Page 112 of Bulletproof Jack: Hunting Lee Child's Jack Reacher

Saturday, June 4

Devil’s Punchbowl, Ontario, CA

Kim heard the distant gunshot through the fog almost as soon as she’d parked the SUV. “Where’d that come from?”

“Over there.” Russell pointed toward the Devil’s Punchbowl. “I’ll check the cabin to be sure they left no one injured or restrained or anything.”

“Copy that,” Kim replied, already moving eastward.

Russell headed in the opposite direction, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll be right behind you.”

Kim hustled through the woods, careful where she stepped. She’d been a Girl Scout. Hiked in the Michigan forests all her life. She knew the hazards to watch for.

She called Gaspar on the way. He picked up instantly. “Can you see what’s going on over at Devil’s Punchbowl? We heard a gunshot.”

Just as she uttered the words, a second gunshot rang out. She increased her speed as much as she dared.

“Still too much cloud cover for the satellites I can access,” he said. “But heat signatures suggest six humans in the vicinity.”

“Where are they?”

“One inside the gorge on the east side, moving down from the rim. Four in the parking lot. Two down below the lookout point. One of those two is perilously close to the west edge of the gorge,” Gaspar recited as he checked his screens reporting the facts without embellishment.

“Anything else you can tell about them? Males, females, armed?”

“I’d guess maybe four males and two females.” He paused. “Yeah, two females and two males in the parking lot. One man heading down into the east side of the gorge. He seems to be stumbling and fumbling. Two down below close to the lower rim.”

“And the drone?”

“Can’t see it,” Gaspar said slowly, as if he was searching hard.

Kim’s physical conditioning served her well. She ran quickly through the woods and came out into the clearing below the overlook.

She glanced to her left, upward toward the parking lot. Her sight line was blocked by the solid wall of rock between her position and the pavement above.

Another gunshot rang out on her right. She swiveled her head toward the blast.

The entire tableau revealed itself slowly through the fog as she came closer.

The first thing she noticed was the big man going down the far side of the gorge. From this distance, she couldn’t see how he managed what should have been a free fall with a disastrous landing on the rocky bottom.

But he wasn’t tumbling headfirst, which seemed to defy gravity.

The other odd thing was the drone. It wasn’t invisible at all. She could see it plainly flying over the open gorge.

But the drone was in trouble. It dipped and rose in the wind more like a kite than a remotely controlled plane.

The man with a tablet near the overlook, furiously attempting to get the drone under control, must be Liam Stuart.

The other man, the one with the gun in his hand, was much too close to the edge of the gorge. He was running toward Stuart, holding the weapon with the kind of hard-won expertise that suggested both training and experience.

He stumbled a couple of times along the way. Once he tripped and fell and scrambled to his feet again.

The next gunshot came from the overlook. Kim looked up to see a man with a gun at the railing. He was aiming toward the huge man running down the gorge on the east side.

The overlook gunman wasn’t watching his six and he seemed to have no backup.

A luxury sedan came up behind him, moving at least two tons of weight much too fast.

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