Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “We should talk to him,” I said. “Find out exactly what they told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded.”

  I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out of Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn’t been killed there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east, or west.

  “Are you going to call Willard?” Summer asked me.

  “Probably,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Not before midnight?”

  “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”

  “That’s a risk.”

  “I’m protected,” I said.

  “Might not last forever.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll have Delta Force coming after me soon. That’ll make everything else seem kind of academic.”

  “Call Willard tonight,” she said. “That would be my advice.”

  I looked at her.

  “As a friend,” she said. “AWOL is a big deal. No point making things worse.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Do it now,” she said. “Why not?”

  “OK,” I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door. She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the fifth of January.

  “Whose orders?” I asked her.

  “General Vassell’s,” she said.

  “OK,” I said.

  She closed the door.

  “The fifth of January,” Summer said.

  “The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,” I said.

  “He knows something.”

  “He wasn’t even here.”

  “Why else would they hide him away afterward?”

  “It’s a coincidence.”

  “You don’t like coincidences.”

  I nodded.

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s go to Germany.”

  eighteen

  No way was Willard about to authorize any foreign expeditions so I walked over to the Provost Marshal’s office and took a stack of travel vouchers out of the company clerk’s desk. I carried them back to my own office and signed them all with my name on the CO lines and respectable forgeries of Leon Garber’s signature on the Authorized by lines.

  “We’re breaking the law,” Summer said.

  “This is the Battle of Kursk,” I said. “We can’t stop now.”

  She hesitated.

  “Your choice,” I said. “In or out, no pressure from me.”

  She said nothing.

  “These vouchers won’t come back for a month or two,” I said. “By then either Willard will be gone, or we will. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “Go pack,” I said. “Three days.”

  She left and I asked my sergeant to figure out who was next in line for acting CO. She came back with a name I recognized as the female captain I had seen in the O Club dining room. The one with the busted arm. I wrote her a note explaining I would be out for three days. I told her she was in charge. Then I picked up the phone and called Joe.

  “I’m going to Germany,” I said.

  “OK,” he said. “Enjoy. Have a safe trip.”

  “I can’t go to Germany without stopping by Paris on the way back. You know, under the circumstances.”

  He paused.

  “No,” he said. “I guess you can’t.”

  “Wouldn’t be right not to,” I said. “But she shouldn’t think I care more than you do. That wouldn’t be right either. So you should come over too.”

  “When?”

  “Take the overnight flight two days from now. I’ll meet you at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle. Then we’ll go see her together.”

  Summer met me on the sidewalk outside my quarters and we carried our bags to the Chevy. We were both in BDUs because we figured our best shot was a night transport out of Andrews Air Force Base. We were too late for a civilian red-eye and we didn’t want to wait all night for the breakfast flights. We got in the car and logged out at the gate. Summer was driving, of course. She accelerated hard and then dropped into a smooth rhythm that was about ten miles an hour faster than the other cars heading our way.

  I sat back and watched the road. Watched the shoulders, and the strip malls, and the traffic. We drove north thirty miles and passed by Kramer’s motel. Hit the cloverleaf and jogged east to I-95. Headed north. We passed the rest area. Passed the spot a mile later where the briefcase had been found. I closed my eyes.

  I slept all the way to Andrews. We got there well after midnight. We parked in a restricted lot and swapped two of our travel vouchers for two places on a Transportation Corps C-130 that was leaving for Frankfurt at three in the morning. We waited in a lounge that had fluorescent lighting and vinyl benches and was filled with the usual ragtag bunch of transients. The military is always on the move. There are always people going somewhere, any time of the night or day. Nobody talked. Nobody ever did. We all just sat there, stiff and tired and uncomfortable.

  The loadmaster came to get us thirty minutes before takeoff. We filed out onto the tarmac and walked up the ramp into the belly of the plane. There was a long line of cargo pallets in the center bay. We sat on webbing jump seats with our backs to the fuselage wall. On the whole I figured I preferred the first-class section on Air France. The Transportation Corps doesn’t have stewardesses and it doesn’t brew in-flight coffee.

  We took off a little late, heading west into the wind. Then we turned a slow one-eighty over D.C. and struck out east. I felt the movement. There were no windows, but I knew we were above the city. Joe was down there somewhere, sleeping.

  The fuselage wall was very cold at altitude so we all leaned forward with our elbows on our knees. It was too noisy to talk. I stared at a pallet of tank ammunition until my vision blurred and I fell back to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable, but one thing you learn in the army is how to sleep anywhere. I woke up maybe ten times and spent most of the trip in a state of suspended animation. The roar of the engines and the rush of the slipstream helped induce it. It was relatively restful. It was about sixty percent as good as being in bed.

