The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  The two men moved along the bridge towards the shore. Lehman patted the sleeping Lewis on his shoulder.

  “What’s up?” asked Lewis, sleepily.

  “He’s coming back,” said Lehman. “With a monk.”

  “A monk?”

  “Yeah. A monk.” Lehman got to his feet and helped Lewis up. As Tyler and the monk approached, Lehman saw that Tyler’s face was red and covered in a sheen of sweat.

  “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Chuck Doherty,” said Tyler.

  Lehman thought Chuck seemed a hell of a strange name for a Thai monk until he saw with astonishment that the features of the bald-headed man were Caucasian. Lehman instinctively extended his arm to shake hands but the monk ignored it; instead he bowed with the palms of his hands placed together under his chin. Lehman and Lewis copied the action, feeling slightly ridiculous.

  “Chuck has something to show us,” said Tyler.

  “This is starting to feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone,” Lewis whispered to Lehman as Tyler and the monk headed along a track which ran around the lake. They were soon sweating profusely and Lewis picked two large leaves from a bush to use as makeshift fans. The monk took them to the opposite side of the lake and then cut through the undergrowth where at least they could walk in the shade. The monk spoke to Tyler in Thai and Tyler shouted back to Lewis and Lehman that they should keep an eye out for snakes.

  “Most of them are deadly,” called Tyler.

  “Terrific,” growled Lewis.

  They followed the track through the undergrowth until it veered to the right, at which point the monk pushed his way through broad-leaved bushes which came up to his shoulders.

  “We’re going in there?” said Lewis. “Ah, shit, man. What about the snakes?”

  “Chuck’s legs are bare, so if there was anything to worry about he wouldn’t do it,” said Lehman.

  “Fat lot you know,” said Lewis. “Man’s a Buddhist, and Buddhists don’t care what happens to them in this life because they know they’ve got a better one coming round.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Lehman, stamping through the vegetation, banging his feet down to scare off any snakes that might be lurking there. “But how many Buddhist monks do you know who are called Chuck?”

  Lewis hummed a few bars of the theme from The Twilight Zone. He stopped abruptly when they emerged from the bushes into a wide clearing in the centre of which was a hut made of reeds, about twenty paces by ten and about fifteen feet high. There were no windows in the structure, and as far as the men could see, no way in or out.

  Lewis and Lehman walked around it while Tyler and the monk stood at the edge of the clearing, talking in quiet voices.

  “No door,” said Lehman.

  “None that I can see,” agreed Lewis. “It’s like a giant box.”

  “I suppose you just pull out part of the wall to get inside, and rebuild it when you leave,” said Lehman. “Question is, what’s inside?”

  “I think I know,” said Lewis. “I think I know but I don’t believe it.”

  “I think I know, too, and I don’t believe it either.”

  Doherty began pulling away bunches of the reeds. They were attached to a framework of bamboo poles which had been bound together with straw braids and came away easily. He cleared a space about six feet square before Tyler asked Lehman and Lewis to give him a hand. They ripped handfuls of the dried reeds away from the framework and threw them on an untidy pile behind them.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Lewis under his breath. “Would ya look at this.”

  “I’m looking, Bart,” said Lehman. “How the fuck did it get here?”

  Standing in the framework, covered in a layer of thick dust, was a helicopter. A Huey. They were looking at it side on, the Plexiglas cockpit to their left, the tail to the right. The rear of the main rotor had been tied to the tail to stop it swinging around and bits of reed were hanging from the wire. Lehman stopped stripping away the reeds and stepped forward to peer through the Plexiglas. A family of mice had made its home in the co-pilot’s seat and they scampered away in a flurry of dust. Spiders had constructed elaborate webs between the Huey’s controls and the seats, and a centipede was walking nonchalantly across the top of the pilot’s station. Despite the dirt and the animals, nothing appeared to be missing from the Huey, it hadn’t been stripped or vandalised, and Lehman couldn’t see any signs of damage that would have caused it to crash. He knelt down and looked at the skids. They had sunk a couple of inches into the ground but there was no buckling so it looked as if it had landed under control. He took a couple of steps back and examined the side of the helicopter. There were no markings, which was strange. There was no number stencilled on the tail assembly and nothing on the fuselage; it didn’t even have “Navy” or “Marines” or “Army” to denote which of the services it had belonged to, and there was no insignia anywhere to be seen. He frowned and ran a hand through his hair.

