Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  The forms were access requests. Jodie filled in her last name as Jacob and requested all and any information on Major Jack-none-Reacher, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division. Reacher took the pencil from her and asked for all and any information on Lieutenant General Leon Jerome Garber. He slid both forms back to the master sergeant, who glanced at them and dropped them in her out-tray. She rang a bell at her elbow and went back to work. The idea was some private would hear the bell, come pick up the forms, and start the patient search for the files.

  “Who’s working supervisor today?” Reacher asked.

  It was a direct question. The sergeant looked for a way to avoid answering it, but she couldn’t find one.

  “Major Theodore Conrad,” she said, reluctantly.

  Reacher nodded. Conrad? Not a name he recalled.

  “Would you tell him we’d like to meet with him, just briefly? And would you have those files delivered to his office?”

  The way he said it was exactly halfway between a pleasant, polite request and an unspoken command. It was a tone of voice he had always found very useful with master sergeants. The woman picked up the phone and made the call.

  “He’ll have you shown upstairs,” she said, like in her opinion she was amazed Conrad was doing them such a massive favor.

  “No need,” Reacher said. “I know where it is. I’ve been there before.”

  He showed Jodie the way, up the stairs from the lobby to a spacious office on the second floor. Major Theodore Conrad was waiting at the door. Hot-weather uniform, his name on an acetate plate above his breast pocket. He looked like a friendly guy, but maybe slightly soured by his posting. He was about forty-five, and to still be a major on the second floor of the NPRC at forty-five meant he was going nowhere in a hurry. He paused, because a private was racing along the hallway toward him with two thick files in his hand. Reacher smiled to himself. They were getting the A-grade service. When this place wanted to be quick, it could be real quick. Conrad took the files and dismissed the runner.

  “So what can I do for you folks?” he asked. His accent was slow and muddy, like the Mississippi where it originated, but it was hospitable enough.

  “Well, we need your best help, Major,” Reacher said. “And we’re hoping if you read those files, maybe you’ll feel willing to give it up.”

  Conrad glanced at the files in his hand and stood aside and ushered them into his office. It was a quiet, paneled space. He showed them to a matched pair of leather armchairs and stepped around his desk. Sat down and squared the files on his blotter, one on top of the other. Opened the first, which was Leon’s, and started skimming.

  It took him ten minutes to see what he needed. Reacher and Jodie sat and gazed out of the window. The city baked under a white sun. Conrad finished with the files and studied the names on the request forms. Then he glanced up.

  “Two very fine records,” he said. “Very, very impressive. And I get the point. You’re obviously Jack-none-Reacher himself, and I’m guessing Mrs. Jodie Jacob here is the Jodie Garber referred to in the file as the general’s daughter. Am I right?”

  Jodie nodded and smiled.

  “I thought so,” Conrad said. “And you think being family, so to speak, will buy you better and faster access to the archive?”

  Reacher shook his head solemnly.

  “It never crossed our minds,” he said. “We know all access requests are treated with absolute equality.”

  Conrad smiled, and then he laughed out loud.

  “You kept a straight face,” he said. “Very, very good. You play much poker? You damn well should, you know. So how can I help you folks?”

  “We need what you’ve got on a Victor Truman Hobie,” Reacher said.

  “Vietnam?”

  “You familiar with him?” Reacher asked, surprised.

  Conrad looked blank. “Never heard of him. But with Truman for a middle name, he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1952, wasn’t he? Which makes him too young for Korea and too old for the Gulf.”

  Reacher nodded. He was starting to like Theodore Conrad. He was a sharp guy. He would have liked to pull his file to see what was keeping him a major, behind a desk out in Missouri at the age of forty-five.

  “We’ll work in here,” Conrad said. “My pleasure.”

  He picked up the phone and called directly to the storerooms, bypassing the master sergeant at the front desk. He winked at Reacher and ordered up the Hobie file. Then they sat in comfortable silence until the runner came in with the folder five minutes later.

  “That was quick,” Jodie said.

