by Lee Child
“More than you would think,” I said. “I just had a big crowbar lesson.”
“These two look the same.”
“They are the same. They’re peas in a pod. Count on it. They’re custom-made. They’re unique in all the world.”
“Did you ever meet Carbone?”
“Very briefly,” I said.
“What was his posture like?”
“In what way?”
“Did he stoop?”
I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.
“He wasn’t tall enough to stoop,” I said. “He was a wiry guy, solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet. He looked athletic.”
“OK.”
“Why?”
“It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn’t stooping. But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall.”
“You told us that already,” I said.
“No, I mean tall,” he said. “I’ve been working on it. Mapping it out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five.”
“Like me,” I said.
“And as heavy as you too. Not easy to break a skull as badly as that.”
I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when there really wasn’t one.
“Six-four or six-five,” I said. “Are you prepared to go to bat on that?”
“In court?”
“It was a training accident,” I said. “We’re not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?”
The doctor breathed in, breathed out.
“Six-three,” he said. “To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I’d go to bat on six-three. Count on it.”
“OK,” I said.
He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.
Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn’t taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.
“Thirty-three men,” she told me. “Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers.”
“Who are they?”
“A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely canceled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously.”
“We can cross him off.”
“OK, thirty-two men,” she said. “The pathologist is one of them.”
“We can take him out too.”
“Thirty-one, then,” she said. “And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o’clock.”
“Take them out,” I said. “They were eating dinner. Fish, and steak.”
“Twenty-nine,” she said. “Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.”
“OK,” I said. “Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records.”
“Why?”
“To find out how tall they are.”
“Can’t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year’s Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won’t be here.”
“He wasn’t here the night Carbone died,” I said. “So you can take him out, too.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,” I said.
She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.
“We’re making progress,” she said.
I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savored the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined his dinner too, as well as the pathologist’s. But then, I hadn’t eaten anything yet myself.
“Yes, sir?” the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.
“I’ve got a question, Chief,” I said. “Something only you will know.”
“Like what?”
“Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier.”
The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce. It can’t afford not to, literally. And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge.
“No problem,” the guy said. “Male adult population aged twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half, and one seventy-eight. We’re overrepresented with Hispanics by comparison with the nation as a whole, which brings our median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We train pretty hard, which brings our median weight up three pounds to one eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than fat.”
“Those are this year’s figures?”
“Last year’s,” he said. “This year is only a few days old.”
“What’s the spread in height?”
“What are you looking for?”
“How many guys have we got six-three or better?”
“One in ten,” he said. “In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand. Call it a Super Bowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane.”
“OK, Chief,” I said. “Thanks.”
I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.
Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard. Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty-eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty pounds, and he was a padre.
Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post bungalow somewhere. It had no dining table. My mother called people and had one delivered. It came packed flat in a carton. I tried to help her put it together. All the parts were there. There was a laminated tabletop, and four chrome legs, and four big steel bolts. We laid them out on the floor in the dining nook. The top, four legs, four bolts. But there was no way to fit them together. No way at all. It was some kind of an inexplicable design. Nothing would join up. We knelt side by side and worked on it. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust bunnies and the cockroaches. The smooth chrome was cold in my hands. The edges were rough, where the laminate was shaped on the corners. We couldn’t put it together. Joe came in, and tried, and failed. My dad tried, and failed. We ate in the kitchen for a month. We were still trying to put that table together when we moved out. Now I felt like I was wrestling with it all over again. Nothing went together. Everything looked good at first, and then everything stalled and died.
“The crowbar didn’t walk in by itself,” Summer said. “One of those twenty-eight names brought it in. Obviously. It can’t have gotten here any other way.”
I said nothing.
“Want dinner?” she said.
“I think better when I’m hungry,” I said.
“We’ve run out of things to think about.”
