The Tunnel Rats (Coronet books)

by Stephen Leather

  Ramirez shrugged. ‘I’m just listing the possibilities, Doc,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you’re doing that, what about Jumbo?’

  ‘Jumbo?’ repeated O’Leary.

  ‘Yeah, maybe Jumbo wasn’t dead. Okay, maybe we had his blood all over us, okay so his neck was hacked to bits, and I know I helped put the corpse on the helicopter myself, but maybe an angel came down and blessed him and gave him another chance, maybe the dead can walk again . . .’

  ‘Jumbo’s dead,’ said Hammack flatly.

  Doc clenched his left hand in frustration and banged it against the side of the pinball machine. ‘I know he’s fucking dead!’ he hissed. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’re both dead, we all know they’re both dead.’ He turned his back to them and stared at the book-lined walls as if hoping to draw inspiration from the volumes.

  ‘Doc, who else could it be?’ asked O’Leary, hesitantly.

  Doc turned around. ‘I’m going to ask you one at a time. Do you think he’s alive or not? Dennis?’

  ‘I think he might be, yes,’ said O’Leary, averting his eyes.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ. Sergio?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Latino. ‘I really don’t know. Like Dennis said, who else could it be? There were only seven of us came out alive, and two have been murdered. That leaves five, and four of us are here. Rabbit’s got no motive, and if he had, why would he wait so long? He’s always known where we were.’

  Doc blew cigarette smoke in Ramirez’s direction and shook his head sorrowfully. He looked across at Hammack. ‘Bernie?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Hammack. ‘Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. I wouldn’t like to place a bet one way or the other.’

  Doc dropped his cigarette on to the floor and ground it into the carpet with his heel. The emotion seemed to drain from his face and he visibly relaxed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We have a might be, a don’t know, and a maybe. And as my vote is a definite no, that means we have nothing approaching a consensus.’ He sat down and folded his arms. ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked them. ‘I’m open to suggestions.’

  ‘We could talk to the cops,’ said O’Leary.

  ‘And tell them what we did?’ said Doc.

  O’Leary shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago, in a war situation.’

  ‘And if someone is trying to kill us all, you think the Thais will protect us?’

  O’Leary pulled a face. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘We could go back,’ said Hammack.

  ‘And do what?’ said Doc.

  ‘See if the body’s there.’

  ‘And if it’s not? Then what?’

  ‘Then at least we’d know,’ said Hammack.

  Doc leaned forward and scratched his neck. ‘And if there’s no body, Bernie? If it’s not there?’

  ‘Then at least we’d know,’ said Hammack. ‘Either way, we’d know.’

  Doc said nothing. He stared at Hammack and the two men locked eyes as if both were unwilling to be the first to look away.

  ‘Okay,’ said Doc eventually. ‘We’ll vote on it. You first, Bernie.’

  ‘I’m not exactly losing sleep over it, but the card business makes me think it’s connected with what happened back then. Yeah, Doc, I wanna go back for a look-see.’

  Doc nodded. ‘Sergio?’

  The Latino shrugged. ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter who did it, what matters is if they try again. And there ain’t nobody gonna get close to me to cut me up.’

  ‘So you vote no?’

  Ramirez nodded. Doc looked at O’Leary. ‘Dennis?’

  O’Leary slapped the wheels of his chair. ‘What’s the point of me voting? I’m not going back, am I?’

  ‘Dennis,’ said Doc quietly. O’Leary looked up. ‘We’re a team, Dennis,’ said Doc quietly. ‘You get to vote.’

  O’Leary smiled tightly. ‘Then I vote yes. I want to know if he’s dead or not.’

  Doc sat back in his chair. ‘Two votes for yes, one for no,’ he said. ‘You’re out of your minds.’ He looked at Hammack and at O’Leary. ‘Out of your fucking minds.’ He turned to Sergio, and the Latino wrinkled his nose and shrugged. ‘Okay, I vote yes,’ said Doc. ‘Is that okay with you, Sergio? No one’s going to force you.’

  Sergio laughed harshly. ‘Think I’d let you two go back down there alone?’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t last five minutes. Besides, have you taken a look in the mirror lately? You’re both about twenty pounds heavier than you were back then.’