  “Actually it was a little slow,” Conrad said back. “Think about it from the private’s point of view. He hears me say H for Hobie, he runs to the H section, he locates the file by first and middle initials, he grabs it, he runs up here with it. My people are subject to the Army’s normal standards for physical fitness, which means he could probably run most of a mile in five minutes. And although this is a very big place, there was a lot less than a mile to cover in the triangle between his desk and the H section and this office, believe me. So he was actually a little slow. I suspect the master sergeant interrupted him, just to frustrate me.”

  Victor Hobie’s file jacket was old and furred, with a printed grid on the cover where access requests were noted in neat handwriting. There were only two. Conrad traced the names with a finger.

  “Requests by telephone,” he said. “General Garber himself, in March of this year. And somebody called Costello, calling from New York, beginning of last week. Why all the sudden interest?”

  “That’s what we hope to find out,” Reacher said.

  A combat soldier has a thick file, especially a combat soldier who did his fighting thirty years ago. Three decades is long enough for every report and every note to end up in exactly the right place. Victor Hobie’s paperwork was a compressed mass about two inches deep. The old furred jacket was molded tight around it. It reminded Reacher of Costello’s black leather wallet, which he’d seen in the Keys bar. He hitched his chair closer to Jodie’s and closer to the front edge of Conrad’s desk. Conrad laid the file down and reversed it on the shiny wood and opened it up, like he was displaying a rare treasure to interested connoisseurs.

  MARILYN’S INSTRUCTIONS HAD been precise, and Sheryl followed them to the letter. The first step was get treatment. She went to the desk and then waited on a hard plastic chair in the triage bay. The St. Vincent’s ER was less busy than it sometimes is and she was seen within ten minutes by a woman doctor young enough to be her daughter.

  “How did this happen?” the doctor asked.

  “I walked into a door,” Sheryl said.

  The doctor led her to a curtained area and sat her down on the examination table. Started checking the reflex responses in her limbs.

  “A door? You absolutely sure about that?”

  Sheryl nodded. Stuck to her story. Marilyn was counting on her to do that.

  “It was half-open. I turned around, just didn’t see it.”

  The doctor said nothing and shone a light into Sheryl’s left eye, then her right.

  “Any blurring of your vision?”

  Sheryl nodded. “A little.”

  “Headache?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  The doctor paused and studied the admission form.

  “OK, we need X rays of the facial bones, obviously, but I also want a full skull film and a CAT scan. We need to see what exactly happened in there. Your insurance is good, so I’m going to get a surgeon to take a look at you right away, because if you’re going to need reconstructive work it’s a lot better to start on that sooner rather than later, OK? So you need to get into a gown and lie down. Then I’ll put you on a painkiller to help with the headache.”

  Sheryl heard Marilyn insist make the call before the painkiller, or you’ll fuzz out and forget.

  “I need to get to a phone,” she said, worried.

  “We can call your husband, if you w
ant,” the doctor said, neutrally.

  “No, I’m not married. It’s a lawyer. I need to call somebody’s lawyer.”

  The doctor looked at her and shrugged.

  “OK, down the hall. But be quick.”

  Sheryl walked to the bank of phones opposite the triage bay. She called the operator and asked for collect, like Marilyn had told her to. Repeated the number she’d memorized. The phone was answered on the second ring.

  “Forster and Abelstein,” a bright voice said. “How may we help you?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Chester Stone,” Sheryl said. “I need to speak with his attorney.”

  “That would be Mr. Forster himself,” the bright voice said. “Please hold.”

  While Sheryl was listening to the hold music, the doctor was twenty feet away, at the main desk, also making a call. Her call featured no music. Her call was to the NYPD’s Domestic Violence Unit.

  “This is St. Vincent’s,” she was saying. ”I’ve got another one for you. This one says she walked into a damn door. Won’t even admit she’s married, much less he’s beating on her. You can come on down and talk to her anytime you want.”

