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 a dead crab.
“Allen was one of the three they picked up,” Newman said.
Reacher nodded, sadly. The sixth casket was a burn victim. His name was Zabrinski. His bones were calcinated and small.
“He was probably a big guy in life,” Newman said. “Burning can shrink your bones by fifty percent, sometimes. So don’t write him off as a midget.”
Reacher nodded again. Stirred through the bones with his hand. They were light and brittle. Like husks. The veining left them sharp with microscopic ribbing.
“Injuries?” Newman asked.
Reacher looked again, but he found nothing.
“He burned to death,” he said.
Newman nodded.
“Yes, I’m afraid he did,” he said.
“Awful,” Jodie whispered.
The seventh and final casket held the remains of a man named Gunston. They were terrible remains. At first Reacher thought there was no skull. Then he saw it was lying in the bottom of the wooden box. It was smashed into a hundred pieces. Most of them were no bigger than his thumbnail.
“What do you think?” Newman asked.
Reacher shook his head.
“I don’t want to think,” he whispered. “I’m all done thinking.”
Newman nodded, sympathetic. “Rotor blade hit him in the head. He was one of the three they picked up. He was sitting opposite Bamford.”
“Five and three,” Jodie said quietly. “So the crew was Hobie and Kaplan, pilot and copilot, Bamford the crew chief, Soper and Tardelli the gunners, and they went down and picked up Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston.”
Newman nodded. “That’s what the files tell us.”
“So where’s Hobie?” Reacher asked.
“You’re missing something,” Newman said. “Sloppy work, Reacher, for somebody who used to be good at this.”
Reacher glanced at him. DeWitt had said something similar. He had said sloppy work for somebody who was once an
“They were MPs, right?” he said suddenly.
Newman smiled. “Who were?”
“Two of them,” Reacher said. “Two out of Allen and Zabrinski and Gunston. Two of them were arresting the other one. It was a special mission. Kaplan had put two MPs in the field the day before. His last-but-one mission, flying solo, the one I didn’t read. They were going back to pick them up, plus the guy they’d arrested.”
Newman nodded. “Correct.”
“Which was which?”
“Pete Zabrinski and Joey Gunston were the cops. Carl Allen was the bad guy.”
Reacher nodded. “What had he done?”
“The details are classified,” Newman said. “Your guess?”
“In and out like that, a quick arrest? Fragging, I suppose.”
“What’s fragging?” Jodie asked.
“Killing your officer,” Reacher said. “It happened, time to time. Some gung ho lieutenant, probably new in- country, gets all keen on advancing into dangerous positions. The grunts don’t like it, figure he’s after a medal, figure they’d rather keep their asses in one piece. So he says ‘charge,’ and somebody shoots him in the back, or throws a grenade at him, which was more efficient, because it didn’t need aiming and it disguised the whole thing better. That’s where the name comes from, fragging, fragmentation device, a grenade.”
“So was it fragging?” Jodie asked.
“The details are classified,” Newman said again. “But certainly there was fragging involved, at the end of a long and vicious career. According to the files, Carl Allen was definitely not flavor of the month.”
Jodie nodded. “But why on earth is that classified? Whatever he did, he’s been dead thirty years. Justice is done, right?”
Reacher had stepped back to Allen’s casket. He was staring down into it.
“Caution,” he said. “Whoever the gung ho lieutenant was, his family was told he died a hero, fighting the enemy. If they ever find out any different, it’s a scandal. And the Department of the Army doesn’t like scandals.”
“Correct,” Newman said again.
“But where’s Hobie?” Reacher asked again.
“You’re still missing something. One step at a time, OK?”
