Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  The taxi waiting at the head of the line was a replica of the one they’d used at Dallas-Fort Worth, a clean Caprice with the air roaring full blast and the driver’s compartment decorated halfway between a religious shrine and a living room. They disappointed the guy by asking him for the shortest ride available on Oahu, which was the half-mile hop around the perimeter road to the Hickam Air Force Base entrance. The guy glanced backward at the line of cars behind him, and Reacher saw him thinking about the better fares the other drivers would get.

  “Ten-dollar tip in it for you,” he said.

  The guy gave him the same look the ticket clerk at Dallas-Fort Worth had used. A fare that was going to leave the meter stuck on the basic minimum, but a ten-dollar tip? Reacher saw a photograph of what he guessed was the guy’s family, taped to the vinyl of the dash. A big family, dark, smiling children and a dark, smiling woman in a cheerful print dress, all standing in front of a clean simple home with something vigorous growing in a dirt patch to the right. He thought about the Hobies, alone in the dark silence up in Brighton with the hiss of the oxygen bottle and the squeak of the worn wooden floors. And Rutter, in the dusty squalor of his Bronx storefront.

  “Twenty dollars,” he said. “If we get going right now, OK?”

  “Twenty dollars?” the guy repeated, amazed.

  “Thirty. For your kids. They look nice.”

  The guy grinned in the mirror and touched his fingers to his lips and laid them gently on the shiny surface of the photograph. He swung the cab through the lane changes onto the perimeter track and came off again more or less immediately, eight hundred yards into the journey, outside a military gate which looked identical to the one fronting Fort Wolters. Jodie opened the door and stepped out into the heat and Reacher went into his pocket and came out with his roll of cash. Top bill was a fifty, and he peeled it off and pushed it through the little hinged door in the Plexiglas.

  “Keep it.”

  Then he pointed at the photograph. “That your house?”

  The driver nodded.

  “Is it holding up OK? Anything need fixing on it?”

  The guy shook his head. “Tip-top condition.”

  “The roof OK?”

  “No problems at all.”

  Reacher nodded. “Just checking.”

  He slid across the vinyl and joined Jodie on the blacktop. The taxi moved off through the haze, back toward the civilian terminal. There was a breeze coming off the ocean. Salt in the air. Jodie pushed the hair off her face and looked around.

  “Where are we going?”

  “CIL-HI,” Reacher said. “It’s right inside here.”

  He pronounced it phonetically, and it made her smile.

  “Silly?” she repeated. “So what’s that?”

  “C,I,L,H,I,” he said. “Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. It’s the Department of the Army’s main facility.”

  “For what?”

  “I’ll show you for what,” he said.

  Then he paused. “At least I hope I will.”

  They walked up to the gatehouse and waited at the window. There was a sergeant inside, same uniform, same haircut, same suspicious expression on his face as the guy at Wolters. He made them wait in the heat for a second, and then he slid the window back. Reacher stepped forward and gave their names.

  “We’re here to see Nash Newman,” he said.

  The sergeant looked surprised and picked up a clipboard and peeled thin sheets of paper back. He slid a thick finger along a line and nodded. Picked up a phone and dialed a number. Four digits. An internal call. He announced the visitors and listened to the reply, and then he looked puzzled. He covered the phone with his palm and turned back to Jodie.

  “How old are you, miss?” he asked.

  “Thirty,” Jodie said, puzzled in turn.

  “Thirty,” the MP repeated into the phone. Then he listened again and hung it up and wrote something on the clipboard. Turned back to the window.

  “He’ll be right out, so come on through.”

  They squeezed through the narrow gap between the gatehouse wall and the heavy counterweight on the end of the vehicle barrier and waited on the hot pavement six feet away from where they had started, but now it was military pavement, not Hawaii Department of Transportation pavement, and that made a lot of difference to the look on the sergeant’s face. The suspicion was all gone, replaced by frank curiosity about why the legendary Nash Newman was in such a big hurry to get these two civilians inside the base.

  There was a low concrete building maybe sixty yards away with a plain personnel door set in the blank end wall. The door opened up and a silver-haired man stepped out. He turned back to close it and lock it and then set out at a fast walk toward the gatehouse. He was in the pants and the shirt of an Army tropical-issue uniform, with a white lab coat flapping open over them. There was enough metal punched through the collar of the shirt to indicate he was a high-ranking officer, and nothing in his distinguished bearing to contradict that impression. Reacher moved to meet him and Jodie followed. The silver-haired guy was maybe fifty-five, and up close he was tall, with a handsome patrician face and a natural athletic grace in his body that was just beginning to yield to the stiffness of age.

  “General Newman,” Reacher said. “This is Jodie Garber.”

  Newman glanced at Reacher and took Jodie’s hand, smiling.

  “Pleased to meet you, General,” she said.

  “We already met,” Newman said.

  “We did?” she said, surprised.

