The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [84]
“My fault,” I said. “My fault entirely.”
“How?”
Go straight to Kelham, I had said. There are recruiters on every post. As soon as you’ve got something in your hand that proves you’re eighteen years old, they’ll let you in and never let you out again.
The kid had taken it literally. I had meant he would have to wait. But he had gone ahead and made himself eighteen years old, right there and then. He had manufactured something to have in his hand. Probably at the same kitchen table where I had sat and talked and drank iced tea. I pictured him, head down, concentrating, tongue between his teeth, maybe wetting the paper with a drop of water, scraping the old numbers off with the tip of a dinner knife, blotting the damp patch, waiting for it to dry, finding the right pen, calculating, practicing, and then drawing in the new numbers. The numbers that would get him through Kelham’s gate. The numbers that would get him accepted.
All on my dime.
I started walking back toward the road.
Deveraux came after me. I told her,
“I need a gun.”
She said, “Why?”
I stopped again and turned and looked east and scoped it out. Fort Kelham was a giant rectangle north of the road and its fence ran through a broad belt of trees that extended a couple hundred yards each side of the wire. It looked like the whole place had been hacked out of the same kind of old forest that lay south of the road, but I guessed the opposite was true. I guessed Kelham had been laid out on open ground fifty years before, and then farmers had stopped plowing short of the fence, so the trees had come afterward. Like new weeds. Not like the old woods to the south. The new trees thinned here and there, but mostly they provided deep cover wherever it was needed. Easy enough for a small force to stay concealed among them, slipping outward into the open belt of scrub when necessary, then slipping back inward and on through the fence for rest or resupply.
I started walking again. I said, “I’m going to find this quarantine squad that everyone claims doesn’t exist.”
“Suppose you do?” Deveraux said. “It will be your word against theirs. Your word against the Pentagon’s, basically. You’ll say the squad existed, they’ll say it didn’t. And the Pentagon has the bigger microphone.”
“They can’t argue with physical evidence. I’ll bring back enough body parts to convince anyone.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“They shouldn’t have shot the kid, Elizabeth. That was way out of line, whoever they are. They opened the wrong door there. That’s for damn sure. What lies on the other side is their problem, not ours.”
“You don’t even know where they are.”
“They’re in the woods.”
“In camouflage with binoculars. How would you even get near them?”
“They have a blind spot.”
“Where?”
“Close to Kelham’s gate. They’re looking for the kind of intruder who already knows he can’t get through the gate. So they’re not looking there. They’re looking farther afield.”
“The guardhouse watches the gate.”
“No, the guardhouse watches what approaches the gate. I’m not going to approach the gate. I’m going to find the gap. Too far in the rear of the mobile force, too far in advance of the guardhouse.”
“They’re shooting people, Reacher.”
“They’re shooting the people they see. They won’t see me.”
“I’ll give you a ride back to town.”
“I’m not going back to town. I want a ride in the other direction. And a firearm.”
She didn’t answer.
I said, “I’m prepared to do it without either thing if necessary. Slower and harder, but I’ll get it done.”
She said, “Get in the car, Reacher.”
No indication where she planned to take me.
We got in the car and Deveraux backed it away from Butler’s cruiser and then she took off forward, east, toward Kelham. The right direction, as far as I was concerned. We covered most of the last mile and I said, “Now head off across the grass. To the edge of the woods. Like you just saw something.”
She said, “Straight at them?”
“They’re not here. They’re north and west of here. And they wouldn’t shoot at a police vehicle anyway.”
“You sure about