Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [46]
“Show me,” Reacher said.
The guy opened his mouth again and stuck out his tongue. Like a kid at the clinic. The card was gone.
“Now sit down,” Reacher said.
“What?”
“Like you were before.”
“I thought you wanted me to head for the Duncans’ place.”
“I do,” Reacher said. “But not yet. Not while I’m still in the neighborhood.”
The guy sat down, a little worried, facing south, his legs straight out and his hands on his knees and his upper body curled forward a little.
“Arms behind you,” Reacher said. “Lean back on your hands.”
“Why?”
Enemy ordnance.
“Just do it,” Reacher said.
The guy got his arms behind him and put his weight on his hands. Reacher stepped behind him and crashed the sole of his boot through the guy’s right elbow. The guy went down flat and shrieked and rolled and whimpered. Then he sat up again and cradled his broken arm and stared at Reacher accusingly. Reacher stepped around behind him again and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The guy toppled slowly, forward at first, and then he twisted sideways as his gut got in the way of further progress. He sprawled out and landed softly on one shoulder and lay still, like a large letter L on a dirty brown page. Reacher turned away and slogged on north, toward the two wooden buildings on the horizon.
Chapter 22
The Canadian semitruck with the Duncans’ shipment aboard was making good time, heading due east on Route 3 in British Columbia, driving mostly parallel to the die-straight international border, with Alberta up ahead. Route 3 was a lonely road, mountainous, with steep grades and tight turns. Not ideal for a large vehicle. Most drivers took Route 1, which looped north out of Vancouver before turning east later. A better road, all things considered. Route 3 was quiet by comparison. It had long stretches of nothing but asphalt ribbon and wild scenery. And very little traffic. And occasional gravel turnouts, for rest and recuperation.
One of the gravel turn-outs was located a mile or so before Waterton Lakes National Park. In U.S. terms it was directly above the Washington-Idaho state line, about halfway between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, about a hundred miles north of both. The turn-out had an amazing view. Endless forest to the south, the snowy bulk of the Rockies to the east, magnificent lakes to the north. The semitruck driver pulled off and parked there, but not for the view. He parked there because it was a prearranged location, and because a white panel van was waiting there for him. The Duncans had been in business a long time, because of luck and caution, and one of their cautionary principles was to transfer their cargo between vehicles as soon as possible after import. Shipping containers could be tracked. Indeed, they were designed to be tracked, by the BIC code. Better not to risk a delayed alert from a suspicious Customs agent. Better to move the goods within hours, into something anonymous and forgettable and untraceable, and white panel vans were the most anonymous and forgettable and untraceable vehicles on earth.
The semitruck parked and the panel van K-turned on the gravel and backed up to it and stopped rear-to-rear with it. Both drivers got out. They didn’t speak. They just stepped out into the roadway and craned their necks and checked what was coming, one east, one west. Nothing was coming, which was not unusual for Route 3, so they jogged back to their vehicles and got to work. The van driver opened his rear doors, and the truck driver climbed up on his flatbed and cut the plastic security seal and smacked the bolts and levers out of their brackets and opened the container’s doors.
One minute later the cargo was transferred, all 1,260 pounds of it, and another minute after that the white van had K-turned again and was heading east, and the semitruck was trailing behind it for a spell, its driver intending to turn north on 95 and then loop back west on Route 1, a better road, back to Vancouver for his next job, which was likely