  THE FIRST ITEM in the file was Victor Hobie’s original application to join the Army. It was brown at the edges and crisp with age, handwritten in the same neat left-handed schoolboy script they had seen in the letters home to Brighton. It listed a summary of his education, his desire to fly helicopters, and not very much else. On the face of it, not an obvious rising star. But around that time for every one boy stepping up to volunteer, there were two dozen others buying one-way tickets on the Greyhound to Canada, so the Army recruiters had grabbed Hobie with both hands and sent him straight to the doctor.

  He had been given a flight medical, which was a tougher examination than standard, especially concerning eyesight and balance. He had passed A-1. Six feet one inch, 170 pounds, twenty-twenty vision, good lung capacity, free of infectious diseases. The medical was dated early in the spring, and Reacher could picture the boy, pale from the New York winter, standing in his boxers on a bare wooden floor with a tape measure tight around his chest.

  Next item in the file showed he was given travel vouchers and ordered to report to Fort Dix in two weeks’ time. The following batch of paperwork originated from down there. It started with the form he signed on his arrival, irrevocably committing himself to loyal service in the United States Army. Fort Dix was twelve weeks of basic training. There were six proficiency assessments. He scored well above average in all of them. No comments were recorded.

  Then there was a requisition for travel vouchers to Fort Polk, and a copy of his orders to report there for a month of advanced infantry training. There were notes about his progress with weapons. He was rated good, which meant something at Polk. At Dix, you were rated good if you could recognize a rifle at ten paces. At Polk, such a rating spoke of excellent hand-to-eye coordination, steady muscle control, calm temperament. Reacher was no expert on flying, but he guessed the instructors would have been fairly sanguine about eventually letting this guy loose with a helicopter.

  There were more travel vouchers, this time to Fort Wolters in Texas, where the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School was located. There was a note attached from the Polk CO indicating Hobie had turned down a week’s leave in favor of heading straight there. It was just a bald statement, but it carried an approving resonance, even after all those years. Here was a guy who was just about itching to get going.

  The paperwork thickened up at Wolters. It was a five-month stay, and it was serious stuff, like college. First came a month of preflight training, with heavy academic concentration on physics and aeronautics and navigation, taught in classrooms. It was necessary to pass to progress. Hobie had creamed it. The math talent his father had hoped to turn toward accountancy ran riot through those textbook subjects. He passed out of preflight top of his class. The only negative was a short note about his attitude. Some officer was criticizing him for trading favors for coaching. Hobie was helping some strugglers through the complex equations and in return they were shining his boots and cleaning his kit. Reacher shrugged to himself. The officer was clearly an asshole. Hobie was training to be a helicopter pilot, not a damn saint.

  The next four months at Wolters were airborne for primary flight training, initially on H-23 Hillers. Hobie’s first instructor was a guy called Lanark. His training notes were written in a wild scrawl, very anecdotal, very un-military. Sometimes very funny. He claimed learning to fly a helicopter was like learning to ride a bike as a kid. You screwed it up, and you screwed it up, and you screwed it up, and then all of a sudden it came right and you never again forgot how to do it. In Lanark’s opinion, Hobie had maybe taken longer than he ought to master it, but thereafter his progress moved from excellent to outstanding. He signed him off the Hiller and onto the H-19 Sikorsky, which was like moving up to a ten-speed English racer. He performed better on the Sikorsky than he had on the Hiller. He was a natural, and he got better the more complicated the machines became.

  He finished Wolters overall second in his class, rated outstanding, just behind an ace called A. A. DeWitt. More travel vouchers had them heading out together, over to Fort Rucker in Alabama, for another four months in advanced flight training.

  “Have I heard of this guy DeWitt?” Reacher asked. “The name rings a bell.”

  Conrad was following progress upside down.

  “Could be General DeWitt,” he said. “He runs the Helicopter School back at Wolters now. That would be logical, right? I’ll check it out.”

  He called direct to the storeroom and ordered up Major General A. A. DeWitt. Checked his watch as the phone went back down. “Should be faster, because the D section is nearer his desk than the H section. Unless the damn master sergeant interferes with him again.”