I nodd
ed. Gathered the twenty-eight medical charts together and piled them neatly. Put Summer’s original list of thirty-three names on top. Thirty-three, minus Carbone, because he didn’t bring the crowbar in himself and commit suicide with it. Minus the pathologist, because he wasn’t a convincing suspect, and because he was short, and because his practice swings with the crowbar had been weak. Minus Vassell and Coomer and their driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good. Vassell and Coomer had been stuffing their faces, and Marshall hadn’t even come at all.
“Why wasn’t Marshall here?” I said.
Summer nodded. “That’s always bothered me. It’s like Vassell and Coomer had something to hide from him.”
“All they did was eat dinner.”
“But Marshall must have been right there at Kramer’s funeral with them. So they must have specifically told him not to drive them here. Like a positive order to get out of the car and stay home.”
I nodded. Pictured the long line of black government sedans at Arlington National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky. Pictured the ceremony, the folding of the flag, the salute from the riflemen. The shuffling procession back to the cars, bareheaded men with their chins ducked into their collars against the cold, maybe snow in the air. I pictured Marshall holding the Mercury’s rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Coomer. He must have driven them back to the Pentagon lot and then gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver’s seat.
“We should talk to him,” I said. “Find out exactly what they told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded.”
I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out of Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn’t been killed there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east, or west.
“Are you going to call Willard?” Summer asked me.
“Probably,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Not before midnight?”
“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”
“That’s a risk.”
“I’m protected,” I said.
“Might not last forever.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll have Delta Force coming after me soon. That’ll make everything else seem kind of academic.”
“Call Willard tonight,” she said. “That would be my advice.”
I looked at her.
“As a friend,” she said. “AWOL is a big deal. No point making things worse.”
“OK,” I said.
“Do it now,” she said. “Why not?”
“OK,” I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door. She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the fifth of January.
“Whose orders?” I asked her.
“General Vassell’s,” she said.
“OK,” I said.
She closed the door.
“The fifth of January,” Summer said.
“The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,” I said.
“He knows something.”
“He wasn’t even here.”
“Why else would they hide him away afterward?”
“It’s a coincidence.”
“You don’t like coincidences.”
I nodded.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to Germany.”
eighteen
No way was Willard about to authorize any foreign expeditions so I walked over to the Provost Marshal’s office and took a stack of travel vouchers out of the company clerk’s desk. I carried them back to my own office and signed them all with my name on the CO lines and respectable forgeries of Leon Garber’s signature on the Authorized by lines.
“We’re breaking the law,” Summer said.
“This is the Battle of Kursk,” I said. “We can’t stop now.”
She hesitated.
“Your choice,” I said. “In or out, no pressure from me.”
She said nothing.
“These vouchers won’t come back for a month or two,” I said. “By then either Willard will be gone, or we will. We’ve got nothing to lose.”
“OK,” she said.
“Go pack,” I said. “Three days.”
She left and I asked my sergeant to figure out who was next in line for acting CO. She came back with a name I recognized as the female captain I had seen in the O Club dining room. The one with the busted arm. I wrote her a note explaining I would be out for three days. I told her she was in charge. Then I picked up the phone and called Joe.
“I’m going to Germany,” I said.
“OK,” he said. “Enjoy. Have a safe trip.”
“I can’t go to Germany without stopping by Paris on the way back. You know, under the circumstances.”
He paused.
“No,” he said. “I guess you can’t.”
“Wouldn’t be right not to,” I said. “But she shouldn’t think I care more than you do. That wouldn’t be right either. So you should come over too.”
“When?”
“Take the overnight flight two days from now. I’ll meet you at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle. Then we’ll go see her together.”
Summer met me on the sidewalk outside my quarters and we carried our bags to the Chevy. We were both in BDUs because we figured our best shot was a night transport out of Andrews Air Force Base. We were too late for a civilian red-eye and we didn’t want to wait all night for the breakfast flights. We got in the car and logged out at the gate. Summer was driving, of course. She accelerated hard and then dropped into a smooth rhythm that was about ten miles an hour faster than the other cars heading our way.
I sat back and watched the road. Watched the shoulders, and the strip malls, and the traffic. We drove north thirty miles and passed by Kramer’s motel. Hit the cloverleaf and jogged east to I-95. Headed north. We passed the rest area. Passed the spot a mile later where the briefcase had been found. I closed my eyes.
