Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  A neutral reply. Nothing there at all. No hostility. But no approval, either.

  “My father was General Garber,” Jodie said.

  DeWitt nodded without speaking.

  “We’re here in a private capacity,” Reacher said.

  There was a short silence.

  “A civilian capacity, in fact,” DeWitt said slowly.

  Reacher nodded. Strike one.

  “It’s about a pilot called Victor Hobie. You served with him in Vietnam.”

  DeWitt looked deliberately blank. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Did I?” he said. “I don’t remember him.”

  Strike two. Uncooperative.

  “We’re trying to find out what happened to him.”

  Another short silence. Then DeWitt nodded, slowly, amused.

  “Why? Was he your long-lost uncle? Or maybe he was secretly your father? Maybe he had a brief, sad affair with your mother when he was her pool boy. Or did you buy his old childhood home and find his long-lost teenage diaries hidden behind the wainscoting with a 1968 issue of Playboy magazine?”

  Strike three. Aggressively uncooperative. The office went silent again. There was the thumping of rotor blades somewhere in the far distance. Jodie hitched forward on her chair. Her voice was soft and low in the quiet room.

  “We’re here for his parents, sir. They lost their boy thirty years ago, and they’ve never known what happened to him. They’re still grieving, General.”

  DeWitt looked at her with gray eyes and shook his head.

  “I don’t remember him. I’m very sorry.”

  “He trained with you right here at Wolters,” Reacher said. “You went to Rucker together and you sailed to Qui Nhon together. You served the best part of two tours together, flying slicks out of Pleiku.”

  “Your old man in the service?” DeWitt asked.

  Reacher nodded. “The Corps. Thirty years, Semper Fi.”

  “Mine was Eighth Air Force,” DeWitt said. “World War Two, flying bombers out of East Anglia in England all the way to Berlin and back. You know what he told me when I signed up for helicopters?”

  Reacher waited.

  “He gave me some good advice,” DeWitt said. “He told me, don’t make friends with pilots. Because they all get killed, and it just makes you miserable.”

  Reacher nodded again. “You really can’t recall him?”

  DeWitt just shrugged.

  “Not even for his folks?” Jodie asked. “Doesn’t seem right they’ll never know what happened to their boy, does it?”

  There was silence. The distant rotor blades faded to nothing. DeWitt gazed at Jodie. Then he spread his small hands on the desk and sighed heavily.

  “Well, I guess I can recall him a little,” he said. “Mostly from the early days. Later on, when they all started dying, I took the old man’s advice to heart. Kind of closed in on myself, you know?”

  “So what was he like?” Jodie asked.

  “What was he like?” DeWitt repeated. “Not like me, that’s for sure. Not like anybody else I ever knew, either. He was a walking contradiction. He was a volunteer, you know that? I was, too, and so were a lot of the guys. But Vic wasn’t like the others. There was a big divide back then, between the volunteers and the drafted guys. The volunteers were all rahrah boys, you know, going for it because they believed in it. But Vic wasn’t like that. He volunteered, but he was about as mousy quiet as the sulkiest draftee you ever saw. But he could fly like he was born with a rotor blade up his ass.”

  “So he was good?” Jodie prompted.

  “Better than good,” DeWitt replied. “Second only to me in the early days, which is saying something, because I was definitely born with a rotor blade up my ass. And Vic was smart with the book stuff. I remember that. He had it all over everybody else in the classroom.”

  “Did he have an attitude problem with that?” Reacher asked. “Trading favors for help?”

  DeWitt swung the gray eyes across from Jodie.

  “You’ve done your research. You’ve been in the files.”

  “We just came from the NPRC,” Reacher said.

  DeWitt nodded, neutrally. “I hope you didn’t read my jacket.”

  “Supervisor wouldn’t let us,” Reacher said.

  “We were anxious not to poke around where we’re not wanted,” Jodie said.

  DeWitt nodded again.

  “Vic traded favors,” he said. “But they claimed he did it in the wrong way. There was a little controversy about it, as I recall. You were supposed to do it because you were glad to help your fellow candidates, you know? For the good of the unit, right? You remember how that shit went?”

