She giggled. ‘I’ve seen Soviet tank drivers. Dad showed me pictures. Two hundred pounds, big moustaches, smoking pipes, tattoos, and that was just the women.’
The terminal was chilled with air conditioning and they were hit with a forty-degree jump in temperature when they stepped out to the taxi line. June in Texas, just after ten in the morning, and it was over a hundred and humid.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Maybe the dress makes sense.’
They were in the shade of an overhead roadway, but beyond it the sun was white and brassy. The concrete baked and shimmered. Jodie bent and found some dark glasses in her bag and slipped them on and looked more like a blonde Audrey Hepburn than ever. The first taxi was a new Caprice with the air going full blast and religious artefacts hanging from the rearview mirror. The driver was silent and the trip lasted forty minutes, mostly over concrete highways that shone white in the sun and started out busy and got emptier.
Fort Wolters was a big permanent facility in the middle of nowhere with low elegant buildings and landscaping kept clean and tidy in the sterile way only
the Army can achieve. There was a high fence stretching miles around the whole perimeter, taut and level all the way, no weeds at its base. The inner kerb of the road was whitewashed. Beyond the fence internal roads faced with grey concrete snaked here and there between the buildings. Windows winked in the sun. The taxi rounded a curve and revealed a field the size of a stadium with helicopters lined up in neat rows. Squads of flight trainees moved about between them.
The main gate was set back from the road, with tall white flagpoles funnelling down towards it. Their flags hung limp in the heat. There was a low square gatehouse with a red-and-white barrier controlling access. The gatehouse was all windows above waist level and Reacher could see MPs inside watching the approach of the taxi. They were in full service gear, including the white helmets. Regular Army MPs. He smiled. This part was going to be no problem. They were going to see him as more their friend than the people they were guarding.
The taxi dropped them in the turning circle and drove back out. They walked through the blinding heat to the shade of the guardhouse eaves. An MP sergeant slid the window back and looked at them enquiringly. Reacher felt the chilled air spilling out over him.
‘We need to get together with General DeWitt,’ he said. ‘Is there any chance of that happening, Sergeant?’
The guy looked him over. ‘Depends who you are, I guess.’
Reacher told him who he was and who he had been, and who Jodie was and who her father had been, and
a minute later they were both inside the cool of the guardhouse. The MP sergeant was on the phone to his opposite number in the command office.
‘OK, you’re booked in,’ he said. ‘General’s free in half an hour.’
Reacher smiled. The guy was probably free right now, and the half-hour was going to be spent checking that they were who they said they were.
‘What’s the general like, Sergeant?’ he asked.
‘We’d rate him SAS, sir,’ the MP said, and smiled.
Reacher smiled back. The guardhouse felt surprisingly good to him. He felt at home in it. SAS was MP code for ‘stupid asshole sometimes’, and it was a reasonably benevolent rating for a sergeant to give a general. It was the kind of rating that meant if he approached it right, the guy might co-operate. On the other hand, it meant he might not. It gave him something to ponder during the waiting time.
After thirty-two minutes a plain green Chevy with neat white stencils pulled up inside the barrier and the sergeant nodded them towards it. The driver was a private soldier who wasn’t about to speak a word. He just waited until they were seated and turned the car around and headed slowly back through the buildings. Reacher watched the familiar sights slide by. He had never been to Wolters, but he knew it well enough because it was identical to dozens of other places he had been. The same layout, the same people, the same details, like it was built to the same master plan. The main building was a long two-storey brick structure facing a parade ground. Its architecture was exactly the same as the main building on the Berlin base where he was born. Only the weather was different.