  We were in the air nearly eight hours before we started our initial descent. There was no intercom. No cheery message from the pilot. Just a change in the engine note and a downward lurching movement and a sharp sensation in the ears. All around me people were standing up and stretching. Summer had her back flat against an ammunition crate, rubbing like a cat. She looked pretty good. Her hair was too short to get messy and her eyes were bright. She looked determined, like she knew she was heading for doom or glory and was resigned to not knowing which.

  We all sat down again and held tight to the webbing for the landing. The wheels touched down and the reverse thrust howled and the brakes jammed on tight. The pallets jerked forward against their straps. Then the engines cut back and we taxied a long way and stopped. The ramp came down and a dim dusk sky showed through the hole. It was five o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, six hours ahead of the East Coast, one hour ahead of Zulu time. I was starving. I had eaten nothing since the burger in Sperryville the previous day. Summer and I stood up and grabbed our bags and got in line. Shuffled down the ramp with the others and out onto the tarmac. The weather was cold. It felt pretty much the same as North Carolina.

  We were way out in the restricted military corner of the Frankfurt airport. We took a personnel bus to the public terminal. After that we were on our own. Some of the other guys had transport waiting, but we didn’t. We joined a bunch of ci
vilians in the taxi line. Shuffled up, one by one. When our turn came we gave the driver a travel voucher and told him to drive us east to XII Corps. He was happy enough to comply. He could swap the voucher for hard currency at any U.S. post and I was certain he would pick up a couple of XII Corps guys going out into Frankfurt for a night on the town. No deadheading. No empty running. He was making a living off of the U.S. Army, just like plenty of Germans had for four and a half decades. He was driving a Mercedes-Benz.

  The trip took thirty minutes. We drove east through suburbs. They looked like a lot of West German places. There were vast tracts of pale honey buildings built back in the fifties. The new neighborhoods ran west to east in random curving shapes, following the routes the bombers had followed. No nation ever lost a war the way Germany lost. Like everyone, I had seen the pictures taken in 1945. Defeat was not a big enough word. Armageddon would be better. The whole country had been smashed to powdered rubble by a juggernaut. The evidence would be there for all time, written in the architecture. And under the architecture. Every time the phone company dug a trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones and teacups and shells and rusted-out Panzerfausts. Every time ground was broken for a new foundation, a priest was standing by before the steam shovels took their first bite. I was born in Berlin, surrounded by Americans, surrounded by whole square miles of patched-up devastation. They started it, we used to say.

  The suburban streets were neat and clean. There were discreet stores with apartments above them. The store windows were full of shiny items. Street signs were black-on-white, written in an archaic script that made them hard to read. There were small U.S. Army road signs here and there too. You couldn’t go very far without seeing one. We followed the XII Corps arrows, getting closer all the time. We left the built-up area and drove through a couple of kilometers of farmland. It felt like a moat. Like insulation. The eastern sky ahead of us was dark.

  XII Corps was based in a typical glory-days installation. Some Nazi industrialist had built a thousand-acre factory site out in the fields, back in the 1930s. It had featured an impressive home office building and ranks of low metal sheds stretching hundreds of meters behind it. The sheds had been bombed to twisted shards, over and over again. The home office building had been only partially damaged. Some weary U.S. Army armored division had set up camp in it in 1945. Thin Frankfurt women in headscarves and faded print dresses had been brought in to pile the rubble, in exchange for food. They worked with wheelbarrows and shovels. Then the Army Corps of Engineers had fixed up the office building and bulldozed the piles of rubble away. Successive huge waves of Pentagon spending had rolled in. By 1953 the place was a flagship installation. There was cleaned brick and shining white paint and a strong perimeter fence. There were flagpoles and sentry boxes and guard shacks. There were mess halls and a medical clinic and a PX. There were barracks and workshops and warehouses. Above all there were a thousand acres of flat land and by 1953 it was covered with American tanks. They were all lined up, facing east, ready to roll out and fight for the Fulda Gap.

  When we got there thirty-seven years later it was too dark to see much. But I knew that nothing fundamental would have changed. The tanks would be different, but that would be all. The M4 Shermans that had won World War Two were long gone, except for two fine examples standing preserved outside the main gate, one on each side, like symbols. They were placed halfway up landscaped concrete ramps, noses high, tails low, like they were still in motion, breasting a rise. They were lit up theatrically. They were beautifully painted, glossy green, with bright white stars on their sides. They looked much better than they had originally. Behind them was a long driveway with white-painted curbs and the floodlit front of the office building, which was now the post headquarters. Behind that would be the tank lagers, with M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks lined up shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of them, at nearly four million bucks apiece.

  We got out of the taxi and crossed the sidewalk and headed for the main gate guard shack. My special unit badge got us past it. It would get us past any U.S. Army checkpoint anywhere except the inner ring of the Pentagon. We carried our bags down the driveway.

  “Been here before?” Summer asked me.

  I shook my head as I walked.

  “I’ve been in Heidelberg with the infantry,” I said. “Many times.”

  “Is that near?”

  “Not far,” I said.

