Tripwire

by Child, Lee

  Newman nodded. “I felt badly for Leon. No real reason for him to be out of the loop on this, and there was nothing I could do to alter the classification code. But I owed that man a lot, way more than I can tell you about, so I agreed to find the site.”

  Jodie leaned forward. “But why wasn’t it found before? People seem to know roughly where it is.”

  Newman shrugged. “It’s all incredibly difficult. You have no idea. The terrain, the bureaucracy. We lost the war, remember. The Vietnamese dictate the terms over there. We run a joint recovery effort, but they control it. The whole thing is constant manipulation and humiliation. We’re not allowed to wear our uniforms over there, because they say the sight of a U.S. Army uniform will traumatize the village populations. They make us rent their own helicopters to get around, millions and millions of dollars a year for ratty old rust buckets with half the capability of our own machines. Truth is, we’re buying those old bones back, and they set the price and the availability. Bottom line right now is the United States is paying more than three million dollars for every single identification we make, and it burns me up.”

  Four minutes to four. Newman sighed again, lost in thought.

  “But you found the site?” Reacher prompted.

  “It was scheduled for sometime in the future,” Newman said. “We knew roughly where it was, and we knew exactly what we’d find when we got there, so it wasn’t much of a high priority. But as a favor to Leon, I went over there and bargained to move it up the schedule. I wanted it next item on the list. It was a real bitch to negotiate. They get wind you want something in particular, they go stubborn as all hell. You’ve got no idea. Inscrutable? Tell me about it.”

  “But you found it?” Jodie asked.

  “It was a bitch, geographically,” Newman said. “We talked to DeWitt over at Wolters, and he helped us pin down the exact location, more or less. Remotest place you ever saw. Mountainous and inaccessible. I can guarantee you no human being has ever set foot there, no time in the history of the planet. It was a nightmare trip. But it was a great site. Completely inaccessible, so it wasn’t mined.”

  “Mined?” Jodie repeated. “You mean they booby-trap the sites?”

  Newman shook his head. “No, mined, as in excavated. Anything accessible, the population was all over it thirty years ago. They took dog tags, ID cards, helmets, souvenirs, but mostly they were after the metals. Fixed-wing sites, mostly, because of the gold and platinum.”

  “What gold?” she asked.

  “In the electrical circuits,” Newman said. “The F-4 Phantoms, for instance, they had about five thousand dollars’ worth of precious metals in the connections. Population used to hack it all out and sell it. You buy cheap jewelry in Bangkok, probably it’s made out of old U.S. fighter-bomber electronics.”

  “What did you find up there?” Reacher asked.

  “A relatively good state of preservation,” Newman said. “The Huey was smashed up and rusted, but it was recognizable. The bodies were completely skeletonized, of course. Clothing was rotted and gone, long ago. But nothing else was missing. They all had dog tags. We packed them up and helicoptered them to Hanoi. Then we flew them back here in the Starlifter, full honors. We only just got back. Three months, beginning to end, one of the best we’ve ever done in terms of time scale. And the IDs are going to be a total formality, because we’ve got the dog tags. No role for a bone doctor on this one. Open and shut. I’m just sorry Leon didn’t live to see it. It would have put his mind at rest.”

  “The bodies are here?” Reacher asked.

  Newman nodded. “Right next door.”

  “Can we see them?” Reacher asked.

  Newman nodded again. “You shouldn’t, but you need to.”

  The office went quiet and Newman stood up and gestured toward the door with both hands. Lieutenant Simon walked past. He nodded a greeting.

  “We’re going into the lab,” Newman said to him.

  “Yes, sir,” Simon said back. He moved away into his own office cubicle and Reacher and Jodie and Newman walked in the other direction and paused in front of a plain door set in a blank cinder block wall. Newman took keys from his pocket and unlocked it. He pulled it open and repeated the same formal gesture with both his hands. Reacher and Jodie preceded him into the lab.

  SIMON WATCHED THEM go inside from his cubicle. When the door closed and locked behind them, he picked up his phone and dialed nine for a line and then a ten-figure number starting with the New York City area code. The number rang for a long time because it was already the middle of the evening six thousand miles to the east. Then it was answered.

