“Thanks for the ride, soldier,” he said.

The boy just sat in park with the motor running and stared straight ahead. Reacher walked with Jodie to the steps and in through the door. There was an MP private stationed in the cool of the lobby, white helmet, white gaiters, a gleaming M-16 held easy across his chest. His gaze was fixed on Jodie’s bare legs as they danced in toward him.

“Reacher and Garber to see General DeWitt,” Reacher said.

The guy snapped the rifle upright, which was symbolic of removing a barrier. Reacher nodded and walked ahead to the staircase. The place was like every other place, built to a specification poised uneasily somewhere between lavish and functional, like a private school occupying an old mansion. It was immaculately clean, and the materials were the finest available, but the decor was institutional and brutal. At the top of the stairs was a desk in the corridor. Behind it was a portly MP sergeant, swamped with paperwork. Behind him was an oak door with an acetate plate bearing DeWitt’s name, his rank, and his decorations. It was a large plate.

“Reacher and Garber to see the general,” Reacher said.

The sergeant nodded and picked up his telephone. He pressed a button.

“Your visitors, sir,” he said into the phone.

He listened to the reply and stood up and opened the door. Stepped aside to allow them to walk past. Closed the door behind them. The office was the size of a tennis court. It was paneled in oak and had a huge, dark rug on the floor, thread-bare with vacuuming. The desk was large and oak, and DeWitt was in the chair behind it. He was somewhere between fifty and fifty-five, dried out and stringy, with thinning gray hair shaved down close to his scalp. He had half-closed gray eyes and he was using them to watch their approach with an expression Reacher read as halfway between curiosity and irritation.

“Sit down,” he said. “Please.”

There were leather visitor chairs drawn up near the desk. The office walls were crowded with mementoes, but they were all battalion and division mementos, war-game trophies, battle honors, old platoon photographs in faded monochrome. There were pictures and cutaway diagrams of a dozen different helicopters. But there was nothing personal to DeWitt on display. Not even family snaps on the desk.

“How can I help you folks?” he asked.

His accent was the bland Army accent that comes from serving all over the world with people from all over the country. He was maybe a midwesterner, originally. Maybe from somewhere near Chicago, Reacher thought.

“I was an MP major,” he said, and waited.

“I know you were. We checked.”

A neutral reply. Nothing there at all. No hostility. But no approval, either.

“My father was General Garber,” Jodie said.

DeWitt nodded without speaking.

“We’re here in a private capacity,” Reacher said.

There was a short silence.

“A civilian capacity, in fact,” DeWitt said slowly.

Reacher nodded. Strike one.

“It’s about a pilot called Victor Hobie. You served with him in Vietnam.”

DeWitt looked deliberately blank. He raised his eyebrows.

“Did I?” he said. “I don’t remember him.”

Strike two. Uncooperative.

“We’re trying to find out what happened to him.”

Another short silence. Then DeWitt nodded, slowly, amused.

“Why? Was he your long-lost uncle? Or maybe he was secretly your father? Maybe he had a brief, sad affair with your mother when he was her pool boy. Or did you buy his old childhood home and find his long-lost teenage diaries hidden behind the wainscoting with a 1968 issue of Playboy magazine?”

Strike three. Aggressively uncooperative. The office went silent again. There was the thumping of rotor blades somewhere in the far distance. Jodie hitched forward on her chair. Her voice was soft and low in the quiet room.

“We’re here for his parents, sir. They lost their boy thirty years ago, and they’ve never known what happened to him. They’re still grieving, General.”

DeWitt looked at her with gray eyes and shook his head.

“I don’t remember him. I’m very sorry.”

“He trained with you right here at Wolters,” Reacher said. “You went to Rucker together and you sailed to Qui Nhon together. You served the best part of two tours together, flying slicks out of Pleiku.”

“Your old man in the service?” DeWitt asked.

Reacher nodded. “The Corps. Thirty years, Semper Fi.”

“Mine was Eighth Air Force,” DeWitt said. “World War Two, flying bombers out of East Anglia in England all the way to Berlin and back. You know what he told me when I signed up for helicopters?”

Reacher waited.

“He gave me some good advice,” DeWitt said. “He told me, don’t make friends with pilots. Because they all get killed, and it just makes you miserable.”

Reacher nodded again. “You really can’t recall him?”

DeWitt just shrugged.

“Not even for his folks?” Jodie asked. “Doesn’t seem right they’ll never know what happened to their boy, does it?”

There was silence. The distant rotor blades faded to nothing. DeWitt gazed at Jodie. Then he spread his small hands on the desk and sighed heavily.

“Well, I guess I can recall him a little,” he said. “Mostly from the early days. Later on, when they all started dying, I took the old man’s advice to heart. Kind of closed in on myself, you know?”

“So what was he like?” Jodie asked.

“What was he like?” DeWitt repeated. “Not like me, that’s for sure. Not like anybody else I ever knew, either. He was a walking contradiction. He was a volunteer, you know that? I was, too, and so were a lot of the guys. But Vic wasn’t like the others. There was a big divide back then, between the volunteers and the drafted guys. The volunteers were all rahrah boys, you know, going for it because they believed in it. But Vic wasn’t like that. He volunteered, but he was about as mousy quiet as the sulkiest draftee you ever saw. But he could fly like he was born with a rotor blade up his ass.”

“So he was good?” Jodie prompted.

“Better than good,” DeWitt replied. “Second only to me in the early days, which is saying something, because I was definitely born with a rotor blade up my ass. And Vic was smart with the book stuff. I remember that. He had it all over everybody else in the classroom.”

“Did he have an attitude problem with that?” Reacher asked. “Trading favors for help?”

DeWitt swung the gray eyes across from Jodie.

“You’ve done your research. You’ve been in the files.”

“We just came from the NPRC,” Reacher said.

DeWitt nodded, neutrally. “I hope you didn’t read my jacket.”

“Supervisor wouldn’t let us,” Reacher said.

“We were anxious not to poke around where we’re not wanted,” Jodie said.

DeWitt nodded again.

“Vic traded favors,” he said. “But they claimed he did it in the wrong way. There was a little controversy about it, as I recall. You were supposed to do it because you were glad to help your fellow candidates, you know? For the good of the unit, right? You remember how that shit went?”

He stopped and glanced at Reacher, amused. Reacher nodded. Jodie’s being there was helping him. Her charm was inching him back toward approval.

“But Vic was cold about it,” DeWitt said. “Like it was all just another math equation. Like x amount of lift moves the chopper off the ground, like this much help with that complicated formula gets his boots bulled up. They saw it as cold.”

“Was he cold?” Jodie asked.

DeWitt nodded. “Emotionless, the coldest guy I ever saw. It always amazed me. At first I figured it was because he came from some little place where he’d never done anything or seen anything. But later I realized he just felt nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. But it made him a hell of a tremendous flyer.”

“Because he wasn’t afraid?” Reacher asked.