Worth Dying For

all three vehicles and left them running. Then he started leapfrogging them forward, moving them closer to the mouth of the Duncan driveway, a hundred yards at a time, getting them in the right order, hoping to delay detection for as long as possible. Without the scope, his view of the compound was much less detailed, but it still looked quiet. He got the black pick-up within fifty yards, and he left the gold Yukon waiting right behind it, and then he jogged back and got in the white Tahoe and drove it all the way forward. He turned it into the mouth of the driveway and lined it up straight and eased it to a stop.
    He slid out of the seat and crouched down and clamped the jaws of his adjustable wrench across the width of the gas pedal. He corrected the angle so that the stem of the wrench stuck up above the horizontal, and then he turned the knurled knob tight. He ducked back and hustled around the tailgate and opened the fuel filler door and took off the gas cap. He poked the end of the borrowed scarf down the filler neck with the longer screwdriver, and then he lit the free end of the scarf with his matches. Then he hustled back to the driver’s door and leaned in and put the truck in gear. The engine’s idle speed rolled it forward. He kept pace and put his finger on the button and powered the driver’s seat forward. The cushion moved, slowly, an inch at a time, through its whole range, past the point where a person of average height would want it, on towards where a short person would want it, and then the front of the cushion touched the end of the wrench, and the engine note changed and the truck sped up a little. Reacher kept pace and kept his finger where it was and the seat kept on moving, and the truck kept on accelerating, and Reacher started running alongside, and then the seat arrived at the limit of its travel and Reacher stepped away and let the truck go on without him. It was rolling at maybe ten miles an hour, maybe less, not very fast at all, but enough to overcome the wash of gravel under its tyres. The ruts in the driveway were holding it reasonably straight. The scarf in the filler neck was burning pretty well.
    Reacher turned and jogged back to the road, to the black pickup, and he got in and drove it forward beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he backed it up and in and parallel-parked it across the width of the space, between the fences, sawing it back and forth until he had it at a perfect ninety degrees, with just a couple of feet of open space at either end. The white Tahoe was rolling steadily, already halfway to its target, tramlining left and right in the ruts, trailing a bright plume of flame. Reacher pulled the black pick-up’s keys and jogged back to the road. He leaned on the blind side of the gold Yukon’s hood and watched.
    The white Tahoe was well ablaze. It rolled on through its final twenty yards, dumbly, unflinchingly, and it hit the front of the centre house and stopped dead. Two tons, some momentum,but no kind of a major crash. The wood on the house split and splintered, and the front wall bowed inward a little, and glass fell out of a ground floor window, and that was all.
    But that was enough.
    The flames at the rear of the truck swayed forward and came back and settled in to burn. They roiled the air around them and licked out horizontally under the sills and climbed up the doors. They spilled out of the rear wheel wells and fat coils of black smoke came off the tyres. The smoke boiled upward and caught the breeze and drifted away south and west.
    Reacher leaned into the Yukon and took the rifle off the seat.
    The flames crept onward towards the front of the Tahoe, slow but urgent, busy, seeking release, curling out and up. The rear tyres started to burn and the front tyres started to smoke. Then the fuel line must have ruptured because suddenly there was a wide fan of flame, a new colour, a fierce lateral spray that beat against the front of the house and rose up all around the Tahoe’s hood, surging left and right, licking the house, lighting it, bubbling the paint in a fast black semicircle. Then finally flames started chasing the bubbling paint, small at first, then larger, like a map of an army swarming through broken defences, fanning out, seeking new ground. Air sucked in and out of the broken window and the flames started licking at its frame.
    Reacher dialled his borrowed cell.
    He said, ‘The centre house is alight.’
    Dorothy Coe answered, from