No Turning Back

by fulleraaron

A work-in-progress story set during the earlier part of Reacher's army career. He is sent to investigate suspected thefts of equipment at a large base in Michigan. I'd like some feedback on whether I'm on the right track. Given that it's a Reacher story, there will be some violent scenes, although none of them are in the document yet.

1. Chapter 1

No Turning Back

1.

The message was like a crossword puzzle clue. It wasn't one of the crosswords that you solved by swapping one word for another that basically meant the same thing. It was more like one of the longer clues; one where all the individual words made sense, but the overall message didn't. A New York Times crossword kind of a message. Definitely not USA Today.

Master Sergeant Martinez brought it to me. He interrupted my coffee to do it, but that was OK, because that meant it was important. I liked Martinez; a very capable guy with a sense of humour. It's like that sportswriter said about Ali back in the day; a credit to his race. Except the sportswriter was talking about the human race, and I'm talking about senior noncoms. They're not just a different race, but a totally different species from us. But for a guy as good as Martinez, getting commissioned was going to be an inevitable part of his future. It was going to hurt him.

'Note from Colonel G, Cap.' said Martinez, passing a piece of paper over to me, with it lying across his cupped palms, like he was making an offering to a minor god. Like I say, he has a sense of humour.

'Did you read it?'

'Of course I read it. What kind of an investigator would I be if I hadn't? No envelope? General G writes you a note and doesn't seal it, and you expect me not to read it? He was practically begging us to, Cap.'

'That's not the point.'

'That's exactly the point. He was testing your people, making sure we were looking after you, you know?'

'What?'

'I mean suppose we hadn't read it. Or checked it, anyway. It could be anything. There could be anthrax powder between the fold, or acid, or a poison dart ready to flick right into your chest soon as you picked it up. Poison in the ink, even, like in that book about the real old Scottish guy in the monastery. Colour of the Rose, or some crap? All kinds of ways a surprise package could kill you. I'm surprised at you for not knowing, frankly, sir. I had heard that your investigative skills were better than that. I'm disappointed in you.'

'Name of the Rose, sergeant. And I'm suitably chastised. But touched.'

'Don't be, sir. Keeping you alive is what they pay me for. It's nothing personal. The army's just spent too much money on your education – including on books about flowers – to let you kill yourself by being stupid. Besides, we all wanted to see what the note said.'

'I'm touched anyway. Now get the hell out while I read it myself.' Martinez nodded, about-faced and left, without a salute. He knew I wouldn't have wanted to have to stand up to return his one. Good man.

I picked up the note and opened it out. Garber's script, certainly. Strong, decisive and distinct, like a crime-scene fingerprint properly caught in powder.

R,

F&C, 0900, BDUs w/o, rpt W/O mkgs rank/MOS/ID.

G.

The clock on my wall said it was 0840. I had the time, if I got right on it. I got up, locked my office door, and got started.

I needed a blade. Not big, because the job would need to be neat. A bayonet would have been too big and clumsy, even if I'd had one. Which I didn't. I opened my desk drawer, and rummaged around between the notepads and rulers and pens and other army-issue stationery, and pulled out a switchblade, with an old handle but an oiled spring and a sharpened blade. I don't like knives, usually. I have no particular talent with them. But this one was different. I'd carried it around, over and across four continents for over 25 years, since I was six years old. It was probably the oldest friend I'd ever had. Certainly the most loyal one.

I put the blade in the palm of my left hand and opened the closet at the back of my office with my right. I pulled down the oldest of the BDU jackets I kept in there, and carried it across the office and lay it flat on my desk, front side up.

The first part was easy. I opened up the blade, and held the jacket's right sleeve with my left hand. With my right hand I slashed upwards along the length of the sleeve, from a point halfway between the elbow and the shoulder to a point maybe six inches higher. The piece of cloth I'd cut through unfolded, and lay right there on the desk, behind the sleeve, face down. Behind where the patch had sat when it had been whole was the undamaged sleeve. It was much darker than the rest of the jacket. It was the part that hadn't been bleached by the sun.

The next part didn't need the knife. I lay the jacket gently on the desk, and with my right hand I opened up a button on the front of the jacket and slid off the olive green rectangular patch that had sat vertically on the chest.

The third part needed the knife again. I held down the jacket's left lapel with my left arm, and with my right hand I picked up the blade again and used it to cut the jacket. Not the actual jacket. I sliced through the stitching that held the four sides of the three-inch long, three-quarter-inch tall, olive green rectangle that had been attached to the front of the actual jacket. All four sides of a three-inch long, three-quarter inch high rectangle. Seven-and-a-half inches in total. Maybe eighty stitches, all in. Good work for bad pay, by somebody. And I'd ruined it, in less than four seconds. Somewhere, if she'd known, some factory worker in China or Vietnam or Korea would have been cursing me.

But orders were orders. Even for me.

I left the desecrated jacket on my desk, and gathered up the pieces I'd just stripped off. Three olive green rectangles of various sizes and designs. One had been an armband. It had white 'MP' lettering stitched into it. I might have sliced open the band, but I'd left the lettering alone. Maybe the Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean lady would forgive me, for that small mercy. Maybe.

The second piece, although most definitely not in its proper place right now, was intact, at least.

The third piece made me pause for a second. It was between the other two in terms of size, but way out front in terms of significance. I looked at the bold, black lettering on it, seven letters, read left to right. To take off the other two pieces was a desecration. But to take off this piece was like a rape.

Orders were orders. Even for me.

I shucked off the BDU jacket I had been wearing, and swapped it for the desecrated one. It was very loose. I remembered that I'd lost a lot of weight since I last worn this one. Fifty pounds, maybe. It made the jacket so loose that it was slack. Like the sort of jacket a homeless guy would wear, to cover as much of himself as he could, for Winter weather. And it wasn't just oversize. Because of the knifework, it looked old and faded too, at least in parts.

I thought about tossing the three loose pieces of cloth into the trash, but I might need them again. I sincerely hoped I would.

I picked up the three pieces and stuffed them into a pocket. BDUs have lots of pockets. Since about the year 6000 BC, soldiers have been discovering new ways to 'find' things. Clothing suppliers have, by and large, been just as good at discovering new ways to keep those things close and convenient to hand.

I walked to my office door, unlocked it, walked through it into the corridor beyond, and out into the fresh Virginia air. I'd walked that route a hundred times before, but not this way. Not dressed – or undressed, maybe – like this. Because as far as anyone who saw me was concerned, I didn't look myself. Specifically, I was not Reacher, a Captain in the US Army Military Police.

