by Lee Child
“Correct,” she said again.
“So he didn’t park his car,” I said. “He didn’t even touch the brake. He drove straight out the main gate instead. There’s no other way off the post. He drove straight out the main gate, Summer, immediately after he killed Carbone, somewhere around nine or ten o’clock.”
“Check the gate log,” she said. “There’s a copy right there on the desk.”
We checked the gate log together. Operation Just Cause in Panama had moved all domestic installations up one level on the DefCon scale and therefore all closed posts were recording entrances and exits in detail in bound ledgers that had preprinted page numbers in the top right-hand corner. We had a good clear Xerox of the page for January fourth. I was confident it was genuine. I was confident it was complete. And I was confident it was accurate. The Military Police have numerous failings, but snafus with basic paperwork aren’t any of them.
Summer took the page from me and taped it to the wall next to the map. We stood side by side and looked at it. It was ruled into six columns. There were spaces for date, time in, time out, plate number, occupants, and reason.
“Traffic was light,” Summer said.
I said nothing. I was in no position to know whether nineteen entries represented light traffic or not. I wasn’t used to Bird and it had been a long time since I had pulled gate duty anywhere else. But certainly it seemed quiet compared to the multiple pages I had seen for New Year’s Eve.
“Mostly people reporting back for duty,” Summer said.
I nodded. Fourteen lines had entries in the Time In column but no corresponding entries in the Time Out column. That meant fourteen people had come in and stayed in. Back to work, after time away from the post for the holidays. Or after time away from the post for other reasons. I was right there among them: 1-4-90. 2302, Reacher, J., Mjr, RTB. January fourth, 1990, two minutes past eleven in the evening, Major J. Reacher, returning to base. From Paris, via Garber’s old office in Rock Creek. My vehicle plate number was listed as: Pedestrian. My sergeant was there, coming in from her off-post address to work the night shift. She had arrived at nine-thirty, driving something with North Carolina plates.
Fourteen in, to stay in.
Only five exits.
Three of them were routine food deliveries. Big trucks, probably. An army post gets through a lot of food. Lots of hungry mouths to feed. Three trucks in a day seemed about right to me. Each of them was timed inward at some point during the early afternoon and then timed outward again a plausible hour or so later. The last time out was just before three o’clock.
Then there was a seven-hour gap.
The last-but-one recorded exit was Vassell and Coomer themselves, on their way out after their O Club dinner. They had passed through the gate at 2201. They had previously been timed in at 1845. At that point their Department of Defense plate number had been written down and their names and ranks had been entered. Their reason had been stated as: Courtesy visit.
Five exits. Four down.
One to go.
The only other person to have left Fort Bird on the fourth of January was logged as: 1-4-90, 2211, Trifonov, S., Sgt. There was a North Carolina passenger vehicle plate number written in the relevant space. There was no time in recorded. There was nothing in the reason column. Therefore a sergeant called Trifonov had been on-post all day or all week and then he had left at eleven minutes past ten in the evening. No reason had been recorded because there was no directive to inquire as to why a soldier was leaving. The assumption was that he was going out for a drink or a meal or for some other form of entertainment. Reason was a question the gate guards asked of people trying to get in, not trying to get out.
We checked again, just to be absolutely sure. We came up with the same result. Apart from General Vassell and Colonel Coomer in their self-driven Mercury Grand Marquis, and then a sergeant called Trifonov in some other kind of car, nobody had passed through the gate in an outward direction in a vehicle or on foot at any time on the fourth of January, apart from three food trucks in the early part of the afternoon.
“OK,” Summer said. “Sergeant Trifonov. Whoever he is. He’s the one.”
“Has to be,” I said.
I called the main gate. Got the same guy I had spoken to before, when I was checking on Vassell and Coomer earlier. I recognized his voice. I asked him to search forward through his log, starting from the page number immediately following the one we were looking at. Asked him to check exactly when a sergeant named Trifonov had returned to Bird. Told him it could be anytime after about four-thirty in the morning on January fifth. There was a moment’s delay. I could hear the guy turning the stiff parchment pages in the ledger. He was doing it slowly, paying close attention.
“Sir, five o’clock in the morning precisely,” the guy said. “January fifth, 0500, Sergeant Trifonov, returning to base.” I heard another page turn. “He left at 2211 the previous evening.”
“Remember anything about him?”
“He left about ten minutes after those Armored staffers you were asking me about before. He was in a hurry, as I recall. Didn’t wait for the barrier to go all the way up. He squeezed right underneath it.”
“What kind of car?”
“Corvette, I think. Not a new one. But it looked pretty good.”
“Were you still on duty when he got back?”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“Remember anything about that?”
“Nothing that stands out. I spoke to him, obviously. He has a foreign accent.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Civilian stuff. A leather jacket, I think. I assumed he had been off duty.”
“Is he on the post now?”