  He stopped and glanced at Reacher, amused. Reacher nodded. Jodie’s being there was helping him. Her charm was inching him back toward approval.

  “But Vic was cold about it,” DeWitt said. “Like it was all just another math equation. Like x amount of lift moves the chopper off the ground, like this much help with that complicated formula gets his boots bulled up. They saw it as cold.”

  “Was he cold?” Jodie asked.

  DeWitt nodded. “Emotionless, the coldest guy I ever saw. It always amazed me. At first I figured it was because he came from some little place where he’d never done anything or seen anything. But later I realized he just felt nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. But it made him a hell of a tremendous flyer.”

  “Because he wasn’t afraid?” Reacher asked.

  “Exactly,” DeWitt said. “Not courageous, because a courageous guy is somebody who feels the fear but conquers it. Vic never felt it in the first place. It made him a better war flyer than me. I was the one passed out of Rucker head of the class, and I’ve got the plaque to prove it, but when we got in-country, he was better than me, no doubt about it.”

  “In what kind of a way?”

  DeWitt shrugged, like he couldn’t explain it. “We learned everything as we went along, just made it all up. Fact is, our training was shit. It was like being shown a little round thing and being told ‘this is a baseball,’ and then getting sent straight out to play in the major leagues. That’s something I’m trying to put right now that I’m here running this place. I never want to send boys out as unprepared as we were.”

  “Hobie was good at learning on the job?” Reacher asked.

  “The best,” DeWitt said. “You know anything about helicopters in the jungle?”

  Reacher shook his head. “Not a lot.”

  “First main problem is the LZ,” DeWitt said. “LZ, landing zone, right? You got a desperate bunch of tired infantry under fire somewhere, they need exfiltrating, they get on the radio and our dispatcher tells them sure, make us an LZ and we’ll be right over to pull you out. So they use explosives and saws and whatever the hell else they got and they blast a temporary LZ in the jungle. Now a Huey with the rotor turning needs a space exactly forty-eight feet wide and fifty-seven feet nine-point-seven inches long to land in. But the infantry is tired and in a big hurry and Charlie is raining mortars down on them and generally they don’t make the LZ big enough. So we can’t get them out. This happened to us two or three times, and we’re sick about it, and one night I see Vic studying the leading edge of the rotor blade on his Huey. So I say to him, ‘What are you looking at?’ And he says, ‘These are metal.’ I’m thinking, like what else would they be? Bamboo? But he’s looking at them. Next day, we’re called to a temporary LZ again, and sure enough the damn thing is too small, by a couple of feet all around. So I can’t get in. But Vic goes down anyway. He spins the chopper around and around and cuts his way in with the rotor. Like a gigantic flying lawn mower? It was awesome. Bits of tree flying everywhere. He pulls out seven or eight guys and the rest of us go down after him and get all the rest. That became SOP afterward, and he invented it, because he was cold and logical and he wasn’t afraid to try. That maneuver saved hundreds of guys over the years. Literally hundreds, maybe even thousands.”

  “Impressive,” Reacher said.

&n
bsp; “You bet your ass impressive,” DeWitt said back. “Second big problem we had was weight. Suppose you were out in the open somewhere, like a field. The infantry would come swarming in on you until the damn chopper was too heavy to take off. So your own gunners would be beating them off and leaving them there in the field, maybe to die. Not a nice feeling. So one day Vic lets them all on board, and sure enough he can’t get off the ground. So he shoves the stick forward and sort of skitters horizontally along the field until the airspeed kicks in under the rotor and unsticks him. Then he’s up and away. The running jump. It became another SOP, and he invented it, too. Sometimes he would do it downhill, even down the mountainsides, like he was heading for a certain crash, and then up he went. Like I told you, we were just making it up as we went along, and the truth is a lot of the good stuff got made up by Victor Hobie.”

  “You admired him,” Jodie said.

  DeWitt nodded. “Yes, I did. And I’m not afraid to admit it.”

