Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  Old Mr. Hobie closed his mouth and sucked oxygen through his nose, once, twice, and then he leaned down to the floor beside him and came up with a leather-bound folder. He spread it across his bony legs and opened it up. Took out a photograph and passed it across. Reacher juggled his cup and his plate and leaned forward to take it from the shaking hand. It was a faded color print of a boy in a backyard. The boy was maybe nine or ten, stocky, toothy, freckled, grinning, wearing a metal bowl upside down on his head, with a toy rifle shouldered, his stiff denim trousers tucked into his socks to resemble the look of fatigues buckled into gaiters.

  “He wanted to be a soldier,” Mr. Hobie said. “Always. It was his ambition. I approved of it at the time, of course. We were unable to have other children, so Victor was on his own, the light of our lives, and I thought that to be a soldier and to serve his country was a fine ambition for the only son of a patriotic father.”

  There was silence again. A cough. A hiss of oxygen. Silence.

  “Did you approve of Vietnam, Major?” Hobie asked suddenly.

  Reacher shrugged.

  “I was too young to have much of an opinion,” he said. “But knowing what I know now, no, I wouldn’t have approved of Vietnam.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wrong place,” Reacher said. “Wrong time, wrong reasons, wrong methods, wrong approach, wrong leadership. No real backing, no real will to win, no coherent strategy.”

  “Would you have gone?”

  Reacher nodded.

  “Yes, I would have gone,” he said. “No choice. I was the son of a soldier, too. But I would have been jealous of my father’s generation. Much easier to go to World War Two.”

  “Victor wanted to fly helicopters,” Hobie said. “He was passionate about it. My fault again, I’m afraid. I took him to a county fair, paid two bucks for him to have his first flight in one. It was an old Bell, a crop duster. After that, all he wanted to be was a helicopter pilot. And he decided the Army was the best place to learn how.”

  He slid another photograph out of the folder. Passed it across. It showed the same boy, now twice the age, grown tall, still grinning, in a new fatigues, standing in front of an Army helicopter. It was an H-23 Hiller, an old training machine.

  “That’s Fort Wolters,” Hobie said. “All the way down in Texas. U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School.”

  Reacher nodded. “He flew choppers in ‘Nam?”

  “He passed out second in his class,” Hobie said. “That was no surprise to us. He was always an excellent student, all the way through high school. He was especially gifted in math. He understood accountancy. I imagined he’d go to college and then come into partnership with me, to do the book work. I looked forward to it. I struggled in school, Major. No reason to be coy about it now. I’m not an educated man. It was a constant delight for me to see Victor doing so well. He was a very smart boy. And a very good boy. Very smart, very kind, a good heart, a perfect son. Our only son.”

  The old lady was silent. Not eating the cake, not drinking the coffee.

  “His passing out was at Fort Rucker,” Hobie said. “Down in Alabama. We made the trip to see it.”

  He slid across the next photograph. It was a duplicate of one of the framed prints from the mantel. Faded pastel grass and sky, a tall boy in dress uniform, cap down over his eyes, his arm around an older woman in a print dress. The woman was slim and pretty. The photograph was slightly out of focus, the horizon slightly tilted. Taken by a fumbling husband and father, breathless with pride.

  “That’s Victor and Mary,” the old man said. “She hasn’t changed a bit, has she, that day to this?”

  “Not a bit,” Reacher lied.

  “We loved that boy,” the old woman said quietly. “He was sent overseas two weeks after that photograph was taken.”

  “July of ‘68,” Hobie said. “He was twenty years old.”

  “What happened?” Reacher asked.

  “He served a full tour,” Hobie said. “He was commended twice. He came home with a medal. I could see right away the idea of keeping the books for a print shop was too small for him. I thought he would serve out his time and get a job flying helicopters for the oil rigs. Down in the Gulf, perhaps. They were paying big money then, for Army pilots. Or Navy, or Air Force, of course.”

  “But he went over there again,” Mrs. Hobie said. “To Vietnam again.”

