The Hard Way

where did it all go wrong?”
    “I made two mistakes,” Hobart said. Just four words, but the effort of getting them out seemed to suddenly exhaust him. He closed his eyes and his lips tightened against his toothless gums and he started wheezing from the chest.
    “He has malaria and tuberculosis,” his sister said. “You’re tiring him out.”
    “Is he getting care?” Pauling asked.
    “We have no benefits. The VA does a little. Apart from that I take him to the Saint Vincent’s ER.”
    “How? How do you get him up and down the stairs?”
    “I carry him,” Dee Marie said. “On my back.”
    Hobart coughed hard and dribbled blood-flecked spittle down his chin. He raised his severed wrist high and wiped himself with what was left of his bicep. Then he opened his eyes.
    Reacher asked him, “What two mistakes?”
    “There was an early feint,” Hobart said. “About ten point men came out of the trees a mile ahead of Knight. They were going for death or glory, you know, running and firing unaimed. Knight let them run for about fifteen hundred yards and then he dropped them all with his rifle. I couldn’t see him. He was about a hundred yards away but the terrain was uneven. I crawled over to check he was OK.”
    “And was he?”
    “He was fine.”
    “Neither of you had been wounded?”
    “Wounded? Not even close.”
    “But there had been small arms fire?”
    “Some.”
    “Go on.”
    “When I got to Knight’s position I realized I could see the Two O’clock Road even better from his hole than from mine. Plus I figured when the shooting starts it’s always better to be paired up. We could cover each other for jams and reloads. So that was my first mistake. I put myself in the same foxhole as Knight.”
    “And the second mistake?”
    “I believed what Edward Lane told me.”

CHAPTER 39
    REACHER ASKED, “WHAT did Edward Lane tell you?”
    But Hobart couldn’t answer for a minute. He was consumed with another bout of coughing. His caved chest heaved. His truncated limbs flailed uselessly. Blood and thick yellow mucus rimed his lips. Dee Marie ducked back to the kitchen and rinsed her cloth and filled a glass with water. Wiped Hobart’s face very carefully and let him sip from the glass. Then she took him under the arms and hauled him into an upright position. He coughed twice more and then stopped as the fluid settled lower in his lungs.
    “It’s a balance,” Dee Marie said, to nobody in particular. “We need to keep his chest clear but coughing too much wears him out.”
    Reacher asked, “Hobart? What did Lane tell you?”
    Hobart panted for a moment and fixed his eyes on Reacher’s in a mute appeal for patience. Then he said, “About thirty minutes after that first feint Lane showed up in Knight’s foxhole. He seemed surprised to see me there, too. He checked that Knight was OK and told him to stay with the mission. Then he turned to me and told me he had definitive new intelligence that we
were
going to see men crossing the Two O’clock Road but that they would be government troops coming in from the bush and circling around to reinforce us through the rear. He said they had been on a night march and were taking it slow and stealthy because they were so close to the rebels. Both sides were incoming on parallel tracks less than forty yards apart. No danger of visual contact because of how thick the vegetation was, but they were worried about noise. So Lane told me to sit tight and watch the road and just count them cross it, and the higher the number was the better I should feel about it, because they were all on our side.”
    “And you saw them?”
    “Thousands and thousands of them. Your basic ragtag army, all on foot, no transport, decent firepower, plenty of Browning automatic rifles, some M60s, some light mortars. They crossed two abreast and it took hours.”
    “And then?”
    “We sat tight. All day, and into the night. Then all hell broke loose. We had night scopes and we could see what was happening. About five thousand guys just stepped out of the trees and assembled on the One O’clock Road and started marching straight toward us. At the same time another five thousand stepped out of the brush just south of the four o’clock position and came straight at us. They were the same guys I had counted earlier. They weren’t government troops. They were rebels. Lane’s new intelligence had been wrong. At least that’s what I thought at first. Later I realized he had lied