‘It must be difficult,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Technically, it can be very challenging. The recovery sites are usually a mess. The field workers send us animal bones, local bones, anything. We sort it all out here. Then we go to work with what we’ve got. Which sometimes isn’t very much. Sometimes all that’s left of an American soldier is just a handful of bone fragments you could fit in a cigar box.’
‘Impossible,’ she said.
‘Often,’ he said back. ‘We’ve got a hundred part-skeletons here right now, unidentified. The Department of the Army can’t afford mistakes. They demand a very high standard of certainty, and sometimes we just can’t meet it.’
‘Where do you start?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Well, wherever we can. Medical records, usually. Suppose Reacher here was an MIA? If he’d broken his arm as a boy, we’d be able to match the old X-ray against a healed break in the bones we found. Maybe. Or if we found his jaw, we could match the work on his teeth with his dental charts.’
Reacher saw her looking at him, imagining him reduced to dry yellowing bones on a jungle floor, scraped out of the dirt and compared to brittle fading X-rays taken thirty years earlier. The office went silent again, and the clock ticked around.
‘Leon came here in April,’ Reacher said.
Newman nodded. ‘Yes, he visited with me. Foolish of him, really, because he was a very sick man. But it was good to see him.’
Then he turned to Jodie, sympathy on his face.
‘He was a fine, fine man. I owed him a lot.’
She nodded. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it, and it wouldn’t be the last.
‘He asked you about Victor Hobie,’ Reacher said.
Newman nodded again. ‘Victor Truman Hobie.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Nothing,’ Newman said. ‘And I’m going to tell you nothing, too.’
The clock ticked on. A quarter to four.
‘Why not?’ Reacher asked.
‘Surely you know why not.’
‘It’s classified?’
‘Twice over,’ Newman said.
Reacher moved in the silence, restless with frustration. ‘You’re our last hope, Nash. We’ve already been all over everything else.’
Newman shook his head. ‘You know how it is, Reacher. I’m an officer in the US Army, damn it. I’m not going to reveal classified information.’
‘Please, Nash,’ Reacher said. ‘We came all this way.’
‘I can’t,’ Newman said.
‘No such word,’ Reacher said.
Silence.
‘Well, I guess you could ask me questions,’ Newman said. ‘If a former student of mine comes in here and asks me questions based on his own skills and observations, and I answer them in a purely academic fashion, I don’t see that any harm can come to anybody.’
It was like the clouds lifting away from the sun. Jodie glanced at Reacher. He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes to four. Less than three hours to go.
‘OK, Nash, thanks,’ he said. ‘You’re familiar with this case?’
‘I’m familiar with all of them. This one especially, since April.’
‘And it’s classified twice over?’
Newman just nodded.
‘At a level that kept Leon out of the loop?’
‘That’s a pretty high level,’ Newman hinted. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’
Reacher nodded. Thought hard. ‘What did Leon want you to do?’
‘He was in the dark,’ Newman said. ‘You need to bear that in mind, right?’
‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘What did he want you to do?’
‘He wanted us to find the crash site.’
‘Four miles west of An Khe.’
Newman nodded. ‘I felt badly for Leon’. No real reason for him to be out of the loop on this, and there was nothing I could do to alter the classification code. But I owed that man a lot, way more than I can tell you about, so I agreed to find the site.’
Jodie leaned forward. ‘But why wasn’t it found before? People seem to know roughly where it is.’
Newman shrugged. ‘It’s all incredibly difficult. You have no idea. The terrain, the bureaucracy. We lost the war, remember. The Vietnamese dictate the terms over there. We run a joint recovery effort, but they control it. The whole thing is constant manipulation and humiliation. We’re not allowed to wear our uniforms over there, because they say the sight of a US Army uniform will traumatize the village populations. They make us rent their own helicopters to get around, millions and millions of dollars a year for ratty old rust-buckets with half the capability of our own machines. Truth is, we’re buying those old bones back, and they set the price and the availability. Bottom line right now is the United States is paying more than three million dollars for every single identification we make, and it burns me up.’