  “He signed on for a second tour,” Mrs. Hobie said. “He didn’t have to. But he said it was his duty. He said the war was still going on, and it was his duty to be a part of it. He said that’s what patriotism meant.”

  “And what happened?” Reacher asked.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “He didn’t come back,” Hobie said.

  The silence was like a weight in the room. Somewhere a clock was ticking. It grew louder and louder until it was filling the air like blows from a hammer.

  “It destroyed me,” Hobie said quietly.

  The oxygen wheezed in and out, in and out, through a constricted throat.

  “It just destroyed me. I used to say: I’ll exchange the whole rest of my life, just for one more day with him.”

  “The rest of my life,” his wife echoed. “For just one more day with him.”

  “And I meant it,” Hobie said. “And I still would. I still would, Major. Looking at me now, that’s not much of a bargain, is it? I haven’t got much life left in me. But I said it then, and I said it every day for thirty years, and as God is my witness, I meant it every single time I said it. The whole rest of my life, for one more day with him.”

  “When was he killed?” Reacher asked, gently.

  “He wasn’t killed,” Hobie said. “He was captured.”

  “Taken prisoner?”

  The old man nodded. “At first, they told us he was missing. We assumed he was dead, but we clung on, hoping. He was posted missing, and he stayed missing. We never got official word he was killed.”

  “So we waited,” Mrs. Hobie said. “We just kept on waiting, for years and years. Then we started asking. They told us Victor was missing, presumed killed. That was all they could say. His helicopter was shot down in the jungle, and they never found the wreckage.”

  “We accepted that then,” Hobie said. “We knew how it was. Plenty of boys died without a known grave. Plenty of boys always have, in war.”

  “Then the memorial went up,” Mrs. Hobie said. “Have you seen it?”

  “The Wall?” Reacher said. “In D.C.? Yes, I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I found it very moving.”

  “They refused to put his name on it,” Hobie said.

  “Why?”

  “They never explained. We asked and we begged, but they never told us exactly why. They just said he’s no longer considered a casualty.”

  “So we asked them what he is considered as,” Mrs. Hobie said. “They just told us missing in action.”

  “But the other MIAs are on the Wall,” Hobie said.

  There was silence again. The clock hammered away in another room.

  “What did General Garber say about this?” Reacher asked.

  “He didn’t understand it,” Hobie said. “Didn’t understand it at all. He was still checking for us when he died.”

  There was silence again. The oxygen hissed and the clock hammered.

  “But we know what happened,” Mrs. Hobie said.

  “You do?” Reacher asked her. “What?”

  “The only thing that fits,” she said. “He was taken prisoner.”

  “And never released,” Hobie said.

  “That’s why the Army is covering it up,” Mrs. Hobie said. “The government is embarrassed about it. The truth is some of our boys were never released. The Vietnamese held on to them, like hostages, to get foreign aid and trade recognition and credits from us, after the war. Like blackmail. The government held out for years, despite our boys still being prisoners over there. So they can’t admit it. They hide it instead, and won’t talk about it.�
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  “But we can prove it now,” Hobie said.

  He slid another photograph from the folder. Passed it across. It was a newer print. Vivid glossy colors. It was a telephoto shot taken through tropical vegetation. There was barbed wire on bamboo fence posts. There was an Oriental figure in a brown uniform, with a bandanna around his forehead. A rifle in his hands. It was clearly a Soviet AK-47. No doubt about it. And there was another figure in the picture. A tall Caucasian, looking about fifty, emaciated, gaunt, bent, gray, wearing pale, rotted fatigues. Looking half away from the Oriental soldier, flinching.

  “That’s Victor,” Mrs. Hobie said. “That’s our son. That photograph was taken last year.”

  “We spent thirty years asking about him,” Hobie said. “Nobody would help us. We asked everybody. Then we found a man who told us about these secret camps. There aren’t many. Just a few, with a handful of prisoners. Most of them have died by now. They’ve grown old and died, or been starved to death. This man went to Vietnam and checked for us. He got close enough to take this picture. He even spoke to one of the other prisoners through the wire. Secretly, at night. It was very dangerous for him. He asked for the name of the prisoner he’d just photographed. It was Vic Hobie, First Cavalry helicopter pilot.”

