CHAPTER 38

HIS SISTER SAT on the sofa next to him and cradled Hobart’s head and fed him the soup slowly and carefully with a spoon. Hobart licked his lips after every mouthful and from time to time started to raise one or other of his missing hands to wipe a dribble off his chin. He would look at first perplexed for a fleeting second and then rueful, as if he were amazed at how long the memory of simple physical routines endured even after they were no longer possible. Each time it happened his sister would wait patiently for his handless wrist to return to his lap and then she would wipe his chin with a cloth, tenderly, lovingly, as if he were her child and not her brother. The soup was thick and made from some kind of a light green vegetable, maybe lentils or celery or asparagus, and by the time the bowl was empty the cloth was badly stained.

Pauling said, “We need to talk.”

“About what?” Hobart asked.

“About you.”

“I’m not much to talk about. What you see is what you get.”

“And Edward Lane,” Pauling said. “We need to talk about Edward Lane.”

“Where is he?”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Five years ago,” Hobart said. “In Africa.”

“What happened there?”

“I was taken alive. Not smart.”

“And Knight, too?”

Hobart nodded.

“Knight too,” he said.

“How?” Reacher asked.

“You ever been to Burkina Faso?”

“I’ve never been anywhere in Africa.”

Hobart paused for a long moment. He seemed to decide to clam up, and then he seemed to change his mind and decide to talk.

“There was a civil war,” he said. “There usually is. We had a city to defend. We usually do. This time it was the capital. We couldn’t even say its name. I learned it later. It’s called Ouagadougou. But back then we called it O-Town. You were an MP. You know how that goes. The military deploys overseas and changes names. We think we’re doing it for intelligibility, but really we’re depersonalizing the place, psychologically. Making it ours, so we don’t feel so bad when we destroy it.”

“What happened there?” Pauling asked.

“O-Town was about the size of Kansas City, Missouri. All the action was to the northeast. The tree line was about a mile outside the city limit. Two roads in, radial, like spokes in a wheel. One was north of northeast and the other was east of northeast. We called them the One O’clock Road and the Two O’clock Road. Like the face of a wristwatch? If twelve o’clock was due north, there were roads at the one o’clock position and the two o’clock position. The One O’clock Road was the one we had to worry about. That’s the one the rebels were going to be using. Except they wouldn’t exactly be using it. They would be flanking it in the jungle. They would be twenty feet off the shoulder and we’d never see them. They were nothing but infantry, with nothing that wasn’t man-portable. They were going to be creeping along in the weeds, and we wouldn’t see them until they passed the tree line and came out in the open.”

“Tree line was a mile away?” Reacher said.

“Exactly,” Hobart said. “Not a problem. They had a mile of open ground to cross and we had heavy machine guns.”

“So where was the problem?”

“If you were them, what would you have done?”

“I would have moved to my left and outflanked you to the east. With at least half my force, maybe more. I would have stayed in the weeds and moved around and come out at you maybe from the four o’clock position. Coordinated attacks. Two directions. You wouldn’t have known which was your front and which was your flank.”

Hobart nodded. A small painful motion that brought out all the tendons in his scrawny neck.

“We anticipated exactly that,” he said. “We figured they’d be tracking the One O’clock Road with half their force on the right shoulder and the other half on the left shoulder. We figured about two miles out the half that was on the right shoulder as we were looking at it would wheel ninety degrees to its left and attempt an outflanking maneuver. But that meant that maybe five thousand guys would have to cross the Two O’clock Road. Spokes in a wheel, right? We’d see them. The Two O’clock Road was dead-straight. Narrow, but a clear cut through the trees for fifty miles. We could see all the way to the horizon. It was going to be like watching a crosswalk in Times Square.”

“So what happened?” Pauling asked.

“Knight and I had been together forever. And we had been Recon Marines. So we volunteered to set up forward OPs. We crawled out about three hundred yards and found a couple of good depressions. Old shell holes, from back in the day. Those places are always fighting. Knight set up with a good view of the One O’clock Road and I set up with a good view of the Two O’clock Road. Plan was if they didn’t attempt to outflank us we’d take them head-on and if we were making good progress with that our main force would come out to join us. If their attack was heavy Knight and I would fall back to the city limit and we’d set up a secondary line of defense there. And if I saw the outflanking maneuver in progress we’d fall back immediately and reorganize on two fronts.”

Reacher asked, “So where did it all go wrong?”

“I made two mistakes,” Hobart said. Just four words, but the effort of getting them out seemed to suddenly exhaust him. He closed his eyes and his lips tightened against his toothless gums and he started wheezing from the chest.

“He has malaria and tuberculosis,” his sister said. “You’re tiring him out.”

“Is he getting care?” Pauling asked.

“We have no benefits. The VA does a little. Apart from that I take him to the Saint Vincent’s ER.”

“How? How do you get him up and down the stairs?”

“I carry him,” Dee Marie said. “On my back.”

Hobart coughed hard and dribbled blood-flecked spittle down his chin. He raised his severed wrist high and wiped himself with what was left of his bicep. Then he opened his eyes.

Reacher asked him, “What two mistakes?”

“There was an early feint,” Hobart said. “About ten point men came out of the trees a mile ahead of Knight. They were going for death or glory, you know, running and firing unaimed. Knight let them run for about fifteen hundred yards and then he dropped them all with his rifle. I couldn’t see him. He was about a hundred yards away but the terrain was uneven. I crawled over to check he was OK.”

“And was he?”

“He was fine.”

“Neither of you had been wounded?”

“Wounded? Not even close.”

“But there had been small arms fire?”

“Some.”

“Go on.”

“When I got to Knight’s position I realized I could see the Two O’clock Road even better from his hole than from mine. Plus I figured when the shooting starts it’s always better to be paired up. We could cover each other for jams and reloads. So that was my first mistake. I put myself in the same foxhole as Knight.”

“And the second mistake?”

“I believed what Edward Lane told me.”