Lee Child's Jack Reacher Books 1-6

by Lee Child

  Reacher picked up the bones and ran his fingers across the splintered ends.

  “I don’t understand, Nash,” he said. “Why didn’t you search the area?”

  “Why should we?” Newman said back, neutrally.

  “Because why just assume he survived? He was grievously injured. The impact, the severed arm? Maybe other injuries, maybe internal? Massive blood loss at least? Maybe he was burned, too. There was burning fuel everywhere. Think about it, Nash. Probability is he crawled out from the wreck, bleeding from his arteries, maybe on fire, he dragged himself twenty yards away and collapsed in the undergrowth and died. Why the hell didn’t you look for him?”

  “Ask yourself the question,” Newman said. “Why didn’t we look for him?”

  Reacher stared at him. Nash Newman, one of the smartest guys he had ever known. A man so picky and precise he could take a fragment of skull an inch wide and tell you who it had belonged to, how he had lived, how he had died. A man so professional and meticulous he had run the longest-lasting and most complicated forensic investigation ever known in history and had received nothing but praise and plaudits all along the way. How could Nash Newman have made such an elementary mistake? Reacher stared at him, and then he breathed out and closed his eyes.

  “Christ, Nash,” he said slowly. “You know he survived, don’t you? You actually know it. You didn’t look for him because you know it for sure.”

  Newman nodded. “Correct.”

  “But how do you know?”

  Newman glanced around the lab. Lowered his voice.

  “Because he turned up afterward,” he said. “He crawled into a field hospital fifty miles away and three weeks later. It’s all in their medical files. He was racked with fever, serious malnutrition, terrible burns to one side of his face, no arm, maggots in the stump. He was incoherent most of the time, but they identified him by his dog tags. Then he came around after treatment and told the story, no other survivors but himself. That’s why I said we knew exactly what we were going to find up there. That’s why it was such a low priority, until Leon got all agitated about it.”

  “So what happened?” Jodie asked. “Why all the secrecy?”

  “The hospital was way north,” Newman said. “Charlie was pushing south and we were retreating. The hospital was getting ready for evacuation.”

  “And?” Reacher asked.

  “He disappeared the night before they were due to move him to Saigon.”

  “He disappeared?”

  Newman nodded. “Just ran away. Got himself out of his cot and lit out. Never been seen since.”

  “Shit,” Reacher said.

  “I still don’t understand the secrecy,” Jodie said.

  Newman shrugged. “Well, Reacher can explain it. More his area than mine.”

  Reacher still had hold of Hobie’s bones. The radius and the ulna from his right arm, neatly socketed on the lower end like nature intended, savagely smashed and splintered at the upper end by a fragment of his own rotor blade. Hobie had studied the leading edge of that blade and seen that it was capable of smashing through tree limbs as thick as a man’s arm. He had used that inspiration to save other men’s lives, over and over again. Then that same blade had come folding and whirling down into his own cockpit and taken his hand away.

  “He was a deserter,” he said. “Technically, that’s what he was. He was a serving soldier and he ran away. But a decision was taken not to go after him. Had to be that way. Because what could the Army do? If they caught him, what next? They would be prosecuting a guy with an exemplary record, nine hundred ninety-one combat missions, a guy who deserted after the trauma of a horrendous injury and disfigurement. They couldn’t do that. The war was unpopular. You can’t send a disfigured hero to Leavenworth for deserting under those circumstances. But equally you can’t send out the message that you’re letting deserters get away with it. That would have been a scandal of a different sort. They were still busting plenty of guys for deserting. The undeserving ones. They couldn’t reveal they had different strokes for different folks. So Hobie’s file was closed and sealed and classified secret. That’s why the personnel record ends with the last mission. All the rest of it is in a vault, somewhere in the Pentagon.”

  Jodie nodded.

  “And that’s why he’s not on the Wall,” she said. “They know he’s still alive.”