  “The man had no money for a rescue,” Mrs. Hobie said. “And we’d already paid him everything we had for the first trip. We had no more left. So when we met General Garber at the hospital, we told him our story and asked him to try and get the government to pay.”

  Reacher stared at the photograph. Stared at the gaunt man with the gray face.

  “Who else has seen this picture?”

  “Only General Garber,” Mrs. Hobie answered. “The man who took it told us to keep it a secret. Because it’s very sensitive, politically. Very dangerous. It’s a terrible thing, buried in the nation’s history. But we had to show it to General Garber, because he was in a position to help us.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” Reacher asked.

  The oxygen hissed in the silence. In and out, in and out, through the clear plastic tubes. The old man’s mouth was working.

  “I just want him back,” he said. “I just want to see him again, one more day before I die.”

  AFTER THAT, THE old couple were done talking. They turned together and fixed misty gazes on the row of photographs on the mantel. Reacher was left sitting in the silence. Then the old man turned back and used both hands and lifted the leather-bound folder off his bony knees and held it out. Reacher leaned forward and took it. At first he assumed it was so he could put the three photographs back inside. Then he realized the baton had been passed to him. Like a ceremony. Their quest had become Leon’s, and now it was his.

  The folder was thin. Apart from the three photographs he had seen, it contained nothing more than infrequent letters home from their son and formal letters from the Department of the Army. And a sheaf of paperwork showing the liquidation of their life savings and the transfer by certified check of eighteen thousand dollars to an address in the Bronx, to fund a reconnaissance mission to Vietnam led by a man named Rutter.

  The letters from the boy started with brief notes from various locations in the South, as he passed through Dix, and Polk, and Wolters, and Rucker, and Belvoir and Benning on his way through his training. Then there was a short note from Mobile in Alabama, as he boarded ship for the month-long voyage through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to Indochina. Then there were flimsy Army Mailgrams from Vietnam itself, eight from the first tour, six from the second. The paper was thirty years old, and it was stiff and dry, like ancient papyrus. Like something discovered by archaeologists.

  He hadn’t been much of a correspondent. The letters were full of the usual banal phrases a young soldier writes home. There must have been a hundred million parents in the world with treasured old letters like these, different times, different wars, different languages, but the same messages: the food, the weather, the rumor of action, the reassurances.

  The responses from the Department of the Army marched through thirty years of office technology. They started out typed on old manual machines, some letters misaligned, some wrongly spaced, some with red haloes above them where the ribbon had slipped. Then electric typewriters, crisper and more uniform. Then word processors, immaculately printed on better paper. But the messages were all the same. No information. Missing in action, presumed killed. Condolences. No further information.

  The deal with the guy called Rutter had left them penniless. There had been some modest mutual funds and a little cash on deposit. There was a sheet written in a shaky hand Reacher guessed was the old woman’s, totaling their monthly needs, working the figures again and again, paring them down until they matched the Social Security checks, freeing up their capital. The mutuals had been cashed in eighteen months ago and amalgamated with the cash holdings and the whole lot had been mailed to the Bronx. There was a receipt from Rutter, with the amount formally set off against the cost of the exploratory trip, due to leave imminently. There was a request for any and all information likely to prove helpful, including service number and history and any existing photographs. There was a letter dated three months subsequently, detailing the discovery of the remote camp, the risky clandestine photography, the whispered talk through the wire. There was a prospectus for a rescue mission, planned in great detail, at a projected cost to the Hobies of forty-five thousand dollars. Forty-five thousand dollars they didn’t have.

  “Will you help us?” the old woman asked through the silence. “Is it all clear? Is there anything you need to know?”

  He glanced across at her and saw she had been following his progress through the dossier. He closed the folder and stared down at its worn leather cover. Right then the only thing he needed to know was why the hell hadn’t Leon told these people the truth?

