Tripwire

Newman said. “We talked to DeWitt over at Wolters, and he helped us pin down the exact location, more or less. Remotest place you ever saw. Mountainous and inaccessible. I can guarantee you no human being has ever set foot there, no time in the history of the planet. It was a nightmare trip. But it was a great site. Completely inaccessible, so it wasn’t mined.”
    “Mined?” Jodie repeated. “You mean they booby-trap the sites?”
    Newman shook his head. “No, mined, as in excavated. Anything accessible, the population was all over it thirty years ago. They took dog tags, ID cards, helmets, souvenirs, but mostly they were after the metals. Fixed-wing sites, mostly, because of the gold and platinum.”
    “What gold?” she asked.
    “In the electrical circuits,” Newman said. “The F-4 Phantoms, for instance, they had about five thousand dollars’ worth of precious metals in the connections. Population used to hack it all out and sell it. You buy cheap jewelry in Bangkok, probably it’s made out of old U.S. fighter-bomber electronics.”
    “What did you find up there?” Reacher asked.
    “A relatively good state of preservation,” Newman said. “The Huey was smashed up and rusted, but it was recognizable. The bodies were completely skeletonized, of course. Clothing was rotted and gone, long ago. But nothing else was missing. They all had dog tags. We packed them up and helicoptered them to Hanoi. Then we flew them back here in the Starlifter, full honors. We only just got back. Three months, beginning to end, one of the best we’ve ever done in terms of time scale. And the IDs are going to be a total formality, because we’ve got the dog tags. No role for a bone doctor on this one. Open and shut. I’m just sorry Leon didn’t live to see it. It would have put his mind at rest.”
    “The bodies are here?” Reacher asked.
    Newman nodded. “Right next door.”
    “Can we see them?” Reacher asked.
    Newman nodded again. “You shouldn’t, but you need to.”
    The office went quiet and Newman stood up and gestured toward the door with both hands. Lieutenant Simon walked past. He nodded a greeting.
    “We’re going into the lab,” Newman said to him.
    “Yes, sir,” Simon said back. He moved away into his own office cubicle and Reacher and Jodie and Newman walked in the other direction and paused in front of a plain door set in a blank cinder block wall. Newman took keys from his pocket and unlocked it. He pulled it open and repeated the same formal gesture with both his hands. Reacher and Jodie preceded him into the lab.
    SIMON WATCHED THEM go inside from his cubicle. When the door closed and locked behind them, he picked up his phone and dialed nine for a line and then a ten-figure number starting with the New York City area code. The number rang for a long time because it was already the middle of the evening six thousand miles to the east. Then it was answered.
    “Reacher’s here,” Simon whispered. “Right now, with a woman. They’re in the lab, right now. Looking.”
    Hobie’s voice came back low and controlled. “Who’s the woman?”
    “Jodie Garber,” Simon said. “General Garber’s daughter.”
    “Alias Mrs. Jacob.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    There was silence on the line. Just the whistle of the long-distance satellite.
    “You could give them a ride back to the airport, maybe. The woman’s got an appointment in New York tomorrow afternoon, so I guess they’ll be trying to make the seven o’clock flight. Just make sure they don’t miss it.”
    “OK,” Simon said, and Hobie broke the connection.
    THE LAB WAS a wide, low room, maybe forty feet by fifty. There were no windows. The lighting was the bland wash of fluorescent tubes. There was the faint hiss of efficient air circulation, but there was a smell in the room, somewhere between the sharp tang of strong disinfectant and the warm odor of earth. At the far end of the space was an alcove filled with racks. On the racks were rows of cardboard boxes, marked with reference numbers in black. Maybe a hundred boxes.
    “The unidentified,” Reacher said.
    Newman nodded at his side.
    “As of now,” he said, quietly. “We won’t give up on them.”
    Between them and the distant alcove was the main body of the room. The floor was tile, swabbed to a shine. Standing on it were twenty neat wooden tables set in precise rows. The tables were waist high and topped with heavy polished slabs. Each table was a little