61 Hours

how close to take-off we need to use it. And put a man on lookout a hundred feet south. That’s the only direction we have to worry about. Rotate every twenty minutes. Or more often, if you want. Your call. I want the lookout alert at all times, not frozen to death.’
    Then Plato stopped talking and Reacher heard his feet on the stairs above him. Smaller steps, more precise. The metal still clanged, but quieter. The two flashlight beams went down and around, down and around, always clockwise, separated verticallyby twenty feet, and not synchronized. Reacher took it slow. He was Holland now, in more than name. He was improvising, and hoping his moment would come.
    On the surface the de-icer truck got back with the necessary equipment all piled on and around the passenger seat. The engine hoist, the rope, the garbage bags. The hoist was a sturdy metal thing, with three legs and a boom arm like the jib of a small crane. It was designed to be set up at the front of a car, with the jib leaning in over the engine compartment. The pulleys would produce multiplication of effort, according to ancient mechanical principles, allowing a lone operator to lift a heavy iron block.
    Three of Plato’s guys carried the hoist into the bunker and set it up with the jib leaning in over one of the ventilation shafts. Like fishing from a barrel. They started threading the rope through the pulleys. No free lunch. More weight meant less speed. Pull the rope a yard, and with one pulley in play a light weight would move the same yard, but with two pulleys in play a heavier weight would move just eighteen inches, and with three pulleys in play a heavier weight still would move just twelve inches. And so on. A tradeoff.
    They chose to thread two pulleys. A balance of speed and capacity.
    The guy who had driven the truck said nothing about the Ford.
    Two hundred and eighty awkward steps. Reacher completed seventy of them, a quarter of the way down, and then he began to speed up. He saw a window of opportunity ahead.
Set up the equipment, then start the refuelling
, Plato had said. Which meant that there would be some busywork up top before one of his guys came down to connect the pump truck’s hose to the fuel tank. Five minutes, maybe. Possibly ten. And five or ten minutes alone with Plato deep underground could be productive. So he aimed to get to the bottom as far ahead as possible. To prepare. So he speeded up as much as he could. Which wasn’t much.
    And which wasn’t nearly enough.
    Plato matched him step for step. Gained on him, even. For a man of Plato’s stature, the winding stair was broad and palatial. Like something from a Hollywood production. And his feet were dainty. He was nimble and agile in comparison.
    Reacher slowed down again. Better to save energy and avoid busting an ankle.
    The guy who had sat in seat 4A was standing with the guy from seat 4B in the lee of the pump truck, out of sight of the stone building, hidden from the Boeing’s flight deck windows, invisible to the sentry a hundred feet down the runway. The guy from 4A had texted the Russian:
Cop car damaged. No getaway possible
.
    The Russian had replied:
I will double your money
.
    The guy from 4B glanced over at the de-icer truck. The guy from 4A followed his gaze. A diesel engine, a little clumsy, not fast, distinctive in appearance, and stolen. But it was a vehicle.
    He said nothing.
    The phone buzzed again against his palm.
    The Russian had offered:
I will triple your money. Do it
.
    Triple the money was a fortune beyond comprehension. But even that paled against the prospect of a life without Plato in it.
    The guy from 4B nodded. He had just driven the truck. He knew it worked.
    The guy from 4A texted:
OK
.
    Reacher passed through the second of the oboe nodes. Two-thirds of the way down. The individual sounds of four separate feet on metal merged and melded into a keening ghostly song that pulsed up and down the shaft and hung and oscillated in the still dead air, like an elegy for a tragedy about to happen. Reacher shivered and kept on going down into the darkness, his flashlight held between gloved thumb and forefinger, his other three fingers spread and brushing the wall. Above him Plato’s beam turned and jumped and stabbed. Reacher’s heel hit the two hundredth step. Eighty more to go.

    The pump truck was basically a simple device. A relatively recent invention. In the old days tankers refuelled planes directly. In the modern world airports put