by Lee Child
“I think you’re an atheist.”
“We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?”
Thurman didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “Just remember, it was you who was afraid to die, not me.”
They flew on, twenty more minutes. The air went still and quiet. Reacher closed his eyes again. Then dead-on an hour and a quarter total elapsed time Thurman moved in his seat. Reacher opened his eyes. Thurman hit a couple of switches and fired up his radio and held the stick with his knees and clamped a headset over his ears. The headset had a microphone on a boom that came off the left-hand earpiece. Thurman flicked it with his fingernail and said, “It’s me, on approach.” Reacher heard a muffled crackling reply and far below in the distance saw lights come on. Red and white runway lights, he assumed, but they were so far away they looked like a tiny pink pinpoint. Thurman started a long slow descent. Not very smooth. The plane was too small and light for finesse. It jerked and dropped and leveled and dropped again. Laterally it was nervous. It darted left, darted right. The pink pinpoint jumped around below them and drew closer and resolved into twin lines of red and white. The lines looked short. The plane wobbled and stumbled in the air and dipped low and then settled on a shallow path all the way down. The runway lights rushed up to meet it and started blurring past, left and right. For a second Reacher thought Thurman had left it too late, but then the wheels touched down and bounced once and settled back and Thurman cut the power and the plane rolled to a walk with half the runway still ahead of it. The engine note changed to a deep roar and the walk picked up to taxiing speed and Thurman jerked left off the runway and drove a hundred yards to a deserted apron. Reacher could see the vague outlines of brick buildings in the middle distance. He saw a vehicle approaching, headlights on. Big, dark, bulky.
A Humvee.
Camouflage paint.
The Humvee parked twenty feet from the Piper and the doors opened and two guys climbed out.
Battledress uniform, woodland pattern.
Soldiers.
59
Reacher sat for a moment in the sudden silence with his ears ringing and then he opened the Piper’s door and climbed out to the wing. Thurman passed him the cardboard carton. Reacher took it one-handed and slid down to the tarmac. The two soldiers snapped to attention and threw salutes and stood there like a ceremonial detail, expectantly. Thurman climbed down behind Reacher and took the box from him. One of the soldiers stepped forward. Thurman bowed slightly and offered the box. The soldier bowed slightly and took it and turned on his heel and slow-marched back to the Humvee. His partner fell in behind him, line astern. Thurman followed them. Reacher followed Thurman.
The soldiers stowed the box in the Humvee’s load bed and then climbed in the front. Reacher and Thurman got in the back. Big vehicle, small seats, well separated by the massive transmission tunnel. A diesel engine. They turned a tight circle on the apron and drove toward a building that stood alone in a patch of lawn. Lights were on in two ground floor windows. The Humvee parked and the soldiers retrieved the box from the load bed and slow-marched it into the building. A minute later they came back out again without it.
Thurman said, “Job done, for tonight, at least.”
Reacher asked, “What was in the jar?”
“People,” Thurman said. “Men, maybe women. We scrape them off the metal. When there’s been a fire, that’s all that’s left of them. Soot, baked onto steel. We scrape it off and collect it in twists of paper, and then we put the day’s gleanings into jars. It’s as close as we can get to giving them a proper burial.”
“Where are we?”
“Fort Shaw, Oklahoma. Up in the panhandle. They deal with recovered remains here. Among other things. They’re associated with the identification laboratory in Hawaii.”
“You come here every night?”
“As often as necessary. Which is most nights, sadly.”
“What happens now?”
“They give me dinner, and they gas up my plane.”
The soldiers climbed back into the front seats and the Humvee turned again and drove a hundred yards to the main cluster of buildings. A fifties army base, one of thousands in the world. Brick, green paint, whitewashed curbs, swept blacktop. Reacher had never been there before. Had never even heard of it. The Humvee parked by a side door that had a sign that said it led to the Officers’ Club. Thurman turned to Reacher and said, “I won’t ask you to join me for dinner. They’ll have set just one place, and it would embarrass them.”
Reacher nodded. He knew how to find food on post. Probably better food than Thurman would be eating in the O Club.
“I’ll be OK,” he said. “And thanks for asking.”
Thurman climbed out and disappeared through the O Club door. The grunts in the front of the Humvee craned around, unsure about what to do next. They were both privates first class, probably stationed permanently in the States. Maybe they had a little Germany time under their belts, but nothing else of significance. No Korea time. No desert time, certainly. They didn’t have the look. Reacher said, “Remember wearing diapers, when you were two years old?”
The driver said, “Sir, not specifically, sir.”