  “How the hell did it get here?” said Lehman, breathing heavily from the exertion.

  “I flew it here,” said Doherty, throwing an armful of reeds on to the pile.

  “You?” said Lehman incredulously.

  “I was a pilot. During the war.” His words came slowly, as if it had been some time since he had spoken English.

  “But that must have been twenty years ago!” exclaimed Lewis.

  Doherty nodded. “Twenty-two,” he said.

  “You’ve been in the monastery for twenty-two years?” said Lehman.

  Doherty nodded again. “That has been my privilege,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Lewis.

  “Hardly,” said Doherty. “The Lord Buddha would be more appropriate.” There was no trace of irony in his voice.

  They cleared virtually all of the reeds away from one side to reveal the entire length of the helicopter. Lehman could see a row of bullet holes on the underside of the rear of the fuselage, but on closer examination he could see that they’d passed through the skin without doing any serious damage, certainly not enough to bring it down.

  “Why are there no markings?” Lehman asked Doherty.

  “It was an Air America slick,” he explained. “The serial numbers have been removed, too.”

  “Untraceable,” said Lehman.

  “That was the idea,” said Doherty.

  Lewis pulled open the cargo door and peered inside. A small, startled bird flew out chirping loudly, tried to fly up, banged into the reed roof, and then flapped out through the side and off into the trees. Lewis climbed in.

  “So what’s it doing here?” asked Lehman.

  Doherty didn’t answer. Tyler stepped forward and put a hand on Lehman’s shoulder. “The point is, Dan, do you think you can fly her?”

  Lehman looked at him in amazement. “You’re not serious?”

  Tyler’s blue eyes stared back at him. “I’m quite serious. Can you fly her?”

  “If she was working, sure. But, Joel, she’s been standing unused for close to a quarter of a century. She’ll have rusted away to nothing. There’s no way on earth she’s airworthy.”

  Tyler smiled. “Bart, what variant of the Huey would you say this baby is?”

  Lewis whistled through his teeth. He stuck his head between the two pilot seats and looked at the controls, then up at the radio. He climbed out of the cargo area and studied the turbine and the rotors. He looked at Tyler and grinned. “Yeah, I see what you mean.” He looked at Lehman and smiled. “It’s a UH-1E. The Marines used them for assault support, flying them off ships.”

  “So?” said Lehman, confused.

  “The original Huey had lots of structural magnesium components,” said Lewis. “It doesn’t react well to seawater. In fact it disintegrates quite quickly on exposure to salt and water. So when the Marines wanted their own Hueys they came up with the UH-1E. They used aluminium instead of magnesium. It’s heavier, but Bell got around that problem by using a more powerful engine.”

  “I must be obtu
se, but I don’t see what that’s got to do with getting it airborne.”

  “It won’t rust, Dan,” said Lewis. “It’s practically corrosion-proof.” He frowned and then turned back to Tyler. “But I doubt that the turbine’ll still work,” he said. “That’s almost certain to have seized up.”

  “I can get us a new turbine unit,” said Tyler. “That’s the least of our problems.”

  “Transmission, too. And the tail rotor gearbox and the tail rotor intermediate gearbox. We might be lucky, but I’d feel safer knowing we had replacements.”

  “I can get them, too,” said Tyler. “Parts aren’t going to be a problem. Nor are the hydraulic fluids and the fuel. Leaving that aside, and assuming I can get us a place to work, can you make her airworthy?”

  “Sure thing,” said Lewis. “We used practically to take these babies apart and put them back together in the field.”

