Tripwire Part 26

'We need what you've got on a Victor Truman Hobie,' Reacher said.

'Vietnam?'

'You familiar with him?' Reacher asked, surprised.

Conrad looked blank. 'Never heard of him. But with Truman for a middle name, he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1952, wasn't he? Which made him too young for Korea and too old for the Gulf.'

Reacher nodded. He was starting to like Theodore Conrad. He was a sharp guy. He would have liked to pull his file to see what was keeping him a major, behind a desk out in Missouri at the age of forty-five.

'We'll work in here,' Conrad said. 'My pleasure.'

He picked up the phone and called directly to the storerooms, by-pa.s.sing the master sergeant at the front desk. He winked at Reacher and ordered up the Hobie file. Then they sat in comfortable silence until the runner came in with the folder five minutes later.

'That was quick,' Jodie said.

'Actually it was a little slow,' Conrad said back. 'Think about it from the private's point of view. He hears me say H for Hobie, he runs to the H section, he locates the file by first and middle initials, he grabs it, he runs up here with it. My people are subject to the Army's normal standards for physical fitness, which means he could probably run most of a mile in five minutes. And although this is a very big place, there was a lot less than a mile to cover in the triangle between his desk and the H section and this office, believe me. So he was actually a little slow. I suspect the master sergeant interrupted him, just to frustrate me.'

Victor Hobie's file jacket was old and furred, with a printed grid on the cover where access requests were noted in neat handwriting. There were only two. Conrad traced the names with a finger.

'Requests by telephone,' he said. 'General Garber himself, in March of this year. And somebody called Costello, calling from New York, beginning of last week. Why all the sudden interest?'

'That's what we hope to find out,' Reacher said.

A combat soldier has a thick file, especially a combat soldier who did his fighting thirty years ago. Three decades is long enough for every report and every note to end up in exactly the right place. Victor Hobie's paperwork was a compressed ma.s.s about two inches deep. The old furred jacket was moulded tight around it. It reminded Reacher of Costello's black leather wallet, which he'd seen in the Keys bar. He hitched his chair closer to Jodie's and closer to the front edge of Conrad's desk. Conrad laid the file down and reversed it on the s.h.i.+ny wood and opened it up, like he was displaying a rare treasure to interested connoisseurs.

Marilyn's instructions had been precise, and Sheryl followed them to the letter. The first step was get treatment. She went to the desk and then waited on a hard plastic chair in the triage bay. The St Vincent's ER was less busy than it sometimes is and she was seen within ten minutes by a woman doctor young enough to be her daughter.

'How did this happen?' the doctor asked.

'I walked into a door,' Sheryl said.

The doctor led her to a curtain area and sat her down on the examination table. Started checking the reflex responses in her limbs.

'A door? You absolutely sure about that?'

Sheryl nodded. Stuck to her story. Marilyn was counting on her to do that.

'It was half-open. I turned around, just didn't see it.'

The doctor said nothing and shone a light into Sheryl's left eye, then her right.

'Any blurring of your vision?'

Sheryl nodded. 'A little.'

'Headache?'

'Like you wouldn't believe.'

The doctor paused and studied the admission form.

'OK, we need X-rays of the facial bones, obviously, but I also want a full skull film and a CAT scan. We need to see what exactly happened in there. Your insurance is good, so I'm going to get a surgeon to take a look at you right away, because if you're going to need reconstructive work it's a lot better to start on that sooner rather than later, OK? So you need to get into a gown and lie down. Then I'll put you on a painkiller to help with the headache.'

Sheryl heard Marilyn insist make the call before the painkiller, or you'll fuzz out and forget.

'I need to get to a phone,' she said, worried.

'We can call your husband, if you want,' the doctor said, neutrally.

'No, I'm not married. It's a lawyer. I need to call somebody's lawyer.'

The doctor looked at her and shrugged.

'OK, down the hall. But be quick.'

Sheryl walked to the bank of phones opposite the triage bay. She called the operator and asked for collect, like Marilyn had told her to. Repeated the number she'd memorized. The phone was answered on the second ring.

'Forster and Abelstein,' a bright voice said. 'How may we help you?'

'I'm calling on behalf of Mr Chester Stone,' Sheryl said. 'I need to speak with his attorney.'

'That would be Mr Forster himself,' the bright voice said. 'Please hold.'

While Sheryl was listening to the hold music, the doctor was twenty feet away, at the main desk, also making a call. Her call featured no music. Her call was to the NYPD's Domestic Violence Unit.

