Echo Burning (Jack Reacher, #5)

by Lee Child

Reacher had done four years at West Point, and then thirteen years in the service, so he had a total seventeen years’ experience of walking into a new dormitory and being stared at by its occupants. It wasn’t a sensation that bothered him. There was a technique involved in handling it. An etiquette. The way to do it was to just walk in, select an unoccupied bed, and say absolutely nothing at all. Make somebody else speak first. That way, you could judge their disposition before you were forced to reveal your own.

For a military cop, walking into a bar is like a batter stepping to the plate. It’s his place of business. Maybe ninety percent of low-grade trouble in the service happens in bars. Put a bunch of young men trained for aggression and reaction alongside a limitless supply of alcohol, add in unit rivalries, add in the presence of civilian women and their civilian husbands and boyfriends, and it becomes inevitable.

Reacher had no middle name. It was Jack Reacher, plain and simple. Born 1960, not dead yet.

Shoot the women first. That was the standard counterterrorist doctrine. The experts figured they were more fanatical.