by Lee Child
The plane taxied to the gate and the businessmen waited and ushered Jodie down the aisle ahead of them. Either plain Texan courtesy or they wanted to watch her legs and her ass as she walked, but Reacher couldn’t mount any serious criticism on that issue because he wanted to do exactly the same thing. He carried her bag and followed her down the jetway and into the terminal. He stepped alongside her and put his arm around her shoulders and felt a dozen pairs of eyes drilling into his back.
“Claiming what’s yours?” she asked.
“You noticed them?” he asked back.
She threaded her arm around his waist and pulled him closer as they walked.
“They were kind of hard to miss. I guess it would have been easy enough to get a date for tonight.”
“You’d have been beating them off with a stick.”
“It’s the dress. Probably I should have worn trousers, but I figured it’s kind of traditional down here.”
“You could wear a Soviet tank driver’s suit, all gray-green and padded with cotton, and they’d still have their tongues hanging out.”
She giggled. “I’ve seen Soviet tank drivers. Dad showed me pictures. Two hundred pounds, big mustaches, smoking pipes, tattoos, and that was just the women.”
The terminal was chilled with air-conditioning and they were hit with a forty-degree jump in temperature when they stepped out to the taxi line. June in Texas, just after ten in the morning, and it was over a hundred and humid.
“Wow,” she said. “Maybe the dress makes sense.”
They were in the shade of an overhead roadway, but beyond it the sun was white and brassy. The concrete baked and shimmered. Jodie bent and found some dark glasses in her bag and slipped them on and looked more like a blond Audrey Hepburn than ever. The first taxi was a new Caprice with the air going full blast and religious artifacts hanging from the rearview mirror. The driver was silent and the trip lasted forty minutes, mostly over concrete highways that shone white in the sun and started out busy and got emptier.
Fort Wolters was a big, permanent facility in the middle of nowhere with low elegant buildings and landscaping kept clean and tidy in the sterile way only the Army can achieve. There was a high fence stretching miles around the whole perimeter, taut and level all the way, no weeds at its base. The inner curb of the road was whitewashed. Beyond the fence internal roads faced with gray concrete snaked here and there between the buildings. Windows winked in the sun. The taxi rounded a curve and revealed a field the size of a stadium with helicopters lined up in neat rows. Squads of flight trainees moved about between them.
The main gate was set back from the road, with tall white flagpoles funneling down toward it. Their flags hung limp in the heat. There was a low, square gatehouse with a red-and-white barrier controlling access. The gatehouse was all windows above waist level and Reacher could see MPs inside watching the approach of the taxi. They were in full service gear, including the white helmets. Regular Army MPs. He smiled. This part was going to be no problem. They were going to see him as more their friend than the people they were guarding.
The taxi dropped them in the turning circle and drove back out. They walked through the blinding heat to the shade of the guardhouse eaves. An MP sergeant slid the window back and looked at them inquiringly. Reacher felt the chilled air spilling out over him.
“We need to get together with General DeWitt,” he said. “Is there any chance of that happening, Sergeant?”
The guy looked him over. “Depends who you are, I guess.”
Reacher told him who he was and who he had been, and who Jodie was and who her father had been, and a minute later they were both inside the cool of the guardhouse. The MP sergeant was on the phone to his opposite number in the command office.
“OK, you’re booked in,” he said. “General’s free in half an hour.”
Reacher smiled. The guy was probably free right now, and the half hour was going to be spent checking that they were who they said they were.
“What’s the general like, Sergeant?” he asked.
“We’d rate him SAS, sir,” the MP said, and smiled.
Reacher smiled back. The guardhouse felt surprisingly good to him. He felt at home in it. SAS was MP code for “stupid asshole sometimes,” and it was a reasonably benevolent rating for a sergeant to give a general. It was the kind of rating that meant if he approached it right, the guy might cooperate. On the other hand, it meant he might not. It gave him something to ponder during the waiting time.
After thirty-two minutes a plain green Chevy with neat white stencils pulled up inside the barrier and the sergeant nodded them toward it. The driver was a private soldier who wasn’t about to speak a word. He just waited until they were seated and turned the car around and headed slowly back through the buildings. Reacher watched the familiar sights slide by. He had never been to Wolters, but he knew it well enough because it was identical to dozens of other places he had been. The same layout, the same people, the same details, like it was built to the same master plan. The main building was a long two-story brick structure facing a parade ground. Its architecture was exactly the same as the main building on the Berlin base where he was born. Only the weather was different.
The Chevy eased to a stop opposite the steps up into the building. The driver moved the selector into park and stared silently ahead through the windshield. Reacher opened the door and stepped out into the heat with Jodie.
“Thanks for the ride, soldier,” he said.
The boy just sat in park with the motor running and stared straight ahead. Reacher walked with Jodie to the steps and in through the door. There was an MP private stationed in the cool of the lobby, white helmet, white gaiters, a gleaming M-16 held easy across his chest. His gaze was fixed on Jodie’s bare legs as they danced in toward him.
“Reacher and Garber to see General DeWitt,” Reacher said.
