by Lee Child
“Who’s there?” it called out.
“Reacher,” he called back. “General Garber’s friend.”
His voice was loud. Behind him, he heard panicked scurrying in the brush. Furtive animals were fleeing. In front of him, he heard a stiff lock turning and bolts easing back. The door creaked open. Darkness inside. He stepped forward into the shadow of the eaves and saw an old woman waiting. She was maybe eighty, stick thin, white hair, stooped, wearing a faded floral-print dress that flared right out from the waist over nylon petticoats. It was the sort of dress he’d seen in photographs of women at suburban garden parties in the fifties and the sixties. The sort of dress that was normally worn with long white gloves and a wide-brimmed hat and a contented bourgeois smile.
“We were expecting you,” she said.
She turned and stood aside. He nodded and went in. The radius of the skirt meant he had to push past its flare with a loud rustle of nylon.
“I brought your mail,” he said to her. “Your box was full.”
He held up the thick stack of curled envelopes and waited.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind. It’s a long walk out there, and we don’t like to stop the car to get it, in case we get rear-ended. It’s a very busy road. People drive terribly fast, you know. Faster than they should, I think.”
Reacher nodded. It was about the quietest road he had ever seen. A person could sleep the night out there right on the yellow line, with a good chance of surviving until morning. He was still holding the mail. The old lady showed no curiosity over it.
“Where would you like me to put it?”
“Would you put it in the kitchen?”
The hallway was a dark space, paneled in gloomy wood. The kitchen was worse. It had a tiny window, glassed in with yellow reeded glass. There was a collection of freestanding units in muddy dark veneer, and curious old enamel appliances, speckled in mint greens and grays, standing up on short legs. The whole room smelled of old food and a warm oven, but it was clean and tidy. A rag rug on worn linoleum. There was a chipped china mug with a pair of thick eyeglasses standing vertically in it. He put the stack of mail next to the mug. When her visitor was gone, she would use her eyeglasses to read her mail, right after she put her best frock back in the closet with the mothballs.
“May I offer you cake?” she asked.
He glanced at the stovetop. There was a china plate there, covered over with a worn linen cloth. She’d baked something for him.
“And coffee?”
Next to the stove top was an ancient percolator, mint green enamel, green glass knob on the top, connected to the outlet by a cord insulated with frayed fabric. He nodded.
“I love coffee and cake,” he said.
She nodded back, pleased. Bustled forward, crushing her skirt against the oven door. She used a thin trembling thumb and operated the switch on the percolator. It was already filled and ready to go.
“It takes a moment,” she said. Then she paused and listened. The old percolator started a loud gulping sound. “So come and meet Mr. Hobie. He’s awake now, and very anxious to see you. While we’re waiting for the machine.”
She led him through the hallway to a small parlor in back. It was about twelve by twelve and heavily furnished with armchairs and sofas and glass-fronted chest-high cabinets filled with china ornaments. There was an old guy in one of the chairs. He was wearing a stiff serge suit, blue, worn and shiny in places, and at least three sizes too big for his shrunken body. The collar of his shirt was a wide stiff hoop around a pale scrawny neck. Random silky tufts of white were all that was left of his hair. His wrists were like pencils protruding from the cuffs of his suit. His hands were thin and bony, laid loosely on the arms of the chair. He had clear plastic tubes looped over his ears, running down under his nose. There was a bottle of oxygen on a wheeled cart, parked behind him. He looked up and took a long, loud sniff of the gas to fuel the effort of lifting his hand.
“Major Reacher,” he said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
Reacher stepped forward and grasped the hand and shook it. It was cold and dry, and it felt like a skeleton’s hand wrapped in flannel. The old guy paused and sucked more oxygen and spoke again.
“I’m Tom Hobie, Major. And this lovely lady is my wife, Mary.”
Reacher nodded.
“Pleased to meet you both,” he said. “But I’m not a major anymore.”
The old guy nodded back and sucked the gas through his nose.
