The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  According to the itinerary they’d all been given in the States, the first few days were to be spent at Vung Tau, a beach resort some 75 kilometres to the south of Ho Chi Minh City. Lehman had flown to Vung Tau during the war. The US Army had a big camp there and it had been the place where the CIA had trained Vietnamese commando teams.

  After Judy left, Lehman asked if anyone fancied a walk around town before dinner. Tyler agreed, as did Horvitz, Lewis, Cummings and his wife, and Henderson and Speed, and they all arranged to meet an hour later in the lobby after they’d showered and changed.

  Lehman was down first, followed by Peter and Janet Cummings. Horvitz and Tyler came down in the lift together, still deep in conversation. Lehman wondered what the former pilot and the man with dead eyes had to talk about.

  Lewis was the last to arrive and he appeared out of breath, apologising profusely and wearing a shirt that would have done credit to a Hawaiian beach barbecue, a swirl of reds, blues and purples on which were superimposed swaying palm trees and windsurfers.

  Lehman put on his sunglasses. “Hell, Bart. I didn’t realise we were dressing for dinner,” he said.

  The black man laughed and punched him on the shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They walked out of the hotel and turned along Ton Duc Thong Street, the Saigon River on their left. Cyclo drivers kept ringing their bells and touting for business but Tyler waved them away. A group of bare-chested boys and girls – though it was difficult to tell them apart they were so young – ran across the road and then danced around them, chanting, “Lien Xo! Lien Xo!”

  “What are they saying?” Janet Cummings asked.

  “They’re calling us Russians,” Tyler explained. “I suppose most of the Caucasians they meet are from Russia, technical experts and advisers. It’s only recently that Westerners have been allowed in.”

  “And we probably all look alike to them,” said Lewis.

  “Bart, the only black Russian I know is a godforsaken drink,” said Lehman and they all laughed.

  The kids continued to call out “Lien Xo!” in their sing-song voices and passers-by smiled at the group. The smiles seemed good natured, and Lehman got the feeling that the people of Saigon were glad to see visitors from America in their country once more.

  The children had singled out Tyler as the leader of the group, probably because he looked to be the oldest, and one of the girls took his hand, singing “Lien Xo” over and over again.

  Tyler looked down at her and smiled. “Chung toi khong phai la nguoi Lien Xo,” he said.

  The girl looked astonished, her eyes wide and her mouth open.

  A boy, bolder than the rest, stood in front of him, his chin up defiantly. “Ong la nguoi gi?” he asked.

  “Chung toi la nguoi My,” answered Tyler.

  The girl slipped her hand out of Tyler’s and began jumping up and down on the spot, holding out her hands.

  “Yeah, American! American!” she shouted with glee. “Give me dollar, give me dollar.”

  Tyler grinned sheepishly at the rest of the group. “I guess it was a mistake saying we were from the States, huh?” he said. They wandered to the end of the road and then swung right, along Ben Chuong Duong Street, ignoring the calls of the cyclo drivers. Most of the talk was about the Saigon they used to know and how it had changed. All were surprised at the total lack of military presence. They had expected to see NVA troops and tanks at every corner with machine-gun posts outside important buildings, but there were none. Saigon was not a city under occupation with communism being forced down its throat by force. The city had gone into a catastrophic decline under the Hanoi-based regime, that was clear, but the people were always smiling and laughing and seemed to be making the best of a bad job, like refugees in the aftermath of an earthquake, knowing that things were bad, really bad, but they wouldn’t be bad for ever.

  Alongside the road were a line of men in their forties and fifties sitting by collections of tools and engineering parts which had been carefully cleaned and oiled and placed on squares of old blankets. Some of the men were missing limbs and Lehman realised that they were almost certainly war veterans, though it was impossible to tell from which side, north or south. From the smiles and nods, most of which showed missing teeth, he guessed they were from the South. Their wares were heartbreakingly meagre, a few screwdrivers, sets of spanners, batteries, old flash-lights, cogs and wheels that had been wirebrushed clean, bicycle chains and spark plugs. The men waved their arms across their makeshift stalls, appealing for the group to buy something, but there was nothing there that any of them could possibly want.