Garber's note wasn't a puzzle at all, really. It had been so explicit that it would have been X-rated, if you knew the code.

R,

F&C, 0900, BDUs w/o, rpt W/O mkgs rank/MOS/ID.

G.

Reacher,

In front of my desk at nine this morning, wearing Battledress Uniform, without, I repeat WITHOUT, markings indicating your rank, Military Occupational Speciality, or name.

Leon Garber, Lieutenant-Colonel, Officer Commanding 53rd Company, Military Police, United States Army

Orders were orders. Even for me.

2.

As I walked to Garber's office, I got very little attention. I should have been getting plenty. I usually do. I stand out like a Christmas tree in the middle of a mosque, a lot of the time. Even in my new, sub-fighting weight, a six-five tall, two-hundred pound guy should be noticeable, whatever the context. People think that the army is full of big, weightlifter type people, but it isn't. It's full of tough people, which is different. A lot of army time is spent running and jogging, and small, lean guys are good for that, on the whole. It's basic physiology. To move from point A to point B, you have to move your own bodyweight, and the bigger you are, the harder that is.

Ordinarily, the uniform helps me blend in, but today it should have sent my noticability quotient up a notch. Because a soldier walking round a post without any kind of identification markings was unusual, to the point of weirdness. It might even make people nervous, at some level. The tiny, vestigial part of their brains was whispering something doesn't smell right here. Keep away into their minds.

But instead of all the normal attention I got because of my size, plus a slug more for the desecrated uniform, I walked among people all the way from my office to Garber's, and nobody said a damn thing to me all the way there. It was like I was a ghost.

I knew why. I might as well have been invisible. People didn't see me at all.

The human brain 1.0 is essentially a pattern-recognising machine. All day long, from the moment you wake up to the moment you close your eyes to sleep, you see and hear and touch and smell and taste a million things, every colour of the spectrum and every size from a dust mote to a Boeing 747. If a guy tried to actually think about all of these things, his brain would explode. (A woman's too, probably. But women make better multitaskers apparently, so maybe not.)

So before the lizard grew some arms and evolved into a smart biped, it figured out that it had to sort the million things into a few basic, recognisable patterns. Six-foot tall, one-foot wide, non-reflecting, moving thing with four, or a minimum three, appendages? Probably a person. Fifteen-foot long, five feet wide, shiny thing that squats on the ground and moves around with a low, warbling, rumbling sound? Automobile, almost certainly.

There are people who, after very particular kinds of brain injury, forget how to form patterns out of what they sense. They can still get the data from their senses, just not put it together. It might not sound like much, but it really screws up their lives. It's tragic. They can spend twenty minutes looking at a glove or a hat before they can work out what they're supposed to do with it. They end up kicking the heads of people they walk past on the beach, because to them, the roughly-round things they see in a relaxing, relational context look more like soccer balls than a fundamental piece of someone's body. Patterns are essential. You literally can't live without them.

All of which is a fancy way of explaining what one of my instructors once taught me about good camouflage.

Everybody thinks that camouflage is about making you look like something you aren't. That's mostly true. If you're sitting in a field in Germany when the Russians roll in, you will definitely find time previously spent trying to look like a typical German hedge to be a good investment. The Russians are thorough, but even they can't assume that every single piece of foliage they see as they advance through the Fulda Gap might actually be a US anti-tank platoon. The most fanatical zampolit in the Red Army would have to forgive a guy for saying 'Oh, come on, sir, it's just a damn hedge!' occasionally.

But sometimes, looking like something else isn't practical. It's almost impossible to make some things look like West German foliage. Believe me, we've tried it. It's mostly the heavy metal. M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks. Apache Attack Helicopters. M2 Bradley Infantry Carriers. Plus whatever the Navy and the USAF are packing these days. I don't know whether we have any battleships anymore. But you can't make an aircraft carrier look like a porpoise, that's for damn sure.

This is where my camouflage instructor's slice of genius comes in. Because he used to say look like something you're not. But if you can't do that, don't look like what you are.

And as I walked from my office to Garber's, the instructor's words came back. I didn't look like a German hedge. But in my old, faded and slack BDUs and without my MP's armband, name tape and rank slide, I didn't look much like a soldier, either. So the pattern-recognition systems in everyone I saw – and who looked at me but didn't see me – didn't kick in. So I didn't register. It was like I wasn't there. I could have been a ghost.

Garber's handwriting was the only neat thing about him. He was legendary within the service for everything else about him being dishevelled and unkempt. An hour after putting on any uniform in the field manual, and he looked like a homeless person even without an oversized set of BDUs.

Personally I think his car-crash look must be at least partly deliberate. Nobody could be as unkempt as he is, all the time, accidentally, and get through OCS, let alone make senior rank as fast as he has. He uses camouflage too. People immediately file him away under the 'Indisciplined, lazy time-server' pattern. Threat quotient? Absolute zero to anybody and anything, except the post tailor shop's reputation. And he'd stay in that mental file for long enough for him to sneak up on people. Suspects, prisoners, fugitives, they'd all made that mistake. Eventually they'd reassess, and refile him under the 'Cunning son of a gun' pattern, obviously. Too late, then. The inside of the stockade cell walls would look the same.

As I stood in front of his desk, as ordered, I wondered whether this whole thing was some kind of joke. Maybe he was trying to make me feel what it's like to look like him. The shiny silver oak-leaf on his chest was the only part of his uniform that deserved to be actually worn by somebody. The rest only looked good for being doused in fuel and used for incinerator kindling. And the rank slide was only good because it was new. In two weeks time, Garber would have owned it for three weeks, and that would be that. It would take its rightful place in the Garber sartorial hall of decrepitude.

'Colonel, I haven't looked it up recently, but I'm pretty certain that we don't have penal battalions any more. So, what's with the stripping down of the uniform thing?' I said.

'I'm not trying to punish you for anything. God knows, you deserve to be punished for lots of things. But if I was trying to punish you, I'd just cut off your coffee supply. You'd be squealing for your Mother within a half hour.'

'So what's the story?'

'I wanted to have you model for a new look.'

'We're not real big on gratuitous changes of wardrobe, sir.'

'I know that. It's going to an authorised new look. An undercover new look.'

'What's the part I'm supposed to be auditioning for – second hobo on the railcar?'

'11-B.'

'I can live with that. I can shoot pretty well. As long as it's Army infantry. Not a Marine. That would be a fate worse than death.'

'Yeah, army. So you get to keep your hair. Some of it, anyway. And you won't be a total grunt. We'll be presenting you as an E-5, so you'll be allowed to form coherent sentences and write joined-up words. Occasionally.'

'Why?'

