by Lee Child
“Impact, when the Huey hit the ground. He took a big hit in the lower back. Massive internal trauma and hemorrhage. Probably fatal within a minute.”
“But he was strapped in his seat,” Newman said. “Head-on crash into the ground, how does that injure him from behind?”
Reacher looked again. He felt the way he had years before in the classroom, nervous about screwing up in front of the legendary Nash Newman. He looked hard, and he put his hands lightly on the dry bones, feeling them. But he had to be right. This was a crushing impact to the lower back. There was no other explanation.
“The Huey spun,” he said. “It came in at a shallow angle and the trees spun it around. It separated between the cabin and the tail and the cabin hit the ground traveling backward.”
Newman nodded. “Excellent. That’s exactly how we found it. It hit backward. Instead of his harness saving him, his chair killed him.”
Reacher moved on to the next casket. There was the same shallow wooden tray, the same jumble of yellow bones. The same grotesque, accusing, grinning skull. Below it, the neck was broken. He eased the dog tags out from between the shards of cracked bone.
“Tardelli,” he read.
“The starboard side gunner,” Newman said.
Tardelli’s skeleton was a mess. The gunners stood on a slick stand in the open doorway, basically unsecured, juggling with the heavy machine gun swinging on a bungee cord. When the Huey went down, Tardelli had been thrown all over the cabin.
“Broken neck,” Reacher said. “Crushing to the upper chest.”
He turned the awful yellow skull over. It was fractured like an eggshell.
“Head trauma also. I’d say he died instantaneously. Wouldn’t like to say which exact injury killed him.”
“Neither would I,” Newman said. “He was nineteen years old.”
There was silence. Nothing in the air except the faint sweet aroma of loam.
“Look at the next one,” Newman said.
The next one was different. There was a single injury to the chest. The dog tags were tangled into splintered bones. Reacher couldn’t free them. He had to bend his head to get the name.
“Bamford.”
“The crew chief,” Newman said. “He would have been sitting on the cabin bench, facing the rear, opposite the three guys they picked up.”
Bamford’s bony face grinned up at him. Below it, his skeleton was complete and undamaged, except for the narrow crushing injury sideways across the upper body. It was like a three-inch trench in his chest. The sternum had been punched down to the level of the spine and had gone on and knocked three vertebrae out of line. Three ribs had gone with it.
“So what do you think?” Newman asked.
Reacher put his hand into the box and felt the dimensions of the injury. It was narrow and horizontal. Three fingers wouldn’t fit into it, but two would.
“Some kind of an impact,” he said. “Something between a sharp instrument and a blunt instrument. Hit him sideways in the chest, obviously. It would have stopped his heart immediately. Was it the rotor blade?”
Newman nodded. “Very good. The way it looked, the rotor folded up against the trees and came down into the cabin. It must have struck him across the upper body. As you say, a blow like that would have stopped his heart instantaneously.”
In the next casket, the bones were very different. Some of them were the same dull yellow, but most of them were white and brittle and eroded. The dog tags were bent and blackened. Reacher turned them to throw the embossing into relief against the ceiling lights and read: Soper.
“The port side gunner,” Newman said.
“There was a fire,” Reacher said.
“How can you tell?” Newman asked, like the teacher he was.
“Dog tags are burned.”
“And?”
“The bones are calcinated,” Reacher said. “At least, most of them are.”
“Calcinated?” Newman repeated.
Reacher nodded and went back fifteen years to his textbooks.
“The organic components burned off, leaving only the inorganic compounds behind. Burning leaves the bones smaller, whiter, veined, brittle, and eroded.”
“Good,” Newman said.
“The explosion DeWitt saw,” Jodie said. “It was the fuel tank.”
Newman nodded. “Classic evidence. Not a slow fire. A fuel explosion. It spills randomly and burns quickly, which explains the random nature of the burned bones. Looks to me like Soper caught the fuel across his lower body, but his upper body was lying outside of the fire.”
