Reacher stayed in a crouch and dragged the driver another yard. He rolled him over. Then two simultaneous processes unspooled in parallel. Reacher started searching for the car key, and the eight live Albanians started thinking about what he was doing and why he was doing it. And evidently they weren’t dumb. They figured it out pretty fast. About the same time Reacher got his hand in the driver’s left-hand coat pocket, the Albanians started firing at the car. It was a big target. Sixteen feet long, five feet high. They shredded it. First all the driver’s side windows shattered, and rounds punched and clanged through the sheet metal, and then the whole car slumped down on the left as the tires were shot out, and green oily fluid dripped down underneath. Reacher crawled back to where Abby was half in and half out of the passenger seat. He dragged her out and closed her door and pushed her along to where the front wheel was, behind the engine block, which was the safest spot. Relatively speaking. Under the circumstances. The noise was deafening. Rounds came through the busted far side windows and shattered the near side windows. Pebbles of glass rained down. Rounds clanked and smacked into the bodywork. From closer and closer. They were advancing again.
Reacher had two rounds left.
Not encouraging.
He glanced out the roll-up door. Bright morning sunshine. The gate, open. The street, empty. Maybe thirty yards to the scooped-out curb. Maybe seventy more to the first corner. Ten seconds for an athlete. At least twenty for him. Maybe more. With eight guys chasing right behind him. Not good. Except maybe less than twenty seconds for Abby. She might be faster. She might be a small target receding into the distance ahead of a much slower and larger target. She might be OK. If she would agree to run on ahead. Which he knew she wouldn’t. There would be an argument. They would miss what would likely be a one-time opportunity. Inevitable. Human nature. Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rang a bell.
The gate was open.
Human nature. The driver had pulled in during what had obviously been an uproar. Yet he had gone right ahead and popped the trunk. Because he was eager. He couldn’t wait. He wanted the praise and the plaudits. He wanted to be man of the hour. In other words he had sacrificed appropriate tactical caution in favor of his ego. He had been rushed and careless. Reacher remembered peeling off his jacket. He remembered dropping it on the street. He remembered the guns in the pockets bumping and clanking on the blacktop. The two Ukrainian H&Ks, and the two Albanian Glocks. All loaded. Probably more than forty rounds between them.
What would a rushed and careless guy do with a jacket dropped on the street?
Reacher crawled back to the rear passenger door and opened it the same way Abby had opened the front, craning up to the handle, pulling on the bottom edge, easing it wide. A waterfall of glass pebbles fell out. Tufts of upholstery stuffing drifted in the air.
His jacket was dumped on the back seat.
He pulled it toward him. It felt heavy. Partly from window fragments all over it, weighing it down, but mostly because of the metal in the pockets. It was all still there. Two H&Ks, two Glocks. He leaned his back on the rear wheel and checked them over. The H&K that he knew for sure worked had a round chambered and six more in the magazine. The other H&K had a round chambered and a full magazine. Likewise both Glocks. A total of fifty-two rounds, all of them fat little nine-millimeter Parabellums, winking in the smoky light. Against eight opponents, all of which would be low on ammunition by that point, after disabling the Chrysler with such reckless enthusiasm.
More encouraging.
He hooked a finger through all four trigger guards and crawled back to Abby.
Chapter 36
Abby sat with her back against the front tire, hugging her knees, her head ducked between them as low as it would go. Directly behind her was the big V-8 engine block, which was hundreds of pounds of iron, almost three feet long and about a foot and a half high. No doubt a tanker like Vantresca would have ridiculed it as defensive armor, but under the circumstances it was the best they could get. Against handgun rounds it would do its job.
Reacher took up position eight feet back, in a posture the army called modified sitting. His butt was on the concrete. His left leg was bent, like an upside down V, and so was his right, but it was folded down flat on the floor, like a triangle pointing outward, in a different direction, with the heel of his boot wedged up against the cheek of his butt. His left elbow was propped on his left knee, and his left hand was supporting his right forearm, which was straight out from the shoulder. Altogether he was a human geodesic dome, braced and rigid in every separate vector. Which was why the army liked the position enough to give it a name. His eight-feet-back location was textbook, too. It meant he could keep very low. From the far side of the car all that would show above the line of the hood would be the muzzle of his gun, his eyes, and the top of his head. He could skim his rounds exactly nine millimeters over the sheet metal and keep his trajectories flat and level. All good. Except it meant he was firing directly over Abby’s head. She would feel the slipstream in her hair.
He started with a Glock. It seemed appropriate. It was an Albanian weapon. And it was full. Total of eighteen rounds. He figured it might get the job done all by itself. But still he laid out the others, in a fan shape by his right knee. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Partly to test the gun and partly to get the party started he put a round into the pyramid of chemical drums. Second level up, which would be center mass on a standing man. There was a crack and a boom and a clang, and thick brown liquid gurgled out of the hole in the drum, which appeared more or less where he intended it to. The Glock worked OK.
A guy on the right craned up and fired a round from behind a stack of boards, then ducked back down again. The round hit the car. Maybe the driver’s door. Poor shooting. Snatched and panicky. A guy on the left tried to do better. He leaned out and aimed. He was static and exposed for half a second. Mistake. Reacher hit him in the chest, and again in the head, after he was down, just to be sure. Three rounds gone. Seven guys left. They had all backed off a yard. Maybe rethinking their whole approach. There was a certain amount of low conversation. Plenty of whispered to and fro. Some kind of plan being made. Reacher wondered how good it would be. Probably not very. The obvious play was to split up, into two squads, and send one out a back entrance, and around the building, and back in through the roll-up door. Which would give Reacher a two-front problem. It was what he would have done. But the remaining seven guys seemed to have no leader. Their command structure seemed to have collapsed. Maybe some kind of a coup. Or a failed coup. A palace revolution. He had heard the muffled shooting when they arrived. First doubly muffled by the trunk lid, then more distinct after it was raised. It was clear a whole bunch of people were getting it in the head. Far away in the back offices, where the bigwigs lived.
The plan turned out to be a conventional infantry assault based on fire and movement. In other words some would shoot and some would run, and then those who had run would drop down and shoot, and those who had shot would jump up and run. Like leapfrog, with bullets. But not many. They were low on ammunition. Which took the sting out. Covering fire was supposed to be heavy enough to distract or suppress or intimidate or bewilder. Or at least to preoccupy. But Reacher was able to more or less ignore it. Ten thousand generations were screaming at him to take cover, but the front part of his brain was fighting back with the new stuff, math and geometry and probabilities, calculating how likely it was that seven random guys could hit a target as small as a man’s eyes and the top of his head, at range, with handguns, while agitated, and the covering fire was weak enough that the ancient reflexes lost the argument, and were boxed up and put away, leaving the modern man to do his lethal work undisturbed. It was like shooting ducks in a carnival sideshow. The guys on the right laid down the fire, and two guys from the left stood up and charged.