'This is St Vincent's,' she was saying. 'I've got another one for you. This one says she walked into a d.a.m.n door. Won't even admit she's married, much less he's beating on her. You can come on down and talk to her any time you want.'

The first item in the file was Victor Hobie's original application to join the Army. It was brown at the edges and crisp with age, handwritten in the same neat left-handed schoolboy script they had seen in the letters home to Brighton. It listed a summary of his education, his desire to fly helicopters, and not very much else. On the face of it, not an obvious rising star. But around that time for every one boy stepping up to volunteer, there were two dozen others buying oneway tickets on the Greyhound to Canada, so the Army recruiters had grabbed Hobie with both hands and sent him straight to the doctor.

He had been given a flight medical, which was a tougher examination than standard, especially concerning eyesight and balance. He had pa.s.sed A-l. Six feet one inch, 170 pounds, 20/20 vision, good lung capacity, free of infectious diseases. The medical was dated early in the spring, and Reacher could picture the boy, pale from the New York winter, standing in his boxers on a bare wooden floor with a tape measure tight around his chest.

Next item in the file showed he was given travel vouchers and ordered to report to Fort Dix in two weeks' time. The following batch of paperwork originated from down there. It started with the form he signed on his arrival, irrevocably committing himself to loyal service in the United States Army. Fort Dix was twelve weeks of basic training. There were six proficiency a.s.sessments. He scored well above average in all of them. No comments were recorded.

Then there was a requisition for travel vouchers to Fort Polk, and a copy of his orders to report there for a month of advanced infantry training. There were notes about his progress with weapons. He was rated good, which meant something at Polk. At Dix, you were rated good if you could recognize a rifle at ten paces. At Polk, such a rating spoke of excellent hand-to-eye co-ordination, steady muscle control, calm temperament. Reacher was no expert on flying, but he guessed the instructors would have been fairly sanguine about eventually letting this guy loose with a helicopter.

There were more travel vouchers, this time to Fort Wolters in Texas, where the US Army Primary Helicopter School was located. There was a note attached from the Polk CO indicating Hobie had turned down a week's leave in favour of heading straight there. It was just a bald statement, but it carried an approving resonance, even after all those years. Here was a guy who was just about itching to get going. '

The paperwork thickened up at Wolters. It was a five-month stay, and it was serious stuff, like college. First came a month of pre-flight training, with heavy academic concentration on physics and aeronautics and navigation, taught in cla.s.srooms. It was necessary to pa.s.s to progress. Hobie had creamed it. The maths talent his father had hoped to turn to accountancy ran riot through those textbook subjects. He pa.s.sed out of pre-flight top of his cla.s.s. The only negative was a short note about his att.i.tude. Some officer was criticizing him for trading favours for coaching. Hobie was helping some stragglers through the complex equations and in return they were s.h.i.+ning his boots and cleaning his kit. Reacher shrugged to himself. The officer was clearly an a.s.shole. Hobie was training to be a helicopter pilot, not a d.a.m.n saint.

The next four months at Wolters were airborne for primary flight training, initially on H-23 Hillers. Hobie's first instructor was a guy called Lanark. His training notes were written in a wild scrawl, very anecdotal, very un-military. Sometimes very funny. He claimed learning to fly a helicopter was like learning to ride a bike as a kid. You screwed it up, and you screwed it up, and you screwed it up, and then all of a sudden it came right and you never again forgot how to do it. In Lanark's opinion, Hobie had maybe taken longer than he ought to master it, but thereafter his progress moved from excellent to outstanding. He signed him off the Hiller and on to the H-19 Sikorsky, which was like moving up to a ten-speed English racer. He performed better on the Sikorsky than he had on the Hiller. He was a natural, and he got better the more complicated the machines became.

He finished Wolters overall second in his cla.s.s, rated outstanding, just behind an ace called A. A. DeWitt. More travel vouchers had them heading out together, over to Fort Rucker in Alabama, for another four months in advanced flight training.

'Have I heard of this guy DeWitt?' Reacher asked. 'The name rings a bell.'

Conrad was following progress upside down.

'Could be General DeWitt,' he said. 'He runs the Helicopter School back at Wolters now. That would be logical, right? I'll check it out.'

He called direct to the storeroom and ordered up Major General A. A. DeWitt. Checked his watch as the phone went back down. 'Should be faster, because the D section is nearer his desk than the H section. Unless the d.a.m.n master sergeant interferes with him again.'

