Tripwire (34 page)

He finished Wolters overall second in his class, 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 damn 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 front-line assault 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 passed 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 on board 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 Assault Helicopter Battalion. At the end of the two weeks, the renamed company sailed away from the Alabama coast, part of a seventeen-ship 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 brass invented make-work to keep boredom at bay. Hobie’s file indicated he signed up for maintenance, which meant endlessly rinsing and greasing the disassembled Hueys to beat the salt air down in the ship’s hold. The note was approving, and Hobie stepped onto 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 sunshine 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 Hueys in use at that time: one was a gunship, and the other was a transport chopper nicknamed a
slick.
Company B was assigned to fly slicks, servicing 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 copilot, 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 space 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 assigned to the jungle. Then the requirement was to fly five combat missions as a copilot, and if you handled that, you took the pilot’s seat and got your own copilot. 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 dispatch 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 documenting 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 assignment. He took off from Pleiku, heading east for an improvised landing zone near the An Khe Pass. 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 center of the tiny landing zone, under heavy machine-gun fire from the jungle. He was seen to take on board 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 dispatch 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 fueltank 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 pass was considered inaccessible virgin jungle, it was procedure to assume 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 nobody 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 damn 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. Anytime 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 massive search-and-recovery 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 copilot’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 inquiry 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 circumstances by the Department of the Army that F. G. Kaplan had been killed in action four miles west of the An Khe Pass when the helicopter he was copiloting 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 latitude, so the U.S. 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 cockpit 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 space 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, tires 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 Japanese 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 toward 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 honor 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 center into the belly of the plane. They passed 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 onto their shoulders. They slow-marched back with it through the darkened fuselage and down the ramp and out into the blazing afternoon, the shined aluminum winking and the flag glowing bright in the sun against the blue Pacific and the green highlands of Oahu. They right-wheeled on the apron 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 toward the plane.