Tripwire

"Eighty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty," Newman said again. "We still get a few from Korea, the occasional one from World War Two, the Japanese islands. But you’re right, this is mostly about Vietnam. Two thousand, two hundred missing. Not so very many, really. They lost more than that in a single morning during World War One, every morning for four long years. Men and boys blown apart and mashed into the mud. But Vietnam was different. Partly because of things like World War One. We won’t take that wholesale slaughter anymore, and quite rightly. We’ve moved on. The population just won’t stand for those old attitudes now."

Jodie nodded quietly.

"And partly because we lost the war in Vietnam," Newman said quietly. "That makes it very different. The only war we ever lost. Makes it all feel a hell of a lot worse. So we try harder to resolve things."

He made the gesture with his hand again, indicating the unseen complex beyond the office door, and his voice ended on a brighter note.

"So that’s what you do here?" Jodie asked. "Wait for skeletons to be discovered overseas and then bring them back here to identify? So you can finally tick the names off the missing lists?"

Newman rocked his hand again, equivocating. "Well, we don’t wait, exactly. Where we can, we go out searching for them. And we don’t always identify them, although we sure as hell try hard."

"It must be difficult," she said.

He nodded. "Technically, it can be very challenging. The recovery sites are usually a mess. The field-workers send us animal bones, local bones, anything. We sort it all out here. Then we go to work with what we’ve got. Which sometimes isn’t very much. Sometimes all that’s left of an American soldier is just a handful of bone fragments you could fit in a cigar box."

"Impossible," she said.

"Often," he said back. "We’ve got a hundred part-skeletons here right now, unidentified. The Department of the Army can’t afford mistakes. They demand a very high standard of certainty, and sometimes we just can’t meet it."

"Where do you start?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Well, wherever we can. Medical records, usually. Suppose Reacher here was an MIA. If he’d broken his arm as a boy, we’d be able to match the old X ray against a healed break in the bones we found. Maybe. Or if we found his jaw, we could match the work on his teeth with his dental charts."

Reacher saw her looking at him, imagining him reduced to dry yellowing bones on a jungle floor, scraped out of the dirt and compared to brittle fading X rays taken thirty years earlier. The office went silent again, and the clock ticked around.

"Leon came here in April," Reacher said.

Newman nodded. "Yes, he visited with me. Foolish of him, really, because he was a very sick man. But it was good to see him."

Then he turned to Jodie, sympathy on his face.

"He was a fine, fine man. I owed him a lot."

She nodded. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, and it wouldn’t be the last.

"He asked you about Victor Hobie," Reacher said.

Newman nodded again. "Victor Truman Hobie."

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing," Newman said. "And I’m going to tell you nothing, too."

The clock ticked on. A quarter to four.

"Why not?" Reacher asked.

"Surely you know why not."

"It’s classified?"

"Twice over," Newman said.

Reacher moved in the silence, restless with frustration. "You’re our last hope, Nash. We’ve already been all over everything else."

Newman shook his head. "You know how it is, Reacher. I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, damn it. I’m not going to reveal classified information."

"Please, Nash," Reacher said. "We came all this way."

"I can’t," Newman said.

"No such word," Reacher said.

Silence.

"Well, I guess you could ask me questions," he said. "If a former student of mine comes in here and asks me questions based on his own skills and observations, and I answer them in a purely academic fashion, I don’t see that any harm can come to anybody."

It was like the clouds shifting away from the sun. Jodie glanced at Reacher. He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes to four. Less than three hours to go.

"OK, Nash, thanks," he said. "You’re familiar with this case?"

"I’m familiar with all of them. This one especially, since April."

"And it’s classified twice over?"

Newman just nodded.

"At a level that kept Leon out of the loop?"

"That’s a pretty high level," Newman hinted. "Wouldn’t you agree?"

Reacher nodded. Thought hard. "What did Leon want you to do?"

"He was in the dark," Newman said. "You need to bear that in mind, right?"

"OK," Reacher said. "What did he want you to do?"

"He wanted us to find the crash site."

"Four miles west of An Khe."

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.