Finding Jack Read online

  And then it hit him.

  A body was missing.

  Fear prickled up the back of his neck. One of the soldiers had woken up and had probably gone to relieve himself. He’d be returning any minute. Fletcher needed to get out of the room and down the passage before the man returned.

  His mind urged him forward: Move … move … move.

  He reached the end of the railing and dropped down as gracefully as he could.

  Still no one stirred, except for the man standing in the doorway.

  Thirty-seven

  The soldier blinked, his eyes wide with fright, and took a step back.

  He was just beyond Fletcher’s reach. For a moment, they stared at each other, too startled to react. Fletcher lowered his right hand onto his gun and cupped his left hand over his mouth as a warning to the man to remain quiet. It didn’t work. The soldier took a breath and was about to raise the alarm, when a flurry of movement changed everything. Rogan stepped into view and punched the soldier on the side of his head. He was unconscious even before he collapsed into Mitchell’s arms. Together, without uttering a word, they shuffled away from the doorway.

  Fletcher exhaled, feeling like a man who had narrowly avoided falling off a cliff. “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  “No … ’tis the Lord,” Mitchell whispered, “and his lieutenant.”

  “Job done?” Rogan asked calmly, as if the moments preceding his question had not just occurred.

  “The marks are down,” Fletcher managed, numb, as if the words were not his.

  Mitchell carried the soldier back into the barracks and returned him to where he had been sleeping. If another of the soldiers woke up to answer nature’s call, it was crucial that everything appeared normal. The Fat Lady needed as much of a head start down the trail as it could get.

  As they started back down the main corridor, Fletcher felt a fresh wave of nausea pass over him. This time it would not be denied. More as a reflex than a conscious decision, he doubled over and started to heave. Just as the contents of his stomach began their unnatural journey back up his throat, Mitchell swung his arms around Fletcher’s head and forced his hands over his mouth. Rogan quickly added his hands as a further seal.

  “Swallow,” he said.

  Fletcher, with a mouth full of sick, shook his head.

  “The sound of your retching will wake up the soldiers, and we will all die,” Rogan explained calmly. “You have no choice. Just chew it down. It’s all yours, anyway.”

  Fletcher tried to comply, but as he did, more vomit spewed up his throat.

  A thin, watery bile spilled between their fingers.

  “Just get it down, and we can get the fuck out of here.”

  Fletcher cleared his mind and tried to separate himself from his circumstances. It was something he had learned to do effectively in the hospital. After a few seconds, he closed his eyes and managed to swallow the vomit. It felt like thick, warm vegetable soup as it made the return trip down his gullet.

  “That’s it,” Mitchell said, nodding encouragement.

  Tentatively, both men removed their hands.

  “You okay?” Mitchell asked.

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Is it going to stay down?” Rogan pressed.

  “For the moment,” Fletcher groaned, wiping away a long string of saliva that was dangling from his chin.

  “All right, then, let’s move.”

  They continued down the main corridor and, within minutes, were out of the complex. Pushing through the top of the trapdoor, Fletcher filled his nostrils with the sweet scent of the jungle night. He stumbled out, made half a dozen feet, then dropped to his knees and vomited like a man in the throes of an exorcism.

  Although his stomach contents were effectively expelled, the demons remained.

  Thirty-eight

  The darkness made it difficult for the Fat Lady to progress with any real speed down the trail. Although Mitchell had mapped out the remaining traps ahead of them, the terrain itself prohibited anything more than a brisk walk. Whenever they tried to accelerate, someone would inevitably lose their footing. There was a real danger of one of them getting hurt and hindering their pace even further.

  After a while, Travis pulled up alongside Fletcher. “I’m not sure if this is the time, but how’d it go?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “For me,” he began, still fighting a lingering queasiness, “okay. For the two officers I murdered … not so good.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy.”