  “But you weren’t close.”

  He shook his head. “Like my daddy told me, don’t make friends with the other pilots. And I’m glad I didn’t. Too many of them died.”

  “How did he spend his time?” Reacher asked. “The files show a lot of days you couldn’t fly.”

  “Weather was a bitch. A real bitch. You got no idea. I want this facility moved someplace else, maybe Washington State, where they get some mists and fogs. No point training down in Texas and Alabama if you want to go fighting someplace you get weather.”

  “So how did you spend the downtime?”

  “Me? I did all kinds of things. Sometimes I partied, sometimes I slept. Sometimes I took a truck out and went scavenging for things we needed.”

  “What about Vic?” Jodie asked. “What did he do?”

  DeWitt just shrugged again. “I have no idea. He was always busy, always up to something, but I don’t know what it was. Like I told you, I didn’t want to mix with the other flyers.”

  “Was he different on the second tour?” Reacher asked.

  DeWitt smiled briefly. “Everybody was different second time around.”

  “In what way?” Jodie asked.

  “Angrier,” DeWitt said. “Even if you signed up again right away it was nine months minimum before you got back, sometimes a whole year. Then you got back and you figured the place had gone to shit while you were away. You figured it had gotten sloppy and half-assed. Facilities you’d built would be all falling down, trenches you’d dug against the mortars would be half full of water, trees you’d cleared away from the helicopter parking would be all sprouting up again. You’d feel your little domain had been ruined by a bunch of know-nothing idiots while you were gone. It made you angry and depressed. And generally speaking it was true. The whole ’Nam thing went steadily downhill, right out of control. The quality of the personnel just got worse and worse.”

  “So you’d say Hobie got disillusioned?” Reacher asked.

  DeWitt shrugged. “I really don’t remember much about his attitude. Maybe he coped OK. He had a strong sense of duty, as I recall.”

  “What was his final mission about?”

  The gray eyes suddenly went blank, like the shutters had just come down.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “He was shot down,” Reacher said. “Shot out of the air, right alongside you. You can’t recall what the mission was?”

  “We lost eight thousand helicopters in ‘Nam,” DeWitt said. “Eight thousand, Mr. Reacher, beginning to end. Seems to me I personally saw most of them go down. So how should I recall any particular one of them?”

  “What was it about?” Reacher asked again.

  “Why do you want to know?” DeWitt asked back.

  “It would help me.”

  “With what?”

  Reacher shrugged. “With his folks, I guess. I want to be able to tell them he died doing something useful.”

  DeWitt smiled. A bitter, sardonic smile, worn and softened at the edges by thirty years of regular use. “Well, my friend, you sure as hell can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because none of our missions were useful. They were all a waste of time. A waste of lives. We lost the war, didn’t we?”

  “Was it a secret mission?”

  There was a pause. Silence in the big office.

  “Why should it be secret?” DeWitt asked back, neutrally.

  “He only took on board three passengers. Seems like a special sort of a deal to me. No running jump required there.”

  “I don’t remember,” DeWitt said again.

  Reacher just looked at him, quietly. DeWitt stared back.

  “How should I remember? I hear about something for the first time in thirty years and I’m supposed to remember every damn detail about it?”

  “This isn’t the first time in thirty years. You were asked all about it a couple of months ago. In April of this year.”

  DeWitt was silent.

  “General Garber called the NPRC about Hobie,” Reacher said. “It’s inconceivable he didn’t call you afterward. Won’t you tell us what you told him?”

  DeWitt smiled. “I told him I didn’t remember.”

  There was silence again. Distant rotor blades, coming closer.

  “On behalf of his folks, won’t you tell us?” Jodie asked softly. “They’re still grieving for him. They need to know about it.”

  DeWitt shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” Reacher asked.

  DeWitt stood up slowly and walked to the window. He was a short man. He stood in the light of the sun and squinted left, across to where he could see the helicopter he could hear, coming in to land on the field.

