The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  “They sent us into the Iron Triangle. Dropped us by Huey thirty klicks from where they wanted us so that no one would know we were there and the deal was that we walked in and walked out, no Dustoff unless we were in deep, deep shit. Total radio silence. We moved by night, holed up during the day. The whole mission should have taken us eight days, and that’s a hell of a time in the jungle. A hell of a time.”

  He shook himself suddenly as if waking from a dream and, without looking at Lehman, began slowly to walk along the display of pictures. Lehman wasn’t sure if he’d finished talking so he walked with him. Judy, followed by the rest of the group, left the case of unwanted medals and began to relate the story of the amputee in a shrill voice.

  “There was hardly any moon, but the starlight was all that we needed. We were three days out when the weather changed, low cloud cover and the air so wet that we got soaked just sitting still. The clouds blocked out all light, everything, couldn’t even see the luminous dials on the compass. We kept close, so close we could touch the man in front of us, stopping whenever we wanted to take a bearing and using a flashlight inside a rucksack so that we could read the compass. Out in the jungle, they can come from anywhere, and it’s full of sounds, sounds that could be insects or small animals or a squad of NVA ready to blow you to kingdom come. You can’t see where you’re stepping, whether there’s going to be a foot trap or a wire stretched across the trail to a hand-grenade or a mine that’s going to take your foot off, not nice and clean like the surgeons did to that VC but jagged and ripped and the pain so bad you want to die. Have you seen a guy step on a mine, Dan? Not the big ones, not the anti-tank jobs that blow a man to pieces so small that there’s nothing to put in the body bag afterwards, I mean the ones that are aimed at grunts. They just blow off a foot, maybe a whole leg. You still die, unless a Dustoff gets you to a field hospital within a few minutes. And it’s not a good way to die.”

  “There’s no good way to die,” said Lehman, quietly.

  Horvitz turned to look at him. He smiled at Lehman, a cruel, ironic baring of the teeth.

  “There’s good ways, Dan, and there’s bad ways. I’ve seen both. And I’ve been responsible for both. You don’t want …” He shook his head and fell silent. It wasn’t as if he were overcome with emotion – there was no sadness or regret in his voice. It was as if he couldn’t be bothered explaining himself to Lehman. The two men stood side by side and looked at a series of photographs of B-52 bombers dropping swarms of bombs on Hanoi. BUFFs, they’d called them during the war, Lehman remembered with a smile. Big Ugly Fat Fuckers. They usually carried more than one hundred 500 pound bombs packed with high explosive. The VC and NVA called them “the Whispering Death” because the first they knew of a B-52 raid was the whistle of the bombs.

  “Billy had been on point for three hours and in the dark that’s a hell of a long time,” Horvitz continued. “He was starting to slow so we gave him the drag and I went point. A minute out there feels like a year. An hour is like a lifetime. Everything just stops, stops dead. You don’t know if your next step is going to be your last, if a bullet is going to slam into your chest or if you’re going to hear the little click that means you’ve trodden on a mine and that you’ve got half a second before you see the yellow flash and about a second before the pain rips through you. You want to just stop and curl up under a bush but you have to keep on going, you have to keep on taking the next step, the one that could be your last. I’ve never felt so close to death, Dan. Never. And you know something?” He turned to look at Lehman again. “I’ve never felt so alive.”

  Lehman nodded, not sure what he should say. He tried to hold Horvitz’s gaze but he couldn’t, the man’s eyes seemed to bore right through into his soul and their intensity was almost painful. Lehman looked away. Horvitz snorted quietly as if acknowledging Lehman’s weakness.

