Wes grabbed the article out of his friend’s hand. “Wasn’t having your people chasing Anna and me all around town while you had others breaking in to my room and taking all our footage enough for you? Or did you think that maybe you needed to do something a little extra to convince me to back off?”
“Slow down,” Lars said. “Broke in to your room?”
“Like you don’t already know. Your people took my computer and our backup drive. Not the camera, though, and it was probably the most expensive thing in the room. They knew exactly what they wanted, because you told them, didn’t you?”
“Jesus, Wes. I had nothing to do with any of this.”
“The shot of the pilot from the crash? You were the only one who knew I had that. So yeah, I think you might have had something to do with it.”
“I don’t care what you think. It wasn’t me,” Lars shot back.
“And this?” Wes glared, raising the article a few inches. “Not you, either?”
“I would never have left you that. Never. So back off!”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Wes said, trying to keep his anger from overwhelming him, “but there are only three people on this entire planet who could have known what this article would mean to me. I didn’t leave it for myself. So if it wasn’t you, then it would have had to have been Mandy. And I can’t imagine her ever doing this.”
Lars glared at Wes. “That’s not even funny.”
“Of course it’s not. Mandy would never do something like that. And if she didn’t do it, then it must have been you.”
“Shut up.”
Wes pulled out his phone. “Maybe we should call her. Just to clear her name from the list of suspects. Bet you don’t want me to do that, do you? Do you know if she’s still in town, or did she move away somewhere?”
Lars said nothing for several seconds, then the confused look on his face started to fade. “You … you don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t show up. Just run away, forget about all your old friends, and don’t even come back when … God, I thought you were an asshole. Then I thought I was an asshole for considering you a friend. But you never knew, did you? That’s why you didn’t come back.”
“What are you talking about, Lars?”
“Mandy’s dead, Wes. She died a year after you left.”
Wes stared at his friend, stunned into silence.
“I was sure your dad must have told you,” Lars said.
Wes shook his head. “He didn’t say a word.” He knew instantly his father would have said nothing, fearing Wes would have tried to come back. “How … did it happen?”
Lars looked off toward the hills. “Suicide. Senior year.”
How was that possible? Wes thought. Mandy dead? Sixteen years dead? That couldn’t be right. And by suicide?
“She wasn’t that kind of person.”
“It happened exactly one year after that night,” Lars told him.
He didn’t have to say which night.
As Wes leaned against the wall, his body began shaking slightly. Lars reached down and picked something up off the ground. It was the article. Wes hadn’t even realized he’d dropped it.
“I didn’t leave this for you,” Lars said. “I would never have done that.”
“But no one else knew,” Wes whispered. It was true to a point. His father had known. But he, like Mandy, was gone. “How … how did she do it?”
“She took sleeping pills, then climbed into a bathtub full of water and never got out.”
“That … doesn’t sound like something she’d do.”
“Well, I guess you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”
“Why? Did you think that was something she’d do?” Wes snapped.
Lars leaned against the wall next to Wes. “No. I didn’t.”
An image of Mandy Johansson flashed in Wes’s mind. It was Halloween, junior year. She’d come to school dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and had spent most of the day teasing Wes about his attempt to look like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.
“I’m sorry. I really thought you knew,” Lars said.
Wes shook his head, his mind still in the past. He should have kept in touch. Maybe that would have helped. Maybe he could have pulled her through the darkness that must have overtaken her.
“Tell me about the break-in,” Lars said.
“Like you don’t know,” Wes said, but most of the fight had left him.
“No. I don’t. Tell me what happened.”
Wes told Lars about the chase, and then getting back to the motel only to find that he’d been robbed. By the end, Lars was staring at him, stunned. If he was acting, his performance was Oscar worthy.
“Jesus. And the article?”
“I found it tucked below the handlebars of the Triumph thirty minutes ago.”
“So it happened sometime between after you got home last night and then.”
“Obviously.”
“I just mean, it couldn’t have happened during the break-in, because you were on the motorcycle when that happened.”
“They could have come back,” Wes said, but Lars had a point.
“You think they were just after your footage?”
“What else?” Wes said. “The only things they took were the things that held our shots.”
“But why? What’s the value in that?”
Wes stared at his old friend for a moment, trying to get a read on him. Finally he said, “Okay, for the moment, let’s say you had nothing to do with it. But come on. Even you should be able to see they wanted to take any proof I had that the dead pilot isn’t who everyone said he is.”
“The crash again,” Lars said, shaking his head.
“Hell yes, the crash again. And I did have proof.” Still had it, in fact, on his thumb drive. But he’d keep that to himself for the time being.
Lars took a couple steps away, processing. “I don’t know what else to tell you about the crash. Whatever you had would not have proved anything but the truth.” He looked at Wes. “Why does this matter to you so much?”
“The pilot who was trapped in the cockpit when I got there was not the same man the Navy is saying died. I was just trying to get you to actually listen to me, but everyone’s just been trying to shut me up. Why? You’re in the service, Lars. This is one of your colleagues. The question is, why doesn’t it matter to you?”
