Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [1]
“OK,” Tyler said. “So where and when?”
“We want you to watch the barn,” the voice said. “All day tomorrow. We can’t let him see the barn. Not now. If we don’t get him tonight, he’s going to figure it out eventually. He’s going to head over there and take a look.”
“He’s going to walk right into it, just like that?”
“He thinks there are four of us. He doesn’t know there are five.”
“That’s good.”
“Shoot him if you see him.”
“I will.”
“Don’t miss.”
“Do I ever?” Tyler said. He clicked off the call and dumped the phone back on the console and drove on, the little girl’s new shoes waving in his mirror, dead winter fields ahead, dead winter fields behind, darkness to his left, the setting sun to his right.
The barn had been built long ago, when moderate size and wooden construction had been appropriate for Nebraska agriculture. Its function had since been supplanted by huge metal sheds built in distant locations chosen solely on the basis of logistical studies. But the old place had endured, warping slowly, rotting slowly, leaning and weathering. All around it was an apron of ancient blacktop that had been heaved by winter frosts and cracked by summer sun and laced with wiry weeds. The main door was a slider built of great balks of timber banded together with iron, hung off an iron rail by iron wheels, but the gradual tilt of the building had jammed it solid in its tracks. The only way in was the judas hole, which was a small conventional door inset in the slider, a little left of its center, a little smaller than man-sized.
Eldridge Tyler was staring at that small door through the scope on his rifle. He had been in position an hour early, well before dawn, a precaution he considered prudent. He was a patient man. And thorough. And meticulous. He had driven his truck off the road and followed winding tractor ruts through the dark, and he had parked in an ancient three-sided shelter designed long ago to keep spring rain off burlap fertilizer sacks. The ground was frozen hard and he had raised no dust and left no sign. He had shut down the big V-8 and stepped back to the shelter’s entrance and tied a tripwire across it, made of thin electric cable insulated with black plastic, set shin-high to a tall man.
Then he had walked back to his truck, and he had climbed into the load bed, and he had stepped on the roof of the cab, and he had passed his rifle and a canvas tote bag up onto a half-loft built like a shelf under the shelter’s peaked roof. He had levered himself up after them, and crawled forward, and eased a loose louver out of the ventilation hole in the loft’s gable wall, which would give him a clear view of the barn exactly a hundred and twenty yards north, just as soon as there was light in the sky. No luck involved. He had scouted the location many years before, the first time his four friends had called on him for help, and he had prepared well, driving in the nails for the tripwire, pacing out the distance to the barn, and loosening the louver. Now he had once again gotten comfortable up on the half-loft, and he had kept as warm as he could, and he had waited for the sun to come up, which it had eventually, pale and wan.
His rifle was the Grand Alaskan model built in America by the Arnold Arms Company. It was chambered for the .338 Magnum and fitted with a 26-inch barrel and had a stock carved from exhibition-grade English walnut. It was a seven-thousand-dollar item, good against most anything on four legs, better than good against anything on two. The scope was by Leica, a nine-hundred-dollar Ultravid with a standard crosshairs engraving on the reticle. Tyler had it zoomed through about two-thirds of its magnification so that at a hundred and twenty yards it showed a circular slice of life about ten feet high and ten feet across. The pale morning sun was low in the east, and its soft gray light was coming in almost horizontal