They walked backward across the lot. Already flames were curling out of doors and windows. Fantastic shapes were boiling under the eaves, racing laterally, stopping, starting, like breathing, then joining together and lighting the roof on fire.
Shorty said, “They can’t afford to look at it. Not with night vision. It would fry their eyeballs. All we have to do is keep it directly behind us, and they won’t see us coming.”
In her head Patty thought out the geometry, and she nodded, and said, “That’s pretty smart, Shorty.”
They walked east through the meadow, past their suitcase, keeping themselves exactly in line, with the fire plumb behind them, and the mouth of the track dead ahead.
Reacher found a quad-bike parked on the track. It loomed up in gray filtered moonlight. He was six feet in the trees. He dodged left and right to see the whole picture. The bike was stopped on a diagonal, facing mostly back toward the motel. The front wheels were turned in that direction. The handlebar was askew. As if it had driven down, and slowed, and turned a tight half circle. But not completely. Not a full 180.
No sign of a rider.
Hunting, said the back of his brain.
OK, said the front. But where? Up ahead, surely. The guy had driven down, and swung around, and parked. When he figured he was safely beyond the far edge of the action. Like a backstop position. He had thought about it carefully. Reacher had heard him, in the distance. The guy had sat astride his idling bike, most of a minute, presumably leaning forward on his handlebars, staring ahead, calculating. Then he had shut down and gotten off, and presumably he had walked back the way he had come, to get closer to the action, to squeeze the perimeter, to improve his angles. Which meant Reacher was currently behind him. Always a good place to be. He looked ahead through the trees. He dodged left and right for a better view.
No sign of the guy.
Reacher moved up in the trees. Hard going. Vines, brambles, leafy undergrowth shrubs. Not quiet, either. But he broke up his footsteps to a staccato rhythm. Not left, right, left, right. Not like a route march. Just random scrabbling. Like an animal. Maybe a fox, digging cover. In the dark. Maybe a bear cub. Hard to tell. He kept on going.
He saw the rider.
But only just.
The guy was standing in the middle of the track, almost invisible in the moonlight gloom. He was half turned away from something up ahead. He was an extraordinary figure. He was dressed in tight black clothes, like athletic gear. He had an archery bow slung across his back. He had a quiver of arrows. Strapped to his head was a one-lens night vision device. Like a Cyclops eye. U.S. Army. Second generation. Reacher had used them.
A night hunt, said the back of his brain. Told you so.
OK, said the front.
There was a faint glow on the horizon. Slightly red, slightly orange.
Reacher moved up in the trees. A long step, a furtive rustle, and then another. The guy didn’t notice. He was moving his head, trying to see the distant glow in the corner of his eye, where it wouldn’t burn too bright, but he couldn’t do it. He kept flinching away. In the end he flipped the optical tube up and out of the way, and he took a look with the naked eye. He stepped back, and left, to get a better view.
Reacher stepped forward, and right.
Something was on fire, way far in the distance.
The guy was about eight feet away. To the right, and a little ahead. He was a well built individual. With the night vision up he was as handsome as a movie actor.
A nighttime bowhunter.
Of what?
There’s always a victim, said the back of his brain.
Reacher moved.
The guy heard. He took the bow off his back in one fluid motion. A split second later he had an arrow in his hand. He nocked the arrow and half drew the string, and held the weapon half ready, pointing low. He looked all around. His night vision was still in the up position. Disengaged. The arrowhead was wide and flat. It shone faintly in the moonlight. It was a decent chunk of steel. It would do some damage. Like getting hit with an ax, but harder.
Then the guy raised the bow high, both hands, as if he was about to ford a river. He used his forearm to knock his optical tube back into place. Now he had vision again. He peered around, grotesquely, mostly ahead, one huge glass eye the size of a coffee can, his head moving slowly.
Reacher stepped back, and left. He lined up the trees. He wanted a sliver of view, but a narrow one. The narrower the better.
The guy kept peering around. He covered what was ahead of him. Then he turned, to see what was to the side of him. Then he turned some more, to see what was behind him.
He looked straight at Reacher. The blank glass lens fixed right on him. The guy raised the bow and drew the string. Reacher swayed right. The arrow fired and buried itself in the tree in front of him with a ringing thunk that sang through the hardwood from bole to crown.
Like an ax, but harder.
The guy reloaded with fast practiced movements, all right-handed, taking an arrow from the quiver, fitting it to the bow, at the head, at the feathers, then drawing back the string. Ready. Not much slower than working a bolt action rifle. Same kind of ballpark.
Reacher called out, “Are you aware that you’re shooting at a human target?”
The guy fired again. There was a thump of energy in the air as the bowstring released, and the shish of the arrow in flight, and then the same slamming thunk as it hit a tree.
Reacher thought, I guess I’ll take that as a yes.
Told you so, said the back of his brain.
The front of his brain noted that in all his long and varied life, which included military service in many different parts of the world, he had never before been attacked with a bow and arrow. It was a brand new experience. But no fun so far. The night vision was the problem. He was at a huge disadvantage. He knew second generation gear pretty well. He had used various AN/PVS models. Army Navy Portable Visual Search. Like most second generation military gear they were logical developments of the first generation. Images were much sharper around the edge of the lens. Light amplification was boosted from a thousand to twenty thousand times. They gave a highly detailed fine-grained picture, monochrome, slightly gray, mostly green, a little cool, a little wispy. A little fluid and ghostly. Not quite reality. In some ways better.
A huge tactical advantage. Twenty thousand times was a big differential. He had zero times. He had almost pitch dark. It took a strenuous wide-eyed stare even to tell the difference between a tree and not a tree. There were occasional glimmers of dappled moonlight, some of them real, most of them wishful thinking. Far to the left was the orange glow in the sky. Getting brighter. He could see the gleam of the next arrowhead. It was ready to go. It was tracking left, tracking right, trying to find a line through the trees. The guy was stepping in, stepping back, going left, going right. Trying to find his shot. A three dimensional problem. Then a four dimensional problem, when Reacher started moving too, randomly, left, left, right, not much, really just swaying, but enough to need a new ballistic calculation every single time.
Reacher called out, “You need to come closer.”
The guy didn’t move.
Reacher said, “Come in the trees with me.”
The guy didn’t answer.
“You would if I was a deer,” Reacher said.
The guy locked on. The glassy end of the coffee can pointed straight at Reacher. Who saw only a sliver of the right-hand edge of the lens. A chord, in geometric language. A chopped-off edge of a circle. Which in turn meant the guy saw only Reacher’s right eye, and then a wide tree, and then maybe part of his left shoulder. Not a great target. Reacher knew people who could have hit it with anything from a lawn dart to a nuclear missile, but clearly the guy with the bow wasn’t one of them. Because Reacher was still alive to have the thought.