  Doc stood up and went over to O’Leary. ‘Okay, we go. We’ll need visas, but I’ve got a guy who can get them for us pronto.’ He held out his right hand, palm down. O’Leary reached out hesitantly and put his hand on top of Doc’s. Hammack walked over and put his massive black hand down on top, and Ramirez did the same.

  Doc nodded. ‘Not worth a rat’s ass,’ he said. One by one the men repeated the phrase. ‘You are a bunch of crazy bastards,’ said Doc.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Hammack. ‘But you love us really.’

  When Nick Wright arrived back at the hotel, the elderly man in the stained T-shirt was still fast asleep, slumped across the reception desk. He’d been joined in his slumber by the security guard who had reoccupied his spot on the sofa and was snoring softly, his peaked cap pushed down over his face. Half a dozen keys were lined up on the counter and Wright took his.

  Wright went up to his room and sat down on the bed, wondering how he was going to deal with Doc and his band. Why were they lying about not knowing Max Eckhardt? Did they know who the killer was? If they did, why hadn’t they told the police? And if they didn’t, what were they hiding? None of it made any sense. He stood up and paced around the room, then stood for a while staring out through the window.

  His room was at the back of the hotel and overlooked a sprawl of tin shacks with corrugated iron roofs scattered around a construction site where foundations were being laid. Concrete columns intertwined with steel mesh sprouted from the ground like stunted trees and a group of mangy dogs sat staring at a cement mixer as if they expected it to provide food at any moment. Wright ran his finger down the window, then slowly traced out the word ‘Why?’ on the glass.

  He went over to the wardrobe and took his harmonica out of his suitcase, then stood at the window again. He began to play, a slow mournful tune that he’d heard once but never discovered the name of, his brow furrowed as he concentrated. Down below, one of the dogs pricked up its ears and stared up at his window.

  Gerry Hunter lifted down the cardboard box and went through the contents. Several notebooks, a small tape recorder, a pencil sharpener with ‘World’s Best Uncle’ on it, stationery and pens, and a couple of science fiction paperbacks. No video. Hunter hefted the box back on to the metal shelf. He’d cleared out Edmunds’s desk the day after he’d died, but he hadn’t known what to do with his stuff and had left it in the evidence room for safekeeping. Hunter stood with his hands on his hips, wondering if there was anywhere else Edmunds could have left the Apocalypse Now video. He’d searched his flat and his car and he’d asked all his colleagues and friends but none of them had been given a video by Edmunds.

  Hunter went back to the incident room and sat down at his desk. The ace of spades playing card was in a clear plastic evidence bag, propped up against Hunter’s computer keyboard. Hunter stared at it. It was crusted with dried blood and there was a jagged hole in the centre of the card where the knife had been. Hunter picked up the evidence bag and looked more closely at the card within. In the middle of the black ace was the ghostly figure of a woman, and the hole went through her chest. Was there any significance about the ace of spades? Hunter wondered. He knew that there was a death card in the Tarot pack, but he didn’t know if the ace of spades was connected to death or murder. There hadn’t been an ace of spades in the Apocalypse Now video; Duvall had been throwing down cards at random. He turned the card over. There was more blood on the back than the front, but there seemed to be nothing unusual about the car
d itself. It obviously meant something to someone, however. Had Edmunds solved the mystery? Hunter wondered. Had he uncovered the significance of the card before he died?

  Hunter dropped the evidence bag on to his desktop and sat back in his chair, staring up at the polystyrene tiles above his head. A card had been left on mutilated bodies in South London and Bangkok. Playing cards had been left on bodies in the Vietnam War. What was the connection? He wondered if Wright’s investigation in Bangkok had turned anything up yet.

  He leaned forward and tapped out the commands on the HOLMES computer keyboard that called up the background notes on Max Eckhardt. He had been forty-eight years old. Old enough to have served in the Vietnam War. There was no mention of military service in the notes, but as it would have been a quarter of a century earlier, Hunter wasn’t surprised. He called up the post mortem file and scanned it. There had been old scars in the man’s back. Shrapnel wounds, perhaps. A war wound? Hunter took his notebook out of his jacket. He was a compulsive note-taker, had been ever since he’d been a twenty-year-old constable on foot patrol. There were two lines of enquiry that he wanted to follow: he had to find out if Max Eckhardt had served in the Vietnam War, and he had to nail down the significance of the ace of spades.