Reacher smiled briefly and rejoined Jodie thirty years in the past. Fort Rucker was the real thing, with brand-new frontline a.s.sault helicopters replacing the trainers. Bell UH-1 Iroquois, nicknamed Hueys. Big, fierce machines, gas turbine engines, the unforgettable wop-wop-wop sound of a rotor blade forty-eight feet long and twenty-one inches wide. Young Victor Hobie had hurled one around the Alabama skies for seventeen long weeks, and then he pa.s.sed out with credits and distinctions at the parade his father had photographed.

'Three minutes forty seconds,' Conrad whispered.

The runner was on his way in with the DeWitt jacket. Conrad leaned forward and took it from him. The guy saluted and went back out.

'I can't let you see this,' Conrad said. 'The general's still a serving officer, right? But I'll tell you if it's the same DeWitt.'

He opened the file at the beginning and Reacher saw flashes of the same paper as in Hobie's. Conrad skimmed and nodded. 'Same DeWitt. He survived the jungle and stayed onboard afterward. Total helicopter nut. My guess is he'll serve out his time down at Wolters.'

Reacher nodded. Glanced out of the window. The sun was falling away into afternoon.

'You guys want some coffee?' Conrad asked.

'Great,' Jodie said. Reacher nodded again.

Conrad picked up the phone and called the storeroom.

'Coffee,' he said. 'That's not a file. It's a request for refreshment. Three cups, best china, OK?'

The runner brought it in on a silver tray, by which time Reacher was up at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, with Victor Hobie and his new pal A. A. DeWitt reporting to the 3rd Transportation Company of the First Cavalry Division. The two boys were there two weeks, long enough for the Army to add air-mobile to their unit designation, and then to change it completely to Company B, 229th a.s.sault Helicopter Battalion. At the end of the two weeks, the renamed company sailed away from the Alabama coast, part of a seventeen-s.h.i.+p convoy on a thirty-one-day sea voyage to Long Mai Bay, twenty miles south of Qui Nhon and eleven thousand miles away in Vietnam.

Thirty-one days at sea is a whole month, and the company bra.s.s invented make-work to keep boredom at bay. Hobie's file indicated he signed up for maintenance, which meant endlessly rinsing and greasing the disa.s.sembled Hueys to beat the salt air down in the s.h.i.+p's hold. The note was approving, and Hobie stepped on to the Indochina beach a first lieutenant, after leaving the States a second, and thirteen months after joining the Army as an officer candidate. Merited promotions for a worthy recruit. One of the good kids. Reacher recalled Ed Steven's words, in the hot suns.h.i.+ne outside the hardware store: very serious, very earnest, but not really a whole lot out of the ordinary.

'Cream?' Conrad asked.

Reacher shook his head, in time with Jodie.

'Just black,' they said, together.

Conrad poured and Reacher kept on reading. There were two variants of Huey in use at that time: one was a guns.h.i.+p, and the other was a transport chopper nicknamed a slick. Company B was a.s.signed to fly slicks, servicing the First Cavalry's battlefield transport needs. The slick was a transport hack, but it was not unarmed. It was a standard Huey, with the side doors stripped off and a heavy machine-gun hung on a bungee cord in each open doorway. There were a pilot and a co-pilot, two gunners, and a crew chief acting as an all-purpose engineer and mechanic. The slick could lift as many grunts as could pack themselves into the boxy s.p.a.ce between the two gunners' backs, or a ton of ammunition, or any combination.

There was on-the-job training to reflect the fact that Vietnam was very different from Alabama. There was no formal grading attached to it, but Hobie and DeWitt were the first new pilots a.s.signed to the jungle. Then the requirement was to fly five combat missions as a co-pilot, and if you handled that, you took the pilot's seat and got your own co-pilot. Then the serious business started, and it was reflected in the file. The whole second half of the jacket was stuffed with mission reports on flimsy onion-skin paper. The language was dry and matter of fact. They were not written by Hobie himself. They were the work of the company despatch clerk.

It was very episodic fighting. The war was boiling all around him unabated, but Hobie spent a long time on the ground, because of the weather. For days at a time, the fogs and mists of Vietnam made it suicidal to fly a helicopter low-level into the jungle valleys. Then the weather would suddenly clear and the reports would clump together all under the same date: three, five, sometimes seven missions a day, against furious enemy opposition, inserting, recovering, supplying and resupplying the ground troops. Then the mists would roll back in, and the Hueys would wait inert once more in their laagers. Reacher pictured Hobie, lying in his hooch for days on end, frustrated or relieved, bored or tense, then bursting back into terrifying action for frantic exhausting hours of combat.

