Thai Horse

by William Diehl

  Cohen was a strange sight, dressed in a cheongsam with a pistol belt around his waist, sitting like a crown prince on his canvas lawn chair, staring ahead into the darkness, muttering a continuing monologue questioning his sanity, Hatcher’s, Daphne’s — in fact, the whole damn trip. He had insisted upon arranging for the boats and the gunmen.

  Finally Hatcher growled, ‘Listen, China, nobody stuck a gun in your ear and ordered you to come. It was your idea to round up the guns, get your beach chair there and come along for the ride.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t talk you out of it,’ Cohen answered.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Cohen said. ‘What the hell’s so special about this guy Cody anyway?’

  ‘I told you, we went to school together.’

  ‘That doesn’t float,’ Cohen said with disgust.

  ‘Hell,’ Hatcher said, ‘maybe I wanted to do one last job that had . . . some sense of. . . humanity . . . honor maybe.’

  “War, he sung, his toil and trouble; honour but an empty bubble,” Cohen intoned.

  ‘Dryden,’ Hatcher replied. ‘How about “Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done.”

  ‘Richard the Second,’ Cohen answered, and after a moment’s meditation added, ‘I hope to hell all this poetry’s worth the trip.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ answered Hatcher.

  ‘Let me tell you something maybe you don’t know about Sam-Sam,’ Cohen said, starting a rambling monologue that eventually had a point. ‘First time I ever met him was when I saw you, when the Tsu Fi sent me up here to Chin Chin land the first time. Sam- Sam was kind of the new kid on the block, okay? He came down from Peking because he was an ardent capitalist at heart, which didn’t go over well in Peking. This was about six months before that time I met him. I don’t know what he did in Peking, but whatever it was, he had developed the most blasé attitude about killing I’ve ever seen. I mean he would just as soon put a bullet in your brain as step on a bug.

  ‘I was dealing mainly with Joe Cockroach, he was like the agent for everything. You made a deal with Joe and he got it all together — one price, one guy to pay. It was a comfortable way to do business. Also I trusted Joe. I knew him before in Hong Kong when he was in the import business. So maybe the third time I go up there, Sam-Sam comes up to me and says from now on its him and me doing business. He’ll make a better offer, he says. And I tell him, “Sam-Sam, I can’t do that because I’ve been dealing with Joe for too many years and, besides, things don’t work like that up here at the Ts’e K’am Men Ti.”

  ‘So Sam-Sam walks out on the deck — we were in this barge and I was in Joe’s office, Joe is outside doing something — and Sam-Sam walks out the door and next thing I know I hear two shots, pumf, pumf, just like that, and I dash to the door and look out in time to see Sam-Sam with the gun still smoking and he grabs a handful of Joe’s shirt and lifts him up with one arm and throws him in the river. And he looks over at me and he smiles and he says, and this is a quote, he says, “Now it is not a problem anymore.” And he laughs. Six months later he controlled the whole damn river.’

  ‘I know all that stuff, China,’ Hatcher said with a sigh.

  ‘Yeah, but here’s what you don’t know,’ Cohen said rather elegantly. ‘Joe Cockroach came to Hong Kong from China. He did this and that, nothing very successful, then he went up to Chin Chin land and got in the smuggling business. Then he sent for his brother to come down. His brother was Sam-Sam Sam.’

  ‘Sam-Sam isn’t going to be around,’ Hatcher said gruffly.

  ‘Yeah, right, that’s what we’re all hoping,’ Cohen intoned. ‘That Sam-Sam won’t be around.’

  They fell silent again and Cohen began to doze, his head bobbing, then woke up suddenly, but drifted off again. In the eerie twilight before dawn he looked like some ancient Chinese philosopher.

  Daphne and Hatcher sat beside him on the hardback benches provided in the snakeboat. Hatcher was leaning back, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Daphne reached out and slipped her hand in his. He squeezed it gently and held on to it as they peered straight ahead into the waning darkness.

  She leaned over him and said softly in his ear, ‘You like this, don’t you, Hatch? Living with your heart in your mouth.’

  ‘It can become addictive.’

  ‘Did you ever marry, Hatcher?’ Daphne asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Is that the reason?’