  “It’s classified information,” he said. “I’m not allowed to make any comment, and I’m not going to. Garber asked me, and I told him the same thing. No comment. But I hinted he should maybe look closer to home, and I’ll advise you to do the exact same thing, Mr. Reacher. Look closer to home.”

  “Closer to home?”

  DeWitt put his back to the window. “Did you see Kaplan’s jacket?”

  “His copilot?”

  DeWitt nodded. “Did you read his last-but-one mission?”

  Reacher shook his head.

  “You should have,” DeWitt said. “Sloppy work from somebody who was once an MP major. But don’t tell anybody I suggested it, because I’ll deny it, and they’ll believe me, not you.”

  Reacher looked away. DeWitt walked back to his desk and sat down.

  “Is it possible Victor Hobie is still alive?” Jodie asked him.

  The distant helicopter shut off its engines. There was total silence.

  “I have no comment on that,” DeWitt said.

  “Have you been asked that question before?” Jodie said.

  “I have no comment on that,” DeWitt said again.

  “You saw the crash. Is it possible anybody survived it?”

  “I saw an explosion under the jungle canopy, is all. He was way more than half-full with fuel. Draw your own conclusions, Ms. Garber.”

  “Did he survive?”

  “I have no comment on that.”

  “Why is Kaplan officially dead and Hobie isn’t?”

  “I have no comment on that.”

  She nodded. Thought for a moment and regrouped exactly like the lawyer she was, boxed in by some recalcitrant witness. “Just theoretically, then. Suppose a young man with Victor Hobie’s personality and character and background survived such an incident, OK? Is it possible a man like that would never even have made contact with his own parents again afterward?”

  DeWitt stood up again. He was clearly uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know, Ms. Garber. I’m not a damn psychiatrist. And like I told you, I was careful not to get to know him too well. He seemed like a real dutiful guy, but he was cold. Overall, I guess I would rate it as very unlikely. But don’t forget, Vietnam changed people. It sure as hell changed me, for instance. I used to be a nice g
uy.”

  OFFICER SARK WAS forty-four years old, but he looked older. His physique was damaged by a poor childhood and ignorant neglect through most of his adult years. His skin was dull and pale, and he had lost his hair early. It left him looking sallow and sunken and old before his time. But the truth was he had woken up to it and was fighting it. He had read stuff the NYPD’s medical people were putting about concerning diet and exercise. He had eliminated most of the fats from his daily intake, and he had started sunbathing a little, just enough to take the pallor off his skin without provoking the risk of melanomas. He walked whenever he could. Going home, he would get off the subway a stop short and hike the rest of the way, fast enough to get his breath going and his heartbeat raised, like the stuff he’d read said he should. And during the workday, he would persuade O’Hallinan to park the prowl car somewhere that would give them a short walk to wherever it was they were headed.

  O’Hallinan had no interest in aerobic exercise, but she was an amiable woman and happy enough to cooperate with him, especially during the summer months, when the sun was shining. So she put the car against the curb in the shadow of Trinity Church and they approached the World Trade Center on foot from the south. It gave them a brisk six-hundred-yard walk in the sun, which made Sark happy, but it left the car exactly equidistant from a quarter of a million separate postal addresses, and with nothing on paper in the squad room it left nobody with any clue about which one of them they were heading for.

  YOU WANT A ride back to the airport?” DeWitt asked.

  Reacher interpreted the offer as a dismissal mixed in with a gesture designed to soften the stonewall performance the guy had been putting up. He nodded. The Army Chevrolet would get them there faster than a taxi, because it was already waiting right outside with the motor running.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Hey, my pleasure,” DeWitt said back.

  He dialed a number from his desk and spoke like he was issuing an order.

  “Wait right here,” he said. “Three minutes.”

  Jodie stood up and smoothed her dress down. Walked to the windows and gazed out. Reacher stepped the other way and looked at the mementoes on the wall. One of the photographs was a glossy reprint of a famous newspaper picture. A helicopter was lifting off from inside the embassy compound in Saigon, with a crowd of people underneath it, arms raised like they were trying to force it to come back down for them.