The guy snapped the rifle upright, which was symbolic of removing a barrier. Reacher nodded and walked ahead to the staircase. The place was like every other place, built to a specification poised uneasily somewhere between lavish and functional, like a private school occupying an old mansion. It was immaculately clean, and the materials were the finest available, but the decor was institutional and brutal. At the top of the stairs was a desk in the corridor. Behind it was a portly MP sergeant, swamped with paperwork. Behind him was an oak door with an acetate plate bearing DeWitt’s name, his rank, and his decorations. It was a large plate.
“Reacher and Garber to see the general,” Reacher said.
The sergeant nodded and picked up his telephone. He pressed a button.
“Your visitors, sir,” he said into the phone.
He listened to the reply and stood up and opened the door. Stepped aside to allow them to walk past. Closed the door behind them. The office was the size of a tennis court. It was paneled in oak and had a huge, dark rug on the floor, thread-bare with vacuuming. The desk was large and oak, and DeWitt was in the chair behind it. He was somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, dried out and stringy, with thinning gray hair shaved down close to his scalp. He had half-closed gray eyes and he was using them to watch their approach with an expression Reacher read as halfway between curiosity and irritation.
“Sit down,” he said. “Please.”
There were leather visitor chairs drawn up near the desk. The office walls were crowded with mementoes, but they were all battalion and division mementos, war-game trophies, battle honors, old platoon photographs in faded monochrome. There were pictures and cutaway diagrams of a dozen different helicopters. But there was nothing personal to DeWitt on display. Not even family snaps on the desk.
“How can I help you folks?” he asked.
His accent was the bland Army accent that comes from serving all over the world with people from all over the country. He was maybe a midwesterner, originally. Maybe from somewhere near Chicago, Reacher thought.
“I was an MP major,” he said, and waited.
&nbs
p; “I know you were. We checked.”
A neutral reply. Nothing there at all. No hostility. But no approval, either.
“My father was General Garber,” Jodie said.
DeWitt nodded without speaking.
“We’re here in a private capacity,” Reacher said.
There was a short silence.
“A civilian capacity, in fact,” DeWitt said slowly.
Reacher nodded. Strike one.
“It’s about a pilot called Victor Hobie. You served with him in Vietnam.”
DeWitt looked deliberately blank. He raised his eyebrows.
“Did I?” he said. “I don’t remember him.”
Strike two. Uncooperative.
“We’re trying to find out what happened to him.”
Another short silence. Then DeWitt nodded, slowly, amused.
“Why? Was he your long-lost uncle? Or maybe he was secretly your father? Maybe he had a brief, sad affair with your mother when he was her pool boy. Or did you buy his old childhood home and find his long-lost teenage diaries hidden behind the wainscoting with a 1968 issue of Playboy magazine?”
Strike three. Aggressively uncooperative. The office went silent again. There was the thumping of rotor blades somewhere in the far distance. Jodie hitched forward on her chair. Her voice was soft and low in the quiet room.
“We’re here for his parents, sir. They lost their boy thirty years ago, and they’ve never known what happened to him. They’re still grieving, General.”
DeWitt looked at her with gray eyes and shook his head.
“I don’t remember him. I’m very sorry.”
“He trained with you right here at Wolters,” Reacher said. “You went to Rucker together and you sailed to Qui Nhon together. You served the best part of two tours together, flying slicks out of Pleiku.”
“Your old man in the service?” DeWitt asked.
Reacher nodded. “The Corps. Thirty years, Semper Fi.”
“Mine was Eighth Air Force,” DeWitt said. “World War Two, flying bombers out of East Anglia in England all the way to Berlin and back. You know what he told me when I signed up for helicopters?”
Reacher waited.
“He gave me some good advice,” DeWitt said. “He told me, don’t make friends with pilots. Because they all get killed, and it just makes you miserable.”
Reacher nodded again. “You really can’t recall him?”
DeWitt just shrugged.
“Not even for his folks?” Jodie asked. “Doesn’t seem right they’ll never know what happened to their boy, does it?”
There was silence. The distant rotor blades faded to nothing. DeWitt gazed at Jodie. Then he spread his small hands on the desk and sighed heavily.
“Well, I guess I can recall him a little,” he said. “Mostly from the early days. Later on, when they all started dying, I took the old man’s advice to heart. Kind of closed in on myself, you know?”
“So what was he like?” Jodie asked.
“What was he like?” DeWitt repeated. “Not like me, that’s for sure. Not like anybody else I ever knew, either. He was a walking contradiction. He was a volunteer, you know that? I was, too, and so were a lot of the guys. But Vic wasn’t like the others. There was a big divide back then, between the volunteers and the drafted guys. The volunteers were all rahrah boys, you know, going for it because they believed in it. But Vic wasn’t like that. He volunteered, but he was about as mousy quiet as the sulkiest draftee you ever saw. But he could fly like he was born with a rotor blade up his ass.”
“So he was good?” Jodie prompted.
“Better than good,” DeWitt replied. “Second only to me in the early days, which is saying something, because I was definitely born with a rotor blade up my ass. And Vic was smart with the book stuff. I remember that. He had it all over everybody else in the classroom.”
“Did he have an attitude problem with that?” Reacher asked. “Trading favors for help?”
