‘Kaplan,’ he said. ‘The co-pilot.’ ‘How did he die?’ Newman asked. Reacher draped the tags back across the bony ribs and looked hard for the evidence. The skull was OK. No trace of damage to the arms or legs or chest. But the pelvis was smashed. The vertebrae towards the bottom of the spine were crushed. And the ribs at the back were fractured, eight of them on both sides, counting upward from the bottom.
‘Impact, when the Huey hit the ground. He took a big hit in the lower back. Massive internal trauma and haemorrhage. Probably fatal within a minute.’
‘But he was strapped in his seat,’ Newman said. ‘Head-on crash into the ground, how does that injure him from behind?’
Reacher looked again. He felt the way he had years before in the classroom, nervous about screwing up in front of the legendary Nash Newman. He looked hard, and he put his hands lightly on the dry bones, feeling them. But he had to be right. This was a crushing impact to the lower back. There was no other explanation.
‘The Huey spun,’ he said. ‘It came in at a shallow angle and the trees spun it around. It separated between the cabin and the tail and the cabin hit the ground travelling backward.’
Newman nodded. ‘Excellent. That’s exactly how we found it. It hit backward. Instead of his harness saving him, his chair killed him.’
Reacher moved on to the next casket. There was the same shallow wooden tray, the same jumble of yellow bones. The same grotesque, accusing, grinning skull. Below it, the neck was broken. He eased the dog tags out from between the shards of cracked bone.
‘Tardelli,’ he read.
‘The starboard-side gunner,’ Newman said.
Tardelli’s skeleton was a mess. The gunners on a slick stand in the open doorway, basically unsecured, juggling with the heavy machine-gun swinging on a bungee cord. When the Huey went down, Tardelli had been thrown all over the cabin.
‘Broken neck,’ Reacher said. ‘Crushing to the upper chest.’
He turned the awful yellow skull over. It was fractured like an eggshell.
‘Head trauma also. I’d say he died instantaneously. Wouldn’t like to say which exact injury killed him.’
‘Neither would I,’ Newman said. ‘He was nineteen years old.’
There was silence. Nothing in the air except the faint sweet aroma of loam.
‘Look at the next one,’ Newman said.
The next one was different. There was a single injury to the chest. The dog tags were tangled into splintered bones. Reacher couldn’t free them. He had to bend his head to get the name.
‘Bamford.’
‘The crew chief,’ Newman said. ‘He would have been sitting on the cabin bench, facing the rear, opposite the three guys they picked up.’
Bamford’s bony face grinned up at him. Below it, his skeleton was complete and undamaged, except for the narrow crushing injury sideways across the upper body. It was like a three-inch trench in his chest. The sternum had been punched down to the level of the spine and had gone on and knocked three vertebrae out of line. Three ribs had gone with it.
‘So what do you think?’ Newman asked.
Reacher put his hand into the box and felt the dimensions of the injury. It was narrow and horizontal. Three fingers wouldn’t fit into it, but two would.
‘Some kind of an impact,’ he said. ‘Something between a sharp instrument and a blunt instrument. Hit him sideways in the chest, obviously. It would have stopped his heart immediately. Was it the rotor
blade?’
Newman nodded. ‘Very good. The way it looked, the rotor folded up against the trees and came down into the cabin. It must have struck him across the upper body. As you say, a blow like that would have stopped his heart instantaneously.’
In the next casket, the bones were very different. Some of them were the same dull yellow, but most of them were white and brittle and eroded. The dog tags were bent and blackened. Reacher turned them to throw the embossing into relief against the ceiling lights and read: Soper.
“The port-side gunner,’ Newman said.
‘There was a fire,’ Reacher said.
‘How can you tell?’ Newman asked, like the teacher he was.