“You served,” he said. “Therefore I think you’re entitled to your rank.”
There was a fieldstone fireplace, built low in the center of one wall. The mantel was packed tight with photographs in ornate silver frames. Most of them were color snaps showing the same subject, a young man in olive fatigues, in a variety of poses and situations. There was one older picture among them, airbrushed black-and-white, a different man in uniform, tall and straight and smiling, a private first class from a different generation of service. Possibly Mr. Hobie himself, before his failing heart started killing him from the inside, although it was hard for Reacher to tell. There was no resemblance.
“That’s me,” Hobie confirmed, following his gaze.
“World War Two?” Reacher asked.
The old man nodded. Sadness in his eyes.
“I never went overseas,” he said. “I volunteered well ahead of the draft, but I had a weak heart, even back then. They wouldn’t let me go. So I did my time in a storeroom in New Jersey.”
Reacher nodded. Hobie had his arm behind him, fiddling with the cylinder valve, increasing the oxygen flow.
“I’ll bring the coffee now,” the old lady said. “And the cake.”
“Can I help you with anything?” Reacher asked her.
“No, I’ll be fine,” she said, and swished slowly out of the room.
“Sit down, Major, please,” Tom Hobie said.
Reacher nodded and sat down in the silence, in a small armchair near enough to catch the old guy’s fading voice. He could hear the rattle of his breathing. Nothing else, just a faint hiss from the top of the oxygen bottle and the clink of china from the kitchen. Patient domestic sounds. The window had a venetian blind, lime green plastic, tilted down against the light. The river was out there somewhere, presumably beyond an overgrown yard, maybe thirty miles upstream of Leon Garber’s place.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Hobie called from the hallway.
She was on her way back into the room with a wheeled cart. There was a matching china set stacked on it, cups and saucers and plates, with a small milk jug and a sugar bowl. The linen cover was off the platter, revealing a pound cake, drizzled with some kind of yellow icing. Maybe lemon. The old percolator was there, smelling of coffee.
“How do you like it?”
“No milk, no sugar,” Reacher said.
She poured coffee into a cup, her thin wrist quivering with the effort. The cup rattled in its saucer as she passed it across. She followed it with a quarter of the cake on a plate. The plate shook. The oxygen bottle hissed. The old man was rehearsing his story, dividing it up into bites, taking in enough oxygen to fuel each one of them.
“I was a printer,” he said suddenly. “I ran my own shop. Mary worked for a big customer of mine. We met and were married in the spring of ‘47. Our son was born in the June of ‘48.”
He turned away and ran his glance along the line of photographs.
“Our son, Victor Truman Hobie.”
The parlor fell quiet, like an observance.
“I believed in duty,” the old man said. “I was unfit for active service, and I regretted it. Regretted it bitterly, Major. But I was happy to serve my country any way I could, and I did. We brought our son up the same way, to love his country and to serve it. He volunteered for Vietnam.”
Old Mr. Hobie closed his mouth and sucked oxygen through his nose, once, twice, and then he leaned down to the floor beside him and came up with a leather-bound folder. He spread it across his
bony legs and opened it up. Took out a photograph and passed it across. Reacher juggled his cup and his plate and leaned forward to take it from the shaking hand. It was a faded color print of a boy in a backyard. The boy was maybe nine or ten, stocky, toothy, freckled, grinning, wearing a metal bowl upside down on his head, with a toy rifle shouldered, his stiff denim trousers tucked into his socks to resemble the look of fatigues buckled into gaiters.
“He wanted to be a soldier,” Mr. Hobie said. “Always. It was his ambition. I approved of it at the time, of course. We were unable to have other children, so Victor was on his own, the light of our lives, and I thought that to be a soldier and to serve his country was a fine ambition for the only son of a patriotic father.”
There was silence again. A cough. A hiss of oxygen. Silence.
“Did you approve of Vietnam, Major?” Hobie asked suddenly.