  Fletcher stumbled on a loose rock, but reached out for Jack to steady himself. “Taking a life in open combat is one thing. In a firefight, both sides know what’s happening, and as shitty as it is, you’ve each got as much chance of surviving as you do of dying. This was just plain, cowardly murder.” He paused. “They looked like goddamn kids in their bunks.”

  “It’s not murder, Fletcher. It’s war. You’re just following orders.”

  “War doesn’t absolve us of everything. We have to account for some of our actions. Just think of those bastards who ran the death camps in the Second World War. Part of it was duty, but another part was something else. Something a good deal darker. They have to answer for what they did at some point.”

  “You can’t compare what you’ve just done to what happened at those death camps. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “C’mon, Fletch, you know it isn’t.”

  “All I know is this,” he uttered, raising his arms up to the pale moonlight. The backs of his hands and the cuffs of his sleeves were smeared black with blood. “This is what’s real to me right now.”

  “We’ve all got blood on our hands.”

  “I don’t recognize myself anymore. A year ago, I was a different person. Never even thought of owning a gun, let alone firing one. Now I kill people in their sleep.”

  “I know how you feel. This place has changed things for all of us. I always imagined that at this stage of my life, I’d be happily married, running a small business of some kind. Nothing grand, just something big enough to keep the wolves away from the door. But things seldom turn out the way we want them to. I suppose both our lives have been derailed.”

  “Thirty-nine,” Fletcher said.

  “Thirty-nine what?”

  “People I’ve killed since arriving here.”

  Travis unbuttoned his shirt and was about to respond, when the darkness was lit up by an explosion of angry gunfire.

  “Down … down!” Rogan shouted, preaching to the converted.

  Bright bursts of light, the distinctive flares of machine gun fire, crackled to their right from behind a small rise.

  Mitchell and Rogan were first to react, immediately returning fire.

  How the hell had they wandered into an ambush? Fletcher thought as he fumbled for his rifle, waiting for a bullet to tear through his spine.

  The sound of their exchange was thunderous in the dead of morning.

  By the time Fletcher had emptied his second clip, he realized they were no longer being fired upon.

  “Halt,” Rogan instructed. “Hold your fire.”

  The jungle was quiet, save for the birds that had been disturbed from their nests.

  Miraculously, nobody had been shot.

  Mitchell and Kingston quickly swept through the area. Once again, and to no one’s surprise, Charlie was gone.

  All that remained in his wake were the ghosts of bullets—two small mounds of empty shells.

  Thirty-nine

  After struggling through the stifling midday heat, the Fat Lady finally stopped to rest for a few minutes. Fletcher removed his rucksack and was about to sit down, when he noticed something was amiss with young Craig Fallow. He was kneeling down, holding his head in his hands. Despite his own dubious emotional state and against his better judgment, Fletcher decided to investigate.

  “Everything all right, Craig?”

  The young man looked up at him, his eyes g
listening. He was holding a crumpled photograph of a young woman Fletcher might’ve found attractive had she not been so heavy.

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Fiancée,” he replied shakily.

  “She’s pretty. What’s her name?”

  “Sarah … Sarah Evans. Jesus, I miss her.” He lifted a hand to his face, more to mask his emotions than to wipe away his tears. “I’m sorry, it’s just … this place … it’s a living nightmare. You know?”

  Fletcher knew, only too well. In his few months on tour, he’d seen more horror than anything his imagination could ever have conjured up. Innocent villagers executed. Men gutted, strung up in trees. Children torn apart by mines. He’d witnessed a soldier stab himself in the leg to try to get out of combat, succeeding only in severing an artery and bleeding to death. Television footage beamed around the world showed images of spectacular bombings, large artillery fire, and dead bodies being loaded onto choppers, but it failed to capture the real horror of what was happening deep within the bowels of the jungle. The cameras stood and watched from the sidelines while the soldiers were left to inhale the sour stench of the war’s breath. But still, the worst part about Vietnam was the waiting. Waiting to trigger a trap. Waiting to walk into an ambush. You could hike through twenty kilometers of thick jungle, singing at the top of your lungs, and emerge unscathed, but the moment you believed you were safe and let down your guard, you were liable to be shot.

