek. He jammed his head harder into the corner. His crew cut scraped across the carpet.
    The rotor turned slowly, whop, whop, whop.
    The suspension knelt and rose, knelt and rose, front left corner, right rear corner, less than an inch, like dancing.
    Reacher waited.
    Then the door up front opposite the pilot wrenched open and Allen Lamaison dumped himself in the seat and said, “Go.” Reacher heard the turbines spin up and felt the thrill and shiver of vibration fill the cabin and heard the rotor note change to an urgent accelerating whip-whip-whip and felt the whole craft go light on its wheels.
    Then they were airborne.
    Reacher felt the floor come up at him. He heard the wheels pull upward into their wells. He felt rotation and drift and a long steady climb and then the floor tilted forward as the nose went down for speed. He braced himself against spread fingers to stop himself sliding into the seat in front of him. He heard the engine noise settle to a muted whine and then the unique pendulum sensation of helicopter transport came right back at him. He had done his fair share of fast miles in rotary aircraft, a lot of them sitting on the floor.
    A familiar experience.
    For now.

79
    By the clock in Reacher’s head the cruise lasted exactly twenty minutes, which was about what he was expecting. He had figured modern corporate machines would be a little faster than the Hueys he had been accustomed to in the service. He figured a military AH-1 might have taken twenty-plus minutes to get itself beyond the mountains, so twenty dead seemed reasonable for something with black leather seats and a carpet.
    He spent the twenty minutes with his head well down. Animal instinct, a million years old and still displayed by dogs and children: If I can’t see them, they can’t see me. He kept his arms and legs moving through silent fractions of an inch and kept his muscles tensing and relaxing in a bizarre miniaturized version of a gymnasium work-out. He was no longer cold, but he didn’t want to get any stiffer. The noise in the cabin was loud but not overwhelming. The engine whine was whipping away in the slipstream. The rotor noise was blending with the rush of air and could be tuned out. There was no conversation going on. No talking. Reacher heard nothing from anyone.
    Until the twenty-minute cruise came to an end.
    He felt the helicopter slow down. Felt the floor come level and then tip backward a couple of degrees as the nose flared upward. The craft rotated left a little. Like a horse reined in on a movie screen. The cabin got louder. Now they were moving slowly, trapped in a bubble of their own noise.
    He bent forward from the waist and put an eye to the gap between the seats and saw Lamaison leaning over with his forehead pressed against his window. Saw him change direction and lean toward the pilot. Heard him speak. Or maybe he only imagined that he heard him speak. He had reconstructed the orders in his head a thousand times since opening Franz’s file days before. He felt that he knew them, word for word, in all their cruel inevitability.
    “Where are we?” Lamaison asked, in Reacher’s mind, and maybe also in reality.
    “The badlands,” the pilot said.
    “What’s below us now?”
    “Sand.”
    “Height?”
    “Three thousand feet.”
    “What’s the air like up here?”
    “Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”
    “Safe?”
    “Aeronautically.”
    “So let’s do it.”
    Reacher felt the helicopter come to a stationary hover. The engine note dropped down to a deeper key and the rotor thrashed loudly. The floor moved in tiny unstable circles, like a spinning top come to rest. Lamaison turned in his seat and nodded once to Parker and once to Lennox. Reacher heard the click of safety-harness catches and then the weight came up off the seats in front of him. Leather cushions inhaled and tired springs recovered and moved the seat backs a precious inch farther from his face. There was no light other than the orange glow from the cockpit. Parker was on the left and Lennox was on the right. They were both in strange half-crouches, knees bent and heads ducked because of limited headroom, feet apart for stability on the moving floor, arms thrust outward for balance. One of them was going to die easy and one of them was going to die hard.
    It