The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  A blue Pontiac came rushing at him from a slip road and Lewis slowed to let it in front. He was in no rush. The pancreatic tumour was inoperable, the doctor had said. No chemotherapy. No radiation therapy. Just increasing pain and eventual death.

  Lewis wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. God, he wanted his wife so much. He still thought of her as his wife, even though the divorce had been finalised over a year ago and she was now living in Boston with a computer programmer in his four-bedroom town house. He wanted her with him, wanted to put his head on her shoulder and have her caress the back of his neck and have her tell him that everything was going to be okay.

  That was one of the reasons the marriage had gone sour, she’d told him. She said that he depended on her too much, that at times it was as if she were mother to two children. She said she couldn’t cope with the restless nights, his bad dreams, the temper tantrums, the flashbacks. She’d said she’d met somebody else and that was the end of it. The court gave her half the apartment, half the car, and all of Victor. Now he was alone. Alone and dying. A horn sounded behind him and he looked in his rearview mirror. A truck was sitting on his tail, and he saw that his speed had dropped to forty mph. He accelerated away from it.

  Lewis had been having irregular stomach pains for more than a year but had been putting it down to too much junk food after his wife had left him. He hadn’t bothered cooking for himself – hell, he hadn’t known how to, he’d just snacked at McDonald’s or Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken – and when his stomach had felt bad he’d taken a slug of Pepto-Bismol. He should have gone to the clinic earlier, even though the doctor had said it would have made little difference.

  Lewis had asked how long he had left and the doctor hadn’t pulled his punches. Probably six months. Possibly a year. Eighteen months absolute maximum. The doctor had prescribed painkillers for the intermittent pain but warned that they wouldn’t be effective for long. Eventually he’d have to be hospitalised. The doctor had suggested he get his affairs in order, spend time with his family and friends, make his peace. Treat the death sentence as an opportunity to put his life in order.

  He reached the Capitol and managed to find a parking space on Constitution Avenue between a shiny black Cadillac and a white Dodge. Lewis had visited the Vietnam War Memorial once before, in June of 1991, when he’d been in Washington for the Desert Storm celebrations. He’d visited it but hadn’t managed to get close to the wall because it was obliterated by tourists in T-shirts and shorts clicking away with cameras and chattering inanely.

  Spend time with your family and friends, the doctor had said. The only family he had now was Victor, and that was only on one weekend in four. And the best friends he had were dead. That’s why he’d driven from Baltimore to Washington. To spend time with them. Just like the doctor ordered. As he locked the door to his Saab two men and a girl jogged by, talking and laughing as they ran. They were followed by a middle-aged man, balding and with unsteady, flabby legs, whose training shoes slapped on the ground with an irregular rhythm. His running vest was wet with sweat and his shorts were too tight around the tops of his legs and his breath was coming hard and fast. He was wearing a Sony Walkman with bright yellow headphones and his eyes had the glazed look of a tortured animal. Lewis stopped to watch the man wobble past. They were probably about the same age, he thought. What the hell was he keeping fit for? Why was he bothering? It didn’t matter how many press-ups you did or how much you ran. When you died, you died. The cancer grows and kills you, the heart goes into spasm, the blood vessels burst, the body dies. Lewis wanted to call after the man, to tell him that he was wasting his time, that he should take it easy and enjoy what little life he had left.

  He didn’t. He walked across the grass towards the memorial. He could see that there were far fewer visitors gathered around the slabs than there had been on his last visit. He went first to the bronze sculpture at the side of the memorial, three life-size grunts, war-weary and carrying their weapons as if they’d marched a long way. One of the three figures was black, and it looked uncannily like Lewis had done when he was in Nam: short, curly hair, squarish face, medium build, an M16 in his left hand, a towel slung around his neck to soak up perspiration. Yeah, thought Lewis. That was then. Now he’d put on another twenty-eight pounds, most of it around his waist, and the taut neck muscles had become flabby, giving him the jowls of an old bloodhound. The hair was longer, but greying at the temples and not as curly. It was tired, like the rest of him. But it was nothing compared to what the cancer would eventually do to his body, he was sure of that. He shuddered and turned away from the evocative sculpture.