His quiet words died to silence and the three of them were lost in imagining the terror. The bellowing engines, the hostile bullets smashing into the airframe, the sudden loss of power, the spurt of spilling fuel, the fire, the tearing smashing impact through the trees, the screaming, the rotor scything down, the shuddering crash, the screeching of metal, the smashing of frail human bodies into the indifferent jungle floor where no person had ever walked since the dawn of time. Soper’s empty eye sockets stared up into the light, challenging them to imagine.
“Look at the next one,” Newman said.
The next casket held the remains of a man called Allen. No burning. Just a yellow skeleton with bright dog tags around the broken neck. A noble, grinning skull. Even, white teeth. A high, round, undamaged cranium. The product of good nutrition and careful upbringing in the America of the fifties. His whole back was smashed, like a dead crab.
“Allen was one of the three they picked up,” Newman said.
Reacher nodded, sadly. The sixth casket was a burn victim. His name was Zabrinski. His bones were calcinated and small.
“He was probably a big guy in life,” Newman said. “Burning can shrink your bones by fifty percent, sometimes. So don’t write him off as a midget.”
Reacher nodded again. Stirred through the bones with his hand. They were light and brittle. Like husks. The veining left them sharp with microscopic ribbing.
“Injuries?” Newman asked.
Reacher looked again, but he found nothing.
“He burned to death,” he said.
Newman nodded.
“Yes, I’m afraid he did,” he said.
“Awful,” Jodie whispered.
The seventh and final casket held the remains of a man named Gunston. They were terrible remains. At first Reacher thought there was no skull. Then he saw it was lying in the bottom of the wooden box. It was smashed into a hundred pieces. Most of them were no bigger than his thumbnail.
“What do you think?” Newman asked.
Reacher shook his head.
“I don’t want to think,” he whispered. “I’m all done thinking.”
Newman nodded, sympathetic. “Rotor blade hit him in the head. He was one of the three they picked up. He was sitting opposite Bamford.”
“Five and three,” Jodie said quietly. “So the crew was Hobie and Kaplan, pilot and copilot, Bamford the crew chief, Soper and Tardelli the gunners, and they went down and picked up Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston.”
Newman nodded. “That’s what the files tell us.”
“So where’s Hobie?” Reacher asked.
“You’re missing something,” Newman said. “Sloppy work, Reacher, for somebody who used to be good at this.”
Reacher glanced at him. DeWitt had said something similar. He had said sloppy work for somebody who was once an MP major. And he had said look closer to home.
“They were MPs, right?” he said suddenly.
Newman smiled. “Who were?”
“Two of them,” Reacher said. “Two out of Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston. Two of them were arresting the other one. It was a special mission. Kaplan had put two MPs in the field the day before. His last-but-one mission, flying solo, the one I didn’t read. They were going back to pick them up, plus the guy they’d arrested.”
Newman nodded. “Correct.”
“Which was which?”
“Pete Zabrinski and Joey Gu
nston were the cops. Carl Allen was the bad guy.”
Reacher nodded. “What had he done?”
“The details are classified,” Newman said. “Your guess?”
“In and out like that, a quick arrest? Fragging, I suppose.”
“What’s fragging?” Jodie asked.
“Killing your officer,” Reacher said. “It happened, time to time. Some gung ho lieutenant, probably new in-country, gets all keen on advancing into dangerous positions. The grunts don’t like it, figure he’s after a medal, figure they’d rather keep their asses in one piece. So he says ‘charge,’ and somebody shoots him in the back, or throws a grenade at him, which was more efficient, because it didn’t need aiming and it disguised the whole thing better. That’s where the name comes from, fragging, fragmentation device, a grenade.”
“So was it fragging?” Jodie asked.
“The details are classified,” Newman said again. “But certainly there was fragging involved, at the end of a long and vicious career. According to the files, Carl Allen was definitely not flavor of the month.”
