Tripwire

A military policeman trying to get some sense out of a two-star general is like a guy tossing a coin. Heads brings you a guy who knows the value of cooperation. Maybe he’s had difficulties in the past inside some unit or another, and maybe he’s had them solved for him by the MPs in an effective and perceptive manner. Then he’s a believer, and his instinct goes with you. You’re his friend. But tails brings you a guy who has maybe caused his own difficulties. Maybe he’s botched and blundered his way through some command and maybe the MPs haven’t been shy about telling him so. Then you get nothing from him except aggravation. Heads or tails, but it’s a bent coin, because on top of everything any institution despises its own policemen, so it comes down tails a lot more than it comes up heads. That had been Reacher’s experience. And, worse, he was a military policeman who was now a civilian. He had two strikes against him before he even stepped up to the plate.

The plane taxied to the gate and the businessmen waited and ushered Jodie down the aisle ahead of them. Either plain Texan courtesy or they wanted to watch her legs and her ass as she walked, but Reacher couldn’t mount any serious criticism on that issue because he wanted to do exactly the same thing. He carried her bag and followed her down the jetway and into the terminal. He stepped alongside her and put his arm around her shoulders and felt a dozen pairs of eyes drilling into his back.

"Claiming what’s yours?" she asked.

"You noticed them?" he asked back.

She threaded her arm around his waist and pulled him closer as they walked.

"They were kind of hard to miss. I guess it would have been easy enough to get a date for tonight."

"You’d have been beating them off with a stick."

"It’s the dress. Probably I should have worn trousers, but I figured it’s kind of traditional down here."

"You could wear a Soviet tank driver’s suit, all gray-green and padded with cotton, and they’d still have their tongues hanging out."

She giggled. "I’ve seen Soviet tank drivers. Dad showed me pictures. Two hundred pounds, big mustaches, smoking pipes, tattoos, and that was just the women."

The terminal was chilled with air-conditioning and they were hit with a forty-degree jump in temperature when they stepped out to the taxi line. June in Texas, just after ten in the morning, and it was over a hundred and humid.

"Wow," she said. "Maybe the dress makes sense."

They were in the shade of an overhead roadway, but beyond it the sun was white and brassy. The concrete baked and shimmered. Jodie bent and found some dark glasses in her bag and slipped them on and looked more like a blond Audrey Hepburn than ever. The first taxi was a new Caprice with the air going full blast and religious artifacts hanging from the rearview mirror. The driver was silent and the trip lasted forty minutes, mostly over concrete highways that shone white in the sun and started out busy and got emptier.

Fort Wolters was a big, permanent facility in the middle of nowhere with low elegant buildings and landscaping kept clean and tidy in the sterile way only the Army can achieve. There was a high fence stretching miles around the whole perimeter, taut and level all the way, no weeds at its base. The inner curb of the road was whitewashed. Beyond the fence internal roads faced with gray concrete snaked here and there between the buildings. Windows winked in the sun. The taxi rounded a curve and revealed a field the size of a stadium with helicopters lined up in neat rows. Squads of flight trainees moved about between them.

The main gate was set back from the road, with tall white flagpoles funneling down toward it. Their flags hung limp in the heat. There was a low, square gatehouse with a red-and-white barrier controlling access. The gatehouse was all windows above waist level and Reacher could see MPs inside watching the approach of the taxi. They were in full service gear, including the white helmets. Regular Army MPs. He smiled. This part was going to be no problem. They were going to see him as more their friend than the people they were guarding.

The taxi dropped them in the turning circle and drove back out. They walked through the blinding heat to the shade of the guardhouse eaves. An MP sergeant slid the window back and looked at them inquiringly. Reacher felt the chilled air spilling out over him.

"We need to get together with General DeWitt," he said. "Is there any chance of that happening, Sergeant?"

The guy looked him over. "Depends who you are, I guess."

Reacher told him who he was and who he had been, and who Jodie was and who her father had been, and a minute later they were both inside the cool of the guardhouse. The MP sergeant was on the phone to his opposite number in the command office.