  To the left of the cobbled path which led down to the memorial were a number of metal lecterns containing bound volumes protected from the weather by perspex shields. He flicked through one of the volumes with his left hand and took a leaflet on cancer which the doctor had given him and a pen from the inside pocket of his sports jacket. There were six names he wanted, all of them childhood pals from Baltimore, kids he’d grown up with, played games with, stolen cars with, back in the days when he thought stealing was a game and that he was too smart to get caught.

  The book was an alphabetical list of all those whose names were carved into the black marble, along with details of the city they came from, their rank, unit, and date of birth. The six weren’t the only friends that Lewis had lost in Vietnam, but they were the ones he missed the most because they were part of his childhood, a time when he had truly been happy despite the poverty and deprivation of Baltimore. He carefully wrote down the slab and line numbers of the six names, then walked along the path to the memorial. The slabs were all the same width but they started small and grew deeper as he walked until they were taller than he was. The blocks of marble had been set into the side of a hillock so it appeared that he was looking at a solid cliff face of names. The lettering was brutal in its simplicity. Just names, nothing else. No details, no descriptions, no attempt to chronicle the horror of the individual deaths. It was simply a roll-call of the dead.

  At the base of the wall were small American flags hanging limply in the still air. Next to one was a floppy camouflage hat, faded by exposure to the sun and rain. There were wreaths, too, from parents and wives and children, and one from a high school in Chicago.

  There were no tourists that Lewis could see, though he wasn’t alone. A middle-aged black woman in a cheap coat and thick stockings stood at the far left wiping her eyes with a red handkerchief, a black plastic handbag looped over one arm. A hefty guy in his forties with a bushy beard and thick prescription lenses stood staring at the wall, his arms folded tightly across his chest, rocking backwards and forwards on his heels. The man slowly turned his head until he was looking directly at Lewis. Even through the distorting lenses Lewis felt the cold eyes bore right through him. Lewis nodded but there was no reaction from the man and eventually Lewis had to look away. It was like looking at a dead man.

  He found the first name at about the level of his knee, two-thirds along the memorial. James E. Colby. Not that anyone other than his mother had ever called him James. On the streets he’d been Cherry, because he’d never managed to lose his virginity while he was in Baltimore. Tall, lanky with bad skin, he was a bit on the slow side but played a mean game of basketball and was never short of friends. He’d died six weeks after arriving in Vietnam, crushed by an American tank driven by a nineteen-year-old guy from Albany who was high on his first ever joint. Cherry hadn’t even had time to get laid. Lewis reached up and ran his fingers over the individual letters that made up the boy’s name. James E. Colby. For ever a virgin. Lewis still owed him five dollars, he suddenly remembered.

  He heard a scratching sound to his left and he looked over to see a woman standing on tiptoe with a piece of paper held against the wall. In her other hand was a pencil and she was making small brushing movements with it to take an impression of the name below it as if she were making a brass rubbing of a medieval church decoration. The woma
n was well dressed and a gold bracelet jangled and glinted with the movements of her hand.

  One by one, Lewis located the six names and paid homage to them, touching the marble and filling his mind with thoughts of his friends. Overhead he heard the whup-whup of helicopter blades and for a wild moment he flashed back to a muddy pick-up zone in Nam, hovering twenty feet above the ground because the pilot didn’t want to put the Huey down in the mud, throwing down a ladder to pick up a reconnaissance team who’d been out in the jungle for six days and nights. He looked up and saw that the slick was a civilian model, blue and white, circling overhead. Full of sightseers, maybe. He couldn’t think of any other reason for its flight pattern.

  He spent more than an hour at the wall, saying goodbye to the friends he’d lost. In some crazy way it made him feel easier, knowing that guys he’d grown up with were dead and that he’d be joining them. It wasn’t that he was religious – but there was a feeling of security knowing that he wasn’t alone, that others had died and that it was just part of the process of life. You’re born, you live, you die. Seeing the names made him feel less frightened. They’d been through it already, and they’d died suddenly with no chance to prepare themselves. Lewis decided that he would take advantage of the opportunity the diagnosis had given him. He’d prepare himself. He’d do some of the things he’d always promised that he’d do when he had the time. Now he’d make the time. He had a few thousand dollars in a savings account, and he knew that his two mechanics could take care of the business, which wasn’t exactly booming, what with the recession and all. He wouldn’t wait until the cancer got so bad that he couldn’t take care of himself, though. That he was sure of. He’d live life to the full until he couldn’t go on, and then he’d end it himself. He had no intention of wasting away in a hospital bed.

