‘Dog tags are burned.’
‘And?’
‘The bones are calcinated,’ Reacher said. ‘At least, most of them are.’
‘Calcinated?’ Newman repeated.
Reacher nodded and went back fifteen years to his textbooks.
‘The organic components burned off, leaving only the inorganic compounds behind. Burning leaves the bones smaller, whiter, veined, brittle and eroded.’
‘Good,’ Newman nodded.
‘The explosion DeWitt saw,’ Jodie said. ‘It was the fuel tank.’
Newman nodded. ‘Classic evidence. Not a slow fire. A fuel explosion. It spills randomly and burns quickly, which explains the random nature of the burned bones. Looks to me like Soper caught the fuel across his lower body, but his upper body was lying outside of the fire.’
His quiet words died to silence and the three of them were lost in imagining the terror. The bellowing engines, the hostile bullets smashing into the air-frame, the sudden loss of power, the spurt of spilling fuel, the fire, the tearing smashing impact through the trees, the screaming, the rotor scything down, the shuddering crash, the screeching of metal, the smashing of frail human bodies into the indifferent jungle floor where no person had ever walked since the dawn of time. Soper’s empty eye sockets stared up into the light, challenging them to imagine.
‘Look at the next one,’ Newman said.
The next casket held the remains of a man called Allen. No burning. Just a yellow skeleton with bright dog tags around the broken neck. A noble, grinning skull. Even white teeth. A high, round, undamaged cranium. The product of good nutrition and careful upbringing in the America of the Fifties. His whole back was smashed, like a dead crab.
‘Allen was one of the three they picked up,’ Newman said.
Reacher nodded, sadly. The sixth casket was a burn victim. His name was Zabrinski. His bones were calcinated and small.
‘He was probably a big guy in life,’ Newman said.
‘Burning can shrink your bones by fifty per cent, sometimes. So don’t write him off as a midget.’
Reacher nodded again. Stirred through the bones with his hand. They were light and brittle. Like husks. The veining left them sharp with microscopic ribbing. ‘Injuries?’ Newman asked. Reacher looked again, but he found nothing. ‘He burned to death,’ he said. Newman nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he did,’ he said. ‘Awful,’ Jodie whispered.
The seventh and final casket held the remains of a man named Gunston. They were terrible remains. At first Reacher thought there was no skull. Then he saw it was lying in the bottom of the wooden box. It was smashed into a hundred pieces. Most of them were no bigger than his thumbnail.
‘What do you think?’ Newman asked. Reacher shook his head.
‘I don’t want to think,’ he whispered. ‘I’m all done thinking.’
Newman nodded, sympathetic. ‘Rotor blade hit him in the head. He was one of the three they picked up. He was sitting opposite Bamford.’
‘Five and three,’ Jodie said quietly. ‘So the crew was Hobie and Kaplan, pilot and co-pilot, Bamford the crew chief, Soper and Tardelli the gunners, and they went down and picked up Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston.’
Newman nodded. ‘That’s what the files tell us.’ ‘So where’s Hobie?’ Reacher asked. ‘You’re missing something,’ Newman said. ‘Sloppy work, Reacher, for somebody who used to be good at this.’
Reacher glanced at him. DeWitt had said something similar. He had said sloppy work for somebody who was once an MP major. And he had said look closer to home.
‘They were MPs, right?’ he said suddenly.
Newman smiled. ‘Who were?’
‘Two of them,’ Reacher said. ‘Two out of Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston. Two of them were arresting the other one. It was a special mission. Kaplan had put two MPs in the field the day before. His last but one mission, flying solo, the one I didn’t read. They were going back to pick them up, plus the guy they’d arrested.’
Newman nodded. ‘Correct.’
‘Which was which?’
‘Pete Zabrinski and Joey Gunston were the cops. Carl Allen was the bad guy.’
Reacher nodded. ‘What had he done?’
‘The details are classified,’ Newman said. ‘Your guess?’
‘In and out like that, a quick arrest? Fragging, I suppose.’
‘What’s fragging?’ Jodie asked.