  “The clouds kept opening and closing. Sometimes we could see strips of sky like ripped material, and then there would be enough starlight for us to move at normal speed, but then just as quickly the clouds would close and we’d be back to feeling our way through the jungle. When there was starlight we’d open up our formation, and then we’d bunch together in the darkness, keeping close enough to touch. I don’t know if it was my fault for moving too quickly or if it was Billy’s for not moving quickly enough, but the sky clouded over and we lost him. He couldn’t have been more than twenty steps from me and we lost him. Maybe the VC crept up on him, maybe they were lying in wait and I just walked right by them, I still don’t know. I mean, if I walked by them, why didn’t they just open up and kill us all?” The question was rhetorical because he didn’t give Lehman a chance to answer, he just kept right on talking in his dull monotone voice. “Maybe there were only a couple of them and they knew they’d be outgunned. Maybe if he’d have been point and I’d have been covering the rear then I’d be dead and he’d be here now telling it to you.”

  Judy and the group came closer and Horvitz moved away as if they were magnets of the same polarity. They stood in front of more photographs, a record of the My Lai massacre.

  “I don’t know how long it was before we realised he was missing. Could have been just a few yards, could have been a hundred. First we knew about it was when he screamed. Screamed like I’d never heard a man scream before. They kept him screaming for hours, moving him around so that we could never catch up with them. They must have gagged him while they moved him because his screams would come from one direction, then nothing for fifteen minutes or so, and then the screaming would start again somewhere else. We went out of our minds, Dan. He was my best friend and they killed him by inches. We found him the following day. Not because we were particularly good at tracking, but because they wanted us to find him. They’d laid him out in a clearing. You want to know what they did to him, Dan? Do you want to know?”

  Lehman said nothing. He didn’t want to know what had happened to Billy Wills, he didn’t want to share any of the hellish secrets that had resulted in Eric Horvitz having the eyes of a corpse. But he felt that if he listened to Horvitz, then maybe it would help him, and he was clearly a man who needed help.

  “His body was covered in cuts, some of them small, some of them deep, none of them lethal. Hundreds of them. That’s not what killed him, though. They were what had made him scream. They’d disembowelled him. And they’d cut off his prick. Either would have killed him, but it would have taken some time. Lots of blood. Lots of pain. You’d have thought that that would have been enough, wouldn’t you? They’d tortured him, and they’d killed him. But it wasn’t enough, they wanted to teach us a lesson. They wanted to scare us. They spread his intestines all around his body, yards and yards of it. You’d never believe how long your guts are, not until you’ve seen them laid out. They shoved his prick in his mouth. We didn’t look too closely in case we found that he’d still been alive when they did that. Then they cut off his head. Not one clean cut, but lots of small cuts, like they’d sawn it off. Then they put the head in the body cavity. They went to all that trouble, Dan. It takes a particularly perverse sort of mind to do that. A particularly nasty mind. So why don’t I see any indication of that on the walls here? Why do we just have all this anti-American crap?”

  “It’s like Speed said outside. It’s their view. It’s not the truth, it’s just their version of it.”

  “Remember Hue? February 1968, when we finally cleared out the VC. They moved in during the Tet Offensive, January 31, and it took us until February 25 to retake it. We discovered almost 3,000 bodies in mass graves. A lot of them had been buried alive, almost all of them had been mutilated. Heads chopped off, and worse. Much, much worse. When the VC moved in they had death lists, names of bureaucrats, teachers, police, religious figures. A quick court-martial and that was that. I don’t see any mention of that here, Dan. And I don’t see any mention of the cinemas and restaurants they bombed in Saigon. The innocent women and children the VC killed. Fuck them, Dan. Fuck them all!” He shouted the las
t curse and his words echoed around the room. Judy stopped her commentary and looked over at the two men. Horvitz snorted and stamped out of the room. Lehman saw Tyler slip away from the group and follow him.

  Lehman stayed with the group as Judy continued her guided tour of the exhibition, and was surprised at her vehemence as she needlessly described what was going on in the different photographs. She hadn’t acted that way at the Military Museum or the Revolution Museum; her commentaries there had been straightforward and unemotional and Lehman wondered if she was putting on a performance for the museum employees who were standing at various points around the exhibition.