  Dick Marks slammed the door of the black Wrangler Jeep and heard the sound reverberate around the hill like half a dozen gunshots. There was no need to be quiet because Eric Horvitz would hear him coming through the forest anyway. Besides, it was better to give Horvitz advance warning of his approach. He wasn’t the sort of man to creep up on. Not if you wanted a friendly conversation with him.

  He slung his small nylon haversack over one shoulder, stepped away from the Jeep and began to climb, watching where he put his feet and taking care not to grab any branches before checking that they weren’t home to a snake or spider or anything else that might bite him. Marks was not comfortable in the great outdoors. Never had been, never would be. Still, he was being well paid for his trouble, and for the risk. Eric Horvitz was a man who had to be treated with kid gloves. He had already served two prison terms, one for assault and one for manslaughter, and if it wasn’t for his war record and the clutch of medals that he was entitled to wear he’d have still been doing time in some maximum security institution. That was why Horvitz had moved to the woods. He was safer there, less likely to fly off the handle and use the skills which the US Army had given him, skills which made him such a success during his three tours in Nam and which were such a liability in peacetime. It was only after six visits to the camp deep in the woods that Horvitz had come to accept Marks, not as a friend but at least as a non-threatening visitor.

  The first time Horvitz had refused to speak to Marks though he’d at least listened to his speech about the US-Indochina Reconciliation Project and how it had initiated a programme to send veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder back to Vietnam. Horvitz hadn’t replied to any of the questions that Marks had asked and eventually he’d simply wandered off into the trees. On his second visit Horvitz had sat down while Marks had talked, and he’d offered him a joint of the sweetest dope he’d had in a long time. When Marks had asked where he got the dope, Horvitz had smiled and admitted to growing it himself. It was the first time he’d spoken to Marks.

  On subsequent visits Horvitz had gradually opened up to the point of spending several hours talking, reminiscing about his days in Vietnam and explaining how he managed to live all alone in the wilds. It was like winning the confidence of a wild animal, taking it step by step, making no sudden movements or pushing it too hard, talking softly and smiling a lot. Marks was the only outsider Horvitz had spoken to during the three years he had been living rough. There were other Vietnam veterans in the woods, but they rarely encroached into each other’s territory. They were there to be alone, not to form support groups. Almost all were like Horvitz, trained to be killers and now superfluous. They had given everything for their country and when they had needed something in return, their country had failed them. Horvitz and the rest needed to be debriefed, to be eased back into society, but instead they had been treated like lepers, unwanted reminders of the war that America lost. That was something that Marks had touched on in his later conversations: how Horvitz now felt about his country. In the abstract, Horvitz was as patriotic an American as you’d ever meet: he’d been prepared to die for his country during the war, and would still lay down his life for the flag. It was his feelings for the people of America that had changed. Now he felt nothing but resentment, bordering on hostility, for those who had treated him so badly on his return. They’d spat at him and called him Baby Killer. Young girls had refused to serve him in supermarkets. Waiters had sneered and spilled soup on him. College kids had taunted him and scratched “Murderer” on his car.

  Horvitz had been back in America only two weeks when he was drawn into his first fight. He got into an argument with two redneck mechanics about whether or not the United States should have been in Vietnam in the first place. They had been old enough to escape the draft and told Horvitz that anyone stupid enough to fight another man’s war deserved everything they got. He’d tried to walk away but they’d pushed him and taunted him and eventually he’d snapped and put them both in hospital for the best part of a month. Horvitz was lucky: he came up before a sympathetic judge who’d served in the Korean War and he let him walk free on condition that he sought psychiatric help. Horvitz didn’t, and before the year was out he was behind bars on an assault charge.

