The Hard Way Part 25

"Yes," the woman said.

"My sister," Hobart said.

Pauling turned back to him. "What the h.e.l.l happened to you?"

"Africa," Hobart said. "Africa happened to me."

He was wearing stiff new denims, dark blue. Jeans, and a s.h.i.+rt. The sleeves and the pant legs were rolled to clear the stumps of his wrists and his s.h.i.+ns, which were all smeared with a clear salve of some kind. The amputations were crude and brutal. Reacher could see the end of a yellow forearm bone protruding like a broken piano key. There was no st.i.tching of the severed flesh. No reconstruction. Mostly just a thick ma.s.s of scarring. Like burns.

"What happened?" Pauling asked again.

"Long story," Hobart said.

"We need to hear it," Reacher said.

"Why? The FBI is here to help me now? After kicking down my sister's door?"

"I'm not FBI," Reacher said.

"Me either," Pauling said. "Not anymore."

"So what are you now?"

"A private investigator."

Hobart's eyes moved to Reacher's face. "And you?"

"The same," Reacher said. "More or less. Freelance. I don't have a license. I used to be an MP."

n.o.body spoke for a minute.

"I was making soup," Dee Marie Graziano said.

Pauling said, "Go ahead. Please. Don't let us hold you up."

Reacher stepped back through the hallway and pushed the shattered door as far shut as it would go. When he got back to the living room Dee Marie was in the kitchen with a flame under a saucepan. She was pouring the soup from the can into it. Stirring the soup with the spoon as it flowed. Pauling was still staring at the broken abbreviated man on the sofa.

"What happened to you?" she asked him for the third time.

"First he eats," Dee Marie called.

CHAPTER 38

HIS SISTER SAT on the sofa next to him and cradled Hobart's head and fed him the soup slowly and carefully with a spoon. Hobart licked his lips after every mouthful and from time to time started to raise one or other of his missing hands to wipe a dribble off his chin. He would look at first perplexed for a fleeting second and then rueful, as if he were amazed at how long the memory of simple physical routines endured even after they were no longer possible. Each time it happened his sister would wait patiently for his handless wrist to return to his lap and then she would wipe his chin with a cloth, tenderly, lovingly, as if he were her child and not her brother. The soup was thick and made from some kind of a light green vegetable, maybe lentils or celery or asparagus, and by the time the bowl was empty the cloth was badly stained.

Pauling said, "We need to talk."

"About what?" Hobart asked.

"About you."

"I'm not much to talk about. What you see is what you get."

"And Edward Lane," Pauling said. "We need to talk about Edward Lane."

"Where is he?"

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"Five years ago," Hobart said. "In Africa."

"What happened there?"

"I was taken alive. Not smart."

"And Knight, too?"

Hobart nodded.

"Knight too," he said.

"How?" Reacher asked.

"You ever been to Burkina Faso?"

"I've never been anywhere in Africa."

Hobart paused for a long moment. He seemed to decide to clam up, and then he seemed to change his mind and decide to talk.

"There was a civil war," he said. "There usually is. We had a city to defend. We usually do. This time it was the capital. We couldn't even say its name. I learned it later. It's called Ouagadougou. But back then we called it O-Town. You were an MP. You know how that goes. The military deploys overseas and changes names. We think we're doing it for intelligibility, but really we're depersonalizing the place, psychologically. Making it ours, so we don't feel so bad when we destroy it."

"What happened there?" Pauling asked.

"O-Town was about the size of Kansas City, Missouri. All the action was to the northeast. The tree line was about a mile outside the city limit. Two roads in, radial, like spokes in a wheel. One was north of northeast and the other was east of northeast. We called them the One O'clock Road and the Two O'clock Road. Like the face of a wrist.w.a.tch? If twelve o'clock was due north, there were roads at the one o'clock position and the two o'clock position. The One O'clock Road was the one we had to worry about. That's the one the rebels were going to be using. Except they wouldn't exactly be using it. They would be flanking it in the jungle. They would be twenty feet off the shoulder and we'd never see them. They were nothing but infantry, with nothing that wasn't man-portable. They were going to be creeping along in the weeds, and we wouldn't see them until they pa.s.sed the tree line and came out in the open."

"Tree line was a mile away?" Reacher said.

"Exactly," Hobart said. "Not a problem. They had a mile of open ground to cross and we had heavy machine guns."

"So where was the problem?"

"If you were them, what would you have done?"

"I would have moved to my left and outflanked you to the east. With at least half my force, maybe more. I would have stayed in the weeds and moved around and come out at you maybe from the four o'clock position. Coordinated attacks. Two directions. You wouldn't have known which was your front and which was your flank."

Hobart nodded. A small painful motion that brought out all the tendons in his scrawny neck.

"We antic.i.p.ated exactly that," he said. "We figured they'd be tracking the One O'clock Road with half their force on the right shoulder and the other half on the left shoulder. We figured about two miles out the half that was on the right shoulder as we were looking at it would wheel ninety degrees to its left and attempt an outflanking manoeuvre. But that meant that maybe five thousand guys would have to cross the Two O'clock Road. Spokes in a wheel, right? We'd see them. The Two O'clock Road was dead-straight. Narrow, but a clear cut through the trees for fifty miles. We could see all the way to the horizon. It was going to be like watching a crosswalk in Times Square."

"So what happened?" Pauling asked.