Reacher shrugged.
“I was too young to have much of an opinion,” he said. “But knowing what I know now, no, I wouldn’t have approved of Vietnam.”
“Why not?”
“Wrong place,” Reacher said. “Wrong time, wrong reasons, wrong methods, wrong approach, wrong leadership. No real backing, no real will to win, no coherent strategy.”
“Would you have gone?”
Reacher nodded.
“Yes, I would have gone,” he said. “No choice. I was the son of a soldier, too. But I would have been jealous of my father’s generation. Much easier to go to World War Two.”
“Victor wanted to fly helicopters,” Hobie said. “He was passionate about it. My fault again, I’m afraid. I took him to a county fair, paid two bucks for him to have his first flight in one. It was an old Bell, a crop duster. After that, all he wanted to be was a helicopter pilot. And he decided the Army was the best place to learn how.”
He slid another photograph out of the folder. Passed it across. It showed the same boy, now twice the age, grown tall, still grinning, in a new fatigues, standing in front of an Army helicopter. It was an H-23 Hiller, an old training machine.
“That’s Fort Wolters,” Hobie said. “All the way down in Texas. U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School.”
Reacher nodded. “He flew choppers in ‘Nam?”
“He passed out second in his class,” Hobie said. “That was no surprise to us. He was always an excellent student, all the way through high school. He was especially gifted in math. He understood accountancy. I imagined he’d go to college and then come into partnership with me, to do the book work. I looked forward to it. I struggled in school, Major. No reason to be coy about it now. I’m not an educated man. It was a constant delight for me to see Victor doing so well. He was a very smart boy. And a very good boy. Very smart, very kind, a good heart, a perfect son. Our only son.”
The old lady was silent. Not eating the cake, not drinking the coffee.
“His passing out was at Fort Rucker,” Hobie said. “Down in Alabama. We made the trip to see it.”
He slid across the next photograph. It was a duplicate of one of the framed prints from the mantel. Faded pastel grass and sky, a tall boy in dress uniform, cap down over his eyes, his arm around an older woman in a print dress. The woman was slim and pretty. The photograph was slightly out of focus, the horizon slightly tilted. Taken by a fumbling husband and father, breathless with pride.
“That’s Victor and Mary,” the old man said. “She hasn’t changed a bit, has she, that day to this?”
“Not a bit,” Reacher lied.
“We loved that boy,” the old woman said quietly. “He was sent overseas two weeks after that photograph was taken.”
“July of ’68,” Hobie said. “He was twenty years old.”
“What happened?” Reacher asked.
“He served a full tour,” Hobie said. “He was commended twice. He came home with a medal. I could see right away the idea of keeping the books for a print shop was too small for him. I thought he would serve out his time and get a job flying helicopters for the oil rigs. Down in the Gulf, perhaps. They were paying big money then, for Army pilots. Or Navy, or Air Force, of course.”
“But he went over there again,” Mrs. Hobie said. “To Vietnam again.”
“He signed on for a second tour,” Mrs. Hobie said. “He didn’t have to. But he said it was his duty. He said the war was still going on, and it was his duty to be a part of it. He said that’s what patriotism meant.”
“And what happened?” Reacher asked.
There was a long moment of silence.
“He didn’t come back,” Hobie said.
The silence was like a weight in the room. Somewhere a clock was ticking. It grew louder and louder until it was filling the air like blows from a hammer.
“It destroyed me,” Hobie said quietly.
The oxygen wheezed in and out, in and out, through a constricted throat.
“It just destroyed me. I used to say: I’ll exchange the whole rest of my life, just for one more day with him.”
“The rest of my life,” his wife echoed. “For just one more day with him.”
“And I meant it,” Hobie said. “And I still would. I still would, Major. Looking at me now, that’s not much of a bargain, is it? I haven’t got much life left in me. But I said it then, and I said it every day for thirty years, and as God is my witness, I meant it every single time I said it. The whole rest of my life, for one more day with him.”
