Bad Luck and Trouble

depended on which one of them was going to open the door.
    Lennox was going to open the door.
    He half-turned and grabbed his trailing safety harness and held on tight with his left hand. Then he crabbed sideways and used his right to grope for the interior door release. He got there and unlatched it and pushed. The door swung half-open and wind and noise howled in. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching over his shoulder, and he tilted the craft a little so the door fell the rest of the way open under its own weight. Then he brought it level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and inertia and air pressure held the door wide against its hinge.
    Lennox turned back. Big, red-faced, meaty, crouched like an ape, his left hand tight on his harness strap, his right pawing the air like a man on ice.
    Reacher leaned forward and used his left hand to find the seat-release lever. He put his thumb below the pivot and two fingers above it and twisted. The seat back flopped forward. He used his left hand to force it all the way horizontal. He held it there. The cushions exhaled again. He brought the Glock up in his right hand and twisted from the waist and laid his right forearm flat on the seat back. Closed one eye and picked a spot an inch above Lennox’s navel.
    And pulled the trigger.
    The blast was muted in the general roar. Audible, but not as bad as it would have been in a library. The bullet hit Lennox low in the midsection. Reacher figured it was an instant through-and-through. Inevitable, with a nine-millimeter from a range of about four feet. Which was why he was shooting at Lennox and not at Parker. Reacher was not remotely afraid of flying, but he preferred the aircraft he was in to be undamaged. A shot through Parker’s midsection might have hit a hydraulic line or an electrical cable. Through Lennox it went straight out the open door into the night, harmlessly.
    Lennox stayed in his awkward half-crouch. A bloom of blood haloed the hole in his shirt. It looked black in the dim orange light. His left hand came off the harness and pawed the air, a perfect mirror image of his right. He crouched there, balanced, symmetrical, a foot from the door sill, nothing behind him except the void, catastrophic physical shock on his face.
    Reacher moved the Glock a small fraction and shot him again, this time through the sternum. He figured that on a guy as big and as old as Lennox the sternum would be a well-calcified plate maybe three-eighths of an inch thick. The bullet would pass through it for sure, but not before the smashing and splintering of the bone had transferred a little forward momentum into the target. Like the effect of a tiny punch. Maybe enough effect and enough momentum to take the guy with it a little and put him down backward, rather than just dumping him in a vertical heap like a head shot would have. There was too much articulation in the human neck for a head shot to have done what Reacher wanted it to.
    But it was his knees that did Lennox in, not his breastbone. He came down just a fraction in back of vertical, like a guy aiming to squat on his heels. But he was big and heavy and he was forty-one years old and his knees had stiffened. They bent a little more than ninety degrees and then they stopped bending. His upper-body mass was pitched backward by the sudden obstruction and his ass hit square on the door sill and the weight of his shoulders and his head rolled him over the pivot and took him right out the door into the night. The last Reacher saw of him was the soles of his shoes, still well apart, whipping away into the windy darkness like afterthoughts.
    By that point it was much less than two seconds since he had dropped the seat, but to Reacher it seemed like two lifetimes. Franz’s and Orozco’s, maybe. He felt infinitely fluent and languid. He was floating in a state of grace and torment, planning his moves like chess, minutely aware of potentials and drawbacks and threats and opportunities. The others in the cabin had barely reacted at all. O’Donnell was facedown, trying to lift his head far enough to turn. Dixon was trying to roll onto her back. The pilot was half-turned, immobile in his seat. Parker was frozen in his absurd crouch. Lamaison was gazing at the empty air where Lennox had been, like he was completely unable to understand what had just happened.
    Then Reacher stood up.
    He dropped the second seat and climbed out over it like a nightmare