  Somchai was back on duty when Nick Wright went down to reception. ‘Good morning, Mr Nick,’ the Thai said, smiling broadly. ‘I have good news for you.’

  ‘Good news?’ said Wright. He was wearing a blue linen jacket, white shirt, light brown slacks and his BTP tie.

  Somchai produced a sheet of hotel notepaper with a flourish. ‘I have found the policeman you wanted. Colonel Vasan.’ He handed the paper to Wright. In capital letters he’d written Vasan’s name, a telephone number and an address, and he’d noted down the address in Thai. Wright didn’t have the heart to tell him that he already had the man’s business card in his wallet. He smiled and thanked the Thai teenager and gave him a five-hundred-baht note.

  ‘Can you do me another favour? Can you call and fix up an appointment for me?’ He looked at his wristwatch. It was ten a.m. ‘Say in about an hour?’

  ‘It will take you more than an hour, Mr Nick,’ said Somchai. ‘Traffic very bad today. Maybe an hour and a half.’

  ‘Okay. Can you arrange it?’

  ‘I can try,’ said Somchai. He picked up the telephone and dialled Colonel Vasan’s number. He spoke for a minute or two then was put on hold. After a few minutes he spoke to someone else and was then put on hold again. Somchai smiled apologetically.

  Wright went over and sat on one of the sofas by the side of the entrance. He picked up a copy of the Bangkok Post and tried to read an incomprehensible article on Thai politics. There had just been an election but with no outright winner all the participants were manoeuvring to put together a workable coalition. Wright found the story difficult to read: the English was unwieldy and the names of the people involved were so impossibly long and unpronounceable that he couldn’t remember them from one paragraph to the next. From time to time he glanced over at Somchai who was waiting patiently with the phone held against his ear.

  Wright read through the news section and then the sport section, which contained a surprisingly large number of stories on British football. He read the business section, then flicked through the classified advertisements. He looked at his wristwatch. Half an hour had passed and Somchai was still on the phone. Wright sighed and put his feet up on a small table. He closed his eyes.

  He was woken up by someone shaking his shoulder. It was Somchai. Wright rubbed his eyes and took his feet off the table. ‘What?’ he said, momentarily confused. He looked at his watch again. He’d been asleep for half an hour.

  ‘Colonel Vasan is very busy,’ said the receptionist, ‘but his secretary said if you come and wait, maybe he can see you.’

  ‘So is that an appointment or not?’

  Somchai’s eyebrows knotted together. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If I go, will he definitely see me? I don’t want to waste my time.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Somchai, smiling ingratiatingly.

  Wright hauled himself up off the sofa. His mind felt woolly and he was having difficulty concentrating. It was probably jetlag, he figured, coupled with the humidity and the alcohol he’d drunk the previous night. He thanked Somchai and went out in search of a taxi.

  It was a swelteringly hot day and his shirt was soon drenched with sweat. He walked down the soi to Sukhumvit and stood at the roadside, trying to breathe through his nose because the air was thick with traffic fumes. A coach crawled by, the windows wide open and most of its passengers dozing in the heat. Black smoke belched from its exhaust and Wright stepped back. Emission controls were clearly not a priority in the city.

  A motorcyclist in a wraparound helmet and wearing a bright green vest over a T-shirt stopped in front of Wright. ‘Where you go?’ he asked.

  Wright shook his head. He peered down the traffic-packed road. The only taxis he could see were already occupied.

  ‘Where you go?’ the motorcyclist repeated. He was barely in his twenties with skin burned almost black from the sun. He wore ragged jeans and had rubber flipflop sandals on his feet.

  Wright showed him the police colonel’s business card.

  ‘Forty baht,’ said the motorcyclist. About one pound sterling.

