by Lee Child
Jodie nodded.
“Of course, that’s a slight simplification,” Newman said. “A fresh corpse can raise questions concerning its bones. Suppose there’s dismemberment involved? The pathologist would refer to us for help. We can look at the saw marks on the bones and help out. We can say how weak or strong the perpetrator was, what kind of saw he used, was he left-handed or right-handed, things like that. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’m working on skeletons. Dry old bones.”
Then he smiled again. A private, amused smile. “And pathologists are useless with dry old bones. Really, really hopeless. They don’t know the first thing about them. Sometimes I wonder what the hell they teach them in medical school.”
The office was quiet and cool. No windows, indirect lighting from concealed fixtures, carpet on the floor. A rosewood desk, comfortable leather chairs for the visitors. And an elegant clock on a low shelf, ticking quietly, already showing three-thirty in the afternoon. Just three and a half hours until the return flight.
“We’re here for a reason, General,” Reacher said. “This isn’t entirely a social call, I’m afraid.”
“Social enough to stop calling me General and start calling me Nash, OK? And tell me what’s on your mind.”
Reacher nodded. “We need your help, Nash.”
Newman looked up. “With the MIA lists?”
Then he turned to Jodie, to explain.
“That’s what I do here,” he said. “Twenty years, I’ve done nothing else.”
She nodded. “It’s about a particular case. We sort of got involved in it.”
Newman nodded back, slowly, but this time the light was gone from his eyes.
“Yes, I was afraid of that,” he said. “There are eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty MIA cases here, but I bet I know which one you’re interested in.”
“Eighty-nine thousand?” Jodie repeated, surprised.
“And a hundred twenty. Two thousand, two hundred missing from Vietnam, eight thousand, one hundred seventy missing from Korea, and seventy-eight thousand, seven hundred fifty missing from World War Two. We haven’t given up on any single one of them, and I promise you we never will.”
“God, why so many?”
Newman shrugged, a bitter sadness suddenly there in his face.
“Wars,” he said. “High explosive, tactical movement, airplanes. Wars are fought, some combatants live, some die. Some of the dead are recovered, some of them aren’t. Sometimes there’s nothing left to recover. A direct hit on a man by an artillery shell will reduce him to his constituent molecules. He’s just not there anymore. Maybe a fine red mist drifting through the air, maybe not even that, maybe he’s completely boiled off to vapor. A near miss will blow him to pieces. And fighting is about territory, isn’t it? So even if the pieces of him are relatively large, enemy tank movement or friendly tank movement back and forth across the disputed territory will plow the pieces of him into the earth, and then he’s gone forever.”
He sat in silence, and the clock ticked slowly around.
“And airplanes are worse. Many of our air campaigns have been fought over oceans. A plane goes down in the ocean and the crew is missing until the end of time, no matter how much effort we expend in a place like this.”
He waved his arm in a vague gesture that took in the office and all the unseen space beyond and ended up resting toward Jodie, palm up, like a mute appeal.
“Eighty-nine thousand,” she said. “I thought the MIA stuff was just about Vietnam. Two thousand or so.”
“Eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty,” Newman said again. “We still get a few from Korea, the occasional one from World War Two, the Japanese islands. But you’re right, this is mostly about Vietnam. Two thousand, two hundred missing. Not so very many, really. They lost more than that in a single morning during World War One, every morning for four long years. Men and boys blown apart and mashed into the mud. But Vietnam was different. Partly because of things like World War One. We won’t take that wholesale slaughter anymore, and quite rightly. We’ve moved on. The population just won’t stand for those old attitudes now.”
Jodie nodded quietly.
“And partly because we lost the war in Vietnam,” Newman said quietly. “That makes it very different. The only war we ever lost. Makes it all feel a hell of a lot worse. So we try harder to resolve things.”
He made the gesture with his hand again, indicating the unseen complex beyond the office door, and his voice ended on a brighter note.