DeWitt swung the gray eyes across from Jodie.
“You’ve done your research. You’ve been in the files.”
“We just came from the NPRC,” Reacher said.
DeWitt nodded, neutrally. “I hope you didn’t read my jacket.”
“Supervisor wouldn’t let us,” Reacher said.
“We were anxious not to poke around where we’re not wanted,” Jodie said.
DeWitt nodded again.
“Vic traded favors,” he said. “But they claimed he did it in the wrong way. There was a little controversy about it, as I recall. You were supposed to do it because you were glad to help your fellow candidates, you know? For the good of the unit, right? You remember how that shit went?”
He stopped and glanced at Reacher, amused. Reacher nodded. Jodie’s being there was helping him. Her charm was inching him back toward approval.
“But Vic was cold about it,” DeWitt said. “Like it was all just another math equation. Like x amount of lift moves the chopper off the ground, like this much help with that complicated formula gets his boots bulled up. They saw it as cold.”
“Was he cold?” Jodie asked.
DeWitt nodded. “Emotionless, the coldest guy I ever saw. It always amazed me. At first I figured it was because he came from some little place where he’d never done anything or seen anything. But later I realized he just felt nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. But it made him a hell of a tremendous flyer.”
“Because he wasn’t afraid?” Reacher asked.
“Exactly,” DeWitt said. “Not courageous, because a courageous guy is somebody who feels the fear but conquers it. Vic never felt it in the first place. It made him a better war flyer than me. I was the one passed out of Rucker head of the class, and I’ve got the plaque to prove it, but when we got in-country, he was better than me, no doubt about it.”
“In what kind of a way?”
DeWitt shrugged, like he couldn’t explain it. “We learned everything as we went along, just made it all up. Fact is, our training was shit. It was like being shown a little round thing and being told ‘this is a baseball,’ and then getting sent straight out to play in the major leagues. That’s something I’m trying to put right now that I’m here running this place. I never want to send boys out as unprepared as we were.”
“Hobie was good at learning on the job?” Reacher asked.
“The best,” DeWitt said. “You know anything about helicopters in the jungle?”
Reacher shook his head. “Not a lot.”
“First main problem is the LZ,” DeWitt said. “LZ, landing zone, right? You got a desperate bunch of tired infantry under fire somewhere, they need exfiltrating, they get on the radio and our dispatcher tells them sure, make us an LZ and we’ll be right over to pull you out. So they use explosives and saws and whatever the hell else they got and they blast a temporary LZ in the jungle. Now a Huey with the rotor turning needs a space exactly forty-eight feet wide and fifty-seven feet nine-point-seven inches long to land in. But the infantry is tired and in a big hurry and Charlie is raining mortars down on them and generally they don’t make the LZ big enough. So we can’t get them out. This happened to us two or three times, and we’re sick about it, and one night I see Vic studying the leading edge of the rotor blade on his Huey. So I say to him, ‘What are you looking at?’ And he says, ‘These are metal.’ I’m thinking, like what else would they be? Bamboo? But he’s looking at them. Next day, we’re called to a temporary LZ again, and sure enough the damn thing is too small, by a couple of feet all around. So I can’t get in. But Vic goes down anyway. He spins the chopper around and around and cuts his way in with the rotor. Like a gigantic flying lawn mower? It was awesome. Bits of tree flying everywhere. He pulls out seven or eight guys and the rest of us go down after him and get all the rest. That became SOP afterward, and he invented it, because he was cold and logical and he wasn’t afraid to try. That maneuver saved hundreds of guys over the years. Literally hundreds, maybe even thousands.”
“Impres
sive,” Reacher said.
“You bet your ass impressive,” DeWitt said back. “Second big problem we had was weight. Suppose you were out in the open somewhere, like a field. The infantry would come swarming in on you until the damn chopper was too heavy to take off. So your own gunners would be beating them off and leaving them there in the field, maybe to die. Not a nice feeling. So one day Vic lets them all on board, and sure enough he can’t get off the ground. So he shoves the stick forward and sort of skitters horizontally along the field until the airspeed kicks in under the rotor and unsticks him. Then he’s up and away. The running jump. It became another SOP, and he invented it, too. Sometimes he would do it downhill, even down the mountainsides, like he was heading for a certain crash, and then up he went. Like I told you, we were just making it up as we went along, and the truth is a lot of the good stuff got made up by Victor Hobie.”
“You admired him,” Jodie said.
DeWitt nodded. “Yes, I did. And I’m not afraid to admit it.”
“But you weren’t close.”
He shook his head. “Like my daddy told me, don’t make friends with the other pilots. And I’m glad I didn’t. Too many of them died.”
“How did he spend his time?” Reacher asked. “The files show a lot of days you couldn’t fly.”
“Weather was a bitch. A real bitch. You got no idea. I want this facility moved someplace else, maybe Washington State, where they get some mists and fogs. No point training down in Texas and Alabama if you want to go fighting someplace you get weather.”
“So how did you spend the downtime?”
“Me? I did all kinds of things. Sometimes I partied, sometimes I slept. Sometimes I took a truck out and went scavenging for things we needed.”