‘Why?’ Jodie asked again. ‘Because they were afraid of the press?’
Conrad shook his head. ‘No, I’m talking about internal stuff here. Any time 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-recover 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 co-pilot’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 enquiry 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 co-piloting 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 US 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, tyres 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.