Plot summary
Jack Reacher is hitching a ride on a senior citizens' tour through South Dakota in the middle of winter when the bus skids out on the interstate, disabling it. Together with the bus driver, Jay Knox, and the local deputy chief of police, Andrew Peterson, Reacher helps the elderly tourists get to safety in the nearby town of Bolton.
Bolton is home to one of the largest prisons in the United States. In the event of an escape or riot in the prison, the entire Bolton Police Department is legally required to abandon whatever they were doing and report there. This is problematic because Bolton is also home to a gang of methamphetamine dealers operating out of an abandoned U.S. military facility nearby. The police cannot get probable cause to search the complex without the testimony of retired librarian Janet Salter, the only person willing to testify that she saw a drug deal take place in Bolton. If the prison siren rings, the officers guarding Salter will have to leave, making her easy prey for the drug dealers.
Reacher agrees to help the police, first by determining what was stored in the abandoned military compound. He calls up his old military police unit in Virginia, and is connected with its newest commanding officer, Major Susan Turner. Turner agrees to help Reacher if he will tell her the story of how the desk in her office, which used to be Reacher's, ended up with a head-size dent in it. Reacher asks whether Turner is married, and she hangs up the phone.
Reacher travels to the military compound and finds no evidence of a methamphetamine lab, only a small stone building surrounded by barracks huts whose residents are about to move out. The long road leading up to the compound is actually a runway, and it must have been an U.S. Air Force facility. Turner discovers that forty tons of surplus materiel from World War II are being stored in tunnels accessed under the small stone building, but cannot figure out the exact contents. The facility, constructed in the 1950s, was intended to be an orphanage and fallout shelter for kids whose parents were killed in a nuclear war. Reacher guesses that the complex's owner, a Latin American drug lord and pawn shop baron named Plato, is getting ready to sell it, but the sale would be compromised by Salter being alive to testify.
A local lawyer who relayed instructions in and out of the Bolton prison is found shot dead in his car, telling Reacher and the police that Plato's hit man has arrived in town. Reacher stays with Salter to guard her, and teaches her how to fire a gun. Tom Holland (the chief of police), Peterson, and Reacher find the key to the tunnel head and venture underground. In a maze of tunnels which were intended for children, Reacher finds tons of methamphetamine in boxes dating to the 1940s. He deduces that it must have been surplus from doses given to World War II bomber pilots. There is also jewelry, paintings, and other valuables: unredeemed pledges from Plato's pawnshop empire.
Returning home from the police station, Peterson is murdered by the unknown killer, who Reacher now believes to be a police officer. Holland orders the entire department to return to the station, but tells Reacher that he cannot bear to tell the news to Peterson's widow. While Reacher is at Peterson's house, the prison siren goes off. Reacher, lacking a vehicle, runs two miles in the cold conditions to protect Salter. He is too late, and finds her shot dead in her library, her gun in her pocket.
Reacher calls Turner and says he is contemplating suicide. He reveals that the dent in the desk came from when he nearly killed a one-star general who had stolen food supplies meant for Reacher and other troops stationed in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. He had used part of the money to buy a Chevrolet Corvette. The incident cost Reacher his command and his career in the army. Turner tells Reacher to ask her if she is married. He asks, and she says "No." He promises to head towards Virginia the next day.
Plato and a crew of henchmen fly to the abandoned airfield on his private Boeing 737, intending to pack it full of his loot and methamphetamine before selling the base to a Russian gangster. Reacher and Holland drive out to the base, and Reacher reveals that he knows Holland is the killer working for Plato. Holland deliberately crashes his police car. Reacher executes Holland after learning of his role in Salter's death. Plato arrives, and Reacher pretends that he is Holland and goes underground with the gangster. Reacher attacks and kills Plato.
Meanwhile, two of Plato's men are actually working for the Russian. They kill Plato's other henchmen, and begin pumping jet fuel from Plato's aircraft into the fallout bunker. Reacher runs up the stairs as the henchmen drop a flare down the shaft.
In Virginia, Turner watches news reports of an explosion at an Air Force facility outside Bolton, South Dakota, giving off fumes containing some kind of stimulant. A month later, she is redeployed to Afghanistan without a call from Reacher.