  The air was split with the crackle of small arms fire, close by and rapid. To Lehman it was as if everything that happened in the few seconds after the rapid series of bangs took place in slow motion, but it was only hours afterwards, as he lay in his room in the Floating Hotel, that he was able to put it all into perspective and realised that they had all acted differently and that the way they had reacted gave an insight into their characters in a way that hundreds of hours on a psychiatrist’s couch could never have achieved.

  Lehman himself jumped when he heard the sound of shots, his head shrinking into his shoulders as he ducked involuntarily, a flinch that he couldn’t control. But he made no other movement because every other time he’d come under fire, and there had been many, there was nothing he could do but continue to fly his helicopter and any panic or jerking on the controls could lead to a crash.

  Peter Cummings seemed to go into shock when he heard the shots: his head whipped around as he looked for the source of the shots and then he rushed to a wall where he crouched down as if hugging it for protection. His eyes were wide with panic and he shuffled along the wall trying to find a more secure place to hide. His wife dashed over and held him, resting her chin on the top of his head, whispering to him.

  Henderson and Speed both flinched and jumped back. Of the two, Speed seemed to be more in control, and he reached over and took Henderson by the arm, shouting to him that it was okay, it was just firecrackers going off outside a shop across the road. Henderson seemed to have gone into shock; his whole body trembled like he had a fever and it only subsided when Speed put his arms around him and hugged him, pretty much as Janet Cummings held her husband.

  Bart Lewis dropped to the ground and kept low, obviously scared but none the less alert. It was a reaction Lehman had seen time and time again in combat from grunts who were frightened out of their wits but who knew that the only way to survive was to identify the danger and either defeat it or move away from it, that cowering got you nowhere and that action, any sort of action, was better than just staying put and being shot at. Lehman could tell that if an officer yelled at Lewis to attack, or to dig in, or to pull back, he’d obey immediately. He might not want to, but he’d do it, whereas Cummings would be paralysed with fear and Henderson would have just run, eaten up by fear and panic.

  Horvitz was the first to react, of that Lehman was sure. He’d been standing just in front and to the left of Lehman when the shots cracked and it almost seemed as if the man had started to move before the sounds, so fast had he been. Horvitz leapt to the left, and it wasn’t a startled reaction but a controlled, disciplined movement – a low dive to the ground where he rolled over his shoulder past a startled Vietnamese hawker. Horvitz’s hand moved out to grab a screwdriver from the blanket next to the hawker and as he continued to roll he brought up the tool into a throwing position. At first Lehman had thought the dive had been random, but the move took Horvitz behind the rear wing of a battered white Lada and when he was in a kneeling position with the screwdriver ready to be thrown he was the only one who had found himself effective cover. But that wasn’t what had impressed Lehman. It was the way that Horvitz didn’t appear to be the least bit scared. There was no sign of exertion, no panting or heaving chest. He was totally calm and prepared for whatever might come next. When he saw the group of onlookers watching the fire-crackers explode acro
ss the road there was no sign of relief on his face; he just stood upright, walked back over to the hawker and placed the screwdriver back on the blanket. Lewis was grinning sheepishly as he got to his feet and rubbed the dirt off his hands, but there was no embarrassment at all on Horvitz’s face.

  The reaction that most intrigued Lehman was that of Tyler. While everyone else was moving and scrambling to identify the threat, Tyler seemed to react almost lazily. He stood exactly where he was, hands on his hips and slowly turned his head towards the noise, then smiled when he saw the firecrackers popping and the hand-painted sign above the building which proclaimed “Japanese Manufactures Welcome Vietnamese People to Exhibition of Sewing Machines”.

  It was as if Tyler had heard the cracks, identified them immediately as fireworks and not gunfire, and reacted accordingly. He looked around at the vets in their various positions and shrugged. Across the road the crowd applauded a small Japanese gentleman who cut a yellow ribbon with a big pair of scissors and they all went inside, still clapping.