'Why are we making you an E-5, or why will you be allowed to write sentences? I told you, it'll only be an occasional thing.'

'Why an E-5?'

'You're too old to be anything below that. Funny thing; men over thirty typically do not tend to spontaneously cash in their pensions at Wal-Mart, having decided that repeatedly charging uphill, straight towards the enemy, is a better career option. As soon as guys get over their hill, they decide that they don't want to start running up one that belongs to someone else. So, the story will be that you've career infantry, but you've just done a deployment in the Gulf – again – and you're thinking of a change to a different MOS.'

'That's not a story. Those are facts. I have just done a deployment in the Gulf. Again. I left fifty pounds of myself in it. The prisoners we arrested got more food than us. Our major food group was sand. By the end of my tour, we were virtually getting sympathy handouts from Arab refugees. Some of them were Iraqi.'

'You see, you're getting into it already. The rest of it is all in here. Take a look.'

Garber shoved a jacketed file across the desk to me, and said nothing more. I opened the file, and started to read.

The Operation name always sat at the top of page one of any file. This one was called 'Operation Perpetual', which didn't fill me with immediate enthusiasm. I've always been happier with missions called things like 'Quick Win' and 'Easy Victory'. But at least this one wasn't called one of the ridiculous names that the Pentagon staff officers liked so much. Stuff like 'Blue Spoon' and 'Nifty Dolphin'. The last time I saw a blue spoon was in my cereal bowl when I was three years old. And in my experience, nifty dolphins are rarer than porpoise-shaped aircraft carriers.

Right below the Op name was the mission statement. In a corporation report, it would have been the 'Mission Statement'. But the Army was the original institution that had missions; corporations are just trying to look tough by using the term. So we don't bother with the quote marks. The mission for 'Perpetual' was 'To identify, interdict and terminate any and all illegal activities at, or concerning, the motor pool at US Army Camp Grayling, Michigan'.

I looked up at Garber to try and catch his expression. But he said nothing, and waited until I read on.

I didn't read on, or at least not down. My eyes went sideways, to the photo that was clipped to the right-side of the page. The photo was a head-and-shoulders shot of me, a few years younger and wearing a a Class-A dress uniform.

But I was wearing some other guy's jacket.

There were some differences. Not in the fit or colour of the jacket, but the badges on it.

Instead of the lieutenant's silver bars I would have been wearing at the time, you could just see the golden point of a set of sergeant's chevrons poking into the shot, on 'my' left arm. The set of medal ribbons on 'my' chest was basically the same, but without the striped red, white and blue bar that should have indicated that the holder had won the Silver Star. Sitting above the row of ribbons was an award I never earned – a white rifle sitting on a blue square; a Combat Infantryman's Badge, or CIB. The CIB had a silver star above it. This was a nice touch; it indicated a second award.

Finally, the black acetate name badge on 'my' left chest didn't say 'Reacher'. It said 'Coolidge'.

Four differences, and three possible reasons. One, I had a twin who'd changed his name and had a less successful Army career than me. No dice there – my brother was in the Army, but he was a captain too. And we looked alike, but not that alike.

Second option was that I'd gone on the bar crawl from hell three years back and woke up wearing some other guy's uniform. I couldn't positively rule that one out. I didn't remember that happening, but then by definition, I wouldn't remember it. That would be the point. But I'm not one for monumental bar crawls. I don't get invited to many, for a start. I'm an MP. There's a reason why one of the more polite words that the rest of the Army has for us is 'fun police'. When we turn up at a party, it's usually to break it up with batons, dogs and tear gas, not to give it a little extra zip.

So the third option was most likely. They had taken a real photograph of me and airbrushed it to match the identity I had been assigned for 'Perpetual'.

'What do you think?' asked Garber. 'About the photo?'

'I think you could have found a more recent one. What is this, three years ago?' I said.

'We had to go back three years to find one of you smiling.'

'You telling me I haven't smiled in three years?'

'Not that anyone who's ever worked with you knows about.'

'It's because of the people I've worked with that I've been miserable.'

'You've been working for me for three years.'

I said nothing.

Eventually Garber said 'Your wounded pride aside, what do you make of the legend?'

'Pretty good. Very good job on the airbrushing. The medals are spot on. Where is the CIB supposed to be from?'

'Well, the latest one's from the Storm, obviously. The first one was Grenada. Sorry you had to lose the Silver Star, though.' Garber said.

I didn't mean that 'Coolidge's' medals were the same as mine. I meant that whoever did the airbrushing did it once, and did it right. He didn't just edit out my silver star and say 'good enough for government work'. That would have left a hole in the row, like the gap an English dentist would have made taking out a tooth. The airbrusher had taken the time to take out the star and then shuffle up the others one step each, to make a smooth, even row.

Details like that are important. Important with undercover legends, in particular. It's like General Powell, who'd just led us to a 'Stormin' victory over Saddam, once said: check small things. His detail was to remember to triple-check the parachutes before jumping out of a C-130 over Germany. He stopped one of his guys becoming a 400-pound freefall bomb. My airbrusher's check might stop someone from spotting that Coolidge wasn't real, and start asking who I really was. If that happened, then how I ended up might make the fate avoided by Powell's guy a blessing by comparison.

I nodded. To have left such a significant award as the Silver Star for Valour on 'Coolidge's' chest would have just invited questions that I could do without having to answer. And a repeat CIB was a shrewd choice; an infantryman of Coolidge's experience would have expected to have come under fire at least twice. And I had actually been in Grenada, so if anyone asked about it, I could have plausibly talked about it. Check small things.

'The guy was good. But it's not airbrushing.' said Garber.

'So how did he do it?' I said.

'Some new computer graphic thing. They put it together with the Brits, during the Storm. Called a jay-peg, or something. They turn the picture into a whole load of little squares, which you can squirt down a comlink more easily than with whole images. It also means that the photo editor guys at this end can edit those little squares individually, one at a time. By the time you print it, it looks 100% original.'

'Outstanding. I'm sure the counterfeiter's union of America love it.'

'Maybe. But I'll tell you who don't – the intel analysts at Langley.'

'More imagery, faster? What's not to like? That's like an artilleryman griping about having too many shells.' I said.

'Well, now the analysts can't bitch about their assessments only being wrong because the images were two days old, and there weren't enough of them anyway. So, now they bitch that the assessments are wrong because they get so much material they don't have time to look at it all properly.'

'Backroom guys bitching – nothing new there.' I said.

'You aren't exactly filling my office with rays of sunshine either, Reacher.'

'How pleased would you be if you'd just discovered you'd had your best medal stolen, been busted back to E-5, and had your name changed to Coolidge, or all things?'