I slept all the way to Andrews. We got there well after midnight. We parked in a restricted lot and swapped two of our travel vouchers for two places on a Transportation Corps C-130 that was leaving for Frankfurt at three in the morning. We waited in a lounge that had fluorescent lighting and vinyl benches and was filled with the usual ragtag bunch of transients. The military is always on the move. There are always people going somewhere, any time of the night or day. Nobody talked. Nobody ever did. We all just sat there, stiff and tired and uncomfortable.
The loadmaster came to get us thirty minutes before takeoff. We filed out onto the tarmac and walked up the ramp into the belly of the plane. There was a long line of cargo pallets in the center bay. We sat on webbing jump seats with our backs to the fuselage wall. On the whole I figured I preferred the first-class section on Air France. The Transportation Corps doesn’t have stewardesses and it doesn’t brew in-flight coffee.
We took off a little late, heading west into the wind. Then we turned a slow one-eighty over D.C. and struck out east. I felt the movement. There were no windows, but I knew we were above the city. Joe was down there somewhere, sleeping.
The fuselage wall was very cold at altitude so we all leaned forward with our elbows on our knees. It was too noisy to talk. I stared at a pallet of tank ammunition until my vision blurred and I fell back to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable, but one thing you learn in the army is how to sleep anywhere. I woke up maybe ten times and spent most of the trip in a state of suspended animation. The roar of the engines and the rush of the slipstream helped induce it. It was relatively restful. It was about sixty
percent as good as being in bed.
We were in the air nearly eight hours before we started our initial descent. There was no intercom. No cheery message from the pilot. Just a change in the engine note and a downward lurching movement and a sharp sensation in the ears. All around me people were standing up and stretching. Summer had her back flat against an ammunition crate, rubbing like a cat. She looked pretty good. Her hair was too short to get messy and her eyes were bright. She looked determined, like she knew she was heading for doom or glory and was resigned to not knowing which.
We all sat down again and held tight to the webbing for the landing. The wheels touched down and the reverse thrust howled and the brakes jammed on tight. The pallets jerked forward against their straps. Then the engines cut back and we taxied a long way and stopped. The ramp came down and a dim dusk sky showed through the hole. It was five o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, six hours ahead of the East Coast, one hour ahead of Zulu time. I was starving. I had eaten nothing since the burger in Sperryville the previous day. Summer and I stood up and grabbed our bags and got in line. Shuffled down the ramp with the others and out onto the tarmac. The weather was cold. It felt pretty much the same as North Carolina.
We were way out in the restricted military corner of the Frankfurt airport. We took a personnel bus to the public terminal. After that we were on our own. Some of the other guys had transport waiting, but we didn’t. We joined a bunch of civilians in the taxi line. Shuffled up, one by one. When our turn came we gave the driver a travel voucher and told him to drive us east to XII Corps. He was happy enough to comply. He could swap the voucher for hard currency at any U.S. post and I was certain he would pick up a couple of XII Corps guys going out into Frankfurt for a night on the town. No deadheading. No empty running. He was making a living off of the U.S. Army, just like plenty of Germans had for four and a half decades. He was driving a Mercedes-Benz.
The trip took thirty minutes. We drove east through suburbs. They looked like a lot of West German places. There were vast tracts of pale honey buildings built back in the fifties. The new neighborhoods ran west to east in random curving shapes, following the routes the bombers had followed. No nation ever lost a war the way Germany lost. Like everyone, I had seen the pictures taken in 1945. Defeat was not a big enough word. Armageddon would be better. The whole country had been smashed to powdered rubble by a juggernaut. The evidence would be there for all time, written in the architecture. And under the architecture. Every time the phone company dug a trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones and teacups and shells and rusted-out Panzerfausts. Every time ground was broken for a new foundation, a priest was standing by before the steam shovels took their first bite. I was born in Berlin, surrounded by Americans, surrounded by whole square miles of patched-up devastation. They started it, we used to say.