The reports were separated into two halves by paperwork doc.u.menting the end of the first tour, the routine award of the medal, the long furlough back in New York, the start of the second tour. Then more combat reports. Same exact work, same exact pattern. There were fewer reports from the second tour. The very last sheet in the file recorded Lieutenant Victor Hobie's 991st career combat mission. Not routine First Cavalry business. It was a special a.s.signment. He took off from Pleiku, heading east for an improvised landing zone near the An Khe Pa.s.s. His orders were to fly in as one of two slicks and exfiltrate the personnel waiting on the landing zone. DeWitt was flying backup. Hobie got there first. He landed in the centre of the tiny landing zone, under heavy machine-gun fire from the jungle. He was seen to take onboard just three men. He took off again almost immediately. His Huey was taking hits to the airframe from the machine-guns. His own gunners were returning fire blind through the jungle canopy. DeWitt was circling as Hobie was heading out. He saw Hobie's Huey take a sustained burst of heavy machine-gun fire through the engines. His formal report as recorded by the despatch clerk said he saw the Huey's rotor stop and flames appear in the fuel tank area. The helicopter crashed through the jungle canopy four miles west of the landing zone, at a low angle and at a speed estimated by DeWitt to be in excess of eighty miles an hour. DeWitt reported a green flash visible through the foliage, which was normally indicative of a fuel-tank explosion on the forest floor. A search-and-rescue operation was mounted and aborted because of weather. No fragments of wreckage were observed. Because the area four miles west of the pa.s.s was considered inaccessible virgin jungle, it was procedure to a.s.sume there were no NVA troops on foot in the immediate vicinity. Therefore there had been no risk of immediate capture by the enemy. Therefore the eight men in the Huey were listed as missing in action.

'But why?' Jodie asked. 'DeWitt saw the thing blow up. Why list them as missing? They were obviously all killed, right?'

Major Conrad shrugged.

'I guess so,' he said. 'But n.o.body knew it for sure. DeWitt saw a flash through the leaves, is all. Could theoretically have been an NVA ammo dump, hit by a lucky shot from the machine as it went down. Could have been anything. They only ever said killed in action when they knew for d.a.m.n sure. When somebody literally eyeballed it happening. Fighter planes went down alone two hundred miles out in the ocean, the pilot was listed as missing, not killed, because perhaps he could have swum away somewhere. To list them as killed, someone had to see it happen. I could show you a file ten times thicker than this one, packed with orders defining and redefining exactly how to describe casualties.'

'Why?' Jodie asked again. 'Because they were afraid of the press?'

Conrad shook his head. 'No, I'm talking about internal stuff here. Any time they were afraid of the press, they just told lies. This all was for two reasons. First, they didn't want to get it wrong for the next of kin. Believe me, weird things happened. It was a totally alien environment. People survived things you wouldn't expect them to survive. People turned up later. They found people. There was a ma.s.sive search-and-recover deal running, all the time. People got taken prisoner, and Charlie never issued prisoner lists, not until years later. And you couldn't tell folks their boy was killed, only to have him turn up alive later on.

So they were anxious to keep on saying missing, just as long as they could.'

Then he paused for a long moment.

'Second reason is yes, they were afraid. But not of the press. They were afraid of themselves. They were afraid of telling themselves they were getting beat, and beat bad.'

Reacher was scanning the final mission report, picking out the co-pilot's name. He was a second lieutenant named F. G. Kaplan. He had been Hobie's regular partner throughout most of the second tour.

'Can I see this guy's jacket?' he asked.

'K section?' Conrad said. 'Be about four minutes.'

They sat in silence with the cold coffee until the runner brought F.G. Kaplan's life story to the office. It was a thick old file, similar size and vintage as Hobie's. There was the same printed grid on the front cover, recording access requests. The only note less than twenty years old showed a telephone enquiry had been made last April by Leon Garber. Reacher turned the file facedown and opened it up from the back. Started with the second-to-last sheet of paper. It was identical to the last sheet in Hobie's jacket. The same mission report, with the same eyewitness account from DeWitt, written up by the same clerk in the same handwriting.

But the final sheet in Kaplan's file was dated exactly two years later than the final mission report. It was a formal determination made after due consideration of the circ.u.mstances by the Department of the Army that F. G. Kaplan had been killed in action four miles west of the An Khe Pa.s.s when the helicopter he was co-piloting was brought down by enemy ground-to-air fire. No body had been recovered, but the death was to be considered as actual for purposes of memorializing and payment of pensions. Reacher squared the sheet of paper on the desk. 'So why doesn't Victor Hobie have one of these?' Conrad shook his head. 'I don't know.' 'I want to go to Texas,' Reacher said.