  9

  MARILYN STONE MISSED lunch because she was busy, but didn’t mind because she was happy about the way the place was starting to look. She found herself regarding the whole business in a very dispassionate manner, which surprised her a little, because after all it was her home she was getting ready to sell, her own home, the place she’d chosen with care and thought and excitement not so many years ago. It had been the place of her dreams. Way bigger and better than anything she’d ever expected to have. It had been a physical thrill back then, just thinking about it. Moving in felt like she’d died and gone to heaven. Now she was just looking at the place like a showpiece, like a marketing proposition. She wasn’t seeing rooms she’d decorated and lived in and thrilled to and enjoyed. There was no pain. No wistful glances at places where she and Chester had fooled around and laughed and ate and slept. Just a brisk and businesslike determination to bring it all up to a whole new peak of irresistibility.

  The furniture movers had arrived first, just as she’d planned. She had them take the credenza out of the hallway, and then Chester’s armchair out of the living room. Not because it was a bad piece, but because it was definitely an extra piece. It was his favorite chair, chosen in the way men choose things, for comfort and familiarity rather than for style and suitability. It was the only piece they’d brought from their last house. He’d put it next to the fireplace, at an angle. Day to day, she rather liked it. It gave the room a comfortable lived-in quality. It was the touch that changed the room from a magazine showpiece to a family home. Which was exactly why it had to go.

  She had the movers carry out the butcher’s block table from the kitchen, too. She had thought long and hard about that table. It certainly gave the kitchen a no-nonsense look. Like it was a proper workplace, speaking of serious meals planned and executed there. But without it, there was an uninterrupted thirty-foot expanse of tiled floor running all the way to the bay window. She knew that with fresh polish on the tile, the light from the window would flood the whole thirty-foot span into a sea of space. She had put herself in a prospective buyer’s shoes and asked herself: Which would impress you more? A serious k
itchen? Or a drop-dead spacious kitchen? So the butcher’s block was in the mover’s truck.

  The TV from the den was in there, too. Chester had a problem with television sets. Video had killed the home-movie side of his business and he had no enthusiasm for buying the latest and best of his competitors’ products. So the TV was an obsolete RCA, not even a console model. It had shiny fake chrome around the screen, and it bulged out like a gray fishbowl. She had seen better sets junked on the sidewalk, looking down from the train when it eased into the 125th Street station. So she’d had the movers clear it out of the den and bring the bookcase down from the guest suite to fill its space. She thought the room looked much better for it. With just the bookcase and the leather couches and the dark lampshades, it looked like a cultured room. An intelligent room. It made it an aspirational space. Like a buyer would be buying a lifestyle, not just a house.

  She spent some time choosing books for the coffee tables. Then the florist arrived with flat cardboard boxes full of blooms. She had the girl wash all her vases and then left her alone with a European magazine and told her to copy the arrangements. The guy from Sheryl’s office brought the for-sale sign and she had him plant it in the shoulder next to the mailbox. Then the garden crew arrived at the same time the movers were leaving, which required some awkward maneuvering out on the driveway. She led the crew chief around the garden, explaining what had to be done, and then she ducked back inside the house before the roar of the mowers started up. The pool boy came to the door at the same time as the cleaning service people arrived. She was caught glancing left and right between them, momentarily overcome and unsure of who to start first. But then she nodded firmly and told the cleaners to wait and led the boy around to the pool and showed him what needed doing. Then she ran back to the house, feeling hungry, realizing she’d missed her lunch, but glowing with satisfaction at the progress she was making.

  THEY BOTH MADE it down the hallway to see him leave. The old man worked on the oxygen long enough to get himself up out of his chair, and then he wheeled the cylinder slowly ahead of him, partly leaning on it like a cane, partly pushing it like a golf trolley. His wife rustled along in front of him, her skirt brushing both doorjambs and both sides of the narrow passageway. Reacher followed behind them, with the leather folder tucked up under his arm. The old lady worked the lock on the door and the old man stood panting and gripping the handle of the cart. The door opened and sweet fresh air blew in.