Tripwire

door with an acetate plate bearing DeWitt’s name, his rank, and his decorations. It was a large plate.
    “Reacher and Garber to see the general,” Reacher said.
    The sergeant nodded and picked up his telephone. He pressed a button.
    “Your visitors, sir,” he said into the phone.
    He listened to the reply and stood up and opened the door. Stepped aside to allow them to walk past. Closed the door behind them. The office was the size of a tennis court. It was paneled in oak and had a huge, dark rug on the floor, thread-bare with vacuuming. The desk was large and oak, and DeWitt was in the chair behind it. He was somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, dried out and stringy, with thinning gray hair shaved down close to his scalp. He had half-closed gray eyes and he was using them to watch their approach with an expression Reacher read as halfway between curiosity and irritation.
    “Sit down,” he said. “Please.”
    There were leather visitor chairs drawn up near the desk. The office walls were crowded with mementoes, but they were all battalion and division mementos, war-game trophies, battle honors, old platoon photographs in faded monochrome. There were pictures and cutaway diagrams of a dozen different helicopters. But there was nothing personal to DeWitt on display. Not even family snaps on the desk.
    “How can I help you folks?” he asked.
    His accent was the bland Army accent that comes from serving all over the world with people from all over the country. He was maybe a midwesterner, originally. Maybe from somewhere near Chicago, Reacher thought.
    “I was an MP major,” he said, and waited.
    “I know you were. We checked.”
    A neutral reply. Nothing there at all. No hostility. But no approval, either.
    “My father was General Garber,” Jodie said.
    DeWitt nodded without speaking.
    “We’re here in a private capacity,” Reacher said.
    There was a short silence.
    “A civilian capacity, in fact,” DeWitt said slowly.
    Reacher nodded. Strike one.
    “It’s about a pilot called Victor Hobie. You served with him in Vietnam.”
    DeWitt looked deliberately blank. He raised his eyebrows.
    “Did I?” he said. “I don’t remember him.”
    Strike two. Uncooperative.
    “We’re trying to find out what happened to him.”
    Another short silence. Then DeWitt nodded, slowly, amused.
    “Why? Was he your long-lost uncle? Or maybe he was secretly your father? Maybe he had a brief, sad affair with your mother when he was her pool boy. Or did you buy his old childhood home and find his long-lost teenage diaries hidden behind the wainscoting with a 1968 issue of Playboy magazine?”
    Strike three. Aggressively uncooperative. The office went silent again. There was the thumping of rotor blades somewhere in the far distance. Jodie hitched forward on her chair. Her voice was soft and low in the quiet room.
    “We’re here for his parents, sir. They lost their boy thirty years ago, and they’ve never known what happened to him. They’re still grieving, General.”
    DeWitt looked at her with gray eyes and shook his head.
    “I don’t remember him. I’m very sorry.”
    “He trained with you right here at Wolters,” Reacher said. “You went to Rucker together and you sailed to Qui Nhon together. You served the best part of two tours together, flying slicks out of Pleiku.”
    “Your old man in the service?” DeWitt asked.
    Reacher nodded. “The Corps. Thirty years, Semper Fi.”
    “Mine was Eighth Air Force,” DeWitt said. “World War Two, flying bombers out of East Anglia in England all the way to Berlin and back. You know what he told me when I signed up for helicopters?”
    Reacher waited.
    “He gave me some good advice,” DeWitt said. “He told me, don’t make friends with pilots. Because they all get killed, and it just makes you miserable.”
    Reacher nodded again. “You really can’t recall him?”
    DeWitt just shrugged.
    “Not even for his folks?” Jodie asked. “Doesn’t seem right they’ll never know what happened to their boy, does it?”
    There was silence. The distant rotor blades faded to nothing. DeWitt gazed at Jodie. Then he spread his small hands on the desk and sighed heavily.
    “Well, I guess I can recall him a little,” he said. “Mostly from the early days. Later on, when they all started dying, I took the old man’s advice to heart. Kind of closed in on myself, you know?”
    “So what was he like?” Jodie asked.
    “What was he like?” DeWitt repeated. “Not