‘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 damn 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 passed 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 assessments. 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 classrooms. It was necessary to pass to progress. Hobie had creamed it. The maths talent his father had hoped to turn to accountancy ran riot through those textbook subjects. He passed out of pre-flight top of his class. The only negative was a short note about his attitude. Some officer was criticizing him for trading favours for coaching. Hobie was helping some stragglers through the complex equations and in return they were shining his boots and cleaning his kit. Reacher shrugged to himself. The officer was clearly an asshole. Hobie was training to be a helicopter pilot, not a damn 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.