‘OK,’ Simon said, and Hobie broke the connection.
The lab was a wide low room, maybe forty feet by fifty. There were no windows. The lighting was the bland wash of fluorescent tubes. There was the faint hiss of efficient air circulation, but there was a smell in the room, somewhere between the sharp tang of strong disinfectant and the warm odour of earth. At the far end of the space was an alcove filled with racks. On the racks were rows of cardboard boxes, marked with reference numbers in black. Maybe a hundred boxes.
‘The unidentified,’ Reacher said.
Newman nodded at his side.
‘As of now,’ he said quietly. ‘We won’t give up on them.’
Between them and the distant alcove was the main body of the room. The floor was tile, swabbed to a shine. Standing on it were twenty neat wooden tables set in precise rows. The tables were waist high and
topped with heavy polished slabs. Each table was a little shorter and a little narrower than an Army cot. They looked like sturdy versions of the tables decorators use for wallpaper pasting. Six of them were completely empty. Seven of them had the lids of seven polished aluminium caskets laid across them. The final seven tables held the seven aluminium caskets themselves, in neat alternate rows, each one adjacent to the table bearing its lid. Reacher stood silent with his head bowed, and then he drew himself up to attention and held a long silent salute for the first time in more than two years.
‘Awful,’ Jodie whispered.
She was standing with her hands clasped behind her, head bowed, like she was at a graveside ceremony. Reacher released his salute and squeezed her hand.
‘Thank you,’ Newman said quietly. ‘I like people to show respect in here.’
‘How could we not?’ Jodie whispered.
She was staring at the caskets, with tears starting in
her eyes.
‘So, Reacher, what do you see?’ Newman asked in
the silence.
Reacher’s eyes were wandering around the bright room. He was too shocked to move.
‘I see seven caskets,’ he said quietly. ‘Where I expected to see eight. There were eight people in that Huey. Crew of five, and they picked up three. It’s in DeWitt’s report. Five and three make eight.’
‘And eight minus one makes seven,’ Newman said.
‘Did you search the site? Thoroughly?’
Newman shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ll have to figure that out.’
Reacher shook himself and took a step forward. ‘May I?’
‘Be my guest,’ Newman replied. ‘Tell me what you see. Concentrate hard, and we’ll see what you’ve remembered, and what you’ve forgotten.’
Reacher walked to the nearest casket and turned so that he was looking down into it along its length. The casket held a rough wooden box, six inches smaller in every dimension than the casket itself.
‘That’s what the Vietnamese make us use,’ Newman said. ‘They sell those boxes to us and make us use them. We put them in our own caskets in the hangar at the airfield in Hanoi.’
The wooden box had no lid. It was just a shallow tray. There was a jumble of bones in it. Somebody had arranged them in roughly the correct anatomical sequence. There was a skull at the top, yellowed and old. It grinned up with a grotesque smile. There was a gold tooth in the mouth. The empty eye sockets stared. The vertebrae of the neck were lined up neatly. Below them the shoulder blades and the collarbones and the ribs were laid out in their correct places above the pelvis. The arm bones and the leg bones were stacked to the sides. There was the dull glint of a metal chain draped over the vertebrae of the neck, running away under the flatness of the left shoulder blade.
‘May I?’ Reacher asked again.
Newman nodded. ‘Please.’
Reacher stood silent for a long moment and then leaned in and hooked his finger under the chain and eased it out. The bones stirred and clicked and moved as the dog tags caught. He pulled them out and brought them up and rubbed the ball of his thumb across their faces. Bent down to read the stamped name.