Tripwire

like me, that’s for sure. Not like anybody else I ever knew, either. He was a walking contradiction. He was a volunteer, you know that? I was, too, and so were a lot of the guys. But Vic wasn’t like the others. There was a big divide back then, between the volunteers and the drafted guys. The volunteers were all rahrah boys, you know, going for it because they believed in it. But Vic wasn’t like that. He volunteered, but he was about as mousy quiet as the sulkiest draftee you ever saw. But he could fly like he was born with a rotor blade up his ass.”
    “So he was good?” Jodie prompted.
    “Better than good,” DeWitt replied. “Second only to me in the early days, which is saying something, because I was definitely born with a rotor blade up my ass. And Vic was smart with the book stuff. I remember that. He had it all over everybody else in the classroom.”
    “Did he have an attitude problem with that?” Reacher asked. “Trading favors for help?”
    DeWitt swung the gray eyes across from Jodie.
    “You’ve done your research. You’ve been in the files.”
    “We just came from the NPRC,” Reacher said.
    DeWitt nodded, neutrally. “I hope you didn’t read my jacket.”
    “Supervisor wouldn’t let us,” Reacher said.
    “We were anxious not to poke around where we’re not wanted,” Jodie said.
    DeWitt nodded again.
    “Vic traded favors,” he said. “But they claimed he did it in the wrong way. There was a little controversy about it, as I recall. You were supposed to do it because you were glad to help your fellow candidates, you know? For the good of the unit, right? You remember how that shit went?”
    He stopped and glanced at Reacher, amused. Reacher nodded. Jodie’s being there was helping him. Her charm was inching him back toward approval.
    “But Vic was cold about it,” DeWitt said. “Like it was all just another math equation. Like x amount of lift moves the chopper off the ground, like this much help with that complicated formula gets his boots bulled up. They saw it as cold.”
    “Was he cold?” Jodie asked.
    DeWitt nodded. “Emotionless, the coldest guy I ever saw. It always amazed me. At first I figured it was because he came from some little place where he’d never done anything or seen anything. But later I realized he just felt nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. But it made him a hell of a tremendous flyer.”
    “Because he wasn’t afraid?” Reacher asked.
    “Exactly,” DeWitt said. “Not courageous, because a courageous guy is somebody who feels the fear but conquers it. Vic never felt it in the first place. It made him a better war flyer than me. I was the one passed out of Rucker head of the class, and I’ve got the plaque to prove it, but when we got in-country, he was better than me, no doubt about it.”
    “In what kind of a way?”
    DeWitt shrugged, like he couldn’t explain it. “We learned everything as we went along, just made it all up. Fact is, our training was shit. It was like being shown a little round thing and being told ‘this is a baseball,’ and then getting sent straight out to play in the major leagues. That’s something I’m trying to put right now that I’m here running this place. I never want to send boys out as unprepared as we were.”
    “Hobie was good at learning on the job?” Reacher asked.
    “The best,” DeWitt said. “You know anything about helicopters in the jungle?”
    Reacher shook his head. “Not a lot.”
    “First main problem is the LZ,” DeWitt said. “LZ, landing zone, right? You got a desperate bunch of tired infantry under fire somewhere, they need exfiltrating, they get on the radio and our dispatcher tells them sure, make us an LZ and we’ll be right over to pull you out. So they use explosives and saws and whatever the hell else they got and they blast a temporary LZ in the jungle. Now a Huey with the rotor turning needs a space exactly forty-eight feet wide and fifty-seven feet nine-point-seven inches long to land in. But the infantry is tired and in a big hurry and Charlie is raining mortars down on them and generally they don’t make the LZ big enough. So we can’t get them out. This happened to us two or three times, and we’re sick about it, and one night I see Vic studying the leading edge of the rotor blade on his Huey. So I say to him, ‘What are you looking at?’ And he says, ‘These are metal.’ I’m thinking, like what else would they be? Bamboo? But he’s looking at them.