‘You’re being too hard on yourself. It was a feeling, was all. A gut feeling that turned out wrong.’
‘Gut feelings should turn out right,’ he said. ‘Mine always did before. I could tell you about a dozen times when I stuck to gut feelings, no other reason than I felt them. They saved my life, time to time.’
She nodded, without speaking.
‘And statistically I should have been right,’ he said. ‘You know how many men were officially unaccounted for after ‘Nam? Only about five. Twenty-two hundred missing, but they’re dead, we all know that. Eventually Nash will find them all, and tick them all off. But there were five guys left we can’t categorize. Three of them changed sides and stayed on in the villages afterward, gone native. A couple disappeared in Thailand. One of them was living in a hut under a bridge in Bangkok. Five loose ends out of a
million men, and Victor Hobie is one of them, and I was wrong about him.’
‘But you weren’t really wrong,’ she said. ‘You were judging the old Victor Hobie, is all. All that stuff was about Victor Hobie before the war and before the crash. War changes people. The only witness to the change was DeWitt, and he went out of his way not to notice it.’
He shook his head again. ‘I took that into account, or at least I tried to. I didn’t figure it could change him that much.’
‘Maybe the crash did it,’ she said. ‘Think about it, Reacher. What was he, twenty-one years old? Twenty-two, something like that? Seven people died, and maybe he felt responsible. He was the captain of the ship, right? And he was disfigured. He lost his arm, and he was probably burned, too. That’s a big trauma for a young guy, physical disfigurement, right? And then in the field hospital, he was probably woozy with drugs, terrified of going back.’
‘They wouldn’t have sent him back to combat,’ Reacher said.
Jodie nodded. ‘Yes, but maybe he wasn’t thinking straight. The morphine, it’s like being high, right? Maybe he thought they were going to send him straight back. Maybe he thought they were going to punish him for losing the helicopter. We just don’t know his mental state at the time. So he tried to get away, and he hit the orderly on the head. Then later he woke up to what he’d done. Probably felt terrible about it. That was my gut feeling, all along. He’s hiding out, because of a guilty secret. He should have turned himself in, because nobody was going to convict him of anything. The mitigating circumstances
were too obvious. But he hid out, and the longer it went on, the worse it got. It kind of snowballed.’
‘Still makes me wrong,’ he said. ‘You’ve just described an irrational guy. Panicky, unrealistic, a little hysterical. I had him down as a plodder. Very sane, very rational, very normal. I’m losing my touch.’
The giant plane hissed on imperceptibly. Six hundred miles an hour through the thin air of altitude, and it felt like it was suspended immobile. A spacious pastel cocoon, hanging there seven miles up in the night sky, going nowhere at all.
‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘About what?’
‘The future?’
He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What about the Hobies?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said again.
‘You could try to find him,’ she said. ‘You know, convince him no action would be taken now. Talk some sense into him. Maybe you could get him to meet with his folks again.’
‘How could I find him? The way I feel right now, I couldn’t find the nose on my face. And you’re so keen on making me feel better, you’re forgetting something.’
‘What?’
‘He doesn’t want to be found. Like you figured, he wants to stay hidden. Even if he started out real confused about it, he evidently got the taste for it later. He had Costello killed, Jodie. He sent people after us. So he could stay hidden.’
Then the stewardess dimmed the cabin lights right down to darkness, and Reacher gave up and laid his seat back and tried to sleep, with his last thought