'What's the matter? An ex-president's name not good enough for you?'

'Not that ex-president. When he died, somebody asked 'How can they tell?'. I'm going to struggle for gravitas with a name like that.'

'You'll have to improvise. Adapt. Overcome.'

'That's not even the Army. That's the Marines. We're 'Be the best'.

'Always. Carry on, sergeant Coolidge.'

3.

Later, I sat in my room in the Quarters, and went through the whole of the file. It was substantial, and intriguing. Operation 'Perpetual' was the Army's response to the fact that since a few weeks after the Gulf War had ended, the efficiency numbers for the motor pool at Camp Grayling had gone through the toilet, for no apparent reason.

Numbers aren't everything. It's hard to assign a meaningful number to something like a rifleman's morale, or an MP's investigative ability. When I describe a woman as a 'ten', it doesn't literally mean she is in the top decile of the female population. But numbers aren't a total waste of time, either. Especially when you're dealing with objective information. A vehicle either works, or it doesn't. And right now, Grayling's – at least the ones served by their own, on-base crew, the 75th Mechanical Aid Detachment, or MAD, mostly didn't. In the space of a few months, the serviceability of its vehicle fleet had gone from being on the good side of unremarkable, to downright awful.

This was significant, because Grayling was significant. This wasn't some dinky little outfit in the sticks, which nobody would ever find except by accident. It was one of the largest posts in the country. It spread over thee counties. It was big enough that you could drop a small European country into it, with space left over.

One of the reasons for its size was the same reason for its substantial population. It's the largest national guard training area in the country. And especially right now, that made for a lot of traffic. Guard units had been shuffling in and out of it for the last two years, in huge numbers – sixty-five thousand Guardsmen ended up being deployed for Desert Shield, and then the Storm that came after it. Most of those were what the field manual calls 'Combat Support' troops – guys who are at, or near, the front, but not actually engaging the enemy. The term covered all the trades you suddenly need a lot more of when you have a big, unexpected deployment, somewhere that six months earlier, you hadn't expected to be. Engineers, medics, communications people, MPs, logistics guys.

And mechanics. Because a big, mechanised army has a lot of vehicles, and although everybody gets taught the basics, most of the vehicles are complicated enough to need a lot of maintaining by specialists. Since the Cavalry handed back its horses, all of our vehicles have worked on some sort of combustion engine, and they all basically work the same way. You suck air into a chamber, mix it with fuel, make it go bang, and then use the energy from the explosion to move something from A to B. The bigger the vehicle, the bigger the bang you needed, which meant more fuel. Hence, the logistics guys. But it also meant you needed more air. It takes a lot of very big bangs to move an Abrams tank. Some of our vehicles sucked in air like a whale sucks in water – hundreds of cubic metres, every minute, all day long. Normally this isn't a problem, unless you're underwater. But in Arabia, the sand got everywhere. I was only half-joking when I told Garber that it was our major food group in the Gulf. From the time I spent there, I'd probably be seeing sand I thought I'd left behind in the desert reappear in all kinds of places. Falling out of pockets, spilling out from between folds in map sheets, small clouds of it appearing every time I patted a uniform jacket. Everywhere. It would probably be in my handkerchief the next time I blew my nose.

And for the best part of a year, we had been taking a vehicle fleet that was designed to suck up the clear, crisp air of the German plains, and throwing it around the world's biggest sand table. Sand isn't just pervasive. It's also abrasive. It doesn't just clog stuff up; it wears it down. There's a reason why, when you want to clean something really well, you don't 'dustblast' it.

And on top of the dirtier air, we'd been doing way more mileage than we'd planned for. Because we hadn't been engaged in the expected slow, managed, tenacious retreat, in the face of the massed assaults by the Red Army tank divisions. Instead, we'd been the ones doing the advancing.

Take an Olympic athlete who's been training in, say, Ohio. Then dump him in Death Valley, double his training programme, and start sprinkling broken glass onto each of his meals. That's basically what we had been doing to our vehicles in the Gulf. It should have been a disaster. By the second day, we should have had to get out and walk. But instead, we drove through Iraq and Kuwait faster than TV news crews could learn to spell 'manoeuvre warfare'. We could have stayed buttoned-up all the way to Baghdad.

My guys and I covered a lot of ground other there, chasing crimes from one unit to another, all over the Theatre of Operations. The state of our food supply didn't help – it sucked the energy out of us after a while, to the point that we started driving a few hundred yards from one parking lot to another, just to save a few calories. Since we couldn't drink gasoline, letting the wheels do the walking was definitely the way to go. I personally must have driven, or ridden, about a thousand miles in various trucks, Humvees and APCs. Between us all, ten or twenty times that. And I couldn't remember any of us having a serious problem with a vehicle. Not even once.

It was uncomfortable a lot of the time, for sure. The only air conditioning we could get was by taking off the doors. And something somewhere was usually rattling, banging or shimmying at a volume proportional to your speed. But nothing ever totally broke down. Nobody ever saw a soldier standing by the side of the road next to a broken-down vehicle, with his thumb in the air, hitching a ride. It just didn't happen. But now pretty much everything was breaking down at Grayling.

The most obvious explanation was sheer incompetence. But the guys in the motor pool at Grayling were among the people that kept the same types of vehicle running so well on the 'broken glass' diet in the desert for a year.

So basic competence wasn't likely to be the problem. For the 75th MAD to have gone from the performance they exhibited in Arabia, to where they were at now, purely on the basis of incompetence, would have needed pretty much all of them to have been lobotomised somewhere between Riyadh and the States.

But effectiveness wasn't all about natural talent and training. A major part of it – some would say the dominant part – is commitment. This wouldn't be the first time that a unit had performed with distinction in the field and then taken a dive for the canvas when they got back to barracks. It happens so often that we even have a name for it. We call it 'Hitting the ROAD'. Retired On Active Duty. People we call ROAD Warriors. Among other things.

If that's what was happening here, it would be understandable. No matter how much guys want to get home after a year's deployment, it's still deflating to go from a full-on war to being based on a camp where there's nothing to do except get frustrated that there's next to nothing within hundreds of miles, except Detroit. Getting bored, and maybe even a little bitter, would be understandable.

But not acceptable. Not even a little bit. Because whether the 75th knew it or not, people were still depending on them doing a job. The vehicles they were responsible for were needed by someone, somewhere. Guardsmen, and regulars, were still passing through Grayling on the way out to the Gulf, to relieve the guys who'd been out there all through the War. The new guys needed wheels and tracks, too.