  As he lay on his bed in the hotel, his hands behind his head, Lehman wondered how a former pilot could be so calm when most of the experienced grunts reacted so badly. And why a man whose war was supposedly fought thousands of feet above the rice fields of Vietnam should be fluent in Vietnamese.

  Senior Inspector Neil Coleman carried his burning hot plastic cup of machine coffee over to his desk and put it down next to the telephone. He dropped down into his chair and surveyed the office which he shared with two other policemen, both Chinese. The desks were standard issue, grey metal with a drawer full of files on the left side and three drawers on the right, all with locks which could be opened with a paperclip. Being the senior of the three, Coleman’s desk was on its own by the window where he could look down on the bustling streets below. His colleagues, Tommy Yip and Kenneth Hui, sat facing each other to the left of the room, their desks touching so they could answer each other’s phones. On the right of the office was a line of green metal filing cabinets filled to capacity. The overspill was piled high on a table behind Yip’s desk. Coleman had requisitioned extra filing cabinets but there was a staff shortage in the supplies department, he’d been told, and it was taking months rather than weeks to process equipment requests. It seemed that every department in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was losing people and finding it next to impossible to fill its vacancies. It wasn’t a brain drain, it was a people drain. Secretaries, clerks, drivers – they were all rushing to emigrate if they had relatives abroad, or moving to better paid jobs so that they stood a chance of buying a passport if they hadn’t. The police didn’t pay well, and there was the ever present worry about what would happen when the Chinese took over in 1997. Some feared that they would be regarded as “contaminated” by the new rulers, others feared that promotion would go only to reliable cadres and true communists. Either way, few were eager to take the risk and those who could go were leaving like fleas jumping off a drowning dog.

  Yip and Hui were both speaking on their telephones, using Cantonese. When he’d joined the force eight years earlier Coleman had gone through the force’s intensive Cantonese course but he’d spent most of his time since in Arsenal Street headquarters and he was now rusty to say the least. For all he knew Yip and Hui were talking to each other on their phones. He’d only been working with them for about six months and he didn’t trust them at all. They were forever talking to each other in Chinese and sometimes they’d look over at him when they thought he wasn’t looking, as if to check whether or not he was trying to eavesdrop. They’d both tested him early on, speaking directly to him in Cantonese to see if he’d understood, and seemed happy when they discovered the limits of his comprehension of their language. Of the two he liked Tommy Yip better – at least he went to the police social club occasionally and drank a couple of bottles of Heineken with Coleman. So far as he could tell, Hui never drank, never socialised, and had no life outside the force. Hui’s English was good, too, so good that Coleman was sure that he’d have no trouble getting a much better paid job in the private sector if he wanted. But he appeared to be quite happy with his job and, on the one occasion Coleman had brought up the subject, he’d expressed no interest in leaving Hong Kong. Coleman suspected that he was a spy. It was general knowledge among the expatriate officers that Beijing was sending agents to join the force in the run-up to 1997 so they’d get the inside track on what was happening and who they could trust once they took over. Late at night, in the social club or in the bars of Wan Chai, they’d compare notes on who they thought was working for the mainland and Coleman always had Hui at the top of his list.

  Above the filing cabinets was a graph showing the number of cases being dealt with by the Stolen Vehicles Group. There were two lines on the chart: a thick red line showed the number of cases of stolen cars, a blue line below showed the number of cars the group had recovered. The two lines were drawing inexorably apart.

  Hong Kong’s stolen car problem stemmed from its proximity to China, where there was always a shortage of vehicles. Each year up to 10,000 were stolen and only about two-thirds were recovered. Of the rest, most ended up in mainland China. As China’s foreign currency shortage worsened, so grew its appetite for stolen Hong Kong cars. The triads had got the business so well organised that they would steal on order if the price was right. A cadre in Beijing or Shanghai could choose the make, model and probably the colour of the car he wanted, and within the month the triads would deliver it to his door. Most cadres wanted a top-of-the-line Mercedes, but the car most commonly smuggled into China was the humble Toyota because it was so easily converted to left-hand drive. Hong Kong followed Britain’s lead and used right-hand-drive cars which would stick out in China so they were usually converted before being smuggled across to the mainland.