  “And what about you, Dan? If Bart gets her airworthy, can you fly her?”

  Lehman shook his head as if he were awakening from a dream, trying to clear the growing sense of disbelief that was clouding his mind. “I guess so,” he said.

  “Guessing isn’t good enough,” said Tyler, sharply. “I need to know for certain.”

  Lehman nodded. “If Bart can fix her up, I can fly her,” he said slowly.

  “Good man,” said Tyler. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  “But fly it where, Joel? What is it you’re planning?”

  Tyler smiled. “Soon, Dan. I’ll fill you in when we get to Hong Kong.”

  Doherty pulled the door to the pilot’s station open and climbed in. He had to hitch up his robe, revealing thin, brown legs, and he wiped the seat with his hand, scraping off bits of grass and cobwebs. He looked over the instruments as if seeing them for the first time, and gently placed his hands on the controls.

  “How did you know it was here?” Lehman asked Tyler.

  “Josh told me about it,” said Tyler. “He comes up here a couple of times a year for girls. Buying trips, you might say. He takes young girls from the farms and gives them jobs in his bar. They can earn more there in six months than in twenty years on a farm. He told me that he’d heard about a farang who’d arrived with a helicopter and become a monk. It sounded crazy, but I asked him to make a few discreet enquiries.”

  “Had you seen the helicopter before?”

  Tyler shook his head. “No. But Josh had a look at it. He’s not an expert but he told me enough to make me think that we could use it. Think about it, Dan! It’s practically untraceable. Like Doherty said, it was an Air America slick, they’d have used it for all sorts of covert missions into Cambodia, Laos, Thailand. The spooks will have removed any identifying marks that could link it with the American forces. If we use it, nobody’ll have a clue where it came from.”

  “You said you could get parts for it. How come?” Doherty was playing with the controls, a faraway look in his eyes. Lewis had gone to the rear of the helicopter and was checking the tail assembly.

  “There are many South-East Asian armies using the Huey these days,” said Tyler. “They were one of the few American successes during the war. The Philippine army, for instance, has almost a hundred. Money talks, the parts walk. It’s as easy as that. I’ve got contacts in the Philippines, and so has Josh.”

  “You seem to have contacts everywhere,” said Lehman.

  “Everywhere that counts,” said Tyler.

  “And how do you plan to get this baby to Hong Kong?”

  “Josh will take care of it for us. He’ll drive it down in a container, one of the big things they load on to ships. We’ll have to take off the rotor and the skids, but most of it should go in in one piece. They’re easy to strip down, anyway. It won’t be a problem. The container will be labelled as containing machine parts and Josh’ll bribe the Customs people both ends, in Thailand and in Hong Kong. It’ll take two weeks, max.”

  “How big will this container be?” asked Lewis.

  “I think they’re a standard size, Bart, something like forty feet long, eight feet wide, eight feet six inches high. But don’t hold me to that, we’ll check with Josh. Why, is there a problem?”

  “The Hueys were all about forty feet long. The UH-lD was forty-one feet six inches, the early UH-lEs were based on the UH-lB and the later ones on the UH-lC. The Bs were just over thirty-eight feet long; I’m not sure about the Cs.”

  “So if it’s longer than forty feet it won’t fit?” said Lehman.

  “It’ll fit, but we’ll have to take the tail off,” said Lewis.

  “You can do that?” asked Tyler.

  “Anyone can,” said Lewis. He went to the portion of the tail behind the cabin and unlatched a panel. He waved Tyler over and pointed inside. “There are four bolts, here, here, here and here,” he said. “Unscrew them and the whole assembly comes off. If you can get new replacements it’d be better.”