And we still had an armoured Corps in Germany. Ivan may be down, but as far as we could tell, he wasn't out, yet. Hitler may have made the mistake of confusing those two things, but we weren't going to, that was for sure, The intel people said that the Russians weren't just pretending to be angry at us for setting up training bases in Poland and Ukraine, right in their backyard. They really were angry.

Whether in the Gulf or Europe, or anywhere else you wanted to talk about it, the Green Machine still needed its stuff to work. And if Grayling's people weren't pulling their weight, then that meant that some other unit somewhere was taking the strain. Somewhere that was probably a lot less comfortable than the Great Lakes. So lack of effort was not acceptable. Not at all.

The camp's own MP unit had added another hypothesis to incompetence and idleness. Criminality was suspected. The local guys made quiet, but nonetheless thorough, enquiries. Personnel records were checked. Enquiries had been made. Paperwork was reviewed. Equipment holdings had been audited. Vehicles, barrack rooms and even, as a last resort, lockers and garages were searched.

This wasn't illegal, even without a warrant, on a base. It's a whole different world inside the army bubble. As long as it doesn't involve children or animals, MPs get to pretty much go where we want and do what we want. But searching lockers isn't usually the first thing you do. Partly because we like doing some things more than others, and rooting through a fellow soldier's gear was low on the list of fun ways to spend a Saturday night. But it's also almost always a total waste of time. The kind of criminal who is retarded enough to leave stolen goods in a standard-issue storage locker to which the local Provost-Marshall usually an unofficial master key, wouldn't have made it through army selection process in the first place.

As expected, the searches had turned up nothing of substance, just like all the other covert enquiries had. So the Grayling CO, an armoured branch brigadier-general that I'd never heard of called Irwin, had done the next thing in the SOP, and switched from covert to overt.

Private, but widely-publicised, recorded interviews had taken place with anyone who either worked in or talked to the motor pool, going back from before the problems started. The gate guards got a lot more obviously thorough in searching vehicles on the way out of the base. The speed of the posting plot's merry-go-round moved up a notch, so that people came and went a little more rapidly.

Most visibly, barrack rooms got rousted in the middle of the night, with the searches being done by guys in pairs. One would do the search. The other one would distract the searchee by screaming provisions from the UCMJ at him.

Provisions that 'allow any search or other enquiry to take place without either prior notice to, or consent of, said individual at any time and any place for any purpose, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?' and then pretend to see the soldier nod at the end of it to indicate understanding, whether he'd actually nodded or not. Everybody would know that the solider most likely hardly understood a word of it. But soldiers generally agree with whatever senior noncoms tell them, whether it actually makes sense or not. Especially when it's four o'clock in the morning, the soldier is standing to attention in just his skivvies, and the noncom is a white-helmeted MP who is waving a baton around. The MP doing the yelling normally has more fun than the one doing the search. And definitely more fun than the soldier in skivvies.

The purpose of all this theatre wasn't just to remind the younger soldiers that it wasn't just during basic training that the army could wake you up at four in the morning without you being able to a damn thing about it. It was to point a flashlight into a corner full of cockroaches, metaphorically speaking. By following the direction the roaches scattered in, you might find the nest.

But it hadn't worked. Not only had nothing turned up, but the problems continued. Possibly because there really was nothing criminal going on. But probably because the cockroaches were smart enough to realise that all the shouting and yelling and searching was just a play, and that if they stayed calm and still, they could wait it out. And so they stayed calm and still, and waited it out.

So Irwin switched back to covert action. He asked us to send in an undercover guy. It was a brave move. It meant telling the world outside his own chain of command that he had a major problem that he couldn't fix by himself. Senior officers were very nervous about doing that. It's evolution in action. Junior officers who casually tell bad news to the wrong people get culled by the career system, and never become senior officers. They don't get the chance to pass on the faulty gene to subordinates. Irwin had done the right thing. But some very important people to his career – the ones in his chain of command – were going to see it differently.

4.

The next morning I got up, showered, and put on a set of BDUs that actually looked like they belonged to me. The hobo look wasn't really working for me. Plus, it might be the last day I got to be 'me' for a while. Best make the most of it, I thought.

The line of food in the BOQ was, as usual, stupendously well-populated. Before 'enough food to feed an army' became a cliché, it was a standard entry in some senior chef's operations manual. I'm no gourmet, but I love the army's chefs. There's an old joke that while it takes 48 hours for the human body to turn food into waste, an army cook can do it in fifteen minutes. Whoever thought it up was never in my army. These guys can produce a three-course meal in the middle of the jungle, using a trash can and a pile of sticks as an oven. With decent ingredients and the best equipment that Uncle Sam will buy, they do the nearest thing a mortal will see to alchemy. It's amazing. It's like watching entropy in reverse.

I loaded my tray with protein. Eggs, bacon and sausage; the three major food groups. I piled the plate so high that eventually stuff started to slide off the sides. I went to find somewhere to sit. I would have been happy to eat alone, but I spotted fellow MP captain Dave O'Donnell at an otherwise empty table, and joined him. Dave was easy to spot in a room – he was always the only one in immaculate uniform, no matter what the time was. In fact he wasn't just immaculate. He was sort of Garber's alter ego. His uniforms somehow looked more expensive than ours, like he bought them privately out of a catalogue. In a different world, he would have been an accountant, or an investment banker.

I sat opposite him. He raised his eyes from his own plate, and glanced down at my mine. He grimaced, then looked up at me, and waited.

I said nothing.

He looked at me straight in the face some more. Eventually he said 'Jesus'.

'Are you confusing me with the son of God?' I said.

'No way. That guy had humility as a defining characteristic. I just couldn't believe that plate. Are you preparing for the apocalypse or something? You might have told me it was coming. Some friend you are.'

'I'm recovering from my own hell, I guess. The medics told me I need to build myself up after the weight I lost in the Gulf.'

'You got specifically told by a medic to eat an entire cattle herd every morning? Did he exhibit any other obvious signs of mental illness? I guarantee you, you carry on eating like that, you'll get a heart attack before you retire.'

'The guy who told me seemed sane enough. Drunk, admittedly, at the time. But sane. And anyway, he was a major. So if I don't do what he days, I will be refusing to obey a direct order. So what can I do?' I shrugged.

'Of course. That's you, always respectful of authority.'

'I am when it gives me an excuse to eat. Besides, I'm eating a lot, but I'm eating healthy. No carbohydrates.'

'All that means is that you'll turn into a portable chemical weapon system by lunch. At which point the rest of the army will have to survive on potatoes and rice because you'll have eaten all the protein.'

'Each to his own. Beside, this might be the last decent meal I get in a while. Or at least that I get for free.'