  “You wouldn’t recall it,” he said. “At least I’d be terribly surprised if you did. You were three years old at the time, I guess. In the Philippines. It was in your father’s backyard. I remember you brought me a glass of planter’s punch. It was a big glass, and a big yard, and you were a very little girl. You carried it in both hands, with your tongue sticking out, concentrating. I watched you all the way, with my heart in my mouth in case you dropped it.”

  She smiled. “Well, you’re right, I’m afraid I don’t recall it. I was three? That’s an awful long time ago now.”

  Newman nodded. “That’s why I checked how old you looked. I didn’t mean for the sergeant to come right out and ask you straight. I wanted his subjective impression, is all. It’s not the sort of thing one should ask a lady, is it? But I was wondering if you could really be Leon’s daughter, come to visit me.”

  He squeezed her hand and let it go. Turned to Reacher and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Jack Reacher,” he said. “Damn, it’s good to see you again.”

  Reacher caught Newman’s hand and shook it hard, sharing the pleasure.

  “General Newman was my teacher,” he said to Jodie. “He did a spell at staff college about a million years ago. Advanced forensics, taught me everything I know.”

  “He was a pretty good student,” Newman said to her. “Paid attention at least, which is more than most of them did.”

  “So what is it you do, General?” she asked.

  “Well, I do a little forensic anthropology,” Newman said.

  “He’s the best in the world,” Reacher said.

  Newman waved away the compliment. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “Anthropology?” Jodie said. “But isn’t that studying remote tribes and things? How they live? Their rituals and beliefs and so on?”

  “No, that’s cultural anthropology,” Newman said. “There are many different disciplines. Mine is forensic anthropology, which is a part of physical anthropology.”

  “Studying human remains for clues,” Reacher said.

  “A bone doctor,” Newman said. “That’s about what it amounts to.”

  They were drifting down the sidewalk as they talked, getting nearer the plain door in the blank wall. It opened up and a younger man was standing there waiting for them in the entrance corridor. A nondescript guy, maybe thirty years old, in a lieutenant’s uniform under a white lab coat. Newman nodded toward him. “This
is Lieutenant Simon. He runs the lab for me. Couldn’t manage without him.”

  He introduced Reacher and Jodie and they shook hands all around. Simon was quiet and reserved. Reacher figured him for a typical lab guy, annoyed at the disruption to the measured routine of his work. Newman led them inside and down the corridor to his office, and Simon nodded silently to him and disappeared.

  “Sit down,” Newman said. “Let’s talk.”

  “So you’re a sort of pathologist?” Jodie asked him.

  Newman took his place behind his desk and rocked his hand from side to side, indicating a disparity. “Well, a pathologist has a medical degree, and we anthropologists don’t. We studied anthropology, pure and simple. The physical structure of the human body, that’s our field. We both work postmortem, of course, but generally speaking if a corpse is relatively fresh, it’s a pathologist’s job, and if there’s only a skeleton left, then it’s our job. So I’m a bone doctor.”

  Jodie nodded.

  “Of course, that’s a slight simplification,” Newman said. “A fresh corpse can raise questions concerning its bones. Suppose there’s dismemberment involved? The pathologist would refer to us for help. We can look at the saw marks on the bones and help out. We can say how weak or strong the perpetrator was, what kind of saw he used, was he left-handed or right-handed, things like that. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’m working on skeletons. Dry old bones.”

  Then he smiled again. A private, amused smile. “And pathologists are useless with dry old bones. Really, really hopeless. They don’t know the first thing about them. Sometimes I wonder what the hell they teach them in medical school.”

  The office was quiet and cool. No windows, indirect lighting from concealed fixtures, carpet on the floor. A rosewood desk, comfortable leather chairs for the visitors. And an elegant clock on a low shelf, ticking quietly, already showing three-thirty in the afternoon. Just three and a half hours until the return flight.

  “We’re here for a reason, General,” Reacher said. “This isn’t entirely a social call, I’m afraid.”

  “Social enough to stop calling me General and start calling me Nash, OK? And tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Reacher nodded. “We need your help, Nash.”

  Newman looked up. “With the MIA lists?”

  Then he turned to Jodie, to explain.

  “That’s what I do here,” he said. “Twenty years, I’ve done nothing else.”

  She nodded. “It’s about a particular case. We sort of got involved in it.”

  Newman nodded back, slowly, but this time the light was gone from his eyes.

  “Yes, I was afraid of that,” he said. “There are eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty MIA cases here, but I bet I know which one you’re interested in.”

  “Eighty-nine thousand?” Jodie repeated, surprised.

  “And a hundred twenty. Two thousand, two hundred missing from Vietnam, eight thousand, one hundred seventy missing from Korea, and seventy-eight thousand, seven hundred fifty missing from World War Two. We haven’t given up on any single one of them, and I promise you we never will.”

  “God, why so many?”

  Newman shrugged, a bitter sadness suddenly there in his face.

