Lee Child - The Hard Way

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.”

“What happened on your birthday?”

“They gave me a present.”

“Which was?”

“A choice.”

“Of what?”

“They hauled out about a dozen guys. I guess we all shared the same birthday. They took us to a courtyard. First thing I noticed was a big bucket of tar on a propane burner. It was bubbling away. Real hot. I remembered the smell from when I was a kid, from when they were blacktopping roads where I lived. My mother believed some old superstition that said if a kid sniffed the tar smell it would protect him from getting coughs and colds. She would send us out to chase the trucks. So I knew the smell real well. Then I saw next to the bucket was a big stone block, all black with blood. Then some big guard grabbed a machete and started screaming at the first guy in line. I had no idea what he was saying. The guy next to me spoke a little English and translated for me. He said we had a choice. Three choices, actually. To celebrate our birthdays we were going to lose a foot. First choice, left or right. Second choice, long pants or short pants. That was a kind of joke. It meant we could be cut above the knee or below. Our choice. Third choice, we could use the bucket or not. Our choice. You plunge the stump in there, the boiling tar seals the arteries and cauterizes the wound. Choose not to, and you bleed out and die. Our choice. But the guard said we had to choose fast. We weren’t allowed to mess around and hold up the queue behind us.”

Silence in the tiny room. Nobody spoke. There was no sound at all, except faint incongruous New York City sirens in the far distance.

Hobart said, “I chose left, long pants, and yes to the bucket.”

FOR A LONGtime the small room stayed quiet as a tomb. Hobart rolled his head from side to side to ease his neck. Reacher sat down in a small chair near the window.

Hobart said, “Twelve months later on my next birthday I chose right, long pants, and yes to the bucket.”

Reacher said, “They did this to Knight, too?”

Hobart nodded. “We thought we had been close before. But some things really bring you together.”

Pauling was leaning up in the kitchen doorway, white as a sheet. “Knight told you about Anne Lane?”

“He told me about a lot of things. But remember, we were doing seriously hard time. We were sick and starving. We had infections. We had malaria and dysentery. We were out of our heads for weeks at a time with fevers.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me he shot Anne Lane in New Jersey.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He gave me a whole bunch of different reasons. Different day, different reason. Sometimes it was that he had been having an affair with her, and she broke it off, and he got mad. Other times it was that Lane was mad at her and asked him to do it. Other times he said he was working for the CIA. Once he said she was an alien from another planet.”

“Did he kidnap her?”

Hobart nodded, slowly, painfully. “Drove her to the store, but didn’t stop there. Just pulled a gun and kept on going, all the way to New Jersey. Killed her there.”

“Immediately?” Pauling asked.

Hobart said, “Yes, immediately. She was dead a day before you ever even heard of her. There was nothing wrong with your procedures. He killed her that first morning and drove back and waited outside the store until it was time to sound the alarms.”

“Not possible,” Pauling said. “His EZ-Pass records showed he hadn’t used a bridge or a tunnel that day.”

“Give me a break,” Hobart said. “You pull the tag off the windshield and put it in the foil packet they mailed it in. Then you use a cash lane.”

“Were you really in Philadelphia?” Reacher asked.

“Yes, I really was,” Hobart said.

“Did you know what Knight was doing that day?”

“No, I really didn’t.”

“Who faked Anne’s voice on the phone?” Pauling asked. “Who set up the ransom drop?”

“Sometimes Knight would say it was a couple of his buddies. Sometimes he would say Lane took care of all of that.”

“Which version did you believe?”

Hobart’s head dropped to his chest and canted left. He stared toward the floor. Reacher asked, “Can I get you something?”

“I’m just looking at your shoes,” Hobart said. “I like nice shoes, too. Or at least I did.”

“You’ll get prosthetics. You can wear shoes with them.”

“Can’t afford them. Prosthetics, or shoes.”

Pauling said, “What was the truth about Anne Lane?”

Hobart pulled his head back to the cushion so he could look straight up at Pauling. He smiled, sadly.

“The truth about Anne Lane?” he said. “I thought about that a lot. Believe me, I obsessed over it. It became the central question of my life, because basically it was responsible for what was happening to me. The third birthday I spent in there, they took me back to the courtyard. The second choice was phrased slightly different. Long sleeves or short? Stupid question, really. Nobody ever chose short sleeves. I mean, who the hell would? I saw a thousand amputees in there and nobody ever took it above the elbow.”