'Don't try and tell me you're taking a vacation.' said Dave.

'Temporary duty. Michigan.'

'What the hell's happening in Michigan? Is someone afraid the Canuks are going to invade across the Lakes or something?'

'Maybe, but that's not why they told me I'm going. Something at Grayling. People stealing things. Vehicle parts, probably.' Dave said nothing for a beat, thinking.

'Does sending you to Michigan to worry about a pile of missing spark plugs seem reasonable to you?'

'They're going to pay me for it. That's reasonable.' Dave thought for a moment again.

'Who's the CO there?' he asked.

'A tread-head called Irwin. One-star. Why?'

'Because you wouldn't be going unless he wanted you there. So why does he want you there?'

'To solve a crime, presumably. That's what we do in the MPs. You should try it. It might be fun.'

'He doesn't have his own MPs? Why has he asked for someone off-post? Bit of a Hail Mary move isn't it? '

'His own people couldn't find anything. So he's thinking laterally. Nothing wrong with that.'

'They couldn't find anything, or they just didn't? And he's a tank general, for God's sake. Those guys' idea of thinking laterally is to swivel the turret around ninety degrees.'

'You think too much, Dave.'

'I read somewhere that's what we do in the investigative branch. You should try it sometime. It might be fun.'

I said nothing.

'Reacher, whether you find anything or not, he must know how it'll look to have called us for help. So he's either desperate, or stupid. And even though he's in the armoured branch, I don't think it's the second option. And one-stars don't get to be one-stars by seating the small stuff. So whatever he's desperate about, it's going to give you a bigger problem than your diet plan.'

'So stop giving me a hard time and let me eat.'

'I should. Maybe I should have compared you to the son of god. If you're not careful, this might turn out to be your last supper.'

'Well then, I beat him; I'm up earlier in the morning.'

'I'm sure that will make you feel better as they nail you to the cross. I'm serious – whatever's going on in Grayling, if it worried a general, it ought to worry you more.'

5.

Time spent gathering intelligence is never wasted. I had learned just about all I was going to by looking at the file for 'Perpetual'. The next step was to go and look at some actual vehicles. I'm no gasoline-head. I've never spent weekends staring in awe at monster trucks, or cooing with excitement watching cars throw themselves round an oval racetrack, again and again. But since Coolidge was supposed to be considering a change of profession, I needed to know enough to get by when people started talking about whatever was under the hood of military vehicles these days.

I walked over to the Rock Creek motor pool, and went into the office. A Specialist saw me come in, walked over from the back office area to stand behind the counter, and braced up to attention. His name tag said 'Rackham'.

'Morning sir!' he said.

'Morning. Have you got time to give a guy a guided tour of your fleet?'

'Can do, sir. You looking to buy, rent or borrow? We take cash, personal or company cheques, and all major plastic.'

I smiled. 'Borrow, eventually. But at the moment I'm just looking to learn a few things.'

'OK, sir. How long do you have?' The specialist had a confused expression. Like a research scientist in an obscure field might look if a member of the public had just wandered into his lab and asked about the project, out of nothing but curiosity.

'How long do you need?'

'We don't have much to show you really. Just soft-skinned stuff, no tracks. Basically all we have here is some civilian stuff painted green. An hour should cover the basics, then we can take it from there.'

'Sounds good to me. Can you do it now or should I come back?'

'If you could give me a minute, I'll need to get somebody to cover the desk. I'll see you outside in the park, sir?'

'Okay.' I nodded, and headed out of the office.

The vehicles in the parking area may officially have been the army's, but to all practical purposes they belonged to the senior sergeant in the pool. He would let the right kind of person borrow them from time to time, but they were still his. It was his adopted family, almost, and the parking area his front parlour. The fleet at Rock Creek wasn't the largest or most diverse in the world, but having a look around it with a spot of commentary from an expert would help me sound like a credible aspiring mechanic once I got to Grayling.

After a few minutes, Rackham came out, and walked over to me.

'Thanks for waiting, sir. I thought we'd start with the simple stuff – break you in gently. If I dive right in to the high-end stuff, your brain might explode.'

I said nothing in reply, and just nodded. He was smiling as he was talking. Like a lot of soldiers he seemed to think that MPs were, by definition, stupid. Every other branch in the army had its favourite jokes about us. One of the more subtle ones was about how it take three MPs to arrest anyone – one to read the charge, the second to write down anything the prisoner said, and a third one to keep an eye on the other two dangerous intellectuals.

We started walking round the park together, the Specialist giving a running commentary on the specifications, design features and mode of operation of each vehicle type. After about fifteen minutes I realised that he hadn't been kidding about the need to break me in gently. My brain was metaphorically in serious danger, if not of exploding, then at least of leaking. For fifteen minutes after that point, the guy kept on talking about things like weight differentials and torque application levels and transmission tunnels and transfer ratios. And he said all this stuff in the same tone of voice, and the same gestures, that more well-adjusted men reserved for descriptions of beautiful women, preferably ones they're sleeping with.

I decided after forty-five minutes that I was wasting my time carrying on. I was beginning to be like a college drop-out sitting in an a lecture by a quantum physicist.

'Thank you, Rackham – very useful. I'll be in touch if I have any questions.'

'Thanks for taking the time, sir. Not many people care, really.'

'People can be odd like that, sometimes. Can I sign out one of your sedans for some detached duty from tomorrow?'

'Absolutely, sir – they're all ready to roll right now. But we'll get one all spruced up for you. If you'll wait here I'll bring you out the keys and the paperwork.'

'Great, thanks.'

He reappeared a few minutes later with a simple silver key and a sheaf of forms. I made a show of reading the paperwork, and glanced down a lit of requirements that I needed to fulfil in order to legally borrow an army vehicle.

There were lots of references to training courses that I hadn't gone anywhere near since basic training, and eyesight tests, and statements from medics certifying the operator to be free of epilepsy, colour-blindness and a whole list of other medical complaints that would have ruled people out of service in the army in the first place. I'd sent people to jail for murder on less paperwork than this. Hell, we'd just invaded Iraq on less paperwork than this. At the end I just shrugged, and initialled in a few check boxes.

'Didn't take long for the lawyers to come back out of their holes after the war was over, did it?' I asked Rackham.

'Damn straight, sir. You know what they call a pile of dead lawyers a hundred feet high?'

'The makings of a good bonfire?'

'And a job half-finished.'