“Back then I was a major in the MPs. So I’m going to take a stroll now, and you don’t need to worry about it. If you want to worry about it, I’ll dig out your CO and we’ll do the brother officer thing, and he’ll OK it and you’ll look stupid. How does that sound?”
The guy wasn’t totally derelict. Not totally dumb. He asked, “Sir, what unit, and where?”
Reacher said, “110th MP. HQ was in Rock Creek, Virginia.”
The guy nodded. “It still is. The 110th is still in business.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Sir, you have a pleasant evening. Chow in the mess until ten, if you’re interested.”
“Thanks, soldier,” Reacher said. He climbed out and the Humvee drove away and left him. He stood still for a moment in the sharp night air and then set out walking to the standalone building. Its original purpose was unclear to him. No reason to have a physically separated building unless it held infectious patients or explosives, and it didn’t look like either a hospital or an armory. Hospitals were bigger and armories were stronger.
He went in the front door and found himself in a small square hallway with stairs ahead of him and doors either side. The upstairs windows had been dark. The lit windows had been on the ground floor. If in doubt, turn left was his motto. So he tried the left-hand door and came up empty. An administrative office, lights blazing, nobody in it. He stepped back to the hallway and tried the right-hand door. Found a medic with the rank of captain at a desk, with Thurman’s jar in front of him. The guy was young for a captain, but medics got promoted fast. They were usually two steps ahead of everyone else.
“Help you?” the guy said.
“I flew in with Thurman. I was curious about his jar.”
“Curious how?”
“Is it what he says it is?”
“Are you authorized to know?”
“I used to be. I was an MP. I did some forensic medicine with Nash Newman, who was probably your ultimate boss back when you were a second lieutenant. Unless he had retired already. He’s probably retired now.”
The guy nodded. “He is retired now. But I heard of him.”
“So are there human remains in the jar?”
“Probably. Almost certainly, in fact.”
“Carbon?”
“No carbon,” the guy said. “In a hot fire all the carbon is driven off as carbon dioxide. What’s left of a person after cremation are oxides of potassium, sodium, iron, calcium, maybe a little magnesium, all inorganic.”
“And that’s what’s in the jar?”
The guy nodded again. “Entirely consistent with burned human flesh and bone.”
“What do you do with it?”
“We send it to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.”
“And what do they do with it?”
“Nothing,” the guy said. “There’s no DNA in it. It’s just soot, basically. The whole thing is an embarrassment, really. But Thurman keeps on showing up. He’s a sentimental old guy. We can’t turn him away, obviously. So we stage a sweet little ceremony and accept whatever he brings. Can’t trash it afterward, either. Wouldn’t be respectful. So we move it off our desks onto Hawaii’s. I imagine they stick it in a closet and forget all about it.”
“I’m sure they do. Does Thurman tell you where it comes from?”
“Iraq, obviously.”
“But what kind of vehicles?”
“Does it matter?”
“I would say so.”
“We don’t get those details.”
Reacher asked, “What was this building originally?”
“A VD clinic,” the medic said.
“You got a phone I could use?”
The guy pointed to a console on his desk.
“Have at it,” he said.
Reacher dialed 411 upside down and got the number for David Robert Vaughan, Fifth Street, Hope, Colorado. He said the number once under his breath to memorize it and then dialed it.
No answer.
He put the phone back in the cradle and asked, “Where’s the mess?”
“Follow your nose,” the medic said. Which was good advice. Reacher walked back to the main cluster and circled until he smelled the aroma of fried food coming out of a powerful extraction vent. The vent came through the wall of a low lean-to addition to a larger square one-story building. The mess kitchen, and the mess. Reacher went in and got a few questioning looks but no direct challenges. He got in line and picked up a cheeseburger the size of a softball, plus fries, plus beans, plus a mug of coffee. The burger was excellent, which was normal for the army. Mess cooks were in savage competition to produce the best patty. The coffee was excellent, too. A unique standardized blend, in Reacher’s opinion the best in the world. He had been drinking it all his life. The fries were fair and the beans were adequate. All in all, probably better than the limp piece of grilled fish the officers were getting.
He took more coffee and sat in an armchair and read the army papers. He figured the two PFCs would come get him when Thurman was ready to leave. They would drive their guests out to the flight line and salute smartly and finish their little show in style, just after midnight. Taxiing, takeoff, the climb, then ninety minutes in the air. That would get them back to Despair by two, which seemed to be the normal schedule. Three hours’ worth of free aviation fuel, plus a free four-hour dinner. Not bad, in exchange for a quarter-full jar of soot. A born-again-Christian American and a businessman was how Thurman had described himself. Whatever kind of a Christian he was, he was a useful businessman. That was for damn sure.