  He took a few steps back. “It’s too tall to fit in as it is, so the rotor mast will have to come out. You’ll have to take the rotors off anyway, and then it’s just four bolts to slip the rotor itself out. And you’ll probably have to remove the skids. Then the Huey can be lifted right off. You can use the rescue hoist mounted in the roof. One thing: you mustn’t put it flat on the ground without the skids or you’ll damage the gear on the bottom. You’ll have to design some sort of trolley which supports the cab at the same point as the skids. You could put it on small wheels so that the fuselage will slide in and out of the container.” He looked at Tyler, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. “But it’ll fit, all right.”

  Tyler clapped him on the back.

  “And Josh can have the container shipped straight through to Hong Kong,” said Lehman. “It’s that easy?”

  “It’s not easy, but it happens all the time,” said Tyler. “Hong Kong is a major clearing centre for a good percentage of the heroin from the Golden Triangle, and most of it goes by sea. Arms, too. You’d be amazed at how many weapons go through Hong Kong’s ports, and most of them are described as heavy machinery or spare parts. It’s just a matter of knowing who to bribe and how much. This is Asia, remember, and bribery and corruption are a way of life here. When somebody gets caught smuggling it’s usually because they haven’t greased the right palms, not because of smart detective work on the part of the authorities.”

  Lehman nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve obviously got it all thought out,” he said.

  “That’s the key to a successful operation, Dan. Planning. Taking care of all contingencies. Thinking ahead. I promise you, I’ve pre-planned every step of this mission. Nothing can go wrong.”

  Doherty had put on the flight helmet and was looking up at the radio switches. Lewis finished his inspection of the Huey and walked over to join Tyler and Lehman, wiping his big hands on his trousers. “It’s going to work,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to work.” His enthusiasm for the project was obvious.

  “Good,” said Tyler. “When we get back to Bangkok you can write out a full set of instructions for Josh and his men. They’ll do all the work.”

  “But what about the mad monk?” asked Lehman, nodding towards Doherty.

  Tyler’s eyes narrowed. “He wants to come back with us,” he said quietly.

  “Say what?” said Lehman.

  “He says he wants to come with us. To Hong Kong. He wants to be part of it.”

  Lehman turned to face Tyler. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “This guy is a spook pilot with Air America. He flies his slick to Thailand, builds a hut around it and joins a monastery. He shaves his head, goes native for twenty years, and yet within minutes of meeting you he wants to sign up for the robbery of the century. Are we supposed to buy that?”

  Tyler shrugged. “I’m as surprised as you are, Dan. It wasn’t my intention to have him along. I knew about the helicopter, that was all. Josh told me Doherty had become a Buddhist and I figured that I could persuade him to part with the Huey. He’s in the country illegally so I was sure he
wouldn’t take too much convincing. He agreed to let us take it, but he insists that he comes along.”

  “Why? Why would he give up what he’s spent more than twenty years achieving?”

  “Part of it is that he feels he’s gone as far as he can within the community here. Despite their willingness to accept him as a novice, they never let him forget that he is a farang. He has always been an outsider, and I think that seeing me brought that home to him. I was the first non-Thai he had spoken to since he arrived here. But there’s more to it than that. I think he’s frightened that others will trace him here. If we found him, others could, so this place is no longer a sanctuary for him. And I think he realised that if we could get his Huey out of the country, we could do the same for him. He doesn’t have any papers, you see. No passport. No visa. Nothing. He’s been pretty much a prisoner in Thailand.”

  “Can you do that?” asked Lehman. “Can you get him out?”

  “Oh sure. Josh can fix him up with all the papers he needs, good enough to pass muster anywhere in the world. He can probably get him a Social Security number as well. He can have a whole new identity, and with that he can go back to the States.”

  “That’s what he wants? To go back?”

  “I think he’s confused,” said Tyler. “I don’t think he knows what he wants. But the one thing he’s sure of is that he wants to be part of what we’re doing.”

  Lehman shook his head in bewilderment. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “He’s a monk. Monks don’t steal.”

  “He’s confused,” said Tyler. “Besides, he’s so unstable it’d probably be a good idea to have him in Hong Kong where we can keep an eye on him. God knows who he’ll tell if we leave him here.”