Tripwire

moved on to the next casket. There was the same shallow wooden tray, the same jumble of yellow bones. The same grotesque, accusing, grinning skull. Below it, the neck was broken. He eased the dog tags out from between the shards of cracked bone.
    “Tardelli,” he read.
    “The starboard side gunner,” Newman said.
    Tardelli’s skeleton was a mess. The gunners stood on a slick stand in the open doorway, basically unsecured, juggling with the heavy machine gun swinging on a bungee cord. When the Huey went down, Tardelli had been thrown all over the cabin.
    “Broken neck,” Reacher said. “Crushing to the upper chest.”
    He turned the awful yellow skull over. It was fractured like an eggshell.
    “Head trauma also. I’d say he died instantaneously. Wouldn’t like to say which exact injury killed him.”
    “Neither would I,” Newman said. “He was nineteen years old.”
    There was silence. Nothing in the air except the faint sweet aroma of loam.
    “Look at the next one,” Newman said.
    The next one was different. There was a single injury to the chest. The dog tags were tangled into splintered bones. Reacher couldn’t free them. He had to bend his head to get the name.
    “Bamford.”
    “The crew chief,” Newman said. “He would have been sitting on the cabin bench, facing the rear, opposite the three guys they picked up.”
    Bamford’s bony face grinned up at him. Below it, his skeleton was complete and undamaged, except for the narrow crushing injury sideways across the upper body. It was like a three-inch trench in his chest. The sternum had been punched down to the level of the spine and had gone on and knocked three vertebrae out of line. Three ribs had gone with it.
    “So what do you think?” Newman asked.
    Reacher put his hand into the box and felt the dimensions of the injury. It was narrow and horizontal. Three fingers wouldn’t fit into it, but two would.
    “Some kind of an impact,” he said. “Something between a sharp instrument and a blunt instrument. Hit him sideways in the chest, obviously. It would have stopped his heart immediately. Was it the rotor blade?”
    Newman nodded. “Very good. The way it looked, the rotor folded up against the trees and came down into the cabin. It must have struck him across the upper body. As you say, a blow like that would have stopped his heart instantaneously.”
    In the next casket, the bones were very different. Some of them were the same dull yellow, but most of them were white and brittle and eroded. The dog tags were bent and blackened. Reacher turned them to throw the embossing into relief against the ceiling lights and read: Soper.
    “The port side gunner,” Newman said.
    “’There was a fire,” Reacher said.
    “How can you tell?” Newman asked, like the teacher he was.
    “Dog tags are burned.”
    “And?”
    “The bones are calcinated,” Reacher said. “At least, most of them are.”
    “Calcinated?” Newman repeated.
    Reacher nodded and went back fifteen years to his textbooks.
    “The organic components burned off, leaving only the inorganic compounds behind. Burning leaves the bones smaller, whiter, veined, brittle, and eroded.”
    “Good,” Newman said.
    “The explosion DeWitt saw,” Jodie said. “It was the fuel tank.”
    Newman nodded. “Classic evidence. Not a slow fire. A fuel explosion. It spills randomly and bums quickly, which explains the random nature of the burned bones. Looks to me like Soper caught the fuel across his lower body, but his upper body was lying outside of the fire.”
    His quiet words died to silence and the three of them were lost in imagining the terror. The bellowing engines, the hostile bullets smashing into the airframe, the sudden loss of power, the spurt of spilling fuel, the fire, the tearing smashing impact through the trees, the screaming, the rotor scything down, the shuddering crash, the screeching of metal, the smashing of frail human bodies into the indifferent jungle floor where no person had ever walked since the dawn of time. Soper’s empty eye sockets stared up into the light, challenging them to imagine.
    “Look at the next one,” Newman said.
    The next casket held the remains of a man called Allen. No burning. Just a yellow skeleton with bright dog tags around the broken neck. A noble, grinning skull. Even, white teeth. A high, round, undamaged cranium. The product of good nutrition and careful upbringing in the America of the fifties. His whole back was smashed, like