I heard pages turning again. I imagined a finger, tracing slowly down all the lines written after 0500 on the morning of the fifth.
“We haven’t logged him out again, sir,” the guy said. “Not as of right now. So he must be on-post somewhere.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks, soldier.”
I hung up. Summer looked at me.
“He got back at 0500,” I said. “Three and a half hours after Brubaker’s watch stopped.”
“Three-hour drive,” she said.
“And he’s here now.”
“Who is he?”
I called post headquarters. Asked the question. They told me who he was. I put the phone down and looked straight at Summer.
“He’s Delta,” I said. “He was a defector from Bulgaria. They brought him in as an instructor. He knows stuff our guys don’t.”
I got up from my desk and stepped over to the map on the wall. Put my own fingers on the pushpins. Little finger on Fort Bird, index finger on Columbia. It was like I was validating a theory by touch alone. A hundred and fifty miles. Three hours and twelve minutes to get there, three hours and thirty-seven minutes to get back. I did the math in my head. An average speed of forty-seven miles an hour going, and forty-one coming back. At night, on empty roads, in a Chevrolet Corvette. He could have done it with the parking brake on.
“Should we have him picked up?” Summer said.
“No,” I said. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll go over there.”
“Is that smart?”
“Probably not. But I don’t want those guys to think they got to me.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“OK,” I said.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, exactly thirty-six hours to the minute since Trifonov arrived back on-post. The weather was dull and cold. We took sidearms and handcuffs and evidence bags. We walked to the MP motor pool and found a Humvee that had a cage partition bolted behind the front seats and no inside handles on the back doors. Summer drove. She parked at Delta’s prison gate. The sentry let us through on foot. We walked around the outside of the main block until I found the entrance to their NCO Club. I stopped, and Summer stopped beside me.
“You going in there?” she said.
“Just for a minu
te.”
“Alone?”
I nodded. “Then we’re going to their armory.”
“Not smart,” she said. “I should come in with you.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. “As a witness, I guess.”
“To what?”
“To whatever they do to you.”
I smiled, briefly.
“Terrific,” I said.
I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded. The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward. People stood where they were. Stock-still. Then they turned to face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd. Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their shoulders, left and right. I bumped back, in the silence. I stand six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I can hold my own in a shoving competition.
I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned toward me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path. He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its contents on the linoleum tile.
“You spilled my drink,” he said.
I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his eyes.
“Lick it up,” I said.
We stood face-to-face for a second. Then I moved on past him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But I wasn’t about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a bottle shatter against a table behind me.
I didn’t hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned around and started back. The return journey was no different. The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a little.
I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room, slowly, one group at a time, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and stepped out into the cold fresh air.
Summer wasn’t there.
I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the bar. I figured she had been watching my back.
She looked at me.
“Now you know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman.”
She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their armory was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn’t been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job, up at the Pentagon.
“Over here,” Summer said.
She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue. Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn’t salute. Didn’t come to attention. But he didn’t turn away either. He just stood there and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper etiquette as Delta ever got.
“Help you?” he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of every description. I saw five different submachine-gun models. There were some M16s, A1s, and A2s. There were handguns. Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.
In front of the guy on the desk was a logbook.
“You check them in and check them out?” I asked.
“Like valet parking,” the guy said. “Post regulations won’t allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas.” He was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone’s new P7.
“What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?” I asked.
“Trifonov? He favors the Steyr GB.”
“Show me.”
He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.
“Nine-millimeter,” Summer said.
I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.
Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.
“Got a phone?” I said.
The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant’s desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.
“Get me Sanchez at Jackson,” I said.
I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
“What?” Sanchez said.
“Did they find the shell cases?” I said.
“No,” he said. “The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.”
“Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.”
“You found the guy?”
“I’m holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less two fired.”
“Who is he?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell.”
“One of ours?”
“Sad, but true.”
Sanchez said nothing.
“Did they find the bullets?” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Then they won’t do us any good. They’ll be flattened beyond recognition.”
“They were jacketed,” I said. “They won’t have broken up. We could weigh them, at least.”
“They haven’t found them.”
“Are they looking?”
“I don’t know.”
“They dug up any witnesses yet?”
“No.”
“Did they find Brubaker’s car?”
“No.”
“It’s got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o’clock. In a distinctive car. Aren’t they looking for it?”
“There’s something they’re not sharing. I can feel it.”
“Did Willard get there yet?”
“I expect him any minute.”
“Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,” I said. “And tell him you heard the other thing wasn’t a training accident after all. That should make his day.”
Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder to shoulder with the armory clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his logbook together.
“Look at this,” she said.
She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimeter pistol at seven-thirty on the evening of January fourth. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.
“Why did he take it?” I said.
“We don’t ask for a reason,” the clerk said. “We just do the paperwork.”
We came out of the hangar and walked toward the accommodations block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers’ rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pickup trucks and big Detroit coupes, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tires. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.