  She led them to another room which contained a display of American weapons, including M16s, M14s, M18s, mortars, an M72 anti-tank rocket launcher, M20B1 and M9A1 bazookas and shotguns. At the far side of the room sat a bored museum employee, a young girl in a yellow ao dais and white pantaloons, who studied her nails and yawned. Tyler and Horvitz were standing by a cluster of mortars. Tyler was whispering to Horvitz, who appeared to be a good deal calmer than when he’d stormed out of the other room. They both looked up when the rest of the group appeared and wandered away outside.

  Speed and Henderson took it in turns to pose in front of the anti-tank weapons while the other took pictures, and the salesman from Seattle told his wife war stories. Cummings and his wife walked arm in arm, she asking him quiet questions, he answering and occasionally resting his forehead on her shoulder. Judy continued to harangue the American actions in Vietnam, reading out the notices on the walls and then embellishing them with more details before leading them to yet another room, this one with an exhibition of America’s attempt to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam.

  She showed them flight plans of the planes which had criss-crossed the countryside dropping eighteen million gallons of herbicides on the forests of South Vietnam, and photographs of victims who, years later, had developed cancers. There were photographs taken through microscopes showing the effects the dioxin in Agent Orange had on human chromosomes, and there was a morbid display of specimen bottles containing deformed human foetuses. “The legacy of American poisons continues to kill our children,” said Judy as if accusing each and every one of them for the birth defects. Carmody giggled nervously at the back of the group and Lewis turned round and glared at him.

  “Man, this isn’t funny,” he hissed. “We had no right to do this. No right at all.” His eyes were blazing and Lehman thought that he might take a swing at Carmody but then the anger seemed to be replaced by sadness and the black man turned away, waving his hand in the air as if swatting an annoying insect.

  Lewis listened carefully to Judy as she catalogued the number of cases and types of cancer that were still being reported, and the number of babies that were born dead because of the poisons in the ground and in the water, especially around what had been the demilitarised zone. As he listened he slowly rubbed his stomach.

  Lehman came up behind him. “Are you okay, Bart?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just fine.”

  “Don’t let this stuff get to you. It’s propaganda, that’s all.”

  Lewis shook his head. “It’s more than that, Dan. Yeah, I know that a lot of the rest of that crap about torture and stuff don’t mean nothing but this is different. We did this, we dumped millions of gallons of poison on their land. At the time I didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “None of us did, Bart. We were just obeying orders. They didn’t give us time to think about what we were doing. Hell, they probably didn’t even know themselves. I mean, they knew it was a defoliant but I don’t think they knew what the long-term effects would be.”

  Lewis looked at him with watery eyes. “You think that would’ve stopped them?” he asked. “Shit, they’d probably have used even more of the stuff. Scorched earth, they called it. Ain’t that the truth?”

  Judy called the group together and told them that the tour of the museum was over and that it was time to return to the bus. Lewis was the last to go and he walked slowly, his head down and his right hand massaging his stomach.

  Neil Coleman sifted through the computer print-out which listed all the stolen cars which had been recovered over the past twenty-four hours. He also had a list of cars which had been stolen since the beginning of the year, and he methodically crossed off all those which had been found. Normally he would have given the task to Yip or Hui but both were conveniently absent.

  His eyes were starting to ache so he leaned back in his chair and looked out of his window. Offices were emptying and the streets were crowded to capacity. The sound of horns and shouts and the rattle of trams penetrated the double-glazing. There was always noise in Hong Kong, Coleman thought. There was always noise and there were always people around you, you couldn’t escape either. Down the corridor he could hear the chatter of Cantonese, three women gossiping by the coffee machine. Cantonese was a language that was shouted, never whispered.