  Reacher was reluctant to put the arm bones down. He held them, and ran his fingers up and down their length. The good ends were smooth and perfect, ready to accept the subtle articulation of the human wrist.

  “Have you logged his medical records?” he asked Newman. “His old X rays and dental charts and all that stuff?”

  Newman shook his head. “He’s not MIA. He survived and deserted.”

  Reacher turned back to Bamford’s casket and laid the two yellow shards gently in one corner of the rough wooden box. He shook his head. “I just can’t believe it, Nash. Everything about this guy says he didn’t have a deserter’s mentality. His background, his record, everything. I know about deserters. I hunted plenty of them.”

  “He deserted,” Newman said. “It’s a fact, it’s in the files from the hospital.”

  “He survived the crash,” Reacher said. “I guess I can’t dispute that anymore. He was in the hospital. Can’t dispute that, either. But suppose it wasn’t really desertion? Suppose he was just confused, or groggy from the drugs or something? Suppose he just wandered away and got lost?”

  Newman shook his head. “He wasn’t confused.”

  “But how do you know that? Loss of blood, malnutrition, fever, morphine?”

  “He deserted,” Newman said.

  “It doesn’t add up,” Reacher said.

  “War changes people,” Newman said.

  “Not that much,” Reacher said back.

  Newman stepped closer and lowered his voice again.

  “He killed an orderly,” he whispered. “The guy spotted him on the way out and tried to stop him. It’s all in the file. Hobie said ‘I’m not going back,’ and hit the guy in the head with a bottle. Broke his skull. They put the guy in Hobie’s bed and he didn’t survive the trip back to Saigon. That’s what the secrecy is all about, Reacher. They didn’t just let him get away with deserting. They let him get away with murder.”

  There was total silence in the lab. The air hissed and the loamy smell of the old bones drifted. Reacher laid his hand on the shiny lip of Bamford’s casket, just to keep himself standing upright.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “You should,” Newman said back. “Because it’s true.”

  “I can’t tell his folks that,” Reacher said. “I just can’t. It would kill them.”

  “Hell of a secret,” Jodie said. “They let him get away with murder?”

  “Politics,” Newman said. “The politics over there stunk to high heaven. Still do, as a matter of fact.”

  “Maybe he died later,” Reacher said. “Maybe he got away into the jungle and died there later. He was still very sick, right?”

  “How would that help you?” Newman asked.

  “I could tell his folks he was dead, you know, gloss over the exact details.”

  “You’re clutching at straws,” Newman said.

  “We have to go,” Jodie said. “We need to make the plane.”

  “Would you run his medical records?” Reacher asked. “If I got hold of them from his family? Would you do that for me?”

  There was a pause.

  “I’ve already got them,” Newman said. “Leon brought them with him. The family released them to him.”

  “So will you run them?” Reacher asked.

  “You’re clutching at straws,” Newman said again.

  Reacher turned around and pointed at the hundred cardboard boxes stacked in the alcove at the end of the room. “He could be already here, Nash.”

  “He’s in New York,” Jodie said. “Don’t you see that?”

  “No, I want him to be d
ead,” Reacher said. “I can’t go back to his folks and tell them their boy is a deserter and a murderer and has been running around all this time without contacting them. I need him to be dead.”

  “But he isn’t,” Newman said.

  “But he could be, right?” Reacher said. “He could have died later. Back in the jungle, someplace else, maybe faraway, on the run? Disease, malnutrition? Maybe his skeleton was found already. Will you run his records? As a favor to me?”

  “Reacher, we need to go now,” Jodie said.

  “Will you run them?” Reacher asked again.

  “I can’t,” Newman said. “Christ, this whole thing is classified, don’t you understand that? I shouldn’t have told you anything at all. And I can’t add another name to the MIA lists now. The Department of the Army wouldn’t stand for it. We’re supposed to be reducing the numbers here, not adding to them.”

  “Can’t you do it unofficially? Privately? You can do that, right? You run this place, Nash. Please? For me?”

