PART ONE
1
1988
SOMEWHERE IN CENTRAL AMERICA
The blast hit Joe Reacher with enough force to lift him from his feet and drive him backward into the jungle. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think and struggled to move any part of his body.
The weight was then lifted and he inhaled deeply. His mind snapped back into cognition and he realized what had happened.
They’d walked into an ambush.
Bullets ripped past his head, and the foliage around them seemed to be shredding from the amount of gunfire.
His ears screamed with a high-pitched whine that drowned out everything else. The world tilted sideways, then righted itself, then tilted again. Reacher tried to push himself up but his arms wouldn't cooperate. They felt like they belonged to someone else, distant and unresponsive. His vision swam, doubled, then slowly began to clear into something resembling focus.
The ringing. Jesus Christ, the ringing.
He blinked hard, trying to force his eyes to work properly. Shapes moved in front of him—dark figures against the greenwall of jungle. Muzzle flashes strobed through the canopy like deadly fireflies. The acrid smell of cordite mixed with something else.
Something metallic and wrong.
Blood.
Reacher's hand went to his chest, patting himself down with clumsy fingers. Wet. Everything was wet. But the blood wasn't his—at least not most of it. He'd caught shrapnel across his left shoulder and down his ribs, he could feel that now, hot lines of pain that cut through the fog in his head. But he was intact.
Mostly intact.
Then he saw Mave.
She was ten feet away, sprawled on her back in a position no living person should be able to achieve. Her right leg was bent underneath her at an impossible angle, the femur clearly shattered.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
Not even close.
The left side of her tactical vest had been shredded by shrapnel, and Reacher could see the white gleam of ribs through the torn fabric and flesh. Blood pulsed from the wound in rhythmic spurts, way too much blood, pooling beneath her and soaking into the jungle floor. Her face was gray, lips already taking on a bluish tint. Her eyes were open but unfocused, staring up at the canopy without seeing it.
A round had caught her in the throat, just above the vest. The entry wound was small, almost neat, but Reacher knew what the exit wound would look like. He'd seen enough of them. The blood from her neck mixed with the blood from her torso, creating a spreading lake of crimson that looked black in the filtered jungle light.
Her sniper rifle lay beside her, the scope shattered.
Reacher tried to crawl toward her, his body finally beginning to respond to his commands. His shoulder screamed in protest but he ignored it.
"Reacher!"
The voice cut through the ringing in his ears. Bill Kinsman. His CO.
Kinsman was already moving, already in command, his M4 up and firing in controlled bursts. He'd taken cover behind a fallen log, using it as a fighting position. He fired, shifted position, fired again.
"Contact left! Fifty meters!" Kinsman's voice was almost calm. Like he was calling out plays in a football game instead of fighting for their lives.
Reacher's hand found his M4. He didn't remember dropping it, but there it was, half-buried in the leaf litter. He grabbed it, checked the chamber by instinct, and rolled onto his stomach. The movement sent fresh waves of pain through his shoulder and ribs, but pain was just information. Pain meant he was alive.
The jungle erupted with gunfire.
The rebels had them in a perfect kill zone. They'd been waiting, probably for hours, letting them walk right into the trap. Classic L-shaped ambush, with the long side of the L parallel to their line of march and the short side blocking their escape route.