Lars opened his mouth to speak, stopped himself, then said, “Of course it matters to me. Do you think I ignored what you were saying? We’re handling this internally, and your prodding isn’t helping.” He paused for a moment. “Look, what if I could prove to you Adair was the pilot? Would you accept that?”
“Prove how?”
“Hold on.” Lars pulled out a cellphone, then walked out of earshot and made a call.
Wes looked at the article again. Mandy. Dead. He figured she’d grown up, moved away, gone on to better things. Not this. Never this.
As Lars walked back up, Wes slipped the clipping into his pocket.
“Come on,” Lars said.
“Where are we going?”
“To show you that you’re wrong.”
“ARE YOU SURE WE’RE GOING THE RIGHT WAY?” Mandy asked from the front passenger seat.
She was excited, and probably a little anxious. It was her first party at the Rocks, after all. Wes and Lars were pros compared to her.
“I’m sure,” Wes said from the driver’s seat.
The dirt road was really not much of a road at all—two ruts on either side, beaten down by the tires of those who’d passed this way before, and a narrow, deeper gouge running roughly between them, cut there by the infrequent desert rains.
Wes turned the wheel suddenly, barely missing a rock sticking out of the ground on the right side. In the backseat, he heard Lars tumble sideways and the sound of several bottles clinking together.
“Careful!” Lars said. “Y
ou don’t want me to break any of these in here, do you? Try explaining that to your folks.”
Wes eased off the accelerator. “You should be holding on to them.”
“I am holding on to them.”
“Dip!” Wes yelled out.
The van lurched downward, then jerked up just as quickly.
“Woohoo!” Mandy cried out.
“Holy crap,” Lars said.
When the road evened out, Wes said, “We need some kind of code phrase to let each other know we’re ready to leave.”
“Leave?” Mandy said. “We haven’t even got there yet.”
“Yeah, but if any of us gets to the point where they want to go, then we all go. That was the deal.”
“Right,” Mandy said, sounding less than happy. “I remember.”
“So the code word?” Lars said.
“Dip!” Wes yelled out.
The car bounced again.
“I’m not sure ‘dip’ would be a good word to use,” Lars said. “Hard to work into a sentence.”
“Very funny, jackass,” Wes said.
“Why don’t we just say we want to go?” Mandy suggested.
“Because that would be completely uncool,” Lars told her. “We want to sneak away so people think we’re still there. We don’t want them knowing we left early. They’d think we were a bunch of losers.”
“Even if they do, at least we won’t be the only losers there,” Wes said. “Tommy from the debate team said he’s coming with some of his friends from band.”
They all laughed.
“Some of the guys from the football team are going to be there, too,” Mandy said.
“Really?” Lars said. “That sucks.”
“How do you know that?” Wes asked her.
“Jack told me.”
“Jack?” Wes asked.
“Jack Rice.”
“Why were you talking to that jerk?” Lars asked.
“He’s not so bad once you get to know him.”
Wes rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Question number two,” Lars said. “Why would anyone want to get to know him?”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Wes said.
“You guys are idiots,” she said.
“We’re the idiots? Who’s the one getting all kissy-kissy with Jack Rice?” Lars said.
“I never said anything about …” Instead of finishing the sentence, Mandy punched Lars in the arm.
The VW swerved a few inches off the road, brushing the front fender against a creosote bush. “Hey! Careful. You want to kill us?”
“A little sensitive on the whole Jack thing, aren’t you?” Lars said, rubbing his arm.
Mandy groaned. “Just stop talking. Both of you.”
They drove in silence for nearly a minute before Lars said, “We, uh, never came up with our exit phrase.”
A wry smile grew on Wes’s lips. “How about ‘There’s Jack’?”
He was already ducking when Mandy’s fist slammed into his shoulder.
THEY RODE IN LARS’S TRUCK TO THE MAIN ENTRANCE of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, neither of them saying a word. Just before the gate, Lars pulled in to the visitor center parking area.
Wes started to get out with him, but Lars shook his head. “No. You stay here.”
Lars disappeared into the building for a few minutes. When he climbed back into the cab, he handed Wes a piece of plastic.
“I’m sure you know what to do with this.”
It was a visitor’s badge, complete with a clip. Wes attached it to his shirt as Lars pulled back onto the road and drove over to the gate. Once the guard there checked both their badges, he waved the truck through, and just like that, they were on the base.
If driving through Ridgecrest after all this time had been strange, being back on the base was absolutely surreal. There was so much that hadn’t changed since Wes had been a ten-year-old riding in his parents’ VW van, and so much that was completely different.
Whole swaths of base housing had disappeared, leaving empty desert. From what Wes could tell, both of the houses his family had lived in on the base were gone. It was as if a specialized bomb had gone off and had left only roads and sidewalks and desert, but no debris at all.
Wes tried to guess where they were going, but once they’d passed Michelson Lab, his geographical knowledge from his youth ran out. All he could tell was that they were heading north into the open desert portion of the base, which probably meant Armitage Field.