  “Reacher’s here,” Simon whispered. “Right now, with a woman. They’re in the lab, right now. Looking.”

  Hobie’s voice came back low and controlled. “Who’s the woman?”

  “Jodie Garber,” Simon said. “General Garber’s daughter.”

  “Alias Mrs. Jacob.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  There was silence on the line. Just the whistle of the long-distance satellite.

  “You could give them a ride back to the airport, maybe. The woman’s got an appointment in New York tomorrow afternoon, so I guess they’ll be trying to make the seven o’clock flight. Just make sure they don’t miss it.”

  “OK,” Simon said, and Hobie broke the connection.

  THE LAB WAS a wide, low room, maybe forty feet by fifty. There were no windows. The lighting was the bland wash of fluorescent tubes. There was the faint hiss of efficient air circulation, but there was a smell in the room, somewhere between the sharp tang of strong disinfectant and the warm odor of earth. At the far end of the space was an alcove filled with racks. On the racks were rows of cardboard boxes, marked with reference numbers in black. Maybe a hundred boxes.

  “The unidentified,” Reacher said.

  Newman nodded at his side.

  “As of now,” he said, quietly. “We won’t give up on them.”

  Between them and the distant alcove was the main body of the room. The floor was tile, swabbed to a shine. Standing on it were twenty neat wooden tables set in precise rows. The tables were waist high and topped with heavy polished slabs. Each table was a little shorter and a little narrower than an Army cot. They looked like sturdy versions of the tables decorators use for wallpaper pasting. Six of them were completely empty. Seven of them had the lids of seven polished aluminum caskets laid across them. The final seven tables held the seven aluminum caskets themselves, in neat alternate rows, each one adjacent to the table bearing its lid. Reacher stood silent with his head bowed, and then he drew himself up to attention and held a long, silent salute for the first time in more than two years.

  “Awful,” Jodie whispered.

  She was standing with her hands clasped behind her, head bowed, like she was at a graveside ceremony. Reacher released his salute and squeezed her hand.

  “Thank you,” Newman said quietly. “I like people to show respect in here.”

  “How could we not?” Jodie whispered.

  She was staring at the caskets, with tears starting in her eyes.

  “So, Reacher, what do you see?” Newman asked in the silence.

  Reacher’s eyes were wandering around the bright room. He was too shocked to move.

  “I see seven caskets,” he said quietly. “Where I expected to see eight. There were eight people in that Huey. Crew of five, and they picked up three. It’s in DeWitt’s report. Five and three make eight.”

  “And eight minus one makes seven,” Newman said.

  “Did you search the site? Thoroughly?”

  Newman shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll have to figure that out.”

  Reacher shook himself and took a step forward. “May I?”

  “Be my guest,” Newman replied. “Tell me what you see. Concentrate hard, and we’ll see what you’ve remembered, and what you’ve forgotten.”

  Reacher walked to the ne
arest casket and turned so that he was looking down into it along its length. The casket held a rough wooden box, six inches smaller in every dimension than the casket itself.

  “That’s what the Vietnamese make us use,” Newman said. “They sell those boxes to us and make us use them. We put them in our own caskets in the hangar at the airfield in Hanoi.”

  The wooden box had no lid. It was just a shallow tray. There was a jumble of bones in it. Somebody had arranged them in roughly the correct anatomical sequence. There was a skull at the top, yellowed and old. It grinned up with a grotesque smile. There was a gold tooth in the mouth. The empty eye sockets stared. The vertebrae of the neck were lined up neatly. Below them the shoulder blades and the collarbones and the ribs were laid out in their correct places above the pelvis. The arm bones and the leg bones were stacked to the sides. There was the dull glint of a metal chain draped over the vertebrae of the neck, running away under the flatness of the left shoulder blade.

  “May I?” Reacher asked again.

  Newman nodded. “Please.”

  Reacher stood silent for a long moment and then leaned in and hooked his finger under the chain and eased it out. The bones stirred and clicked and moved as the dog tags caught. He pulled them out and brought them up and rubbed the ball of his thumb across their faces. Bent down to read the stamped name.

  “Kaplan,” he said. “The copilot.”

  “How did he die?” Newman asked.