  Craig rubbed his wrists as if he’d just been released from handcuffs. “I thought I was dead.”

  “Last night?”

  He nodded and removed his helmet. There was a circular dent and scorch mark on its side. “An inch lower, and I’d be gone. Just like that.” He traced his fingers over the bullet mark. “It’s too much for me.”

  Fletcher felt for the young man. He was clearly terrified and had every right to be. He was only eighteen and, aside from Fletcher and Travis, the only other soldier in the platoon who had volunteered to serve.

  “Why are you here, Craig?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.” Fletcher sensed that the youngster wanted to tell him his story.

  “To prove a point.”

  “To whom?”

  “Anyone who’s ever known me. My parents. My brother. Kids I went to school with. But most of all, to Sarah.”

  “What are you trying to prove?”

  A pause. “My nickname at school was Mr. Gray.”

  “Doesn’t sound that bad. I’ve heard worse.”

  “They called me Mr. Gray because I was the guy who no one would remember after school. In their eyes, I was nothing. A nobody. They used to tease me for being a coward and not having a backbone. I got pushed around for so long, it eventually began to feel normal. I guess it’s like those women who let their husbands beat them. After a while, they get so used to it that the idea of suddenly doing something about it seems absurd. Maybe even impossible.”

  “So you came out into this madness?”

  Craig looked back down at the photograph. “I wanted Sarah to be proud of me. To know that she was marrying a real man, not someone who wouldn’t be able to look after her. You have to understand, she was at school with me. She saw what the other kids would say and how I always backed down. I couldn’t go on having her think I was weak. Hell, I also needed to prove it to myself. There’s nothing worse in life than feeling helpless.” More tears welled up in his eyes. “The irony is that it’s all true. I am a fucking coward! This place is killing me.”

  “Hey, that’s bullshit! Just by pitching up here, you’ve shown more courage than any of your classmates. And you’re right to be scared. Only a lunatic would be enjoying himself down here. We’re all scared shitless, I promise you. Last night I was so goddamn afraid, I puked my guts out.”

  Fletcher’s words did little to console Craig Fallow. The teenager was on the verge of a breakdown, and nothing but a flight out of Vietnam was going to help him. Even that, Fletcher knew, could be too late.

  As he watched the youngster lovingly fold the photo of his fiancée and return it to his pocket, he realized something that he knew was true the moment it entered his mind: Craig Fallow was in a world of trouble, whatever his future held.

  Forty

  It was late afternoon the following day when they finally reached the extraction point. The men were all dead on their feet; few even had the energy left to make casual conversation. The relief of surviving their assignment was eclipsed by their exhaustion. Jack, in particular, looked stiff and sore from their journey. It was the farthest he had traveled, by some margin, since his recovery.

  Fletcher looked across to Craig Fallow, who was once again poring over his fiancée’s photo. His desperation to get home to her was plain to see. Fletcher was trying to recall what the young Sarah Evans looked like, when a distant crack, almost like the sound of a tree being felled, echoed behind them. If it was gunfire, it was a distance away.

  “Lord, Rex … check it out,” Rogan instructed in a hushed voice, passing Mitchell his binoculars. The two men stood up and hurried over to a short but steep hill behind them.

  As Fletcher watched them climb the embankment, a second crack issued out from the same area, slightly louder this time.

  “Stay down,” Rogan ordered.

  As Fletcher watched Mitchell reach the top of the rise, something made him look back. “Oh, Christ.”

  Sitting with his legs folded, Craig Fallow had his head bowed down over his lap. The front of his shirt was stained bright red.

  “Edgar, get to Craig now!”

  As they scrambled to his side, blood was already gushing from his throat. Edgar shoved a bandage into the wound to try to stem the flow, but it was immediately saturated.