"Knight and I had been together forever. And we had been Recon Marines. So we volunteered to set up forward OPs. We crawled out about three hundred yards and found a couple of good depressions. Old sh.e.l.l holes, from back in the day. Those places are always fighting. Knight set up with a good view of the One O'clock Road and I set up with a good view of the Two O'clock Road. Plan was if they didn't attempt to outflank us we'd take them head-on and if we were making good progress with that our main force would come out to join us. If their attack was heavy Knight and I would fall back to the city limit and we'd set up a secondary line of defence there. And if I saw the outflanking manoeuvre in progress we'd fall back immediately and reorganize on two fronts."

Reacher asked, "So where did it all go wrong?"

"I made two mistakes," Hobart said. Just four words, but the effort of getting them out seemed to suddenly exhaust him. He closed his eyes and his lips tightened against his toothless gums and he started wheezing from the chest.

"He has malaria and tuberculosis," his sister said. "You're tiring him out.

"Is he getting care?" Pauling asked.

"We have no benefits. The VA does a little. Apart from that I take him to the Saint Vincent's ER."

"How? How do you get him up and down the stairs?"

"I carry him," Dee Marie said. "On my back."

Hobart coughed hard and dribbled blood-flecked spittle down his chin. He raised his severed wrist high and wiped himself with what was left of his bicep. Then he opened his eyes. Reacher asked him, "What two mistakes?"

"There was an early feint," Hobart said. "About ten point men came out of the trees a mile ahead of Knight. They were going for death or glory, you know, running and firing unaimed. Knight let them run for about fifteen hundred yards and then he dropped them all with his rifle. I couldn't see him. He was about a hundred yards away but the terrain was uneven. I crawled over to check he was OK."

"And was he?"

"He was fine."

"Neither of you had been wounded?"

"Wounded? Not even close."

"But there had been small arms fire?"

"Some."

"Go on."

"When I got to Knight's position I realized I could see the Two O'clock Road even better from his hole than from mine. Plus I figured when the shooting starts it's always better to be paired up. We could cover each other for jams and reloads. So that was my first mistake. I put myself in the same foxhole as Knight."

"And the second mistake?"

"I believed what Edward Lane told me."

CHAPTER 39

REACHER ASKED, "What did Edward Lane tell you?"

But Hobart couldn't answer for a minute. He was consumed with another bout of coughing. His caved chest heaved. His truncated limbs flailed uselessly. Blood and thick yellow mucus rimed his lips. Dee Marie ducked back to the kitchen and rinsed her cloth and filled a gla.s.s with water. Wiped Hobart's face very carefully and let him sip from the gla.s.s. Then she took him under the arms and hauled him into an upright position. He coughed twice more and then stopped as the fluid settled lower in his lungs.

"It's a balance," Dee Marie said, to n.o.body in particular. "We need to keep his chest clear but coughing too much wears him out."

Reacher asked, "Hobart? What did Lane tell you?"

Hobart panted for a moment and fixed his eyes on Reacher's in a mute appeal for patience. Then he said, "About thirty minutes after that first feint Lane showed up in Knight's foxhole. He seemed surprised to see me there, too. He checked that Knight was OK and told him to stay with the mission. Then he turned to me and told me he had definitive new intelligence that we were going to see men crossing the Two O'clock Road but that they would be government troops coming in from the bush and circling around to reinforce us through the rear. He said they had been on a night march and were taking it slow and stealthy because they were so close to the rebels. Both sides were incoming on parallel tracks less than forty yards apart. No danger of visual contact because of how thick the vegetation was, but they were worried about noise. So Lane told me to sit tight and watch the road and just count them cross it, and the higher the number was the better I should feel about it, because they were all on our side."

"And you saw them?"

"Thousands and thousands of them. Your basic ragtag army, all on foot, no transport, decent firepower, plenty of Browning automatic rifles, some M60s, some light mortars. They crossed two abreast and it took hours."

"And then?"

"We sat tight. All day, and into the night. Then all h.e.l.l broke loose. We had night scopes and we could see what was happening. About five thousand guys just stepped out of the trees and a.s.sembled on the One O'clock Road and started marching straight toward us. At the same time another five thousand stepped out of the brush just south of the four o'clock position and came straight at us. They were the same guys I had counted earlier. They weren't government troops. They were rebels. Lane's new intelligence had been wrong. At least that's what I thought at first. Later I realized he had lied to me."

"What happened?" Pauling said.

"At first nothing computed. The rebels started firing from way too far away. Africa's a big continent but most of them probably missed it. At that point Knight and I were kind of relaxed. Plans are always bulls.h.i.+t. Everything in war is improvisation. So we expected some suppressing fire from behind us to allow us to fall back. But it never came. I was turned around staring at the city behind me. It was just three hundred yards away. But it was all dark and silent. Then I turned back and saw these ten thousand guys coming at me. Two different directions ninety degrees apart. Dead of night. Suddenly I had the feeling Knight and I were the only two Westerners left in-country. Turns out I was probably right. The way I pieced it together afterward, Lane and all the other crews had pulled out twelve hours before. He must have gotten back from his little visit with us and just hopped straight into his jeep. Mounted everyone up and headed due south for the border with Ghana. Then to the airport at Tamale, which was where we came in."

Reacher said, "What we need to know is why he did that."

"That's easy," Hobart said. "I had plenty of time to figure it out afterward, believe me. Lane abandoned us because he wanted Knight dead. I just happened to be in the wrong foxhole, that's all. I was collateral damage."

"Why did Lane want Knight dead?"

"Because Knight killed Lane's wife."

CHAPTER 40