  “Wars,” he said. “High explosive, tactical movement, airplanes. Wars are fought, some combatants live, some die. Some of the dead are recovered, some of them aren’t. Sometimes there’s nothing left to recover. A direct hit on a man by an artillery shell will reduce him to his constituent molecules. He’s just not there anymore. Maybe a fine red mist drifting through the air, maybe not even that, maybe he’s completely boiled off to vapor. A near miss will blow him to pieces. And fighting is about territory, isn’t it? So even if the pieces of him are relatively large, enemy tank movement or friendly tank movement back and forth across the disputed territory will plow the pieces of him into the earth, and then he’s gone forever.”

  He sat in silence, and the clock ticked slowly around.

  “And airplanes are worse. Many of our air campaigns have been fought over oceans. A plane goes down in the ocean and the crew is missing until the end of time, no matter how much effort we expend in a place like this.”

  He waved his arm in a vague gesture that took in the office and all the unseen space beyond and ended up resting toward Jodie, palm up, like a mute appeal.

  “Eighty-nine thousand,” she said. “I thought the MIA stuff was just about Vietnam. Two thousand or so.”

  “Eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty,” Newman said again. “We still get a few from Korea, the occasional one from World War Two, the Japanese islands. But you’re right, this is mostly about Vietnam. Two thousand, two hundred missing. Not so very many, really. They lost more than that in a single morning during World War One, every morning for four long years. Men and boys blown apart and mashed into the mud. But Vietnam was different. Partly because of things like World War One. We won’t take that wholesale slaughter anymore, and quite rightly. We’ve moved on. The population just won’t stand for those old attitudes now.”

  Jodie nodded quietly.

  “And partly because we lost the war in Vietnam,” Newman said quietly. “That makes it very different. The only war we ever lost. Makes it all feel a hell of a lot worse. So we try harder to resolve things.”

  He made the gesture with his hand again, indicating the unseen complex beyond the office door, and his voice ended on a brighter note.

  “So that’s what you do here?” Jodie asked. “Wait for skeletons to be discovered overseas and then bring them back here to identify? So you can finally tick the names off the missing lists?”

  Newman rocked his hand again, equivocating. “Well, we don’t wait, exactly. Where we can, we go out searching for them. And we don’t always identify them, although we sure as hell try hard.”

  “It must be difficult,” she said.

  He nodded. “Technically, it can be very challenging. The recovery sites are usually a mess. The field-workers send us animal bones, local bones, anything. We sort it all out here. Then we go to work with what we’ve got. Which sometimes isn’t very much. Sometimes all that’s left of an American soldier is just a handful of bone fragments you could fit in a cigar box.”

  “Impossible,” she said.

  “Often,” he said back. “We’ve got a hundred part-skeletons here right now, unidentified. The Department of the Army can’t afford mistakes. They demand a very high standard of certainty, and sometimes we just can’t meet it.”

  “Where do you start?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Well, wherever we can. Medical records, usually. Suppose Reacher here was an MIA. If he’d broken his arm as a boy, we’d be able to match the old X ray against a healed break in the bones we found. Maybe. Or if we found his jaw, we could match the work on his teeth with his dental charts.”

  Reacher saw her looking at him, imagining him reduced to dry yellowing bones on a jungle floor, scraped out of the dirt and compared to brittle fading X rays taken thirty years earlier. The office went silent again, and the clock ticked around.

  “Leon came here in April,” Reacher said.

  Newman nodded. “Yes, he visited with me. Foolish of him, really, because he was a very sick man. But it was good to see him.”

  Then he turned to Jodie, sympathy on his face.

  “He was a fine, fine man. I owed him a lot.”

  She nodded. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  “He asked you about Victor Hobie,” Reacher said.

  Newman nodded again. “Victor Truman Hobie.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing,” Newman said. “And I’m going to tell you nothing, too.”

  The clock ticked on. A quarter to four.

  “Why not?” Reacher asked.

  “Surely you know why not.”

  “It’s classified?”

  “Twice over,” Newman said.

  Reacher move
d in the silence, restless with frustration. “You’re our last hope, Nash. We’ve already been all over everything else.”

  Newman shook his head. “You know how it is, Reacher. I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, damn it. I’m not going to reveal classified information.”

  “Please, Nash,” Reacher said. “We came all this way.”

  “I can’t,” Newman said.

  “No such word,” Reacher said.

  Silence.

  “Well, I guess you could ask me questions,” he said. “If a former student of mine comes in here and asks me questions based on his own skills and observations, and I answer them in a purely academic fashion, I don’t see that any harm can come to anybody.”

  It was like the clouds shifting away from the sun. Jodie glanced at Reacher. He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes to four. Less than three hours to go.

  “OK, Nash, thanks,” he said. “You’re familiar with this case?”

  “I’m familiar with all of them. This one especially, since April.”

  “And it’s classified twice over?”

  Newman just nodded.

  “At a level that kept Leon out of the loop?”

  “That’s a pretty high level,” Newman hinted. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Reacher nodded. Thought hard. “What did Leon want you to do?”

  “He was in the dark,” Newman said. “You need to bear that in mind, right?”

  “OK,” Reacher said. “What did he want you to do?”

  “He wanted us to find the crash site.”

  “Four miles west of An Khe.”