  Reacher draped the tags back across the bony ribs and looked hard for the evidence. The skull was OK. No trace of damage to the arms or legs or chest. But the pelvis was smashed. The vertebrae toward the bottom of the spine were crushed. And the ribs at the back were fractured, eight of them on both sides, counting upward from the bottom.

  “Impact, when the Huey hit the ground. He took a big hit in the lower back. Massive internal trauma and hemorrhage. Probably fatal within a minute.”

  “But he was strapped in his seat,” Newman said. “Head-on crash into the ground, how does that injure him from behind?”

  Reacher looked again. He felt the way he had years before in the classroom, nervous about screwing up in front of the legendary Nash Newman. He looked hard, and he put his hands lightly on the dry bones, feeling them. But he had to be right. This was a crushing impact to the lower back. There was no other explanation.

  “The Huey spun,” he said. “It came in at a shallow angle and the trees spun it around. It separated between the cabin and the tail and the cabin hit the ground traveling backward.”

  Newman nodded. “Excellent. That’s exactly how we found it. It hit backward. Instead of his harness saving him, his chair killed him.”

  Reacher moved on to the next casket. There was the same shallow wooden tray, the same jumble of yellow bones. The same grotesque, accusing, grinning skull. Below it, the neck was broken. He eased the dog tags out from between the shards of cracked bone.

  “Tardelli,” he read.

  “The starboard side gunner,” Newman said.

  Tardelli’s skeleton was a mess. The gunners stood on a slick stand in the open doorway, basically unsecured, juggling with the heavy machine gun swinging on a bungee cord. When the Huey went down, Tardelli had been thrown all over the cabin.

  “Broken neck,” Reacher said. “Crushing to the upper chest.”

  He turned the awful yellow skull over. It was fractured like an eggshell.

  “Head trauma also. I’d say he died instantaneously. Wouldn’t like to say which exact injury killed him.”

  “Neither would I,” Newman said. “He was nineteen years old.”

  There was silence. Nothing in the air except the faint sweet aroma of loam.

  “Look at the next one,” Newman said.

  The next one was different. There was a single injury to the chest. The dog tags were tangled into splintered bones. Reacher couldn’t free them. He had to bend his head to get the name.

  “Bamford.”

  “The crew chief,” Newman said. “He would have been sitting on the cabin bench, facing the rear, opposite the three guys they picked up.”

  Bamford’s bony face grinned up at him. Below it, his skeleton was complete and undamaged, except for the narrow crushing injury sideways across the upper body. It was like a three-inch trench in his chest. The sternum had been punched down to the level of the spine and had gone on and knocked three vertebrae out of line. Three ribs had gone with it.

  “So what do you think?” Newman asked.

  Reacher put his hand into the box and felt the dimensions of the injury. It was narrow and horizontal. Three fingers wouldn’t fit into it, but two would.

  “Some kind of an impact,” he said. “Something between a sharp instrument and a blunt instrument. Hit him sideways in the chest, obviously. It would have stopped his heart immediately. Was it the rotor blade?”

  Newman nodded. “Very good. The way it looked, the rotor folded up against the trees and came down into the cabin. It must have struck him across the upper body. As you say, a blow like that would have stopped his heart instantaneously.”

  In the next casket, the bones were very different. Some of them were the same dull yellow, but most of them were white and brittle and eroded. The dog tags were bent and blackened. Reacher turned them to throw the embossing into relief against the ceiling lights and read: Soper.

  “The port side gunner,” Newman said.

  “’There was a fire,” Reacher said.

  “How can you tell?” Newman asked, like the teacher he was.

  “Dog tags are burned.”

  “And?”

  “The bones are calcinated,” Reacher said. “At least, most of them are.”

  “Calcinated?” Newman repeated.

  Reacher nodded and went back fifteen years to his textbooks.

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

  “Good,” Newman said.

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

  Newman nodded. “Classic evidence. Not a slow fire. A fuel explosion. It spills randomly and bums 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 smashing into the airframe, the sudden loss of power, the spurt of spilling fuel, the fire, the tearing smashing impact through the trees, the screaming, the rotor scything down, the shuddering crash, the screeching of metal, the smashing 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 noble, 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 percent, 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 copilot, 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 classified,” 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 asses 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.”