The mess kitchen closed. Reacher finished the papers and dozed. The PFCs never showed. At twelve-ten in the morning Reacher woke up and heard the Piper’s engine in the distance and by the time the sound registered in his mind it was revving hard. By the time he made it outside the little white plane was on the runway. He stood and watched as it lifted off and disappeared into the darkness above.
60
The Humvee came back from the flight line and the two PFCs got out and nodded to Reacher like nothing was wrong. Reacher said, “I was supposed to be on that plane.”
The driver said, “No sir, Mr. Thurman told us you had a one-way ticket tonight. He told us you were heading south from here, on business of your own. He told us you were all done in Colorado.”
Reacher said, “Shit.” He thought back to Thurman, in front of the airplane barn. The deliberate pause. Debate in his face, some kind of a long-range calculus, like he was playing a long game, thinking eight moves ahead.
Fly with me tonight.
I won’t ask you to join me for dinner.
Reacher shook his head. He was ninety minutes’ flying time from where he needed to be, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with no airplane.
Outwitted by a seventy-year-old preacher.
Dumb.
And tense.
I think they were all stirred up because they’re heading for the end of something.
What, he had no idea.
When, he had no clue.
He checked the map in his head. There were no highways in the Oklahoma panhandle. None at all. Just a thin red tracery of state four-lanes and county two-lanes. He glanced at the Humvee and at the PFCs and said, “You guys want to drive me out to a road?”
“Which road?”
“Any road that gets traffic more than once an hour.”
“You could try 287. That goes south.”
“I need to go north. Back to Colorado. Thurman wasn’t entirely frank with you.”
“287 goes north, too. All the way up to I-70.”
“How far is that?”
“Sir, I believe it’s dead-on two hundred miles.”
Hitchhiking had gotten more and more difficult in the ten years since Reacher left the army. Drivers were less generous, more afraid. The West was sometimes better than the East, which helped. Day was always better than night, which didn’t. The Humvee from Fort Shaw let him out at twelve-forty-five, and it was a quarter past one in the morning before he saw his first northbound vehicle, a Ford F150 that didn’t even slow down to take a look. It just blew past. Ten minutes later an old Chevy Blazer did the same thing. Reacher blamed the movies. They made people scared of strangers. Although in reality most movies had the passing strangers messed up by the locals, not the other way around. Weird inbred families that hunted people for sport. But mostly Reacher blamed himself. He knew he was no kind of an attractive roadside proposition. Look at yourself. What do you see? Maria from San Diego was the kind of person that got rides easily. Sweet, small, unthreatening, needy. Vaughan would do OK, too. Hulks six-five in height were a riskier bet.
At ten of two a dark Toyota pick-up at least slowed and took a look before passing by, which was progress of a sort. Five after two, a twenty-year-old Cadillac swept past. It had an out-of-tune motor and a collapsed rear suspension and an old woman low down behind the wheel. White hair, thin neck. What Reacher privately called a Q-tip. Not a likely prospect. Then at a quarter past two an old Suburban heaved into view. In Reacher’s experience new Suburbans were driven by uptight assholes, but old models were plain utilitarian vehicles often driven by plain utilitarian people. Their bulk often implied a kind of no-nonsense self-confidence on the part of their owners. The kind of self-confidence that said strangers weren’t necessarily a problem.
The best hope so far.
Reacher stepped off the shoulder and put one foot in the traffic lane. Cocked his thumb in a way that suggested need, but not desperation.
The Suburban’s brights came on.
It slowed.
It stopped altogether fifteen feet short of where Reacher was standing. A smart move. It gave the guy behind the wheel a chance to look over his potential passenger without the kind of social pressure that face-to-face proximity would imply. Reacher couldn’t see the driver. Too much dazzle from the headlights.
A decision was made. The headlights died back to low beam and the truck rolled forward and stopped again. The window came down. The driver was a fat red-faced man. He was clinging to the wheel like he would fall out of his chair if he didn’t. He said, “Where are you headed?” His voice was slurred.
Reacher said, “North into Colorado. I’m trying to get to a place called Hope.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Me neither, until a few days ago.”
“How far away?”
“Maybe four hours.”
“Is it on the way to Denver?”
“It would be a slight detour.”
“Are you an honest man?”
Reacher said, “Usually.”
“Not really.”
“Are you drunk?”
Reacher said, “Not even a little bit.”