The whole exercise taught me more about Rackham than about the vehicles, really. I understood very little of what he'd told me, and I came to only two useful conclusions. The first was that this guy needed a hobby. The second was that if I didn't see any vehicle reliability problems arising at Rock Creek in the immediate future. If all our mechanics were like Rackham, then they would let their own children starve to death through neglect before they slacked off on the job. And they probably regard actual theft of parts as being roughly equivalent to female genital mutilation. They could understand the concept, but would recoil at the idea of even allowing it to happen within a hundred miles of them, let alone actually doing it.

There are plenty of things that the Army couldn't buy efficiently if World War Three depended on it. Sometimes this is understandable, because a lot of our stuff isn't supplied competitively. The list of companies able and willing to manufacture, say, 155mm artillery shells, is pretty short. And some of those firms operate out of places like China, and North Korea, and Cambodia. So paying ridiculous prices for that kind of stuff might sting, but you can see how it happens.

But the Army real estate is full of a lot of things that everybody else buys too. Lightbulbs. Xerox machines. Sheds. The problem, in my humble opinion, is that we buy that stuff using the same complicated procedures that we use to buy artillery shells. Instead of finding a capable person, giving that person a budget and saying 'Get on it', we have committees, and scrutiny boards, and 'guideline manuals' so thick you could use them as bombs if you dropped them out of a helicopter. This is all so that if some Congressman ever wants to know why we buy our lightbulbs from some other Congressman's constituent, we have a big thick wad of paper to slap him down with.

But the side-effect is that we have lightbulbs costing fifty dollars, xerox machines that cost us the same as a lot of civilians spend on their cars, and unmarked sedans with a price tag that would buy you a small house anywhere outside New York City limits.

The good news for me is that what I was after next was of little or no interest to any Congressman. I wanted a haircut. I was currently wearing my acceptably, but noticeably, long for a soldier, mainly because I could. But it wouldn't do for a senior infantry noncom. So next stop was the post barbershop. I got lucky; today's guy was a grizzled, grey-haired, six-foot slab of granite who looked like he'd be on the same wavelength as I was, stylistically. I had him pegged as someone who almost certainly wore a uniform back in his day. I just wasn't sure when his day was. Vietnam? Korea? Maybe even Big Two. I didn't think it would be polite to ask, so I just let him get on with it. Ten minutes and ten dollars later, the top of my head looked just like his, but with not so much grey. Perfect.

I was almost ready to go. Almost. I walked across to the Post Exchange, and headed into the sports store inside.

I wasn't looking for the sexy, branded gear that was shown prominently in the windows. I went straight past the latest training apparel, logos all over them, implying that all you had to do to chip and putt like Tiger Woods was wear the same gear he did. I carried on walking right to the back, eventually getting to the part that had all the old stuff on discount. Of course, 'old' was relative – it probably meant last season. But I didn't care about the age, or the logo, or who was in the TV ads advertising the stuff. All I cared about was the colour. I found what I was looking for piled against the back wall. In a corner, like the store was embarrassed to be stocking the stuff at all.

A big, unloved-looking, heap of holdalls. I rummaged around for a minute looking for two that I wanted – both large, but one of them cream, and the other red. The red one was straightforward enough, but in the end I couldn't find a cream one. But there were plenty of scuffed, tired, faded white ones, which was almost as good. Good enough for government work, certainly.

I paid for the bags and headed back to my quarter. Opened the door to my room, and threw them onto my bed.

I then looked around the room, slowly, systematically, like I was conducting a search of a suspect's home for evidence. Which I was, in a way. Except this time, I was the suspect. I gathered together everything to do with Operation PERPERTUAL and gathered it together on my bed. The section of the file for PERPTUAL that was Coolidge's fake personnel record. The headshot pictures of 'Coolidge', and 'his' BDU jackets and Class A uniform that I'd be wearing while I was being him. Even a good quality but worn wallet that came with the file. The wallet had no money and no credit cards in it. There was a limit to what the Army was prepared to pay for, even to build a good legend. But it did have a photograph in it. It was in the see-through, foldout section where a single man might have put his driving license. In the same compartment of my actual wallet, I had my MP's ID card.

The snapshot wasn't of Coolidge, that was for sure. It was of a woman. She was in her mid to late twenties, at a guess. She was standing on a beach somewhere, smiling, looking straight towards the photographer, hands in the pockets of a pair of blue short pants. You couldn't see her eyes because she had a set of stylish sunglasses, but there was something in her pose that suggested she didn't mind being photographed. Didn't mind at all. She looked like the kind of woman who got photographed a lot. She could conceivably have been an infantry sergeant's wife. But he'd have to have been very lucky.

Once I was sure all the stuff for PERPETUAL was in the pile, I packed it all into the white holdall. Ideally, 'Coolidge' would have been packed into a 'cream' bag. But off-white would do.

Once I'd cleared away of Coolidge's stuff, I repeated the procedure, with my own. On my bed, I stacked up my own BDUs and Class A uniform. The part of the file that was real, instead of full of faked material on Coolidge. A couple of blank travel voucher forms that I'd need to get reimbursed for gas, and anything else I bought when I wasn't being Coolidge. And right on the top of the pile, my folding toothbrush.

Then came the tools of the trade. Half a dozen plastic ziplock bags and a roll of yellow and black-striped tape, marked 'EVIDENCE' in red lettering. Three or four chinagraph pens in various colours. A bulky, high-spec camera and half a dozen batteries for the flash unit, and a dozen rolls of wet film. I wondered what kind of evidence I'd be gathering with the overall package. The camera looked more useful to a wildlife photographer than a policeman. The zoom lens on it was huge. It was way bigger and heavier than the camera itself. It looked like the sight on a sniper rifle.

I transferred the pile of stuff into the red holdall, but didn't zip it up just yet. Because I had a final decision to make. Should I take a weapon? I would be driving, so transporting a siderarm wouldn't present the same security problems that flying would cause. But it would be an extra enbumbrance that I almost certainly wouldn't need.

In the end, it was actually Coolidge who made the decision for me. He was an infantryman, and they never went anywhere without a weapon. I knew guys in the Gulf who took their M-16s into the showers with them, muzzles kept dry with plastic bags taped onto the end of the barrel. Just in case.

I briefly considered checking a rifle out of the armory. Coolidge would probably think that traveling to a new unit, even temporarily, with only a sidearm, would be coming close to indecent exposure. Like an accountant coming to a party in a lounge suit instead of a dinner jacket. I wrote off that idea, fast. Even Coolidge would realise that he wouldn't need an M-16 for a garage assignment. But it would be unthinkable for him not to have something lethal in his gear. So the old standby, the 1911 Model Colt 45, went into the bag. The white bag. It was supposed to be Coolidge's, not mine.