Jodie nodded. “But why on earth is that classified? Whatever he did, he’s been dead thirty years. Justice is done, right?”
Reacher had stepped back to Allen’s casket. He was staring down into it.
“Caution,” he said. “Whoever the gung ho lieutenant was, his family was told he died a hero, fighting the enemy. If they ever find out any different, it’s a scandal. And the Department of the Army doesn’t like scandals.”
“Correct,” Newman said again.
“But where’s Hobie?” Reacher asked again.
“You’re still missing something. One step at a time, OK?”
“But what is it?” Reacher asked. “Where is it?”
“In the bones,” Newman said.
The clock on the laboratory wall showed five-thirty. Not much more than an hour to go. Reacher took a breath and walked back around the caskets in reverse order. Gunston, Zabrinski, Allen, Soper, Bamford, Tardelli, Kaplan. Six grinning skulls and one headless bony set of shoulders stared back up at him. He did the round again. The clock ticked on. He stopped next to each casket and gripped the cold aluminum sides and leaned over and stared in, desperate to spot what he was missing. In the bones. He started each search at the top. The skull, the neck, the collarbones, the ribs, the arms, the pelvis, the legs, the feet. He took to rummaging through the boxes, lightly, delicately sorting the dry bones, looking for it. A quarter to six. Ten to six. Jodie was watching him, anxiously. He did the round for the third time, starting again with Gunston, the cop. He moved on to Zabrinski, the other cop. On to Allen, the criminal. On to Soper, the gunner. On to Bamford, the crew chief. He found it right there in Bamford’s box. He closed his eyes. It was obvious. It was so obvious it was like it was painted in Day-Glo paint and lit up with a searchlight. He ran back around the other six boxes, counting, double-checking. He was right. He had found it. Six o’clock in the evening in Hawaii.
“There are seven bodies,” he said. “But there are fifteen hands.”
SIX O’CLOCK IN the evening in Hawaii is eleven o’clock at night in New York City, and Hobie was alone in his apartment, thirty floors above Fifth Avenue, in the bedroom, getting ready to go to sleep. Eleven o’clock was earlier than his normal bedtime. Usually he would stay awake, reading a book or watching a film on cable until one or two in the morning. But tonight he was tired. It had been a fatiguing day. There had been a certain amount of physical activity, and some mental strain.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed. It was a king-size bed, although he slept alone, and always had. There was a thick comforter in white. The walls were white and the blinds were white. Not because he had wanted any kind of artistic consistency in his decor, but because white things were always the cheapest. Whatever you were dealing with, bed linen or paint or window coverings, the white option was always priced lowest. There was no art on the walls. No photographs, no ornaments, no souvenirs, no hangings. The floor was plain oak strips. No rug.
His feet were planted squarely on the floor. His shoes were black Oxfords, polished to a high shine, planted exactly at right angles to the oak strips. He reached down with his good hand and undid the laces, one at a time. Eased the shoes off, one at a time. Pushed them together with his feet and picked them up both together and squared them away under the bed. He slid his thumb into the top of his socks, one at a time, and eased them off his feet. Shook them out and dropped them on the floor. He unknotted his tie. He always wore a tie. It was a source of great pride to him that he could knot a tie with one hand.
He picked up the tie and stood and walked barefoot to his closet. Slid the door open and worked the thin end of the tie down behind the little brass bar where it hung at night. Then he dropped his left shoulder and let his jacket slide off his arm. Used the left hand to pull it off on the right. He reached into the closet and came out with a hanger and slid the jacket onto it, one-handed. He hung it up on the rail. Then he unbuttoned his pants and dropped the zip. Stepped out of them and crouched and straightened them on the shiny oak floor. No other way for a one-armed man to fold trousers. He put the cuffs together one on top of the other and trapped them under his foot and pulled the legs straight. Then he stood up and took a second hanger from the closet and bent down and flipped the bar under the cuffs and slid it along the floor to the knees. Then he stood up again and shook the hanger and the pants fell into perfect shape. He hung them alongside the jacket.
