“What happened?” Pauling said.

“At first nothing computed. The rebels started firing from way too far away. Africa’s a big continent but most of them probably missed it. At that point Knight and I were kind of relaxed. Plans are always bullshit. Everything in war is improvisation. So we expected some suppressing fire from behind us to allow us to fall back. But it never came. I was turned around staring at the city behind me. It was just three hundred yards away. But it was all dark and silent. Then I turned back and saw these ten thousand guys coming at me. Two different directions ninety degrees apart. Dead of night. Suddenly I had the feeling Knight and I were the only two Westerners left in-country. Turns out I was probably right. The way I pieced it together afterward, Lane and all the other crews had pulled out twelve hours before. He must have gotten back from his little visit with us and just hopped straight into his jeep. Mounted everyone up and headed due south for the border with Ghana. Then to the airport at Tamale, which was where we came in.”

Reacher said, “What we need to know is why he did that.”

“That’s easy,” Hobart said. “I had plenty of time to figure it out afterward, believe me. Lane abandoned us because he wanted Knight dead. I just happened to be in the wrong foxhole, that’s all. I was collateral damage.”

“Why did Lane want Knight dead?”

“Because Knight killed Lane’s wife.”

CHAPTER 40

PAULING ASKED, “DID Knight confess that to you directly?”

Hobart didn’t answer. Just waved the stump of his right wrist, weakly, vaguely, a dismissive little gesture.

“Did Knight confess to killing Anne Lane?”

Hobart said, “He confessed to about a hundred thousand different things.” Then he smiled, ruefully. “You had to be there. You had to know how it was. Knight was raving for four years. He was completely out of his mind for three. Me too, probably.”

“So how was it?” Pauling asked. “Tell us.”

Dee Marie Graziano said, “I don’t want to hear this again. I can’t hear this again. I’m going out.”

Pauling opened her purse and took out her wallet. Peeled off part of her wad. Didn’t count it. Just handed the sheaf of bills straight to Dee Marie.

“Get stuff,” she said. “Food, medicine, whatever you need.”

Dee Marie said, “You can’t buy his testimony.”

“I’m not trying to,” Pauling said. “I’m trying to help, that’s all.”

“I don’t like charity.”

“Then get over it,” Reacher said. “Your brother needs everything he can get.”

“Take it, Dee,” Hobart said. “Be sure to get something for yourself.”

Dee Marie shrugged, then took the money. Jammed it in the pocket of her shift and collected her keys and walked out. Reacher heard the front door open. The hinges squealed where he had damaged them. He stepped into the hallway.

“We should call a carpenter,” Pauling said, from behind him.

“Call that Soviet super from Sixth Avenue,” Reacher said. “He looked competent and I’m sure he moonlights.”

“You think?”

Reacher whispered, “He was with the Red Army in Afghanistan. He won’t freak when he sees a guy with no hands and no feet.”

“You talking about me?” Hobart called.

Reacher followed Pauling back to the living room and said, “You’re lucky to have a sister like that.”

Hobart nodded. The same slow, painful movement.

“But it’s hard on her,” he said. “You know, with the bathroom and all. She has to see things a sister shouldn’t see.”

“Tell us about Knight. Tell us about the whole damn thing.”

Hobart laid his head back on the sofa cushion. Stared up at the ceiling. With his sister gone, he seemed to relax. His ruined body settled and quieted.

“It was one of those unique moments,” he said. “Suddenly we were sure we were alone, outnumbered ten thousand to two, dead of night, in no man’s land, in the middle of a country we had no right be in. I mean, you think you’ve been in deep shit before, and then you realize you have absolutely no conception of how deep shit can really be. At first we didn’t do anything. Then we just looked at each other. That was the last moment of true peace I ever felt. We looked at each other and I guess we just took an unspoken decision to go down fighting. Better to die, we figured. We all have to die sometime, and that looked like as good an occasion as any. So we started firing. I guess we figured they’d lay some mortar rounds on us and that would be that. But they didn’t. They just kept on coming, tens and twenties, and we just kept on firing, putting them down. Hundreds of them. But they kept on coming. Now I guess it was a tactic. We started to have equipment problems, like they knew we would. Our M60 barrels overheated. We started to run short of ammunition. We only had what we had been able to carry. When they sensed it, they all charged. OK, I thought, bring it on. I figured bullets or bayonets right there in the hole would be as good as mortar rounds from a distance.”

He closed his eyes and the little room went quiet.

“But?” Reacher said.

Hobart opened his eyes. “But it didn’t happen that way. They got to the lip of the hole and stopped and just stood there. Waited in the moonlight. Watched us floundering around looking for fresh clips. We didn’t have any. Then the crowd parted and some kind of an officer walked through. He looked down at us and smiled. Black face, white teeth, in the moonlight. It hit us then. We thought we’d been in deep shit before, but that was nothing. This was deep shit. We’d just killed hundreds of their guys and we were about to be captured.”

“How did it go down?”

“Surprisingly well, at the beginning. They stole everything of any value immediately. Then they slapped us around a little bit for a minute, but it was really nothing. I had worse from the NCOs in boot camp. We had these little Stars and Stripes patches on our BDUs, and I thought maybe they counted for something. The first few days were chaos. We were chained all the time, but that was more out of necessity than cruelty. They had no jail facilities. They had nothing, really. They’d been living in the bush for years. No infrastructure. But they fed us. Appalling food, but it was the same as they were eating, and it’s the thought that counts. Then after a week it was clear the coup had succeeded, so they all moved into O-Town proper and took us with them and put us in the city prison. We were in a separate wing for about four weeks. We figured they were maybe negotiating with Washington. They fed us and left us alone. We could hear bad stuff elsewhere in the building, but we figured we were special. So altogether the first month was a day at the beach compared to what came later.”

“What came later?”

“Evidently they gave up on Washington or stopped thinking we were special because they took us out of the separate wing and tossed us in with some of the others. And that was bad. Real bad. Incredible overcrowding, filth, disease, no clean water, almost no food. We were skeletons inside a month. Savages after two. I went six months without even lying down, the first cell was so crowded. We were ankle deep in shit, literally. There were worms. At night the place crawled with them. People were dying from disease and starvation. Then they put us on trial.”

“You had a trial?”

“I guess it was a trial. War crimes, probably. I had no idea what they were saying.”

“Weren’t they speaking French?”

“That’s for government and diplomacy. The rest of them speak tribal languages. It was just two hours of noise to me, and then they found us guilty. They took us back to the big house and we found out that the part we’d already been in was the VIP accommodations. Now we were headed for general population, which was a whole lot worse. Two months later I figured I was about as low as I could go. But I was wrong. Because then I had a birthday.”