  “Craig! Wake up, son.… wake up!” Kingston said, squeezing his hand.

  Edgar tore away the front of his shirt to try to get a better look at the boy’s wound. Sheets of blood flowed down his chest. He listened for a heartbeat and, discovering none, immediately began to administer CPR.

  But it was no good.

  After almost ten minutes of compressions, Rogan pulled him away. “Stop it, son. He’s gone. There’s nothing more you can do for him. Leave him be.”

  Edgar, a teenager himself, had to bite back the tears; his hands and face were covered in his friend’s blood. “What just happened here?” he asked in little more than a whisper.

  Rogan helped the young medic to his feet. “Vietnam,” he sighed. “Fucking Vietnam.”

  The bullet that had robbed Craig Fallow of the opportunity of a happy life with the woman of his dreams had done so purely by chance. It was discharged from too far away to be an intentional strike.

  Mercifully, he never felt what hit him. His life was lost before he knew it was in jeopardy. The bullet entered through the top of his forehead and exited through his neck, suggesting it had been fired randomly into the air. Had he been wearing his helmet, his life might well have been spared.

  Fletcher leaned over the young man’s lifeless body and covered his face with his bandanna. He wondered grimly if fate had been stalking the troubled soldier. It had missed its mark the previous night; had it conspired to return for him today?

  After all, Fletcher had felt fate’s shadowed side before.

  He reached into Craig’s lap and retrieved the crumpled photograph of the one bright light in his life. In time, a soldier or an official from the army would notify his family of his death. The communication would simply state that Infantryman Craig Fallow had died fighting for his country and that the United States was indebted to them for his sacrifice.

  But that wasn’t good enough.

  Right then, Fletcher resolved to write his first letter in Vietnam. In it, he would tell of how well liked and respected Craig was by his platoon. He would describe how he had defended the lives of numerous villagers and once even helped rescue a captured pilot. He would tell young Sarah Evans how much she was loved and how Craig h
ad died with her photograph clutched in his hand. And he would let them know that Craig Fallow was the most courageous young man he had ever known.

  And it would all be true, every last word.

  Forty-one

  Fletcher closed his eyes and tried to tune out the drone of the helicopter’s rotors. He could no longer bear the sight of Craig Fallow’s bloodied corpse. Instead, he imagined he was sitting on a perfect golden beach, the early morning sun shimmering off the ocean. The image evoked the memory of a holiday he and his girls had shared only two years ago. He remembered Kelly, who had built an elaborate sand castle too close to the shoreline, working furiously to build a moat to protect her handiwork.

  “Mommy … Daddy … help me! Quick, the water’s going to wash away my castle!”

  Abigail, who was tanning, stood up and rushed to her daughter’s side. “C’mon, Fletch, help us defend the kingdom.”

  Fletcher reluctantly set aside his newspaper and joined his girls. Together, the three of them dug a deep moat around the front and sides of the castle. But no matter how hard they worked, the waves kept coming, each onslaught filling the hastily dug channel. Eventually the incoming tide overwhelmed the castle, melting its sculpted edges and reducing it to a blurred, indistinct mound.

  After watching her creation be destroyed, Kelly looked up at her father. She never said anything, but Fletcher saw it in her eyes. She was disappointed in him. She was upset that he wasn’t able to save something of hers.

  He was her father: He was supposed to protect her.

  That innocently conceived but accusing expression had haunted Fletcher since the crash. The sand castle became a natural metaphor for her death. Just as he could not protect her sculpture, so he had failed to save her from that nightmarish December morning. Sometimes, just that single thought threatened to consume him.

  A familiar weight pressed against his thigh, rousing him from his daydream. It was Jack. In his first assignment, he had performed far beyond everyone’s expectations. Fletcher couldn’t help but feel proud of how well he had fared. As he watched the Labrador drift off to sleep, familiar questions swirled around in his mind.