  There were broad stone steps leading up to the doors. The whole place looked like a capitol building in some small state back home. It was immaculately maintained. We went up the steps and inside. There was a soldier at a desk just behind the doors. Not an MP. Just a XII Corps office grunt. We showed him our IDs.

  “Your VOQ got space for us?” I asked.

  “Sir, no problem,” he said.

  “Two rooms,” I said. “One night.”

  “I’ll call ahead,” he said. “Just follow the signs.”

  He pointed to the back of the hallway. There were more doors there that would lead out into the complex. I checked my watch. It said noon exactly. It was still set to East Coast time. Six in the evening, in West Germany. Already dark.

  “I need to see your MP XO,” I said. “Is he still in his office?”

  The guy used his phone and got an answer. Pointed us up a broad staircase to the second floor.

  “On your right,” he said.

  We went up the stairs and turned right. There was a long corridor with offices on both sides. They had hardwood doors with reeded glass windows. We found the one we wanted and went in. It was an outer chamber with a sergeant in it. It was pretty much identical to the one back at Bird. Same paint, same floor, same furniture, same temperature, same smell. Same coffee, in the same standard-issue machine. The sergeant was like plenty I had seen before too. Calm, efficient, stoic, ready to believe he ran the place all by himself, which he probably did. He was behind his desk and he looked up at us as we came in. Spent half a second deciding who we were and what we wanted.

  “I guess you need the major,” he said.

  I nodded. He picked up his phone and buzzed through to the inner office.

  “Go straight through,” he said.

  We went in through the inner door and I saw a desk with a guy called Swan behind it. I knew Swan pretty well. Last time I had seen him was in the Philippines, three months earlier, when he was starting a tour of duty that was scheduled to last a year.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You got here December twenty-ninth.”

  “Froze my ass off,” he said. “All I had was Pacific gear. Took XII Corps three days to find me a winter uniform.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Swan was short, and wide. Almost cubic. He probably owned a percentile all his own, on the quartermasters’ charts.

  “Your Provost Marshal here?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Temporarily reassigned.”

  “Garber signed your orders?”

  “Allegedly.”

  “Figured it out yet?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  He shrugged, like he was saying, Hey, the army, what can you do?

  “This is Lieutenant Summer,” I said.

  “Special unit?” Swan said.

  Summer shook her head.

  “But she’s cool,” I said.

  Swan stretched a short arm over his desk and they shook hands.

  “I need to see a guy called Marshall,” I said. “A major. Some kind of a XII Corps staffer.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “Someone is. I’m hoping Marshall will help me figure out who. You know him?”

  “Never heard of him,” Swan said. “I only just got here.”

  “I know,” I said. “December twenty-ninth.”

  He smiled and gave me the What can you do? shrug again and picked up his phone. I heard him ask his sergeant to find Marshall and tell him I wanted to see him at his convenience. I looked around while we waited for the response.
Swan’s office looked borrowed and temporary, just like mine did back in North Carolina. It had the same kind of clock on the wall. Electric, no second hand. No tick. It said ten minutes past six.

  “Anything happening here?” I said.

  “Not much,” Swan said. “Some helicopter guy went shopping in Heidelberg and got run over. And Kramer died, of course. That’s shaken things up some.”

  “Who’s next in line?”

  “Vassell, I guess.”

  “I met him,” I said. “Wasn’t impressed.”

  “It’s a poisoned chalice. Things are changing. You should hear these guys talk. They’re real gloomy.”

  “The status quo is not an option,” I said. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

  His phone rang. He listened for a minute and put it down.

  “Marshall’s not on-post,” he said. “He’s out on a night exercise in the countryside. Back in the morning.”

  Summer glanced at me. I shrugged.

  “Have dinner with me,” Swan said. “I’m lonely here with all these cavalry types. The O Club in an hour?”

  We carried our bags over to the Visiting Officers’ Quarters and found our rooms. Mine looked pretty much the same as the one Kramer had died in, except it was cleaner. It was a standard American motel layout. Presumably some hotel chain had bid for the government contract, way back when. Then they had airfreighted all the fixtures and fittings, right down to the sinks and the towel rails and the toilet bowls.

  I shaved and took a shower and dressed in clean BDUs. Knocked on Summer’s door fifty-five minutes into Swan’s hour. She opened up. She looked clean and fresh. Behind her the room looked the same as mine, except it already smelled like a woman’s. There was some kind of nice eau de toilette in the air.

  The O Club occupied half of one of the ground floor wings of the main building. It was a grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster moldings. There was a lounge, and a bar, and a dining room. We found Swan in the bar. He was with a lieutenant colonel who was wearing Class As with a combat infantryman’s badge on the coat. It was an odd thing to see, on an Armored post. His nameplate said: Simon. He introduced himself to us. I got the feeling he was going to join us for dinner. He told us he was a liaison officer, working on behalf of the infantry. He told us there was an Armored guy down in Heidelberg, doing the same job in reverse.