All in all, not the most entertaining Friday night I'd ever had, but time well spent. I set the alarm in my head to 0500, got into bed, and went to sleep.

6.

On Saturday morning, I took longer than usual in the shower. As well as the typical soaping all over, I made a point of scrubbing under my nails, hands and feet, and then clipped the nails. I also spent much longer than usual cleaning anywhere there was hair on my body. It wasn't because I was dirtier than usual. I wasn't trying to remove forensic traces of anything from myself. If it got to the point where the bad guys were poking under my fingernails, I would have bigger problems than worrying whether any skin cells they found could be matched to Jack-None-Reacher.

The extra cleaning was a psychological thing. I wanted to remind myself that I was about to become someone else. It was the same reason I'd had the haircut the day before. It was necessary, certainly, but not especially urgent. I could have left it till I arrived at Grayling. But that would have left me walking through their front gate not completely being Coolidge.

I dressed in a set of my own BDUs, slung the red and white bags over my shoulders, and headed towards the motor pool. No time for breakfast – I wanted to be clear of the Virginia beltway before the morning commuters clogged it up more thoroughly than Dave O'Donnel thought I was doing to my arteries. I found the sedan that Rackham had booked out for me and headed towards it. I saw that someone had taped a piece of paper to the windshield, under the wiper. I peeled it off the windshield, and unfolded it.

'Sir,

Thanks for stopping by yesterday. After we talked, I gassed her up for you, and gave her a spruce-up on the inside with a vacuum. You shouldn't need to stop before Cincinnati, IF you stick to the limits, ha ha! Good luck, & Bonne Voyage!

Rackham, Spec.

PS – This one needs a little TLC on any hill start you have to make. She'll do it, but be gentle.'

Rackham wasn't going to pass any exams in French but his heart was clearly in the right place. The right place for a mechanic. If the infantry marching chant was 'I love my rifle more than you', then presumably the mechanic equivalent was 'I love my rev counter more than you'.

I folded up the note and put it into a jacket pocket. Time to hit the road.

Of course, this was America, not some third-world African hellhole. Everything's relative. Here, even the 'backroards' were substantial. Four-lane ribbons of cement, mostly running straight and true for mile after mile. No variation, either latterly or vertically. Once I got away from the metro area, I made good progress, and after a while, the hardest problem became monotony.

To pass the time, I played mental games with the speed being indicated on the dial in front of me on the dash, setting myself a challenge of staying as close to 63 MPH for ten minutes, then 61, then 59, 57 and 55, then back up to 63 again. I started with 63 because it was an odd number, and therefore, possibly also a prime number. At each speed, I'd throw the number round in my head to see if it was prime. Then if it wasn't, I worked out how many times I'd have to break the factors into other, smaller, factors, before I ended up with a list of primes, and nowhere else to go, mentally.

63 isn't a prime number. It doesn't even have a long list of factors. Seven and three, that's all. Unremarkable. Boring, even. And it didn't get more interesting the second time. This little game had limited replay value. The second time around, I kept the part of the game about keeping to the same speed the same, but I had to think of something else during the ten minute intervals.

Finding and prosecuting a criminal, or criminals, within a military population is both harder and easier than doing the same in a civilian population.

Identifying criminals was harder for me because the military is a relatively homogeneous population. There is far less variation within any given population of grunts than in the same number of civilians. In the US as a whole, the vast majority of crimes are committed by physically able men between the ages of 18 and 25, with a certain basic minimum level of intelligence but not by geniuses. So a civilian cop, without knowing anything about the circumstances of a crime, can rule out anyone who's too old, too young, has the wrong set of genitals, or has fewer than four limbs, more than 140 points of IQ or less than 80 points. There are cases of octangenarian grandmothers turning into bank robbers, and child prodigies committing fraud because they're bored, but these are exceptions. Outside of very specific crimes, very rare exceptions.

That's a great start for my civilian counterparts. It narrows down the suspect pool enormously, allowing him or her to focus investigative effort where it's most likely to be useful.

But I could apply the same test on the population at Camp Grayling and be right back where I started. There, pretty much everybody was a young man, and absolutely everybody was physically healthy and of at least average IQ. Most were better than healthy, and had an IQ considerably higher than average. Everyone on the military gets lots of practice dealing with unexpected situations and events, and using existing experience and knowledge to deal with them successfully. That's pretty much the definition of IQ. We can't get started by rounding up the usual suspects. Everyone we know is a usual suspect.

All of which added up to the fact that at the stage of an investigation involving working out who the bad guy was, I started off a lap behind Sherrif Flatfoot.

But it wasn't all bad news. MPs have tools and resources that civilian cops could only dream of. We can do things – and do things to people – that are exactly the kind of breaches of due process and common decency that the founding fathers scratched their beards over, back in the day, when they were deciding what to put in the Constitution. We don't have to worry a lot about personal privacy, or search warrants. With us, it's not 'Nothing to see, officer, I'll move right along', it's 'You got nothing to hide, you got nothing to fear'. At that point, we're even with civilian law enforcement.

And because of the extra powers and techniques we had, then once we'd managed to narrow the pool down enough, we would be all over a case like a pack of wolves chasing down a wounded deer. And when we'd found the bad guy, we had another advantage over the Sheriff. Prosecuting Army suspects was a walk in the park. Court-martials might look look regular courts, and procedurally they are. But culturally, they're a whole different world. There's a presumption of guilt. I once met a Brit MP – 'Redcaps', they call them – joke once that every court-martial he'd ever been a witness at, had started off with the presiding judge saying 'Sarn't-Major, march the guilty man in.' In the Army, you do not have the right to remain silent. You do not have the right to an attorney. You do not have the rights of free assembly, or free speech, or free anything, except regular haircuts. And the right to bear arms. That one's pretty much a given. If the Army was a state, its motto wouldn't be Virginia's 'Live Free or Die'.

It would be 'Defending democracy, by living in a dictatorship.'

So all in all, we almost always cross the line ahead of the competition. Our only disadvantage came right at the start, when we had to be more thorough in working out who we should be looking at.

But that was one of the things that made the Grayling thing puzzling. We already knew who was doing it, pretty much. Out of a total post population of ten thousand plus, we had narrowed the suspect pool down to a hundred or so guys, all working out of one facility. So by rights, the rest of it should be easy. We shouldn't just be ahead of where our civilian counterparts would be. We should be so far ahead that we'd be tapping them on the shoulder as we lapped them, again. But we weren't. Things had stalled. Despite the things that Irwin had tried, things hadn't been able to get father than a vague impression of who was involved and what they were doing. We had no idea whatever of the 'how'.

We were obviously missing something. Or many things.