Tripwire

were anxious to keep on saying missing, just as long as they could.”
    Then he paused for a long moment.
    “Second reason is yes, they were afraid. But not of the press. They were afraid of themselves. They were afraid of telling themselves they were getting beat, and beat bad.”
    Reacher was scanning the final mission report, picking out the copilot’s name. He was a second lieutenant named F. G. Kaplan. He had been Hobie’s regular partner throughout most of the second tour.
    “Can I see this guy’s jacket?” he asked.
    “K section?” Conrad said. “Be about four minutes.”
    They sat in silence with the cold coffee until the runner brought F. G. Kaplan’s life story to the office. It was a thick, old file, similar size and vintage as Hobie’s. There was the same printed grid on the front cover, recording access requests. The only note less than twenty years old showed a telephone inquiry had been made last April by Leon Garber. Reacher turned the file facedown and opened it up from the back. Started with the second-to-last sheet of paper. It was identical to the last sheet in Hobie’s jacket. The same mission report, with the same eyewitness account from DeWitt, written up by the same clerk in the same handwriting.
    But the final sheet in Kaplan’s file was dated exactly two years later than the final mission report. It was a formal determination made after due consideration of the circumstances by the Department of the Army that F. G. Kaplan had been killed in action four miles west of the An Khe Pass when the helicopter he was copiloting was brought down by enemy ground-to-air fire. No body had been recovered, but the death was to be considered as actual for purposes of memorializing and payment of pensions. Reacher squared the sheet of paper on the desk.
    “So why doesn’t Victor Hobie have one of these?”
    Conrad shook his head. “I don’t know.”
    “I want to go to Texas,” Reacher said.
    NOI BAI AIRPORT outside Hanoi and Hickam Field outside Honolulu share exactly the same latitude, so the U.S. Air Force Starlifter flew neither north nor south. It just followed a pure west-east flight path across the Pacific, holding comfortably between the Tropic of Cancer and the Twentieth Parallel. Six thousand miles, six hundred miles an hour, ten hours’ flight time, but it was on approach seven hours before it took off, at three o’clock in the afternoon of the day before. The Air Force captain made the usual announcement as they crossed the date line and the tall silver-haired American in the rear of the cockpit wound his watch back and added another bonus day to his life.
    Hickam Field is Hawaii’s main military air facility, but it shares runway space and air-traffic control with Honolulu International, so the Starlifter had to turn a wide, weary circle above the sea, waiting for a JAL 747 from Tokyo to get down. Then it turned in and flattened and came down behind it, tires shrieking, engines screaming with reverse thrust. The pilot was not concerned with the niceties of civilian flying, so she jammed the brakes on hard and stopped short enough to get off the runway on the first taxiway. There was a standing request from the airport to keep the military planes away from the tourists. Especially the Japanese tourists. This pilot was from Connecticut and had no real interest in Hawaii’s staple industry or Oriental sensitivities, but the first taxiway gave her a shorter run to the military compound, which is why she always aimed to take it.
    The Starlifter taxied slowly, as was appropriate, and stopped fifty yards from a long, low cement building near the wire. The pilot shut down her engines and sat in silence. Ground crew in full uniform marched slowly toward the belly of the plane, dragging a fat cable behind them. They latched it into a port under the nose and the plane’s systems kicked in again under the airfield’s own power. That way, the ceremony could be conducted in silence.
    The honor guard at Hickam that day was the usual eight men in the usual mosaic of four different full-dress uniforms, two from the United States Army, two from the United States Navy, two from the United States Marine Corps, and two from the United States Air Force. The eight slow-marched forward and waited in silent formation. The pilot hit the switch and the rear ramp came whining down. It settled against the hot blacktop of American territory and the guard slow-marched up its exact center into the belly