“So that’s what you do here?” Jodie asked. “Wait for skeletons to be discovered overseas and then bring them back here to identify? So you can finally tick the names off the missing lists?”
Newman rocked his hand again, equivocating. “Well, we don’t wait, exactly. Where we can, we go out searching for them. And we don’t always identify them, although we sure as hell try hard.”
“It must be difficult,” she said.
He nodded. “Technically, it can be very challenging. The recovery sites are usually a mess. The field-workers send us animal bones, local bones, anything. We sort it all out here. Then we go to work with what we’ve got. Which sometimes isn’t very much. Sometimes all that’s left of an American soldier is just a handful of bone fragments you could fit in a cigar box.”
“Impossible,” she said.
“Often,” he said back. “We’ve got a hundred part-skeletons here right now, unidentified. The Department of the Army can’t afford mistakes. They demand a very high standard of certainty, and sometimes we just can’t meet it.”
“Where do you start?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Well, wherever we can. Medical records, usually. Suppose Reacher here was an MIA. If he’d broken his arm as a boy, we’d be able to match the old X ray against a healed break in the bones we found. Maybe. Or if we found his jaw, we could match the work on his teeth with his dental charts.”
Reacher saw her looking at him, imagining him reduced to dry yellowing bones on a jungle floor, scraped out of the dirt and compared to brittle fading X rays taken thirty years earlier. The office went silent again, and the clock ticked around.
“Leon came here in April,” Reacher said.
Newman nodded. “Yes, he visited with me. Foolish of him, really, because he was a very sick man. But it was good to see him.”
Then he turned to Jodie, sympathy on his face.
“He was a fine, fine man. I owed him a lot.”
She nodded. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“He asked you about Victor Hobie,” Reacher said.
Newman nodded again. “Victor Truman Hobie.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing,” Newman said. “And I’m going to tell you nothing, too.”
The clock ticked on. A quarter to four.
“Why not?” Reacher asked.
“Surely you know why not.”
“It’s classified?”
“Twice over,” Newman said.
Reacher moved in the silence, restless with frustration. “You’re our last hope, Nash. We’ve already been all over everything else.”
Newman shook his head. “You know how it is, Reacher. I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, damn it. I’m not going to reveal classified information.”
“Please, Nash,” Reacher said. “We came all this way.”
“I can’t,” Newman said.
“No such word,” Reacher said.
Silence.
“Well, I guess you could ask me questions,” he said. “If a former student of mine comes in here and asks me questions based on his own skills and observations, and I answer them in a purely academic fashion, I don’t see that any harm can come to anybody.”
It was like the clouds shifting away from the sun. Jodie glanced at Reacher. He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes to four. Less than three hours to go.
“OK, Nash, thanks,” he said. “You’re familiar with this case?”
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“I’m familiar with all of them. This one especially, since April.”
“And it’s classified twice over?”
Newman just nodded.
“At a level that kept Leon out of the loop?”
“That’s a pretty high level,” Newman hinted. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Reacher nodded. Thought hard. “What did Leon want you to do?”
“He was in the dark,” Newman said. “You need to bear that in mind, right?”
“OK,” Reacher said. “What did he want you to do?”
“He wanted us to find the crash site.”
“Four miles west of An Khe.”
Newman nodded. “I felt badly for Leon. No real reason for him to be out of the loop on this, and there was nothing I could do to alter the classification code. But I owed that man a lot, way more than I can tell you about, so I agreed to find the site.”
Jodie leaned forward. “But why wasn’t it found before? People seem to know roughly where it is.”
Newman shrugged. “It’s all incredibly difficult. You have no idea. The terrain, the bureaucracy. We lost the war, remember. The Vietnamese dictate the terms over there. We run a joint recovery effort, but they control it. The whole thing is constant manipulation and humiliation. We’re not allowed to wear our uniforms over there, because they say the sight of a U.S. Army uniform will traumatize the village populations. They make us rent their own helicopters to get around, millions and millions of dollars a year for ratty old rust buckets with half the capability of our own machines. Truth is, we’re buying those old bones back, and they set the price and the availability. Bottom line right now is the United States is paying more than three million dollars for every single identification we make, and it burns me up.”
