Tripwire

“How do you like it?”

“No milk, no sugar,” Reacher said.

She poured coffee into a cup, her thin wrist quivering with the effort. The cup rattled in its saucer as she passed it across. She followed it with a quarter of the cake on a plate. The plate shook. The oxygen bottle hissed. The old man was rehearsing his story, dividing it up into bites, taking in enough oxygen to fuel each one of them.

“I was a printer,” he said suddenly. “I ran my own shop. Mary worked for a big customer of mine. We met and were married in the spring of ‘47. Our son was born in the June of ‘48.”

He turned away and ran his glance along the line of photographs.

“Our son, Victor Truman Hobie.”

The parlor fell quiet, like an observance.

“I believed in duty,” the old man said. “I was unfit for active service, and I regretted it. Regretted it bitterly, Major. But I was happy to serve my country any way I could, and I did. We brought our son up the same way, to love his country and to serve it. He volunteered for Vietnam.”

Old Mr. Hobie closed his mouth and sucked oxygen through his nose, once, twice, and then he leaned down to the floor beside him and came up with a leather-bound folder. He spread it across his bony legs and opened it up. Took out a photograph and passed it across. Reacher juggled his cup and his plate and leaned forward to take it from the shaking hand. It was a faded color print of a boy in a backyard. The boy was maybe nine or ten, stocky, toothy, freckled, gri

“He wanted to be a soldier,” Mr. Hobie said. “Always. It was his ambition. I approved of it at the time, of course. We were unable to have other children, so Victor was on his own, the light of our lives, and I thought that to be a soldier and to serve his country was a fine ambition for the only son of a patriotic father.”

There was silence again. A cough. A hiss of oxygen. Silence.

“Did you approve of Vietnam, Major?” Hobie asked suddenly.

Reacher shrugged.

“I was too young to have much of an opinion,” he said. “But knowing what I know now, no, I wouldn’t have approved of Vietnam.”

“Why not?”

“Wrong place,” Reacher said. “Wrong time, wrong reasons, wrong methods, wrong approach, wrong leadership. No real backing, no real will to win, no coherent strategy.”

“Would you have gone?”

Reacher nodded.

“Yes, I would have gone,” he said. “No choice. I was the son of a soldier, too. But I would have been jealous of my father’s generation. Much easier to go to World War Two.”

“Victor wanted to fly helicopters,” Hobie said. “He was passionate about it. My fault again, I’m afraid. I took him to a county fair, paid two bucks for him to have his first flight in one. It was an old Bell, a crop duster. After that, all he wanted to be was a helicopter pilot. And he decided the Army was the best place to learn how.”

He slid another photograph out of the folder. Passed it across. It showed the same boy, now twice the age, grown tall, still gri

“That’s Fort Wolters,” Hobie said. “All the way down in Texas. U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School.”

Reacher nodded. “He flew choppers in ‘Nam?”

“He passed out second in his class,” Hobie said. “That was no surprise to us. He was always an excellent student, all the way through high school. He was especially gifted in math. He understood accountancy. I imagined he’d go to college and then come into partnership with me, to do the book work. I looked forward to it. I struggled in school, Major. No reason to be coy about it now. I’m not an educated man. It was a constant delight for me to see Victor doing so well. He was a very smart boy. And a very good boy. Very smart, very kind, a good heart, a perfect son. Our only son.”

The old lady was silent. Not eating the cake, not drinking the coffee.

“His passing out was at Fort Rucker,” Hobie said. “Down in Alabama. We made the trip to see it.”

He slid across the next photograph. It was a duplicate of one of the framed prints from the mantel. Faded pastel grass and sky, a tall boy in dress uniform, cap down over his eyes, his arm around an older woman in a print dress. The woman was slim and pretty. The photograph was slightly out of focus, the horizon slightly tilted. Taken by a fumbling husband and father, breathless with pride.

“That’s Victor and Mary,” the old man said. “She hasn’t changed a bit, has she, that day to this?”

“Not a bit,” Reacher lied.

“We loved that boy,” the old woman said quietly. “He was sent overseas two weeks after that photograph was taken.”

“July of ‘68,” Hobie said. “He was twenty years old.”

“What happened?” Reacher asked.

“He served a full tour,” Hobie said. “He was commended twice. He came home with a medal. I could see right away the idea of keeping the books for a print shop was too small for him. I thought he would serve out his time and get a job flying helicopters for the oil rigs. Down in the Gulf, perhaps. They were paying big money then, for Army pilots. Or Navy, or Air Force, of course.”

“But he went over there again,” Mrs. Hobie said. “To Vietnam again.”

“He signed on for a second tour,” Mrs. Hobie said. “He didn’t have to. But he said it was his duty. He said the war was still going on, and it was his duty to be a part of it. He said that’s what patriotism meant.”

“And what happened?” Reacher asked.

There was a long moment of silence.

“He didn’t come back,” Hobie said.

The silence was like a weight in the room. Somewhere a clock was ticking. It grew louder and louder until it was filling the air like blows from a hammer.

“It destroyed me,” Hobie said quietly.

The oxygen wheezed in and out, in and out, through a constricted throat.

“It just destroyed me. I used to say: I’ll exchange the whole rest of my life, just for one more day with him.”

“The rest of my life,” his wife echoed. “For just one more day with him.”

“And I meant it,” Hobie said. “And I still would. I still would, Major. Looking at me now, that’s not much of a bargain, is it? I haven’t got much life left in me. But I said it then, and I said it every day for thirty years, and as God is my witness, I meant it every single time I said it. The whole rest of my life, for one more day with him.”

“When was he killed?” Reacher asked, gently.

“He wasn’t killed,” Hobie said. “He was captured.”

“Taken prisoner?”

The old man nodded. “At first, they told us he was missing. We assumed he was dead, but we clung on, hoping. He was posted missing, and he stayed missing. We never got official word he was killed.”

“So we waited,” Mrs. Hobie said. “We just kept on waiting, for years and years. Then we started asking. They told us Victor was missing, presumed killed. That was all they could say. His helicopter was shot down in the jungle, and they never found the wreckage.”

“We accepted that then,” Hobie said. “We knew how it was. Plenty of boys died without a known grave. Plenty of boys always have, in war.”

“Then the memorial went up,” Mrs. Hobie said. “Have you seen it?”

“The Wall?” Reacher said. “In D.C.? Yes, I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I found it very moving.”

“They refused to put his name on it,” Hobie said.

“Why?”

“They never explained. We asked and we begged, but they never told us exactly why. They just said he’s no longer considered a casualty.”

“So we asked them what he is considered as,” Mrs. Hobie said. “They just told us missing in action.”

“But the other MIAs are on the Wall,” Hobie said.

There was silence again. The clock hammered away in another room.