Tripwire

Next day, we’re called to a temporary LZ again, and sure enough the damn thing is too small, by a couple of feet all around. So I can’t get in. But Vic goes down anyway. He spins the chopper around and around and cuts his way in with the rotor. Like a gigantic flying lawn mower? It was awesome. Bits of tree flying everywhere. He pulls out seven or eight guys and the rest of us go down after him and get all the rest. That became SOP afterward, and he invented it, because he was cold and logical and he wasn’t afraid to try. That maneuver saved hundreds of guys over the years. Literally hundreds, maybe even thousands.”
    “Impressive,” Reacher said.
    “You bet your ass impressive,” DeWitt said back. “Second big problem we had was weight. Suppose you were out in the open somewhere, like a field. The infantry would come swarming in on you until the damn chopper was too heavy to take off. So your own gunners would be beating them off and leaving them there in the field, maybe to die. Not a nice feeling. So one day Vic lets them all on board, and sure enough he can’t get off the ground. So he shoves the stick forward and sort of skitters horizontally along the field until the airspeed kicks in under the rotor and unsticks him. Then he’s up and away. The running jump. It became another SOP, and he invented it, too. Sometimes he would do it downhill, even down the mountainsides, like he was heading for a certain crash, and then up he went. Like I told you, we were just making it up as we went along, and the truth is a lot of the good stuff got made up by Victor Hobie.”
    “You admired him,” Jodie said.
    DeWitt nodded. “Yes, I did. And I’m not afraid to admit it.”
    “But you weren’t close.”
    He shook his head. “Like my daddy told me, don’t make friends with the other pilots. And I’m glad I didn’t. Too many of them died.”
    “How did he spend his time?” Reacher asked. “The files show a lot of days you couldn’t fly.”
    “Weather was a bitch. A real bitch. You got no idea. I want this facility moved someplace else, maybe Washington State, where they get some mists and fogs. No point training down in Texas and Alabama if you want to go fighting someplace you get weather.”
    “So how did you spend the downtime?”
    “Me? I did all kinds of things. Sometimes I partied, sometimes I slept. Sometimes I took a truck out and went scavenging for things we needed.”
    “What about Vic?” Jodie asked. “What did he do?”
    DeWitt just shrugged again. “I have no idea. He was always busy, always up to something, but I don’t know what it was. Like I told you, I didn’t want to mix with the other flyers.”
    “Was he different on the second tour?” Reacher asked.
    DeWitt smiled briefly. “Everybody was different second time around.”
    “In what way?” Jodie asked.
    “Angrier,” DeWitt said. “Even if you signed up again right away it was nine months minimum before you got back, sometimes a whole year. Then you got back and you figured the place had gone to shit while you were away. You figured it had gotten sloppy and half-assed. Facilities you’d built would be all falling down, trenches you’d dug against the mortars would be half full of water, trees you’d cleared away from the helicopter parking would be all sprouting up again. You’d feel your little domain had been ruined by a bunch of know-nothing idiots while you were gone. It made you angry and depressed. And generally speaking it was true. The whole ’Nam thing went steadily downhill, right out of control. The quality of the personnel just got worse and worse.”
    “So you’d say Hobie got disillusioned?” Reacher asked.
    DeWitt shrugged. “I really don’t remember much about his attitude. Maybe he coped OK. He had a strong sense of duty, as I recall.”
    “What was his final mission about?”
    The gray eyes suddenly went blank, like the shutters had just come down.
    “I can’t remember.”
    “He was shot down,” Reacher said. “Shot out of the air, right alongside you. You can’t recall what the mission was?”
    “We lost eight thousand helicopters in ‘Nam,” DeWitt said. “Eight thousand, Mr. Reacher, beginning to end. Seems to me I personally saw most of them go down. So how should I recall any particular one of them?”
    “What was it about?” Reacher asked again.
    “Why do you want to know?” DeWitt asked back.
    “It would help me.”
    “With what?”
    Reacher shrugged. “With