  He thought for a moment, and said, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Ever thought about it?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said immediately, and was surprised at his answer. ‘The thought never occurred to me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Hatcher did not answer immediately. He thought of all the stereotyped reasons.

  ‘I live day to day,’ he said finally. ‘Marriage is also yesterdays and tomorrows.’

  He turned and looked back at her. ‘Or maybe I’ve just been too damn selfish all my life to think about anyone else. Why? Is this a proposal?’

  They both laughed softly in the darkness.

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not the marrying kind either.’ She paused for a moment and then asked, ‘Do you ever worry about dying?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said quickly, ‘I gave that up a long time ago.’

  The river broke up into a dozen twisting streams and creeks that coursed through the thick jungle. This was the northern rim of the Southeast Asian rain forest. A few miles to the north, trees gave way to foothills and then mountains, but here the jungle was still fresh and verdant. Chinese patrol boats, limited in number, ignored the area, which was like pirate Jean Lafitte’s stronghold in the early 1800s, a drifting, lush green empire of assassins and privateers who could vanish in an instant up one of its many creeks and rivers or disappear into jungle hideouts defended by mines and booby traps. It was a sprawling black market, its barges and boats of contraband protected by nature and by the brigands who called themselves the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the Secret Gate Keepers, and dominated with vicious authority by the ruthless Sam-Sam Sam, and his henchmen, the SAVAK killer Batal and the Tonton assassin Billy Death.

  With the sun, the jungle creatures in this marginal rain forest began to awaken and the underbrush came alive with morning sounds. Adjutant storks squawked, gliding frogs bellowed and leaped from tree to tree, hornbills pushed through the foliage with their powerful beaks vying for food with fruit-eating bats. High above them all, eagles drifted leisurely through the blood-red sky seeking breakfast.

  By noon they were near the small villages of Jiangmen and Shunde. They slipped past them. By mid afternoon they were deep in the jungle.

  ‘We’re coming to the Ts’e K’am Men Ti cutoff,’ Daphne said.

  Hatcher studied the map she had sketched before they left. It showed a narrow cutoff snaking away from the main river to the south. Four miles up the cutoff was another branch that twisted off to the east through the jungle, then cut sharply west forming a narrow peninsula, an elbow in the stream, like the trap in a sink, and easy to block in the event someone tried a hurried retreat back toward the main river. Leatherneck John’s was on the far side of the elbow.

  Hatcher pointed to the tight little peninsula and traced his finger straight across its base, away from Leatherneck John’s.

  ‘This where we are?’ he whispered.

  ‘About there.’ Daphne nodded.

  ‘So if we got in trouble at the bar, we could forget the boat and come overland, straight back here, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How far is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A mile or less,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ Hatcher’s voice rasped, ‘that’s our fall-back position. We’ll have the Cigarette boat wait here and we’ll go around the bend in the snakeboat. If we get in trouble, we run overland, like rabbits, back here, forget the small boat.’

  Cohen said, ‘How many men
do re take with us?’

  ‘Sing goes in the bar with u, covers our ass,’ said Hatcher. ‘Maybe one other shooter to stay with the snakeboat and keep his eyes open in case Sam-Sam should show up. The other three stay with the Cigarette. If we have to run for it they can cover our retreat. If it goes smoothly, they’ll just follow us back.’

  ‘Sam-Sam will not be back until tomorrow,’ Daphne reiterated.

  ‘Uh-huh. Well, there’s always the unexpected,’ Hatcher said, half aloud. ‘I’ll stop worrying about Sam-Sam when we get back to Hong Kong.’

  ‘You are very cautious,’ Daphne said with a smile.

  ‘And still alive,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Let’s put it together and get on up there.’

  As they entered the domain of the Ts’e K’am Men Ti the jungle sounds merged with other sounds. Human sounds. While the sun began to sink behind the trees a strange chant drifted through the trees from in front of them.

  ‘What’s that?’ Cohen asked.

  Daphne said, ‘The women are singing a hanchi, some kind of good-luck song.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that before,’ Cohen said.

  ‘It’s Cambodian, I think,’ Daphne said.

  ‘Are they Khmer Rouge?’ Hatcher asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Khmer Rouge, free Laotian guerrillas, river tramps. Who knows. Remember, the women are just as mean as the men, and maybe a little quicker.’