Four minutes to four. Newman sighed again, lost in thought.
“But you found the site?” Reacher prompted.
“It was scheduled for sometime in the future,” Newman said. “We knew roughly where it was, and we knew exactly what we’d find when we got there, so it wasn’t much of a high priority. But as a favor to Leon, I went over there and bargained to move it up the schedule. I wanted it next item on the list. It was a real bitch to negotiate. They get wind you want something in particular, they go stubborn as all hell. You’ve got no idea. Inscrutable? Tell me about it.”
“But you found it?” Jodie asked.
“It was a bitch, geographically,” Newman said. “We talked to DeWitt over at Wolters, and he helped us pin down the exact location, more or less. Remotest place you ever saw. Mountainous and inaccessible. I can guarantee you no human being has ever set foot there, no time in the history of the planet. It was a nightmare trip. But it was a great site. Completely inaccessible, so it wasn’t mined.”
“Mined?” Jodie repeated. “You mean they booby-trap the sites?”
Newman shook his head. “No, mined, as in excavated. Anything accessible, the population was all over it thirty years ago. They took dog tags, ID cards, helmets, souvenirs, but mostly they were after the metals. Fixed-wing sites, mostly, because of the gold and platinum.”
“What gold?” she asked.
“In the electrical circuits,” Newman said. “The F-4 Phantoms, for instance, they had about five thousand dollars’ worth of precious metals in the connections. Population used to hack it all out and sell it. You buy cheap jewelry in Bangkok, probably it’s made out of old U.S. fighter-bomber electronics.”
“What did you find up there?” Reacher asked.
“A relatively good state of preservation,” Newman said. “The Huey was smashed up and rusted, but it was recognizable. The bodies were completely skeletonized, of course. Clothing was rotted and gone, long ago. But nothing else was missing. They all had dog tags. We packed them up and helicoptered them to Hanoi. Then we flew them back here in the Starlifter, full honors. We only just got back. Three months, beginning to end, one of the best we’ve ever done in terms of time scale. And the IDs are going to be a total formality, because we’ve got the dog tags. No role for a bone doctor on this one. Open and shut. I’m just sorry Leon didn’t live to see it. It would have put his mind at rest.”
“The bodies are here?” Reacher asked.
Newman nodded. “Right next door.”
“Can we see them?” Reacher asked.
Newman nodded again. “You shouldn’t, but you need to.”
The office went quiet and Newman stood up and gestured toward the door with both hands. Lieutenant Simon walked past. He nodded a greeting.
“We’re going into the lab,” Newman said to him.
“Yes, sir,” Simon said back. He moved away into his own office cubicle and Reacher and Jodie and Newman walked in the other direction and paused in front of a plain door set in a blank cinder block wall. Newman took keys from his pocket and unlocked it. He pulled it open and repeated the same formal gesture with both his hands. Reacher and Jodie preceded him into the lab.
SIMON WATCHED THEM go inside from his cubicle. When the door closed and locked behind them, he picked up his phone and dialed nine for a line and then a ten-figure number starting with the New York City area code. The number rang for a long time because it was already the middle of the evening six thousand miles to the east. Then it was answered.
“Reacher’s here,” Simon whispered. “Right now, with a woman. They’re in the lab, right now. Looking.”
Hobie’s voice came back low and controlled. “Who’s the woman?”
“Jodie Garber,” Simon said. “General Garber’s daughter.”
“Alias Mrs. Jacob.”
“What do you want me to do?”
There was silence on the line. Just the whistle of the long-distance satellite.
“You could give them a ride back to the airport, maybe. The woman’s got an appointment in New York tomorrow afternoon, so I guess they’ll be trying to make the seven o’clock flight. Just make sure they don’t miss it.”