"OK, you’re booked in," he said. "General’s free in half an hour."

Reacher smiled. The guy was probably free right now, and the half hour was going to be spent checking that they were who they said they were.

"What’s the general like, Sergeant?" he asked.

"We’d rate him SAS, sir," the MP said, and smiled.

Reacher smiled back. The guardhouse felt surprisingly good to him. He felt at home in it. SAS was MP code for "stupid asshole sometimes," and it was a reasonably benevolent rating for a sergeant to give a general. It was the kind of rating that meant if he approached it right, the guy might cooperate. On the other hand, it meant he might not. It gave him something to ponder during the waiting time.

After thirty-two minutes a plain green Chevy with neat white stencils pulled up inside the barrier and the sergeant nodded them toward it. The driver was a private soldier who wasn’t about to speak a word. He just waited until they were seated and turned the car around and headed slowly back through the buildings. Reacher watched the familiar sights slide by. He had never been to Wolters, but he knew it well enough because it was identical to dozens of other places he had been. The same layout, the same people, the same details, like it was built to the same master plan. The main building was a long two-story brick structure facing a parade ground. Its architecture was exactly the same as the main building on the Berlin base where he was born. Only the weather was different.

The Chevy eased to a stop opposite the steps up into the building. The driver moved the selector into park and stared silently ahead through the windshield. Reacher opened the door and stepped out into the heat with Jodie.

"Thanks for the ride, soldier," he said.

The boy just sat in park with the motor running and stared straight ahead. Reacher walked with Jodie to the steps and in through the door. There was an MP private stationed in the cool of the lobby, white helmet, white gaiters, a gleaming M-16 held easy across his chest. His gaze was fixed on Jodie’s bare legs as they danced in toward him.

"Reacher and Garber to see General DeWitt," Reacher said.

The guy snapped the rifle upright, which was symbolic of removing a barrier. Reacher nodded and walked ahead to the staircase. The place was like every other place, built to a specification poised uneasily somewhere between lavish and functional, like a private school occupying an old mansion. It was immaculately clean, and the materials were the finest available, but the decor was institutional and brutal. At the top of the stairs was a desk in the corridor. Behind it was a portly MP sergeant, swamped with paperwork. Behind him was an oak door with an acetate plate bearing DeWitt’s name, his rank, and his decorations. It was a large plate.

"Reacher and Garber to see the general," Reacher said.

The sergeant nodded and picked up his telephone. He pressed a button.

"Your visitors, sir," he said into the phone.

He listened to the reply and stood up and opened the door. Stepped aside to allow them to walk past. Closed the door behind them. The office was the size of a tennis court. It was paneled in oak and had a huge, dark rug on the floor, thread-bare with vacuuming. The desk was large and oak, and DeWitt was in the chair behind it. He was somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, dried out and stringy, with thinning gray hair shaved down close to his scalp. He had half-closed gray eyes and he was using them to watch their approach with an expression Reacher read as halfway between curiosity and irritation.

"Sit down," he said. "Please."

There were leather visitor chairs drawn up near the desk. The office walls were crowded with mementoes, but they were all battalion and division mementos, war-game trophies, battle honors, old platoon photographs in faded monochrome. There were pictures and cutaway diagrams of a dozen different helicopters. But there was nothing personal to DeWitt on display. Not even family snaps on the desk.

"How can I help you folks?" he asked.

His accent was the bland Army accent that comes from serving all over the world with people from all over the country. He was maybe a midwesterner, originally. Maybe from somewhere near Chicago, Reacher thought.

"I was an MP major," he said, and waited.

"I know you were. We checked."

A neutral reply. Nothing there at all. No hostility. But no approval, either.

"My father was General Garber," Jodie said.

DeWitt nodded without speaking.

"We’re here in a private capacity," Reacher said.

There was a short silence.

"A civilian capacity, in fact," DeWitt said slowly.

Reacher nodded. Strike one.

"It’s about a pilot called Victor Hobie. You served with him in Vietnam."

DeWitt looked deliberately blank. He raised his eyebrows.