Not a Drill: A Jack Reacher Short Story Read Online Free PDF

maybe. Black-and-white film of skinny gentlemen pounding around cinder tracks. Baggy white shirts. Grimaces. Digging in. Enduring. The machetes were between Reacher’s feet. They slid backward and forward, backward and forward, with the pulse of every stroke.

    The far tip of the finger was a rocky V tight up against tree trunks. Which made it easy to steady the ship prior to getting out. There were handholds everywhere. But it made it hard to move more than a foot ashore. It was all about squeezing through, leading with one shoulder, leading with the other, being careful with the trailing foot, like crossing a crowded room at a party, except with statues instead of people, all of them as solid as iron. And not in candlelight, but in a strange green glow, from the bright sun behind abillion still and silent leaves.
    And any wider clearing was no real bonus, either, because they were all tangled with vines and brambles, which to some extent could be blundered through, but nine times out of ten the machetes were needed in the last yard or two, to release ankles all snarled up and fresh out of momentum.
    Reacher asked, “You OK?”
    Helen answered, “In what way?”
    “You don’t like the woods.”
    “You want to take three wild-ass guesses as to why? As in, right now this minute?”
    They pressed on, Reacher leading, making a big hole in the vegetation, Helen coming through it close behind, both of them making prints where maybe no human had ever walked before. And then they sensed rather than saw the trail up ahead, a slit, a discontinuity, an absence. A hole in the woodland sounds. A change in the sky. A seam in the canopy. And then they came upon it, stepping over gnarled trunks bent like knees, turning, squeezing, and finally falling out on what was literally the beaten track. The air above it was damp and still, and noticeably cool.
    Helen said, “So are we ahead of them?”
    “I think so,” Reacher said. “For sure, if they’re sightseeing. Maybe not, if something spooked them and they hustled. But I’m pretty sure we made it. And when it comes to speculation, I’m a very cautious man.”
    “So we wait here?”
    “The most efficient use of our time would be to move and meet them head on. By definition we’d turn them around closer to Naismith than here.”
    “We might be walking away from them.”
    “Life’s a gamble, I guess.”
    “It was a spooky situation from the start. Maybe they were hustling all the way. Just to be able to say they’d done the miles. They could have passed here thirty minutes ago.”
    “I’m guessing they didn’t hustle. They seemed really into this stuff. I think they’re strolling slow, stopping all the time, looking at this and that. All on their own. It’sjust them and the forest. I say they’re thirty minutes in front of us.”
    “You’ve done this kind of thing before, right?”
    “From time to time.”
    “Did you get them right?”
    “Some of them.”
    She took a breath and said, “OK, we’ll hope to meet them head on. And if we don’t, I’m going to call you some very un-Canadian names. Some with several syllables.”
    “Sticks and stones,” Reacher said.
    “I’ll go first,” she said.

    The trail was much easier underfoot, and it was a straight shot, with no twisting or dodging, which meant they could pay a little attention to things more than a foot and a half away. Of which there were many. And which in the end slowed them down more than the tripwire brambles. Because there was a lot to look at.
Primeval
was the right word. Not necessarily Reacher’s thing, but he couldn’t deny some sense of primitive connection. It could have been that a hundred generations of his ancestors had lived in the woods. They had to live somewhere. The trees were spotty with lichen and smooth with light green moss, and they bent and twisted and jostled for light and space, and the gloomy shapes they made seemed to talk, just faintly, like a distant hum.
Perfect ambush