“Impressive,” Reacher said.
“You bet your ass impressive,” DeWitt said back. “Second big problem we had was weight. Suppose you were out in the open somewhere, like a field. The infantry would come swarming in on you until the damn chopper was too heavy to take off. So your own gunners would be beating them off and leaving them there in the field, maybe to die. Not a nice feeling. So one day Vic lets them all on board, and sure enough he can’t get off the ground. So he shoves the stick forward and sort of skitters horizontally along the field until the airspeed kicks in under the rotor and unsticks him. Then he’s up and away. The running jump. It became another SOP, and he invented it, too. Sometimes he would do it downhill, even down the mountainsides, like he was heading for a certain crash, and then up he went. Like I told you, we were just making it up as we went along, and the truth is a lot of the good stuff got made up by Victor Hobie.”
“You admired him,” Jodie said.
DeWitt nodded. “Yes, I did. And I’m not afraid to admit it.”
“But you weren’t close.”
He shook his head. “Like my daddy told me, don’t make friends with the other pilots. And I’m glad I didn’t. Too many of them died.”
“How did he spend his time?” Reacher asked. “The files show a lot of days you couldn’t fly.”
“Weather was a bitch. A real bitch. You got no idea. I want this facility moved someplace else, maybe Washington State, where they get some mists and fogs. No point training down in Texas and Alabama if you want to go fighting someplace you get weather.”
“So how did you spend the downtime?”
“Me? I did all kinds of things. Sometimes I partied, sometimes I slept. Sometimes I took a truck out and went scavenging for things we needed.”
“What about Vic?” Jodie asked. “What did he do?”
DeWitt just shrugged again. “I have no idea. He was always busy, always up to something, but I don’t know what it was. Like I told you, I didn’t want to mix with the other flyers.”
“Was he different on the second tour?” Reacher asked.
DeWitt smiled briefly. “Everybody was different second time around.”
“In what way?” Jodie asked.
“Angrier,” DeWitt said. “Even if you signed up again right away it was nine months minimum before you got back, sometimes a whole year. Then you got back and you figured the place had gone to shit while you were away. You figured it had gotten sloppy and half-assed. Facilities you’d built would be all falling down, trenches you’d dug against the mortars would be half full of water, trees you’d cleared away from the helicopter parking would be all sprouting up again. You’d feel your little domain had been ruined by a bunch of know-nothing idiots while you were gone. It made you angry and depressed. And generally speaking it was true. The whole ’Nam thing went steadily downhill, right out of control. The quality of the personnel just got worse and worse.”
“So you’d say Hobie got disillusioned?” Reacher asked.
DeWitt shrugged. “I really don’t remember much about his attitude. Maybe he coped OK. He had a strong sense of duty, as I recall.”
“What was his final mission about?”
The gray eyes suddenly went blank, like the shutters had just come down.
“I can’t remember.”
“He was shot down,” Reacher said. “Shot out of the air, right alongside you. You can’t recall what the mission was?”
“We lost eight thousand helicopters in ‘Nam,” DeWitt said. “Eight thousand, Mr. Reacher, beginning to end. Seems to me I personally saw most of them go down. So how should I recall any particular one of them?”
“What was it about?” Reacher asked again.
“Why do you want to know?” DeWitt asked back.
“It would help me.”
“With what?”
Reacher shrugged. “With his folks, I guess. I want to be able to tell them he died doing something useful.”
DeWitt smiled. A bitter, sardonic smile, worn and softened at the edges by thirty years of regular use. “Well, my friend, you sure as hell can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because none of our missions were useful. They were all a waste of time. A waste of lives. We lost the war, didn’t we?”
“Was it a secret mission?”
There was a pause. Silence in the big office.
“Why should it be secret?” DeWitt asked back, neutrally.
“He only took on board three passengers. Seems like a special sort of a deal to me. No running jump required there.”
“I don’t remember,” DeWitt said again.
Reacher just looked at him, quietly. DeWitt stared back.
“How should I remember? I hear about something for the first time in thirty years and I’m supposed to remember every damn detail about it?”
“This isn’t the first time in thirty years. You were asked all about it a couple of months ago. In April of this year.”
DeWitt was silent.
“General Garber called the NPRC about Hobie,” Reacher said. “It’s inconceivable he didn’t call you afterward. Won’t you tell us what you told him?”
DeWitt smiled. “I told him I didn’t remember.”
There was silence again. Distant rotor blades, coming closer.
“On behalf of his folks, won’t you tell us?” Jodie asked softly. “They’re still grieving for him. They need to know about it.”
DeWitt shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Reacher asked.
DeWitt stood up slowly and walked to the window. He was a short man. He stood in the light of the sun and squinted left, across to where he could see the helicopter he could hear, coming in to land on the field.
“It’s classified information,” he said. “I’m not allowed to make any comment, and I’m not going to. Garber asked me, and I told him the same thing. No comment. But I hinted he should maybe look closer to home, and I’ll advise you to do the exact same thing, Mr. Reacher. Look closer to home.”
“Closer to home?”
DeWitt put his back to the window. “Did you see Kaplan’s jacket?”
“His copilot?”
DeWitt nodded. “Did you read his last-but-one mission?”
Reacher shook his head.
“You should have,” DeWitt said. “Sloppy work from somebody who was once an MP major. But don’t tell anybody I suggested it, because I’ll deny it, and they’ll believe me, not you.”
Reacher looked away. DeWitt walked back to his desk and sat down.
“Is it possible Victor Hobie is still alive?” Jodie asked him.
The distant helicopter shut off its engines. There was total silence.
“I have no comment on that,” DeWitt said.
“Have you been asked that question before?” Jodie said.
“I have no comment on that,” DeWitt said again.
“You saw the crash. Is it possible anybody survived it?”
“I saw an explosion under the jungle canopy, is all. He was way more than half-full with fuel. Draw your own conclusions, Ms. Garber.”
“Did he survive?”
“I have no comment on that.”
“Why is Kaplan officially dead and Hobie isn’t?”
“I have no comment on that.”
She nodded. Thought for a moment and regrouped exactly like the lawyer she was, boxed in by some recalcitrant witness. “Just theoretically, then. Suppose a young man with Victor Hobie’s personality and character and background survived such an incident, OK? Is it possible a man like that would never even have made contact with his own parents again afterward?”
DeWitt stood up again. He was clearly uncomfortable.
“I don’t know, Ms. Garber. I’m not a damn psychiatrist. And like I told you, I was careful not to get to know him too well. He seemed like a real dutiful guy, but he was cold. Overall, I guess I would rate it as very unlikely. But don’t forget, Vietnam changed people. It sure as hell changed me, for instance. I used to be a nice guy.”
OFFICER SARK WAS forty-four years old, but he looked older. His physique was damaged by a poor childhood and ignorant neglect through most of his adult years. His skin was dull and pale, and he had lost his hair early. It left him looking sallow and sunken and old before his time. But the truth was he had woken up to it and was fighting it. He had read stuff the NYPD’s medical people were putting about concerning diet and exercise. He had eliminated most of the fats from his daily intake, and he had started sunbathing a little, just enough to take the pallor off his skin without provoking the risk of melanomas. He walked whenever he could. Going home, he would get off the subway a stop short and hike the rest of the way, fast enough to get his breath going and his heartbeat raised, like the stuff he’d read said he should. And during the workday, he would persuade O’Hallinan to park the prowl car somewhere that would give them a short walk to wherever it was they were headed.