  According to the file on the back seat of the Jeep, Horvitz must have been holding himself back to merit only a charge of simple assault. Eric Horvitz was a man who had been trained to kill in a thousand different ways, and had used most of them during his three tours of duty with the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols and later with Special Forces teams. Even the stilted military language of the citations in the file couldn’t conceal the horrors that Horvitz had been through, or the fact that he was a very, very dangerous man. After his release from prison Horvitz did go and see a psychiatrist but it didn’t appear to have done him any good because he kept on getting into trouble, usually following arguments over the Vietnam War. He was back in prison in the early eighties after killing a man with a pool cue in a bar in Cleveland after they’d called him a baby killer. This time Horvitz’s war record didn’t help and he only escaped a murder charge because the guy he’d hit had had a heart condition and Horvitz’s lawyer managed to produce a doctor who told the court that the blow to the chest wouldn’t normally have resulted in death.

  Horvitz was released in the summer of 1991, just in time for the celebrations of America’s victory in the Gulf. He’d gone down to New York to see the parade to welcome back the veterans of Desert Storm, men and women who had seen less than one hundred hours of combat in a conflict where there had been more injuries playing sports than there had been from enemy fire. He’d been sickened by the sight of the cheering, waving crowds and the way the parading troops revelled in the adulation, heads held high and chests out, heroes one and all. That hadn’t been in the file, the details had come out during Marks’s later conversations with Horvitz. Horvitz had vividly described the marching bands, the ticker tape, the children sitting on parents’ shoulders waving flags, and the displays of military hardware. And he’d recalled the Vietnam vets he’d seen at the back of the crowds: guys in wheelchairs, guys with limbs missing, guys with blank looks in their eyes. He’d felt red-ho
t anger rise in his throat then, he’d wanted to lash out, to kill indiscriminately, to pick up an M16 and blow away as many of the rosy-cheeked heroes as he could. He’d wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands, to tear out their hearts and eat the warm flesh. He’d wanted to kill so much that he could taste it, and he’d seen his hatred reflected in the faraway eyes of the other Vietnam vets who’d waited silently for the parade to pass as each of them recalled the way they’d been treated when they returned home, not as heroes but as the vanquished, an embarrassment that America could well do without. The baby killers. That was the moment when Horvitz decided that he could no longer live as a normal member of socalled civilised society, and that he faced only two possible futures: to spend the rest of his life behind bars, or to live alone in the wilderness. Four days later he was living rough in a Canadian forest with a rucksack of supplies and survival goods.

  Marks looked at his compass and peered through the trees. It was a chilly morning but he’d worked up a sweat walking uphill and the backs of his legs ached. He knew he was within a few hundred yards of Horvitz’s camp but he had no way of pinpointing it exactly; every tree seemed just like its neighbour and the view was unchanging no matter which way he looked. He wasn’t lost, because he knew that if he kept going south-east he’d eventually hit the road, but there was a world of difference between not being lost and knowing where you were. Horvitz had told Marks how after being in the jungle for a few days his sense of smell had intensified to the extent where he could smell GIs a mile away and could pick out the individual scents of urine, sweat, tobacco and toothpaste. Marks stopped and sniffed the forest air, taking in small breaths and closing his eyes as he tried to interpret what his nose was telling him. All he could smell was vegetation, smelled it so strongly that it actually seemed to smell green. He tipped his head back and breathed again. Nothing. He opened his eyes and saw Horvitz standing in front of him, an easy smile on his bearded face. It wasn’t the same face that was in the file he’d been given. In the black and white photograph an eager, bright-eyed teenager smiled with perfect teeth into a future that held nothing but promise, he had a slight cleft in his chin, his short, blondish hair was neatly combed back from a high forehead, his skin was smooth and blemish-free: a face that could be found in any one of a thousand high school yearbooks along with the forecast “most likely to succeed” or “most popular”. The face that looked back at Marks was moustached and bearded, the facial hair greying in places and unkempt. The teeth were still white and even but the skin was dry and leathery and the lips had grown thinner and seemed to have a cruel edge to them, even when he smiled. The eyes had lost their sparkle, too. They were cold and distant.