"An old joke."
"For a reason."
Thurman started jerking the stick and hammering the rudder. The plane rose and fell sharply and smashed from side to side. At first Reacher thought they were seeking smoother air. Then he realized Thurman was deliberately making things worse. He was diving where the downdrafts were sucking anyway and climbing with the updrafts. He was turning into the side winds and taking them like roundhouse punches. The plane was hammering all over the sky. It was being tossed around like the insignificant piece of junk it was.
Thurman said, "This is why you need to get your life in order. The end could come at any time. Maybe sooner than you expect."
Reacher said nothing.
Thurman said, "I could end it for you now. I could roll and stall and power dive. Two thousand feet, we'd hit the deck at three hundred miles an hour. The wings would come off first. The crater would be ten feet deep."
Reacher said, "Go right ahead."
"You mean that?"
"I dare you."
An updraft hit and the plane was thrown upward and then the decompression wave came in and the lift under the wings dropped away to a negative value and the plane fell again. Thurman dropped the nose and hit the throttle and the engine screamed and the Piper tilted into a forty-five-degree power dive. The artificial horizon on the dash lit up red and a warning siren sounded. It was barely audible over the scream of the engine and the battering airflow. Then Thurman pulled out of the dive. He jerked the nose up. The airframe groaned as the main spar stressed and the plane curved level and then rose again through air that was momentarily calmer.
Reacher said, "Chicken."
Thurman said, "I have nothing to fear."
"So why pull out?"
"When I die, I'm going to a better place."
"I thought the big guy got to make that decision, not you."
"I've been a faithful servant."
"So go for it. Go to a better place, right now. I dare you."
Reacher said nothing. Thurman flew on, straight and level, through air that was calming down. Two thousand feet, a hundred and twenty-five knots, south of southeast.
"Chicken," Reacher said again. "Phony."
Thurman said, "God wants me to complete my task."
"What, he told you that in the last two minutes?"
"I think you're an atheist."
"We're all atheists. You don't believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?"
Thurman didn't answer.
Reacher said, "Just remember, it was you who was afraid to die, not me."
They flew on, twenty more minutes. The air went still and quiet. Reacher closed his eyes again. Then dead-on an hour and a quarter total elapsed time Thurman moved in his seat. Reacher opened his eyes. Thurman hit a couple of switches and fired up his radio and held the stick with his knees and clamped a headset over his ears. The headset had a microphone on a boom that came off the left-hand earpiece. Thurman flicked it with his fingernail and said, "It's me, on approach." Reacher heard a muffled crackling reply and far below in the distance saw lights come on. Red and white runway lights, he assumed, but they were so far away they looked like a tiny pink pinpoint. Thurman started a long slow descent. Not very smooth. The plane was too small and light for finesse. It jerked and dropped and leveled and dropped again. Laterally it was nervous. It darted left, darted right. The pink pinpoint jumped around below them and drew closer and resolved into twin lines of red and white. The lines looked short. The plane wobbled and stumbled in the air and dipped low and then settled on a shallow path all the way down. The runway lights rushed up to meet it and started blurring past, left and right. For a second Reacher thought Thurman had left it too late, but then the wheels touched down and bounced once and settled back and Thurman cut the power and the plane rolled to a walk with half the runway still ahead of it. The engine note changed to a deep roar and the walk picked up to taxiing speed and Thurman jerked left off the runway and drove a hundred yards to a deserted apron. Reacher could see the vague outlines of brick buildings in the middle distance. He saw a vehicle approaching, headlights on. Big, dark, bulky.
A Humvee.
Camouflage paint.
The Humvee parked twenty feet from the Piper and the doors opened and two guys climbed out.
Battledress uniform, woodland pattern.
Soldiers.
59
Reacher sat for a moment in the sudden silence with his ears ringing and then he opened the Piper's door and climbed out to the wing. Thurman passed him the cardboard carton. Reacher took it one-handed and slid down to the tarmac. The two soldiers snapped to attention and threw salutes and stood there like a ceremonial detail, expectantly. Thurman climbed down behind Reacher and took the box from him. One of the soldiers stepped forward. Thurman bowed slightly and offered the box. The soldier bowed slightly and took it and turned on his heel and slow-marched back to the Humvee. His partner fell in behind him, line astern. Thurman followed them. Reacher followed Thurman.
The soldiers stowed the box in the Humvee's load bed and then climbed in the front. Reacher and Thurman got in the back. Big vehicle, small seats, well separated by the massive transmission tunnel. A diesel engine. They turned a tight circle on the apron and drove toward a building that stood alone in a patch of lawn. Lights were on in two ground floor windows. The Humvee parked and the soldiers retrieved the box from the load bed and slow-marched it into the building. A minute later they came back out again without it.
Thurman said, "Job done, for tonight, at least."
Reacher asked, "What was in the jar?"
"People," Thurman said. "Men, maybe women. We scrape them off the metal. When there's been a fire, that's all that's left of them. Soot, baked onto steel. We scrape it off and collect it in twists of paper, and then we put the day's gleanings into jars. It's as close as we can get to giving them a proper burial."
"Where are we?"
"Fort Shaw, Oklahoma. Up in the panhandle. They deal with recovered remains here. Among other things. They're associated with the identification laboratory in Hawaii."
"You come here every night?"
"As often as necessary. Which is most nights, sadly."
"What happens now?"
"They give me dinner, and they gas up my plane."
The soldiers climbed back into the front seats and the Humvee turned again and drove a hundred yards to the main cluster of buildings. A fifties army base, one of thousands in the world. Brick, green paint, whitewashed curbs, swept blacktop. Reacher had never been there before. Had never even heard of it. The Humvee parked by a side door that had a sign that said it led to the Officers' Club. Thurman turned to Reacher and said, "I won't ask you to join me for dinner. They'll have set just one place, and it would embarrass them."
Reacher nodded. He knew how to find food on post. Probably better food than Thurman would be eating in the O Club.
"I'll be OK," he said. "And thanks for asking."
Thurman climbed out and disappeared through the O Club door. The grunts in the front of the Humvee craned around, unsure about what to do next. They were both privates first class, probably stationed permanently in the States. Maybe they had a little Germany time under their belts, but nothing else of significance. No Korea time. No desert time, certainly. They didn't have the look. Reacher said, "Remember wearing diapers, when you were two years old?"