  Wright took another long look around. There wasn’t an empty taxi in sight and the traffic was barely moving. ‘Okay,’ he sighed and climbed on the small motorcycle. The driver twisted around and handed Wright an old pudding-basin-type black helmet with a frayed strap. Wright inspected the interior for lice, found none, and put it on. It wasn’t a bad fit. Before he could fasten the strap the motorcyclist pulled away from the kerb and began weaving through the traffic. Wright held on to the metal bar at the rear of the seat.

  They made surprisingly quick progress. The cars and trucks all left plenty of space between their vehicles, giving the motorcyclists room to get by. On the few occasions they reached a blockage, the car drivers would do their best to create a gap so that the bikes could get through, acts of generosity that were acknowledged with nods of helmeted heads.

  They reached a set of traffic lights where more than fifty motorcycles had already gathered, engines revving. Wright tried holding his tie over his mouth but it provided little in the way of protection from the fumes. The air was deadly, and he could understand why most of the traffic policemen he’d seen wore white cotton masks over their mouths and noses.

  The lights turned green and Wright almost fell off the pillion as his rider sped away. All the girl passengers he saw were riding side-saddle, one leg on the foot rest, the other suspended in mid air, their handbags on their laps. Many appeared to be office workers or housewives in pastel-coloured suits. There were many child passengers, too, some so small that they sat astride the petrol tanks, their tiny hands gripping the handlebars as their fathers drove. On one 250cc Yamaha he saw a husband and wife and three children between them, packed like sardines on to the seat.

  There seemed to be construction sites everywhere Wright looked, and the skyline was peppered with cranes atop half-built office blocks and apartments.

  A Mercedes pulled out of a side street and the bike swerved to avoid a collision, but it all happened so quickly that Wright didn’t even have time to be scared. They turned off Sukhumvit and roared down a four-lane road, but within half a mile hit another traffic jam and began weaving in and out of unmoving cars. At one point the driver took the bike up on to the pavement and drove slowly, nodding apologies to those pedestrians he inconvenienced.

  Several times they were forced to stop at traffic lights and had to wait an inordinate length of time. The lights appeared to be operated almost on a random basis by brown-uniformed policemen who sat in glass-sided cubicles. At one intersection they were held up for a full ten minutes and when Wright looked over his shoulder he could see a queue of cars almost half a mile long.

  They left the main road and sped through
a network of narrow side streets. Behind walls topped with broken glass stood houses with red-tiled roofs, wide balconies, shielded by spreading palm trees. The air was fresher, though occasionally Wright was hit by the stench of an open sewer or the odour of overripe fruit or animal faeces. The small streets had no pavements and the driver kept having to swerve to avoid pedestrians. There were clusters of shops with apartments above them, high-class shops selling Italian furniture and Thai antiques, and others offering haircuts or same-day laundry.

  Many of the side streets were one-way, being too narrow for cars to pass, and they had to zigzag left and right with little or no indication of who had the right of way. They cut through the car park of a large hotel where a security guard in a grey uniform and white gloves pushed a mobile barrier out of the way so they could get by, then joined another main road. Wright had lost all sense of where he was; the city seemed to be one huge sprawl with no obvious centre.

  They eventually came to a halt close to a white three-storey building with a huge car park in front. Above the main entrance porch was a huge gold and red insignia and large Thai letters which ran almost the full length of the building. Brown-uniformed policemen manned the barrier restricting entrance to the car park. Wright dismounted and paid the motorcycle rider, then strode up to the barrier. The policemen smiled at him but didn’t ask what he wanted so Wright walked by and headed for the main entrance. He pushed open a glass door and went inside.

  A dozen or so Thais sat on several rows of wooden benches, and two men in denims lay on one of the benches, snoring softly. An elderly woman was peeling an orange and handing pieces of the fruit to a little girl in pigtails. The benches faced a wooden counter behind which stood half a dozen uniformed men and women. Two of them, young men with red braid on the left shoulders of their tunics and strips of bright-coloured medals on their breast pockets, were talking to visitors and taking notes but the rest didn’t seem to be doing anything. Wright couldn’t see a queuing system in operation so he walked up to the counter. A girl who was barely out of her teens smiled at him.