Lee Child - Tripwire

“It takes a moment,” she said. Then she paused and listened. The old percolator started a loud gulping sound. “So come and meet Mr. Hobie. He’s awake now, and very anxious to see you. While we’re waiting for the machine.”

She led him through the hallway to a small parlor in back. It was about twelve by twelve and heavily furnished with armchairs and sofas and glass-fronted chest-high cabinets filled with china ornaments. There was an old guy in one of the chairs. He was wearing a stiff serge suit, blue, worn and shiny in places, and at least three sizes too big for his shrunken body. The collar of his shirt was a wide stiff hoop around a pale scrawny neck. Random silky tufts of white were all that was left of his hair. His wrists were like pencils protruding from the cuffs of his suit. His hands were thin and bony, laid loosely on the arms of the chair. He had clear plastic tubes looped over his ears, running down under his nose. There was a bottle of oxygen on a wheeled cart, parked behind him. He looked up and took a long, loud sniff of the gas to fuel the effort of lifting his hand.

“Major Reacher,” he said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Reacher stepped forward and grasped the hand and shook it. It was cold and dry, and it felt like a skeleton’s hand wrapped in flannel. The old guy paused and sucked more oxygen and spoke again.

“I’m Tom Hobie, Major. And this lovely lady is my wife, Mary.”

Reacher nodded.

“Pleased to meet you both,” he said. “But I’m not a major anymore.”

The old guy nodded back and sucked the gas through his nose.

“You served,” he said. “Therefore I think you’re entitled to your rank.”

There was a fieldstone fireplace, built low in the center of one wall. The mantel was packed tight with photographs in ornate silver frames. Most of them were color snaps showing the same subject, a young man in olive fatigues, in a variety of poses and situations. There was one older picture among them, airbrushed black-and-white, a different man in uniform, tall and straight and smiling, a private first class from a different generation of service. Possibly Mr. Hobie himself, before his failing heart started killing him from the inside, although it was hard for Reacher to tell. There was no resemblance.

“That’s me,” Hobie confirmed, following his gaze.

“World War Two?” Reacher asked.

The old man nodded. Sadness in his eyes.

“I never went overseas,” he said. “I volunteered well ahead of the draft, but I had a weak heart, even back then. They wouldn’t let me go. So I did my time in a storeroom in New Jersey.”

Reacher nodded. Hobie had his arm behind him, fiddling with the cylinder valve, increasing the oxygen flow.

“I’ll bring the coffee now,” the old lady said. “And the cake.”

“Can I help you with anything?” Reacher asked her.

“No, I’ll be fine,” she said, and swished slowly out of the room.

“Sit down, Major, please,” Tom Hobie said.

Reacher nodded and sat down in the silence, in a small armchair near enough to catch the old guy’s fading voice. He could hear the rattle of his breathing. Nothing else, just a faint hiss from the top of the oxygen bottle and the clink of china from the kitchen. Patient domestic sounds. The window had a venetian blind, lime green plastic, tilted down against the light. The river was out there somewhere, presumably beyond an overgrown yard, maybe thirty miles upstream of Leon Garber’s place.

“Here we are,” Mrs. Hobie called from the hallway.

She was on her way back into the room with a wheeled cart. There was a matching china set stacked on it, cups and saucers and plates, with a small milk jug and a sugar bowl. The linen cover was off the platter, revealing a pound cake, drizzled with some kind of yellow icing. Maybe lemon. The old percolator was there, smelling of coffee.

“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, grinning, wearing a metal bowl upside down on his head, with a toy rifle shouldered, his stiff denim trousers tucked into his socks to resemble the look of fatigues buckled into gaiters.

“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 grinning, in a new fatigues, standing in front of an Army helicopter. It was an H-23 Hiller, an old training machine.

“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.”