Lars wasn’t saying anything, but it was apparent he was growing more and more tense with each mile. Twice he looked over at Wes, scrutinizing him, but he remained silent. Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t sharing.
They came to a second checkpoint. One of the guards took Wes’s badge and reentered the guard hut, where she made a phone call.
When she returned, she passed the badge through the window, saluted Lars, and said, “Have a good day, sir.”
As they neared the airfield, two jets rose into the air, one right after the other, and streaked toward the sky above the Sierra Nevadas, the wail of their engines momentarily drowning everything else out.
Lars turned down a road that ran just east of the hangars, then pulled up in front of a building surrounded by an eight-foot-high barbed-wire-topped fence. The gate across the entrance was closed, but as soon as they stopped, an armed guard exited the building and pushed the gate open wide enough to accommodate Lars’s truck. Lars then pulled into a parking spot and turned the engine off.
“So what’s here?” Wes asked, looking at the building.
Lars opened his door and climbed out. “Your proof,” he said without looking back.
Wes hesitated a few seconds, then got out, too.
The door to the building opened just before they reached it. Lars didn’t miss a step as he passed inside. The Big Brother feel of it bothered Wes, but he continued to follow his friend.
Just inside was another armed guard. Like his buddy at the gate, he was unsmiling. Beyond him two other men waited. One wore a khaki naval uniform, and the other a white lab coat over shirt, tie, and slacks.
The uniformed man saluted Lars. “Lieutenant Commander. Good to see you, sir.”
Lars returned the salute.
“Lieutenant Commander Andersen,” the civilian said, shaking hands with Lars.
“Thank you for doing this,” Lars said. He gestured toward Wes. “This is Wes Stewart. Wes, this is Dr. Handler and Lieutenant Truax.”
“Mr. Stewart,” Lieutenant Truax said, shaking Wes’s hand.
“Are either of you carrying cellphones?” Dr. Handler asked. “There is some very sensitive equipment in the building, so please turn them off for the duration of your visit.” Once they’d complied, the doctor said, “If you’d be so kind as to follow me.”
Dr. Handler led them down a central hallway to a door marked RESTRICTED ACCESS, then paused. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about what you will see here. It’s not necessarily classified, but it could be … well, disturbing to certain people. We’re only showing you this at the request of the lieutenant commander.”
“I understand,” Wes said.
There was an access pad on the wall beside the door. As the doctor waved his badge in front of it, the lock clicked. He pushed the door open and a wave of cool air spilled out.
“There are coats just inside,” Lieutenant Truax said.
One by one they stepped through. The room they entered wasn’t much larger than the mudroom of Wes’s aunt’s house in Wisconsin and appeared to serve a similar purpose. Hanging from pegs on the wall were several black jackets. They were separated by size. Lieutenant Truax took one down and handed it to Wes.
“It’s not that cold,” Wes said.
“It will be,” Lieutenant Truax told him as he donned his own jacket.
“We’re only using this facility because of the sensitive nature of this case,” Dr. Handler added. “I hope you
can overlook the inconvenience.”
With a shrug, Wes pulled his on.
Once they were all properly attired, the doctor opened the door at the opposite side of the room. The air that came out this time was not cool, but cold.
The new room was about forty feet deep and fifty across. White cabinets lined three of the walls, while a long counter with several sinks lined the other. In the center were three large, evenly spaced tables, the two closest of which were empty. The third, however, was not.
The doctor led them to it. “This isn’t going to be pleasant.”
On top, a white sheet covered the obvious form of a body.
“Are you ready?” Lars asked Wes.
“Yeah, sure.”
The doctor pulled the sheet back just enough to reveal the body’s head and shoulders. The corpse was so severely damaged by fire it was almost impossible to imagine the person it had once been.
Bile began rising from Wes’s stomach.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Handler asked.
“I’m fine,” Wes said, attempting to sound convincing.
“This is Lieutenant Adair,” the doctor explained. “I understand you think there might be a problem with identification? I can assure you this is the lieutenant. Both DNA test and dental records have proved that.”
Wes gave his nausea a few seconds to settle, then took another look at the face, trying to spot any familiar features. But it was impossible. Anything recognizable had been obliterated by flames.
“If you knew who he was already, why did you run a DNA test?” he asked.
“Dr. Handler did the test because you questioned the man’s identity,” Lars said, annoyed.
“Okay. If you say it’s Lieutenant Adair, then I’m sure it is.”
Lars stared at his friend for a moment, then frowned. “Lieutenant Truax, could you please tell Wes why you’re here?”
“Yes, sir,” Truax said. “I was with the search-and-rescue team deployed to the crash site.”
Wes gave Truax a second look, but couldn’t remember him from the accident site. Still, there had been dozens of people running around, so the fact that the lieutenant was unfamiliar didn’t mean much.
“Lieutenant Truax was one of the men who removed the pilot’s body from the plane,” Lars said. “Isn’t that correct, Lieutenant?”
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