  There was a black lamp on his desk and he reached forward and switched it on. He leaned back again and ran his fingers through his thick, sandy-coloured hair. With the desk lamp on he could see his reflection in the window, superimposed on the bustling scene outside. His hair was short and parted on the left and continually stood up at the back no matter how much he smoothed it down. It was always easier to keep his hair under control when it was long, but the Royal Hong Kong Police Force required it to be kept to regulation length. He reckoned he was fairly good-looking, in a boyish way, though he thought that his lips were a bit too thick so he tried to smile a lot because that made his mouth look better. His ears stuck out a bit too, but not so much that anyone had commented on them. Not since he’d left school, anyway. His eyes were deep blue and his eyebrows were as sandy and as bushy as his hair. It wasn’t the face of a movie star, he admitted to himself, but it didn’t send girls screaming for the exit, either.

  He wondered how Debbie Fielding felt about his looks. She still hadn’t called even though he’d left several messages. The previous evening he’d gone to the disco where he’d first met her, hoping to see her again, but there’d been no sign of her and he’d ended up drinking too much. He’d got back to his apartment at two o’clock in the morning and decided that it would be a good idea if he called her again. He came to his senses when a man’s sleepy voice answered and he slammed down the receiver before collapsing back on his bed and falling asleep. It must have been her father, William Fielding.

  Coleman drummed his fingers on the desk. He wanted a cigarette, badly, but he settled for a coffee instead. He waited until the chattering in the corridor tailed away before fetching himself a cup. As usual the hot brew burnt his fingers by the time he got it back to his office. He found Phil Donaldson, a senior inspector from Serious Crimes, lounging in Yip’s chair.

  “Whotchya, Neil,” said Donaldson in his east London accent.

  “Hi, Phil, what’s up? You want a coffee?”

  Coleman put the plastic cup on his desk.

  “That stuff makes me wanna puke,” said Donaldson, rubbing his black moustache with the back of his hand. He was balding and had taken to combing hair from the left side of his head across his crown in a vain attempt to cover his bald patch. Donaldson had been on the force for twelve years, and it was his rough manner and lack of tact which had held him back from rising above the rank of senior inspector. Now it was too late: the government’s localisation policy meant that he, like Coleman, would rise no higher.

  “I know what you mean,” agreed Coleman, taking his seat. “But I get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t have coffee every couple of hours.”

  “Honest?”

  “Sure. It’s the caffeine, I guess.”

  “And you can’t give up?”

  “I suppose I could, but I’m trying to give up smoking and that’s more than enough for me to handle. So what’s up?” He sipped his coffee.

  Donaldson grinned, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on his knees. Like Coleman he worked in plain clot
hes and was wearing a dark blue suit which had gone baggy around the knees. His black shoes were scuffed, his shirt had gone several days without a wash and his Foreign Correspondents Club tie was loose and his top button was undone. Donaldson’s dress sense was as sloppy as his manners, but he was well liked by his colleagues and reckoned to be a first-class detective. His Cantonese was virtually perfect, and Yip had told Coleman that when he spoke he had a Chinese accent.

  “I’ve just heard from a pal over in Tai Po,” he said. “They’ve just caught a ship trying to smuggle a BMW out of Tolo Harbour.”

  “So what?” said Coleman, frowning. “Happens all the time. Tolo, Tai Long, Double Haven, all those east-coast ports are used by the triads.”

  Donaldson shook his head, his grin widening. A long wisp of hair slid along his bald patch and down the left side of his head. “No, mate, you don’t understand. They were smuggling it underwater! They were towing it behind a small junk.”

  “Underwater?”

  Donaldson nodded. “You’re not going to believe it, but they put the fucking thing in a rubber bag. A huge rubber bag. They sealed it, leaving enough air so that it floated about twenty feet down, and they towed it.”

  “So how did they get caught?”

  “The bag snagged on a rock before they’d gone more than a few hundred yards. The car dragged the back of the junk in the water and it started to sink. Marine Police had to rescue them. Massive loss of face, Neil, massive loss of face all round.” He laughed, throwing back his head and wiping his hands on his trousers. Coleman laughed with him. It was funny, no doubt about it. Donaldson sighed and shook his head. “You’ll probably get a report on your desk, but you’ll see it in tomorrow’s Hong Kong Standard. One of their photographers lives out there and he took pictures of them dragging the waterlogged BMW on to the shore.”