Tripwire Part 37

'The organic components burned off, leaving only the inorganic compounds behind. Burning leaves the bones smaller, whiter, veined, brittle and eroded.'

'Good,' Newman nodded.

'The explosion DeWitt saw,' Jodie said. 'It was the fuel tank.'

Newman nodded. 'Cla.s.sic 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 smas.h.i.+ng into the air-frame, the sudden loss of power, the spurt of spilling fuel, the fire, the tearing smas.h.i.+ng impact through the trees, the screaming, the rotor scything down, the shuddering crash, the screeching of metal, the smas.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.ble, 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 per cent, 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 co-pilot, 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 Gunston were the cops. Carl Allen was the bad guy.'

Reacher nodded. 'What had he done?'

'The details are cla.s.sified,' 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 a.s.ses 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 cla.s.sified,' 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 the flavour of the month.'

Jodie nodded. 'But why on earth is that cla.s.sified? 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 aluminium 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 Venetian 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 s.h.i.+ne, 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 bra.s.s 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 on to it, one-handed. He hung it up on the rail. Then he unb.u.t.toned his pants and dropped the zip. Stepped out of them and crouched and straightened them on the s.h.i.+ny 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 b.u.t.tonholes and undid his s.h.i.+rt. He opened the right cuff. He shrugged the s.h.i.+rt 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 b.u.t.tons on his s.h.i.+rts to allow them to pa.s.s over his left hand while they were still done up.

He left the s.h.i.+rt 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 unders.h.i.+rt. 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 unders.h.i.+rt came off it and landed on the floor. He bent and scooped it up with the s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+ny with wear. Over the years it had moulded 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 a.s.sembly 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 chafing the skin. It was not a specialist medical device. It was a child's sock. Just tubular, no heel, 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 night-stand.

The stump itself was shrivelled. There was some muscle left, but with no work to do it had wasted to nothing. The bones were filed smooth on the cut ends, and the skin had been sewn tight down over them. The skin was white, and the st.i.tches 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 on to 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.'

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 a.s.sume he survived? He was grievously injured. The impact, the severed arm? Maybe other injuries, maybe internal? Ma.s.sive 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 h.e.l.l 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 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.'

's.h.i.+t,' 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 cla.s.sified 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 any more. 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 s.h.i.+ny 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.'

'h.e.l.l 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.'