Die Trying

roof. A full spectrum of noise. Holly lay down next to Reacher. She put her head next to his. Her hair fanned out and brushed his cheek and fell to his neck. She squirmed her hips and straightened her leg. There was still space between their bodies. The decorous V shape was still there. But the angle was a little tighter than it had been before.
    “But what can he do?” Reacher said. “Talk me through it.”
    “They’re going to make some kind of demand,” she said. “You know, do this or do that, or we hurt your girl.”
    She spoke slowly and there was a tremor in her voice. Reacher let his hand drop into the space between them and found hers. He took it and squeezed gently.
    “Doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Think about it. What does your father do? He implements long-term policy, and he’s responsible for short-term readiness. Congress and the President and the Defense Secretary thrash out the long-term policy, right? So if the Joint Chairman tried to stand in their way, they’d just replace him. Especially if they know he’s under this kind of pressure, right?”
    “What about short-term readiness?” she said.
    “Same sort of a thing,” Reacher said. “He’s only chairman of a committee. The individual Chiefs of Staff are in there, too. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. If they’re all singing a different song from what your father is reporting upward, that’s not going to stay a secret for long, is it? They’ll just replace him. Take him out of the equation altogether.”
    Holly turned her head. Looked straight at him.
    “Are you sure?” she said. “Suppose these guys are working for Iraq or something? Suppose Saddam wants Kuwait again. But he doesn’t want another Desert Storm. So he has me kidnapped, and my father says sorry, can’t be done, for all kinds of invented reasons?”
    Reacher shrugged.
    “The answer’s right there in the words you used,” he said. “The reasons would be invented. Fact is, we could do Desert Storm again, if we had to. No problem. Everybody knows that. So if your father started denying it, everybody would know he was bullshitting, and everybody would know why. They’d just sideline him. The military is a tough place, Holly, no room for sentiment. If that’s the strategy these guys are pursuing, they’re wasting their time. It can’t work.”
    She was quiet for a long moment.
    “Then maybe this is about revenge,” she said slowly. “Maybe somebody is punishing him for something in the past. Maybe I’m going to Iraq. Maybe they want to make him apologize for Desert Storm. Or Panama, or Grenada, or lots of things.”
    Reacher lay on his back and rocked with the motion. He could feel slight breaths of air stirring, because of the holes in the roof. He realized the truck was now a lot cooler, because of the new ventilation. Or because of his new mood.
    “Too arcane,” he said. “You’d have to be a pretty acute analyst to blame the Joint Chairman for all that stuff. There’s a string of more obvious targets. Higher-profile people, right? The President, the Defense Secretary, Foreign Service people, field generals. If Baghdad was looking for a public humiliation, they’d pick somebody their people could identify, not some paper shuffler from the Pentagon.”
    “So what the hell is this about?” Holly said.
    Reacher shrugged again.
    “Ultimately, nothing,” he said. “They haven’t thought it through properly. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They’re competent, but they’re stupid.”

    THE TRUCK DRONED on another six hours. Another three hundred and fifty miles, according to Reacher’s guess. The inside temperature had cooled, but Reacher wasn’t trying to estimate their direction by the temperature anymore. The pellet holes in the roof had upset that calculation. He was relying on dead reckoning instead. A total of eight hundred miles from Chicago, he figured, and not in an easterly direction. That left a big spread of possibilities. He trawled clockwise around the map in his head. Could be in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. Could be in Texas, Oklahoma, the southwest corner of Kansas. Probably no farther west than that. Reacher’s mental map had brown shading there, showing the eastern slopes of the mountains, and the truck wasn’t laboring up any grades. Could be in Nebraska or South Dakota. Maybe he was going to pass right by Mount Rushmore, second time in his life. Could have kept on past Minneapolis, into