  The stream was no more than a hundred feet wide. As they rounded the elbow they saw the first signs of the Ts’e K’am Men Ti. There were three barges lashed to trees hard on the bank to their right, jutting out into the small river. Sing had to swing out to get around them. On the first, there were two hooches, side by side on the back of the barge, like guard stations.

  A dozen women, all bare-breasted and wearing red bandannas tied tightly around stringy black hair, chanted as they cleaned the deck. On one corner of the barge two large woks were smoking as another woman stirred vegetables for dinner into them. A man sat on another corner fishing.

  ‘Quite a domestic little scene,’ Hatcher growled.

  ‘Sweet,’ Cohen said, ‘like a Fourth of July picnic.’

  There were five or six crates of electronic equipment stacked in the center of the deck of the second barge, sloppily covered by a tarp. Beside it, the third barge held only ten or fifteen cases of ammunition. Hatcher checked the ammo through binoculars: 9 mm., .30 caliber, .38 caliber, a crate of .45s.

  ‘A lot of bullets and very little inventory,’ said Hatcher.

  ‘Sam-Sam’s probably got his heavy stuff stashed a little farther upriver. He’s not expecting customers,’ Cohen offered.

  ‘Good,’ said Hatcher.

  Beyond the barges, another hundred yards up the creek, was Leatherneck John’s, a large, ugly square with thatched sides and a corrugated roof. It jutted out over the creek on stilts and was surrounded on both sides by makeshift piers, like a shoddy mud-flat marina. Several boats of various descriptions were tied up at the pier. One of them was a scruffy-looking Chris Craft, at least twenty years old, a tattered German flag dangling from its radio antenna.

  Daphne said, ‘The old white fishing boat is the Dutchman’s.’

  ‘Good,’ Cohen whispered. ‘Maybe we can get out of here in a hurry.’ He swept the binoculars farther upstream. A heavily laden barge, well covered with waterproof tarpaulins, hugged the bank a hundred yards past the bar.

  ‘Jesus,’ Cohen breathed.

  ‘What?’ Hatcher asked.

  ‘Check the barge farther upstream,’ Cohen said and Hatcher lifted his glasses.

  ‘Fat city,’ said Cohen. ‘That’s the store.’

  As they watched, a man came out on the front of the barge and stretched, then began t urinate into the river. He was a tall, very thin black man with greasy hair kneaded into pigtails held in place by a red headband. His blue shirt was open to the waist anti he had an AK-47 over his shoulder and a H&K 9 mm. pistol in his belt. He was wearing gold-rimmed Porsche sunglasses.

  ‘Uh-oh, that’s the Haitian, the one they call Billy Death,’ Cohen said. ‘He’s the one likes to cut off people’s feet. Look down at the bow.’

  Hatcher swung the binoculars down and searched the front of the barge. There, hanging by a cord, appeared to be a pair of shoes. Hatcher flipped the switch on the glasses and increased the focal length, zooming in tightly on the shoes. He could see the rotten gray skin of an ankle sagging over the top of one of the shoes. Flies buzzed furiously around it.

  ‘My God,’ Hatcher gasped.

  ‘It should be all right,’ Daphne said. ‘He doesn’t know you. He probably won’t pay any attention to us.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cohen. ‘Just business as usual.’

  Sam-Sam’s barge was a sprawling floating flatbed, stacked with contraband and ammunition. He had a dozen of his best men with him and seven women, some of them concubines, some tougher than the men. Batal was along but Billy Death was not. The Haitian didn’t like the river.

  ‘What is the problem with Billy Death?’ Sam-Sam asked Batal.

  ‘He cannot swim,’ the Iranian answered.

  Sam-Sam thought that was funny.

  ‘He is afraid to ride the barge because he cannot swim?’ Sam-Sam said with a laugh.

  The Iranian nodded.

  ‘Hell, I cannot swim,’ Sam-Sam said, smacking his chest with an open hand.

  ‘Neither can I,’ Batal said, and he started laughing too.

  A racket from the rear of the barge broke up their merriment. The helmsman came running forward.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Sam-Sam demanded.

  The helmsman pointed toward the rear of the barge.

  ‘Generator blow up,’ he stammered.