  Newman shook his head. “You’re clutching at straws, is all.”

  “Please, Nash,” Reacher said.

  There was silence. Then Newman sighed.

  “OK, damn it,” he said. “For you, I’ll do it, I guess.”

  “When?” Reacher asked.

  Newman shrugged. “First thing tomorrow morning, OK?”

  “Call me as soon as you’ve done it?”

  “Sure, but you’re wasting your time. Number?”

  “Use the mobile,” Jodie said.

  She recited the number. Newman wrote it on the cuff of his lab coat.

  “Thanks, Nash,” Reacher said. “I really appreciate this.”

  “Waste of time,” Newman said again.

  “We need to go,” Jodie called.

  Reacher nodded vaguely and they all moved toward the plain door in the cinder-block wall. Lieutenant Simon was waiting on the other side of it with the offer of a ride around the perimeter road to the passenger terminals.

  15

  FIRST-CLASS OR NOT, the flight back was miserable. It was the same plane, going east to New York along the second leg of a giant triangle. It was cleaned and perfumed and checked and refueled, and it had a new crew on board. Reacher and Jodie were in the same seats they had left four hours earlier. Reacher took the window again, but it felt different. It was still two and a half times as wide as normal, still sumptuously upholstered in leather and sheepskin, but he took no pleasure in sitting in it again.

  The lights were dimmed, to represent night. They had taken off into an outrageous tropical sunset boiling away beyond the islands, and then they had turned away to fly toward darkness. The engines settled to a muted hiss. The flight attendants were quiet and unobtrusive. There was only one other passenger in the cabin. He was sitting two rows ahead, across the aisle. He was a tall, spare man, dressed in a seersucker short-sleeve shirt printed with pale stripes. His right forearm was laid gently on the arm of the chair, and his hand hung down, limp and relaxed. His eyes were closed.

  “How tall is he?” Jodie whispered.

  Reacher leaned over and glanced ahead. “Maybe six one.”

  “Same as Victor Hobie,” she said. “Remember the file?”

  Reacher nodded. Glanced diagonally across at the pale forearm resting along the seat. The guy was thin, and he could see the prominent knob of bone at the wrist, standing out in the dimness. There was slim muscle and freckled skin and bleached hair. The radius bone was visible, running all the way back to the elbow. Hobie had left six inches of his radius bone behind at the crash site. Reacher counted with his eyes, up from the guy’s wrist joint. Six inches took him halfway to the elbow.

  “About half and half, right?” Jodie said.

  “A little more than half,” Reacher said. “The stump would have needed trimming. They’d have filed it down where it was splintered, I guess. If he survived.”

  The guy two rows ahead turned sleepily and pulled his arm in close to his body and out of sight, like he knew they were talking about it.

  “He survived,” Jodie said. “He’s in New York, trying to stay hidden.”

  Reacher leaned the other way and rested his forehead on the cold plastic of the porthole.

  “I would have bet my life he isn’t,” he said.

  He kept his eyes open, but there was nothing to see out of the window. Just black night sky all the way down to the black night ocean, seven miles below.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” she asked, in the quiet.

  He turned forward and stared at the empty seat six feet in front of him.

  “Lots of reasons,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “Like everything, like a great big depressing spiral. It was a professional call. My gut told me something, and it looks like I was wrong.”

  She laid her hand gently on his forearm, where the muscle narrowed a little above his wrist. “Being wrong isn’t the end of the world.”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is. Depends on the issue, right? Somebody asks me who’s going to win the Series, and I say the Yankees, that doesn’t matter, does it? Because how can I know stuff like that? But suppose I was a sportswriter who was supposed to know stuff like that? Or a professional gambler? Suppose baseball was my life? Then it’s the end of the world if I start to screw up.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying judgments like that are my life. It’s what I’m supposed to be good at. I used to be good at it. I could always depend on being right.”

  “But you had nothing to go on.”