“When was he killed?” Reacher asked, gently.
“He wasn’t killed,” Hobie said. “He was captured.”
“Taken prisoner?”
The old man nodded. “At first, they told us he was missing. We assumed he was dead, but we clung on, hoping. He was posted missing, and he stayed missing. We never got official word he was killed.”
“So we waited,” Mrs. Hobie said. “We just kept on waiting, for years and years. Then we started asking. They told us Victor was missing, presumed killed. That was all they could say. His helicopter was shot down in the jungle, and they never found the wreckage.”
“We accepted that then,” Hobie said. “We knew how it was. Plenty of boys died without a known grave. Plenty of boys always have, in war.”
“Then the memorial went up,” Mrs. Hobie said. “Have you seen it?”
“The Wall?” Reacher said. “In D.C.? Yes, I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I found it very moving.”
“They refused to put his name on it,” Hobie said.
“Why?”
“They never explained. We asked and we begged, but they never told us exactly why. They just said he’s no longer considered a casualty.”
“So we asked them what he is considered as,” Mrs. Hobie said. “They just told us missing in action.”
“But the other MIAs are on the Wall,” Hobie said.
There was silence again. The clock hammered away in another room.
“What did General Garber say about this?” Reacher asked.
“He didn’t understand it,” Hobie said. “Didn’t understand it at all. He was still checking for us when he died.”
There was silence again. The oxygen hissed and the clock hammered.
“But we know what happened,” Mrs. Hobie said.
“You do?” Reacher asked her. “What?”
“The only thing that fits,” she said. “He was taken prisoner.”
“And never released,” Hobie said.
“That’s why the Army is covering it up,” Mrs. Hobie said. “The government is embarrassed about it. The truth is some of our boys were never released. The Vietnamese held on to them, like hostages, to get foreign aid and trade recognition and credits from us, after the war. Like blackmail. The government held out for years, despite our boys still being prisoners over there. So they can’t admit it. They hide it instead, and won’t talk about it.”
“But we can prove it now,” Hobie said.
He slid another photograph from the folder. Passed it across. It was a newer print. Vivid glossy colors. It was a telephoto shot
taken through tropical vegetation. There was barbed wire on bamboo fence posts. There was an Oriental figure in a brown uniform, with a bandanna around his forehead. A rifle in his hands. It was clearly a Soviet AK-47. No doubt about it. And there was another figure in the picture. A tall Caucasian, looking about fifty, emaciated, gaunt, bent, gray, wearing pale, rotted fatigues. Looking half away from the Oriental soldier, flinching.
“That’s Victor,” Mrs. Hobie said. “That’s our son. That photograph was taken last year.”
“We spent thirty years asking about him,” Hobie said. “Nobody would help us. We asked everybody. Then we found a man who told us about these secret camps. There aren’t many. Just a few, with a handful of prisoners. Most of them have died by now. They’ve grown old and died, or been starved to death. This man went to Vietnam and checked for us. He got close enough to take this picture. He even spoke to one of the other prisoners through the wire. Secretly, at night. It was very dangerous for him. He asked for the name of the prisoner he’d just photographed. It was Vic Hobie, First Cavalry helicopter pilot.”
“The man had no money for a rescue,” Mrs. Hobie said. “And we’d already paid him everything we had for the first trip. We had no more left. So when we met General Garber at the hospital, we told him our story and asked him to try and get the government to pay.”
Reacher stared at the photograph. Stared at the gaunt man with the gray face.
“Who else has seen this picture?”
“Only General Garber,” Mrs. Hobie answered. “The man who took it told us to keep it a secret. Because it’s very sensitive, politically. Very dangerous. It’s a terrible thing, buried in the nation’s history. But we had to show it to General Garber, because he was in a position to help us.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Reacher asked.
The oxygen hissed in the silence. In and out, in and out, through the clear plastic tubes. The old man’s mouth was working.