The Affair: A Reacher Novel

Tennessee. There’s a north–south railroad track, and a little backwoods dirt road that crosses it east–west near a place that has a spring. The locomotives would stop there to take on water, and the passengers would get out to eat, so the town grew up. But since the end of World War Two there’s only been about two trains a day, both freight, no passengers, so the town was on its way back down again.”
    “Until?”
    “Federal spending. You know how it was. Washington couldn’t let large parts of the South turn into the Third World, so we threw some money down there. A lot of money, actually. You ever notice how the folks who talk loudest about small government always seem to live inthe states with the biggest subsidies? Small government would kill them dead.”
    I asked, “What did Carter Crossing get?”
    Garber said, “Carter Crossing got an army base called Fort Kelham.”
    “OK,” I said. “I’ve heard of Kelham. Never knew where it was, exactly.”
    “It used to be huge,” Garber said. “Ground was broken in about 1950, I think. It could have ended up as big as Fort Hood, but ultimately it was too far east of I-55 and too far west of I-65 to be useful. You have to drive a long way on small roads just to get there. Or maybe Texas politicians have louder voices than Mississippi politicians. Either way, Hood got the attention and Kelham withered on the vine. It struggled on until the end of Vietnam, and then they turned it into a Ranger school. Which it still is.”
    “I thought Ranger training was at Benning.”
    “The 75th sends their best guys to Kelham for a time. It’s not far. Something to do with the terrain.”
    “The 75th is a special ops regiment.”
    “So they tell me.”
    “Are there enough special ops Rangers in training to keep a whole town going?”
    “Almost,” Garber said. “It’s not a very big town.”
    “So what are we saying? An Army Ranger killed Janice May Chapman?”
    “I doubt it,” Garber said. “It was probably some local hillbilly thing.”
    “Do they have hillbillies in Mississippi? Do they even have hills?”
    “Backwoodsmen, then. They have a lot of trees.”
    “Whichever, why are we even talking about it?”
    At that point Garber got up and came out from behind his desk and crossed the room and closed the door. He was older than me, naturally, and much shorter, but about as wide. And he was worried. It was rare for him to close his door, and rarer still for him to go more than five minutes without a tortured little homily or aphorism or slogan, designed to sum up a point he was trying to make in an easilyremembered form. He stepped back and sat down again with a hiss of air from his cushion, and he asked, “Have you ever heard of a place called Kosovo?”
    “Balkans,” I said. “Like Serbia and Croatia.”
    “There’s going to be a war there. Apparently we’re going to try to stop it. Apparently we’ll probably fail, and we’ll end up just bombing the shit out of one side or the other instead.”
    “OK,” I said. “Always good to have a plan B.”
    “The Serbo-Croat thing was a disaster. Like Rwanda. A total embarrassment. This is the twentieth century, for God’s sake.”
    “Seemed to me to fit right in with the twentieth century.”
    “It’s supposed to be different now.”
    “Wait for the twenty-first. That’s my advice.”
    “We’re not going to wait for anything. We’re going to try to do Kosovo right.”
    “Well, good luck with that. Don’t come to me for help. I’m just a policeman.”
    “We’ve already got people over there. You know, intermittently, in and out.”
    I asked, “Who?”
    Garber said, “Peacekeepers.”
    “What, the United Nations?”
    “Not exactly. Our guys only.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “You didn’t know because nobody is supposed to know.”
    “How long has this been happening?”
    “Twelve months.”
    I said, “We’ve been deploying ground troops to the Balkans in secret for a whole year?”
    “It’s not such a big deal,” Garber said. “It’s about reconnaissance, partly. In case something has to happen later. But mostly it’s about calming things down. There are a lot of factions over there. If anyone asks, we always say it was the other guy who invited us. That way everyone thinks everyone else has got our backing. It’s a deterrent.”
    I asked, “Who did we send?”
    Garber said, “Army Rangers.”
    * * *
    Garber told me that Fort Kelham was still operating as a