  “Bullshit, Jodie. I had a whole lot to go on. A whole lot more than I sometimes used to have. I met with the guy’s folks, I read his letters, I talked with his old friend, I saw his record, I talked with his old comrade-in-arms, and everything told me this was a guy who definitely could not behave the way he clearly did behave. So I was just plain wrong, and that burns me up, because where does it leave me now?”

  “In what sense?”

  “I’ve got to tell the Hobies,” he said. “It’ll kill them stone dead. You should have met them. They worshiped that boy. They worshiped the military, the patriotism of it all, serving your country, the whole damn thing. Now I’ve got to walk in there and tell them their boy is a murderer and a deserter. And a cruel son who left them twisting in the wind for thirty long years. I’ll be walking in there and killing them stone dead, Jodie. I should call ahead for an ambulance.”

  He lapsed into silence and turned back to the black porthole.

  “And?” she said.

  He turned back to face her. “And the future. What am I going to do? I’ve got a house, I need a job. What kind of a job? I can’t put myself about as an investigator anymore, not if I’ve started getting things completely ass-backward all of a sudden. The timing is wonderful, right? My professional capabilities have turned to mush right at the exact time I need to find work. I should go back to the Keys and dig pools the rest of my life.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. It was a feeling, was all. A gut feeling that turned out wrong.”

  “Gut feelings should turn out right,” he said. “Mine always did before. I could tell you about a dozen times when I stuck to gut feelings, no other reason than I felt them. They saved my life, time to time.”

  She nodded, without speaking.

  “And statistically I should have been right,” he said. “You know how many men were officially unaccounted for after ’Nam? Only about five. Twenty-two hundred missing, but they’re dead, we all know that. Eventually Nash will find them all, and tick them all off. But there were five guys left we can’t categorize. Three of them changed sides and stayed on in the villages afterward, gone native. One disappeared in Thailand. One of them was living in a hut under a bridge in Bangkok. Five loose ends out of a million men, and Victor Hobie is one of them, and I was wrong about him.”

  “But you weren’t really wrong,” she said. “Yo
u were judging the old Victor Hobie, is all. All that stuff was about Victor Hobie before the war and before the crash. War changes people. The only witness to the change was DeWitt, and he went out of his way not to notice it.”

  He shook his head again. “I took that into account, or at least I tried to. I didn’t figure it could change him that much.”

  “Maybe the crash did it,” she said. “Think about it, Reacher. What was he, twenty-one years old? Twenty-two, something like that? Seven people died, and maybe he felt responsible. He was the captain of the ship, right? And he was disfigured. He lost his arm, and he was probably burned, too. That’s a big trauma for a young guy, physical disfigurement, right? And then in the field hospital, he was probably woozy with drugs, terrified of going back.”

  “They wouldn’t have sent him back to combat,” Reacher said.

  Jodie nodded. “Yes, but maybe he wasn’t thinking straight. The morphine, it’s like being high, right? Maybe he thought they were going to send him straight back. Maybe he thought they were going to punish him for losing the helicopter. We just don’t know his mental state at the time. So he tried to get away, and he hit the orderly on the head. Then later he woke up to what he’d done. Probably felt terrible about it. That was my gut feeling, all along. He’s hiding out, because of a guilty secret. He should have turned himself in, because nobody was going to convict him of anything. The mitigating circumstances were too obvious. But he hid out, and the longer it went on, the worse it got. It kind of snowballed.”

  “Still makes me wrong,” he said. “You’ve just described an irrational guy. Panicky, unrealistic, a little hysterical. I had him down as a plodder. Very sane, very rational, very normal. I’m losing my touch.”

  The giant plane hissed on imperceptibly. Six hundred miles an hour through the thin air of altitude, and it felt like it was suspended immobile. A spacious pastel coccoon, hanging there seven miles up in the night sky, going nowhere at all.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “The future?”

  He shrugged again. “I don’t know.”