  ‘Well, change it. Throw that one overboard and hook up another one.’

  The helmsman shook his head.

  ‘Do not have,’ he said.

  ‘We do not have a spare generator?’

  The helmsman shook his head. He stared down at the deck.

  ‘Only one generator?’ Sam-Sam stormed. ‘We got every fucking other thing on this damn barge. We got TVs, stereos, we got Thai silk and cotton from India. We got cigarettes from America, France, England, Turkey, Egypt. So why do we only have one generator? So? Anybody got an answer to that?’

  He raged around the deck kicking at things and cursing to himself, his snake eyes darting from one person to another. Suddenly he drew his pistol. The men and women on deck moved back as a group. Sam-Sam stalked the deck like an insane man, twirling on the balls of his feet, glaring from one face to the next.

  ‘Who takes responsibility?’ he screamed.

  His clan stared at him, afraid to speak.

  ‘Who wants to eat a bullet?’ he yelled. His voice carried into the jungle and echoed back. ‘Anybody?’

  He waited for a few moments more, enjoying the fear etched on the faces of his band. Then suddenly he wheeled and emptied the gun into the forest. Birds scattered, shrieking their complaints.

  Sam-Sam turned back to his crew and laughed. His crew relaxed. There was a wave of nervous laughter.

  ‘So — we go back,’ Sam-Sam said with a shrug. ‘What is the big rush to go anywhere?’

  LEATHERNECK JOHN’S

  Sing guided the snakeboat into the dock beside Leatherneck John’s and they tied it down.

  ‘Everybody stay loose unless there’s trouble, okay?’ Hatcher said.

  Sing and Joey, the other gunman, nodded. Sing followed them down the makeshift dock to the bar. A large slab of ebony over the door had ‘Leatherneck John’s Last Chance Saloon’ carved into it, and a line below it, ‘Founded 1977.’

  Hatcher was surprised when they entered the place. He had expected the bar to be a tawdry, ramshackle oasis in the midst of the Ts’e K’am Men Ti’s contraband market. But the big room was clean and neat. On one side there were twenty or so tables and a pool table that had seen better days. A black man with thick hair tied in a tight ponytail was sleeping on his
side on the pool table. He was wearing olive drab combat pants and Hawaiian shirt, and was using his bush jacket as a pillow. On the other side was the bar, a long, fancy oak bar with a slate top.

  ‘The last time I saw a bar that fancy was in Paris,’ Hatcher said.

  ‘Came from a joint in Mong Kok,’ Cohen said. ‘The way the story goes, Leatherneck John won the whole place in a crap game and shipped it up by barge. But — up here you can hear anything.’

  The place was deserted except for three men, including the one sleeping on the pool table.

  One was a big man sitting on a barstool sipping a glass of beer. He had less hair than the billiard balls, and was dressed in khaki, his ample stomach folded over a military web belt. This would be the Dutchman, Hatcher thought. His bald head was sunburned and peeling. Years of hard living on the river had ravaged his face, leaving behind a puffy, ruddy orb laced with broken blood vessels. His nose was swollen and warty, and his eyes were buried under thick lids, giving him a sleepy look.

  And then there was Leatherneck John himself. He was an enormous man, towering at least six foot three, and easily weighing 220 pounds, his red hair trimmed close to the scalp, a thick, neatly trimmed beard concealing the bottom half of his face, the sleeves of his camouflage shirt rolled up almost to the shoulders, revealing biceps the size of a truck tire. Leatherneck John looked like an old topkick. Burly was a perfect word to describe his size and bulk. Not fat, but big and solid. Formidable. His hair was shaggy and turning white. His eyes glittered with gaiety, as though he had just heard a joke and had not started laughing yet. A retired topkick, thought Hatcher, has to be. He looked past the big man and saw the six stripes, pinned to the wall with a Marine K-Bar knife.

  ‘No hardware permitted inside the room, cowboys,’ Leatherneck John said in a voice that was friendly but left no room for argument. Hatcher and Cohen gave Sing their weapons. The Chinese bodyguard stuck the short-barreled Aug and Cohen’s .357 in his belt and stepped just outside the door, where he leaned against the wall. The other Chinese gunman in the snakeboat had moved to the back, near the tiller, where he sat with his Uzi tucked against one leg.