  Reacher smiled briefly and rejoined Jodie thirty years in the past. Fort Rucker was the real thing, with brand-new front-line assault helicopters replacing the trainers. Bell UH-1 Iroquois, nicknamed Hueys. Big, fierce machines, gas turbine engines, the unforgettable wop-wop-wop sound of a rotor blade forty-eight feet long and twenty-one inches wide. Young Victor Hobie had hurled one around the Alabama skies for seventeen long weeks, and then he passed out with credits and distinctions at the parade his father had photographed.

  “Three minutes forty seconds,” Conrad whispered.

  The runner was on his way in with the DeWitt jacket. Conrad leaned forward and took it from him. The guy saluted and went back out.

  “I can’t let you see this,” Conrad said. “The general’s still a serving officer, right? But I’ll tell you if it’s the same DeWitt.”

  He opened the file at the beginning and Reacher saw flashes of the same paper as in Hobie’s. Conrad skimmed and nodded. “Same DeWitt. He survived the jungle and stayed on board afterward. Total helicopter nut. My guess is he’ll serve out his time down at Wolters.”

  Reacher nodded. Glanced out of the window. The sun was falling away into afternoon.

  “You guys want some coffee?” Conrad asked.

  “Great,” Jodie said. Reacher nodded again.

  Conrad picked up the phone and called the storeroom.

  “Coffee,” he said. “That’s not a file. It’s a request for refreshment. Three cups, best china, OK?”

  The runner brought it in on a silver tray, by which time Reacher was up at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, with Victor Hobie and his new pal A. A. DeWitt reporting to the 3rd Transportation Company of the First Cavalry Division. The two boys were there two weeks, long enough for the Army to add air-mobile to their unit designation, and then to change it completely to Company B, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion. At the end of the two weeks, the renamed company sailed away from the Alabama coast, part of a seventeen-ship convoy on a thirty-one-day sea voyage to Long Mai Bay, twenty miles south of Qui Nhon and eleven thousand miles away in Vietnam.

  Thirty-one days at sea is a whole month, and the company brass invented make-work to k
eep boredom at bay. Hobie’s file indicated he signed up for maintenance, which meant endlessly rinsing and greasing the disassembled Hueys to beat the salt air down in the ship’s hold. The note was approving, and Hobie stepped onto the Indochina beach a first lieutenant, after leaving the States a Second, and thirteen months after joining the Army as an officer candidate. Merited promotions for a worthy recruit. One of the good kids. Reacher recalled Ed Steven’s words, in the hot sunshine outside the hardware store: very serious, very earnest, but not really a whole lot out of the ordinary.

  “Cream?” Conrad asked.

  Reacher shook his head, in time with Jodie.

  “Just black,” they said, together.

  Conrad poured and Reacher kept on reading. There were two variants of Hueys in use at that time: one was a gunship, and the other was a transport chopper nicknamed a slick. Company B was assigned to fly slicks, servicing First Cavalry’s battlefield transport needs. The slick was a transport hack, but it was not unarmed. It was a standard Huey, with the side doors stripped off and a heavy machine gun hung on a bungee cord in each open doorway. There were a pilot and a copilot, two gunners, and a crew chief acting as an all-purpose engineer and mechanic. The slick could lift as many grunts as could pack themselves into the boxy space between the two gunners’ backs, or a ton of ammunition, or any combination.

  There was on-the-job training to reflect the fact that Vietnam was very different from Alabama. There was no formal grading attached to it, but Hobie and DeWitt were the first new pilots assigned to the jungle. Then the requirement was to fly five combat missions as a copilot, and if you handled that, you took the pilot’s seat and got your own copilot. Then the serious business started, and it was reflected in the file. The whole second half of the jacket was stuffed with mission reports on flimsy onion-skin paper. The language was dry and matter-of-fact. They were not written by Hobie himself. They were the work of the company dispatch clerk.