“OK,” Simon said, and Hobie broke the connection.
THE LAB WAS a wide, low room, maybe forty feet by fifty. There were no windows. The lighting was the bland wash of fluorescent tubes. There was the faint hiss of efficient air circulation, but there was a smell in the room, somewhere between the sharp tang of strong disinfectant and the warm odor of earth. At the far end of the space was an alcove filled with racks. On the racks were rows of cardboard boxes, marked with reference numbers in black. Maybe a hundred boxes.
“The unidentified,” Reacher said.
Newman nodded at his side.
“As of now,” he said, quietly. “We won’t give up on them.”
Between them and the distant alcove was the main body of the room. The floor was tile, swabbed to a shine. Standing on it were twenty neat wooden tables set in precise rows. The tables were waist high and topped with heavy polished slabs. Each table was a little shorter and a little narrower than an Army cot. They looked like sturdy versions of the tables decorators use for wallpaper pasting. Six of them were completely empty. Seven of them had the lids of seven polished aluminum caskets laid across them. The final seven tables held the seven aluminum caskets themselves, in neat alternate rows, each one adjacent to the table bearing its lid. Reacher stood silent with his head bowed, and then he drew himself up to attention and held a long, silent salute for the first time in more than two years.
“Awful,” Jodie whispered.
She was standing with her hands clasped behind her, head bowed, like she was at a graveside ceremony. Reacher released his salute and squeezed her hand.
“Thank you,” Newman said quietly. “I like people to show respect in here.”
“How could we not?” Jodie whispered.
She was staring at the caskets, with tears starting in her eyes.
“So, Reacher, what do you see?” Newman asked in the silence.
Reacher’s eyes were wandering around the bright room. He was too shocked to move.
“I see seven caskets,” he said quietly. “Where I e
xpected to see eight. There were eight people in that Huey. Crew of five, and they picked up three. It’s in DeWitt’s report. Five and three make eight.”
“And eight minus one makes seven,” Newman said.
“Did you search the site? Thoroughly?”
Newman shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll have to figure that out.”
Reacher shook himself and took a step forward. “May I?”
“Be my guest,” Newman replied. “Tell me what you see. Concentrate hard, and we’ll see what you’ve remembered, and what you’ve forgotten.”
Reacher walked to the nearest casket and turned so that he was looking down into it along its length. The casket held a rough wooden box, six inches smaller in every dimension than the casket itself.
“That’s what the Vietnamese make us use,” Newman said. “They sell those boxes to us and make us use them. We put them in our own caskets in the hangar at the airfield in Hanoi.”
The wooden box had no lid. It was just a shallow tray. There was a jumble of bones in it. Somebody had arranged them in roughly the correct anatomical sequence. There was a skull at the top, yellowed and old. It grinned up with a grotesque smile. There was a gold tooth in the mouth. The empty eye sockets stared. The vertebrae of the neck were lined up neatly. Below them the shoulder blades and the collarbones and the ribs were laid out in their correct places above the pelvis. The arm bones and the leg bones were stacked to the sides. There was the dull glint of a metal chain draped over the vertebrae of the neck, running away under the flatness of the left shoulder blade.
“May I?” Reacher asked again.
Newman nodded. “Please.”
Reacher stood silent for a long moment and then leaned in and hooked his finger under the chain and eased it out. The bones stirred and clicked and moved as the dog tags caught. He pulled them out and brought them up and rubbed the ball of his thumb across their faces. Bent down to read the stamped name.
“Kaplan,” he said. “The copilot.”
“How did he die?” Newman asked.
Reacher draped the tags back across the bony ribs and looked hard for the evidence. The skull was OK. No trace of damage to the arms or legs or chest. But the pelvis was smashed. The vertebrae toward the bottom of the spine were crushed. And the ribs at the back were fractured, eight of them on both sides, counting upward from the bottom.