He curled his left wrist around the starched buttonholes and undid his shirt. He opened the right cuff. He shrugged the shirt off his shoulders and used his left hand to pull it down over his hook. Then he leaned sideways and let it fall down his left arm. Trapped the tail under his foot and pulled his arm up through the sleeve. The sleeve turned inside out as it always did and his good hand squeezed through the cuff. The only modification he had been forced to make in his entire wardrobe was to move the cuff buttons on his shirts to allow them to pass over his left hand while they were still done up.
He left the shirt on the floor and pulled at the waistband of his boxers and wriggled them down over his hips. Stepped out of them and grasped the hem of his undershirt. This was the hardest part. He stretched the hem and ducked and whipped it up over his head. Changed his grip to the neck and pulled it up over his face. He pulled it down on the right and eased his hook out through the armhole. Then he cracked his left arm like a whip until the undershirt came off it and landed on the floor. He bent and scooped it up with the shirt and the boxers and the socks and carried them into the bathroom and dumped them all in the basket.
He walked naked back to the bed and sat down again on the edge. Reached across his chest with his left hand and unbuckled the heavy leather straps around his right bicep. There were three straps, and three buckles. He eased the leather corset apart and squeezed it backward off his upper arm. It creaked in the silence as it moved. The leather was thick and heavy, much thicker and heavier than any shoe leather. It was built up in shaped layers. It was brown and shiny with wear. Over the years it had molded itself like steel to his shape. It crushed the muscle as he eased it back. He fiddled the riveted straps clear of his elbow. Then he took the cold curve of the hook in his left hand and pulled gently. The cup sucked off the stump and he pulled it away. Clamped it vertically between his knees, the hook pointing downward to the floor and the cup facing upward. He leaned over to his nightstand and took a wad of tissues from a box and a can of talc from a drawer. He crushed the tissues in his left palm and pushed them down into the cup, twisting the wad like a screw to wipe away the sweat of the day. Then he shook the can of talc and powdered all around the inside. He took more tissues and polished the leather and the steel. Then he laid the whole assembly on the floor, parallel with the bed.
He wore a thin sock on the stump of his right forearm. It was there to stop the leather from chafing the skin. It was not a specialist medical device. It was a child’s sock. Just tubular, no hee
l, the sort of thing mothers choose before their babies can walk. He bought them a dozen pairs at a time from department stores. He always bought white ones. They were cheaper. He eased the sock off the stump and shook it out and laid it next to the box of tissues on the nightstand.
The stump itself was shriveled. There was some muscle left, but with no work to do it had wasted away to nothing. The bones were filed smooth on the cut ends, and the skin had been sewn down tight over them. The skin was white, and the stitches were red. They looked like Chinese writing. There was black hair growing on the bottom of the stump, because the skin there had been stretched down from the outside of his forearm.
He stood up again and walked to the bathroom. A previous owner had installed a wall of mirror above the sink. He looked at himself in it, and hated what he saw. His arm didn’t bother him. It was just missing. It was his face he hated. The burns. The arm was a wound, but the face was a disfigurement. He turned half sideways so he didn’t have to look at it. He cleaned his teeth and carried a bottle of lotion back to the bed. Squeezed a drop onto the skin of the stump and worked it in with his fingers. Then he placed the lotion next to the baby’s sock on the nightstand and rolled under the covers and clicked the light off.
“LEFT OR RIGHT?” Jodie asked. “Which did he lose?”
Reacher was standing over Bamford’s bright casket, sorting through bones.
“His right,” he said. “The extra hand is a right hand.”
Newman moved across to Reacher’s shoulder and leaned in and separated two splintered shards of bone, each one about five inches in length.
“He lost more than his hand,” he said. “These are the radius and the ulna from his right arm. It was severed below the elbow, probably by a fragment of the rotor blade. There would have been enough left to make a decent stump.”