Without Fail

suspension bucked and crashed and banged.
    “They can run,” he screamed.
    “But they can’t hide,” Neagley screamed back.
    Ten minutes later they were ten miles west of Grace and felt like they had been badly beaten in a fistfight. Reacher’s head was hitting the roof over every bump and his arms were aching. His shoulders were wrenched. The engine was still screaming. The only way he could keep his foot on the gas pedal was to mash it all the way down to the carpet. Neagley was bouncing around at his side and flailing back and forth. She had given up bracing herself with her arms in case she broke her elbows.
    Over the next ten murderous miles the terrain shaded into something new. They were literally in the middle of nowhere. The town of Grace was twenty miles behind them and the highway was twenty miles ahead. The grade was rising. The land was breaking up into sharper ravines. There was more rock. There was still grass growing, and it was still tall, but it was thinner because the roots were shallower. And there was snow on the ground. The grass stalks were rigid with ice and they came up out of a six-inch white blanket. Both cars slowed, a hundred yards apart. Within another mile the chase had slowed to a ludicrous twenty-mile-an-hour procession. They were inching down forty-five-degree faces, plunging hood-deep through accumulated snow in the bottoms, clawing up the rises with their transmissions locked in four-wheel-drive. The crevasses ran maybe ten or fifteen feet deep. The endless wind from the west had packed the snow into them with the lee faces bare and the windward faces smooth and sheer. There were flakes in the air, whipping horizontally toward them.
    “We’re going to get stuck,” Neagley said.
    “They got in this way,” Reacher said. “Got to be able to get out.”
    They lost sight of the Tahoe ahead of them every time it dropped away into a ravine. They glimpsed it only when they labored up a peak and caught sight of it up on a peak of its own three or four dips in front. There was no rhythm. No coordination. Both trucks were diving and then clawing upward randomly. They had slowed to walking pace. Reacher had the transmission locked in low range and the truck was slipping and sliding. Far to the west the snowstorm was wild. The weather was blowing in fast.
    “It’s time,” Reacher said. “Any one of these ravines, the snow will hide them all winter.”
    “OK, let’s go for it,” Neagley said.
    She buzzed her window down and a flurry of snow blew in on a gale of freezing air. She picked up the Heckler & Koch and clicked it to full auto. Reacher accelerated hard and plunged through the next two dips as fast as the truck could take it. Then he jammed on the brakes at the top of the third peak and flicked the wheel left. The truck slewed sideways and slid to a stop with the passenger window facing forward and Neagley leaned all the way out and waited. The gold Tahoe reared up a hundred yards ahead and she loosed a long raking burst of fire aimed low at the rear tires and the fuel tank. The Tahoe paused fractionally and then rocked over the peak of its rise and disappeared again.
    Reacher spun the wheel and hit the gas and crawled after it. The stop had cost them maybe another hundred yards. He plowed through three consecutive ravines and stopped again on the fourth peak. They waited. Ten seconds, fifteen. The Tahoe did not reappear. They waited twenty seconds. Thirty.
    “Hell is it?” Reacher muttered.
    He slid the truck down the windward face, through the snow, up the other side. Straight over the top into the next dip. Up the rise, over the top, down into the snow. No sign of the Tahoe. He powered on. The tires spun and the engine screamed. He made it up the next rise. Stopped dead at the top. The land fell away twenty feet into a broad gulch. It was thick with snow and the icy stalks of grass showed less than a foot above it. The Tahoe’s incoming tracks from the day before were visible straight ahead, almost obscured by wind and fresh snowfall. But its outgoing tracks were deep and new. They turned sharply right and ran away to the north, through a tight curve in the ravine, and then out of sight behind a snow-covered outcrop. There was silence all around. Snow was driving straight at them. It was coming upward at them, off the bottom of the dip.
    Time and space , Reacher thought. Four dimensions. A classic tactical problem. The Tahoe might have U-turned and might be aiming