  The original Stolen Vehicles Unit had been absorbed into Criminal Investigations Department as a cost-saving measure, but as the number of cars being stolen continued to rise, the problem was turned over to the Serious Crimes Group, with Interpol becoming responsible for liaising with their opposite numbers in China, Malaysia and Thailand, which also benefited from the trade. Eventually Serious Crimes Group found they couldn’t cope with the workload and so a new Stolen Vehicles Unit was formed, with about half the manpower it originally had. Coleman had been seconded to it, despite his protests that he wanted to stay with anti-triad investigations. He was curtly informed that chasing stolen cars was anti-triad work, and there had been no further argument.

  A middle-aged woman police constable clumped in and dropped a stack of files into his in-tray. She nodded a good morning to him and waved to Hui and Yip as she went out. Coleman flipped his thumb across the new arrivals. Thirty-four. “Terrific,” he said to himself.

  Hui put down his phone and stood up. Coleman motioned at the pile of files but Hui shrugged. “I have to go to Lok Ma Chau border checkpoint, remember?” said Hui. “We’re taking delivery of twenty Toyotas at midday.”

  Coleman had forgotten. “Yeah, enjoy your trip.”

  Hui laughed and lit a cigarette. He held the packet out to Coleman who shook his head. “I’m trying to give up,” said Coleman.

  “I forgot,” said Hui.

  Coleman doubted that Hui forgot anything. In fact, in all probability he went home at night and wrote down every single thing that had happened to him that day in the minutest detail. Yip put down his phone and said something to Hui in Cantonese. They laughed together and Hui went out.

  The return of the twenty Toyotas was the result of two months of hard negotiations between the British and Chinese authorities and represented less than one per cent of the cars that they believed had been smuggled into China over the past year. The procedure was first to establish which cars had been really stolen and which had been mislaid by their owners or borrowed by Hong Kong’s many joy-riders and road-racers. Once they were sure a car had been stolen Coleman’s office sent the details upstairs to Interpol. The staff officer there, a superintende
nt, waited until he had a list of 500 or so before he passed on the details of the cars, including chassis numbers and engine numbers, to his opposites in other Asian countries. In China he dealt with the Public Security Bureau through their Gung On Kuk office in Beijing.

  It was then a case of the Beijing Interpol office persuading the police to investigate. It was a slow, tortuous process. The PSB had its own criminals to deal with and its men were less than happy at spending their time returning the cars of what they saw as Hong Kong fat cats. The fact that so many high-ranking Chinese officials and their families ended up as recipients of the stolen cars didn’t exactly help Coleman’s investigations.

  Coleman sipped his hot coffee and glared at the files. He wanted a cigarette, badly, but he’d promised himself that this time he really would give up. He’d given up at least six times before but never managed more than two weeks before lighting up. This time he was determined to quit. A good chunk of that determination had come from Debbie Fielding. She’d been trying to give up, too, and he’d promised to help. Even though he hadn’t seen her for almost two weeks he wanted to set her a good example. Thoughts of Debbie gradually replaced his urge to smoke, though both left him with a nagging ache in his guts, a longing that kept his mind off his work.

  He’d met Debbie at one of the Lan Kwai Fong nightclubs, seen her dancing with a girlfriend, bought her a drink and, he thought, got on really well with her. The one drink led to others and they left together. She could barely stand and he’d had to help her to her car. A Jaguar XJS, of all things, a car the cadres would kill for in Beijing. She’d insisted that she could drive but he’d poured her into the passenger seat and taken her home. At least he’d tried to get her home. Halfway up the Peak her hand had begun to wander into his lap and she’d giggled and stroked him until he thought he’d burst. She’d persuaded him to turn off the road into a secluded side-street and practically leapt over the gear lever to his side of the car. Not that Coleman had needed much persuasion. It was cramped and their lovemaking had been quick and urgent. She hadn’t even given him time to remove his trousers.