Tripwire

Why the hell didn’t you look for him?”
    “Ask yourself the question,” Newman said. “Why didn’t we look for him?”
    Reacher stared at him. Nash Newman, one of the smartest guys he had ever known. A man so picky and precise he could take a fragment of skull an inch wide and tell you who it had belonged to, how he had lived, how he had died. A man so professional and meticulous he had run the longest-lasting and most complicated forensic investigation ever known in history and had received nothing but praise and plaudits all along the way. How could Nash Newman have made such an elementary mistake? Reacher stared at him, and then he breathed out and closed his eyes.
    “Christ, Nash,” he said slowly. “You know he survived, don’t you? You actually know it. You didn’t look for him because you know it for sure.”
    Newman nodded. “Correct.”
    “But how do you know?”
    Newman glanced around the lab. Lowered his voice.
    “Because he turned up afterward,” he said. “He crawled into a field hospital fifty miles away and three weeks later. It’s all in their medical files. He was racked with fever, serious malnutrition, terrible bums to one side of his face, no arm, maggots in the stump. He was incoherent most of the time, but they identified him by his dog tags. Then he came around after treatment and told the story, no other survivors but himself. That’s why I said we knew exactly what we were going to find up there. That’s why it was such a low priority, until Leon got all agitated about it.”
    “So what happened?” Jodie asked. “Why all the secrecy?”
    “The hospital was way north,” Newman said. “Charlie was pushing south and we were retreating. The hospital was getting ready for evacuation.”
    “And?” Reacher asked.
    “He disappeared the night before they were due to move him to Saigon.”
    “He disappeared?”
    Newman nodded. “Just ran away. Got himself out of his cot and lit out. Never been seen since.”
    “Shit,” Reacher said.
    “I still don’t understand the secrecy,” Jodie said.
    Newman shrugged. “Well, Reacher can explain it. More his area than mine.”
    Reacher still had hold of Hobie’s bones. The radius and the ulna from his right arm, neatly socketed on the lower end like nature intended, savagely smashed and splintered at the upper end by a fragment of his own rotor blade. Hobie had studied the leading edge of that blade and seen that it was capable of smashing through tree limbs as thick as a man’s arm. He had used that inspiration to save other men’s lives, over and over again. Then that same blade had come folding and whirling down into his own cockpit and taken his hand away.
    “He was a deserter,” he said. “Technically, that’s what he was. He was a serving soldier and he ran away. But a decision was taken not to go after him. Had to be that way. Because what could the Army do? If they caught him, what next? They would be prosecuting a guy with an exemplary record, nine hundred ninety-one combat missions, a guy who deserted after the trauma of a horrendous injury and disfigurement. They couldn’t do that. The war was unpopular. You can’t send a disfigured hero to Leavenworth for deserting under those circumstances. But equally you can’t send out the message that you’re letting deserters get away with it. That would have been a scandal of a different sort. They were still busting plenty of guys for deserting. The undeserving ones. They couldn’t reveal they had different strokes for different folks. So Hobie’s file was closed and sealed and classified secret. That’s why the personnel record ends with the last mission. All the rest of it is in a vault, somewhere in the Pentagon.”
    Jodie nodded.
    “And that’s why he’s not on the Wall,” she said. “They know he’s still alive.”
    Reacher was reluctant to put the arm bones down. He held them, and ran his fingers up and down their length. The good ends were smooth and perfect, ready to accept the subtle articulation of the human wrist.
    “Have you logged his medical records?” he asked Newman. “His old X rays and dental charts and all that stuff?”
    Newman shook his head. “He’s not MIA. He survived and deserted.”
    Reacher turned back to Bamford’s casket and laid the two yellow shards gently in one comer of the rough wooden box. He shook his head. “I just can’t believe it, Nash. Everything about this guy says he didn’t have a deserter’s mentality.