Noi Bai Airport outside Hanoi and Hickam Field outside Honolulu share exactly the same lat.i.tude, so the US Air Force Starlifter flew neither north nor south. It just followed a pure west-east flight path across the Pacific, holding comfortably between the Tropic of Cancer and the Twentieth Parallel. Six thousand miles, six hundred miles an hour, ten hours' flight time, but it was on approach seven hours before it took off, at three o'clock in the afternoon of the day before. The Air Force captain made the usual announcement as they crossed the date line and the tall silver-haired American in the rear of the c.o.c.kpit wound his watch back and added another bonus day to his life.

Hickam Field is Hawaii's main military air facility, but it shares runway s.p.a.ce and air-traffic control with Honolulu International, so the Starlifter had to turn a wide weary circle above the sea, waiting for a JAL 747 from Tokyo to get down. Then it turned in and flattened and came down behind it, tyres shrieking, engines screaming with reverse thrust. The pilot was not concerned with the niceties of civilian flying, so she jammed the brakes on hard and stopped short enough to get off the runway on the first taxiway. There was a standing request from the airport to keep the military planes away from the tourists. Especially the j.a.panese tourists. This pilot was from Connecticut and had no real interest in Hawaii's staple industry or Oriental sensitivities, but the first taxiway gave her a shorter run to the military compound, which is why she always aimed to take it.

The Starlifter taxied slowly, as was appropriate, and stopped fifty yards from a long low cement building near the wire. The pilot shut down her engines and sat in silence. Ground crew in full uniform marched slowly towards the belly of the plane, dragging a fat cable behind them. They latched it into a port under the nose and the plane's systems kicked in again under the airfield's own power. That way, the ceremony could be conducted in silence.

The honour guard at Hickam that day was the usual eight men in the usual mosaic of four different full-dress uniforms, two from the United States Army, two from the United States Navy, two from the United States Marine Corps, and two from the United States Air Force. The eight slow-marched forward and waited in silent formation. The pilot hit the switch and the rear ramp came whining down. It settled. against the hot blacktop of American territory and the guard slow-marched up its exact centre into the belly of the plane. They pa.s.sed between the twin lines of silent aircrew and moved forward. The loadmaster removed the rubber straps and the guard lifted the first casket off the shelves and on to their shoulders. They slow-marched back with it through the darkened fuselage and down the ramp and out into the blazing afternoon, the s.h.i.+ned aluminium winking and the flag glowing bright in the sun against the blue Pacific and the green highlands of Oahu. They right-wheeled on the ap.r.o.n and slow-marched the fifty yards to the long, low cement building. They went inside and bent their knees and laid the casket down. They stood in silence, hands folded behind them, heads bowed, and then they about-turned and slow-marched back towards the plane.

It took an hour to unload all seven of the caskets. Only when the task was complete did the tall silver-haired American leave his seat. He used the pilot's stairway, and paused at the top to stretch his weary limbs in the sun.

TWELVE

Stone had to wait five minutes behind the black gla.s.s in the rear of the Tahoe, because the loading dock under the World Trade Center was busy. Tony loitered near by, leaning on a pillar in the noisy dark, waiting until a delivery truck moved out in a blast of diesel and there was a moment before the next one could move in. He used that moment to hustle Stone across the garage to the freight elevator. He hit the b.u.t.ton and they rode up in silence, heads down, breathing hard, smelling the strong smell of the tough rubber floor. They came out in the back of the eighty-eighth-floor lobby and Tony scanned ahead. The way was clear to the door of Hobie's suite.

The thickset man was at the reception counter. They walked straight past him into the office. It was dark, as usual. The blinds were pulled tight and it was quiet. Hobie was at the desk, sitting still and silent, gazing at Marilyn, who was on the sofa with her legs tucked underneath her.

'Well?' he asked. 'Mission accomplished?' Stone nodded. 'She got inside OK.' 'Where?' Marilyn asked. 'Which hospital?' 'St Vincent's,' Tony said. 'Straight into the ER.'

Stone nodded to confirm it and he saw Marilyn smile a slight smile of relief.

'OK,' Hobie said into the silence, 'That's the good deed for the day. Now we do business. What are these complications I need to know about?'

Tony shoved Stone around the coffee table to the sofa. He sat down heavily next to Marilyn and stared straight ahead, focusing on nothing.

'Well?' Hobie said again.