The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  “That’s a good point,” said Lewis.

  “I guess so,” agreed Lehman. The three men watched Doherty play with the controls like a kid in an amusement arcade.

  “And if it doesn’t work out, we can always kill him,” said Tyler. Lehman jerked his head round, his mouth open. Tyler held up his hands. “Just joking,” he said. “Honest.”

  The Thai Airways Airbus seemed reluctant to descend into the thick white clouds which obscured Hong Kong and the South China Sea some 10,000 feet below. It was as if the pilot didn’t quite believe his instruments, but eventually the nose dipped down and, like a timid swimmer who has decided to jump in and get it over with at once, the plane swooped down towards the ground. Lehman leaned his forehead against the window and peered into the white nothingness, unconsciously counting off the seconds. It was impossible to tell if he were looking a hundred yards or just a few inches, there was no depth or substance to the cloud.

  The plane vibrated and shuddered and they felt it bank to the right and then suddenly they were out of the cloud and Horvitz breathed deeply and grinned across at Lehman. The grin vanished when he saw a tower block swing past the left-hand wing, not more than a hundred feet below.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “Did you see that?”

  “The television programme they were watching, you mean?” laughed Lehman. “Yeah, I saw it. And the dinner on the table.”

  A metal hook banged down in the gap between their seats and Carmody’s face followed it.

  “Is it always as hairy as this?” he asked.

  “It only looks hairy,” said Lehman. “It’s one of the most difficult approaches in the world, but because it’s tough the pilots take more care. They hardly ever have an accident.”

  “You’ve been to Hong Kong before?” asked Horvitz.

  “Sure,” he answered. “I came for R&R in the mid-seventies and I’ve been here as a tourist twice, in 1982 and again in ‘86, I think. Before they opened Vietnam up.”

  The plane levelled out and then they saw a flash of water and then they were down, rumbling along the single finger of runway which pointed out into the bustling harbour. Horvitz could see fishermen throwing out what looked like lobster pots from a trio of tiny dinghies and a motorised junk with its deck piled high with wooden crates bobbing in the waves and making next to no progress. Hong Kong Island was virtually obscured in a thick, cloying mist which had rolled down from the Peak, though he could make out indistinct shapes of exotic skyscrapers like some hastily done watercolour. The plane turned around through 180 degrees and headed back to the terminal building while a stewardess welcomed them all to Hong Kong in English, Thai and Cantonese over the intercom and said she hoped that they’d fly with her again.

  The four vets were through immigration and Customs within twenty minutes and they queued together at the taxi rank. Tyler, who had remained in Bangkok with Doherty, had booked them into the Eastin Valley Hotel on Hong Kong Island but had warned them that most taxi drivers probably wouldn’t know its English name so he’d given them all a card with its name and address in Chinese. On the back of the card was a map which showed where it was and they’d all commented on its proximity to the Happy Valley Race Course and its distance from the harbour. It was clear they wouldn’t be able to get all four of their suitcases into one of the red and grey Toyota cabs so they took two, Horvitz and Carmody travelling in one, and Lewis and Lehman in another. Both taxis were soon in thick traffic and driving through the built-up areas of Kowloon. Neither can had the air-conditioner switched on and all four were sweating profusely. To Lehman it seemed that every breath was an effort, almost as if he were breathing underwater. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him to switch on the air-conditioning. The driver laughed at his discomfort and did as asked while Lehman and Lewis wound up the windows. The interior of the cab was soon almost chilly and both men could feel the sweat drying on their skin.

  “You tourists?” the driver asked, looking at them in the mirror.

  “Yeah,” said Lewis.

  “You Americans?”

  Lewis nodded.

  The driver laughed. “I have two cousins in America,” he said. “In San Francisco. Good country. Maybe I go one day.” He slammed on the brakes and narrowly missed crashing into the rear of a truck loaded with baskets of green vegetables. In the back of the lorry sat two young men whose bare chests were covered in brightly coloured tattoos of roaring tigers and fire-breathing dragons. They grinned good-naturedly at the taxi driver and made obscene gestures.

  “Triads!” said the driver contemptuously.

  “How do you know?” asked Lewis.

  “Can tell,” he answered. “The tattoos. Only triads have tattoos like that.”

  The traffic moved slowly through ugly high-rise industrial buildings and after thirty minutes they reached the toll gates for the Cross Harbour Tunnel. The driver thrust a green note into the hands of a young girl in a black and white uniform and a white filter mask hiding the bottom of her face and then drove down the double-track road that led to Hong Kong Island. In the distance Lehman and Lewis could see the taxi containing the two other vets.

  They emerged into the open air on the island among high-rise blocks that were several times higher than those in Kowloon and whose shapes seemed more imaginative than the boring cubes that were stacked around the airport district. There were tall, thin spires, towering oblongs with circular windows, mirrored blocks in blue, silver and bronze, buildings with hard edges, others with curves, each different from its neighbour as if the architects had been in some sort of competition. They had plenty of time to look at their surroundings as the taxi had to slow to a crawl to negotiate a series of roadworks. Young men without ear-protectors were drilling away at the tarmac while others attacked it with pickaxes. Like the men in the back of the vegetable truck, many were bare-chested to reveal their tattoos. The taxi was suddenly filled with a foul odour and both men looked at each other.

  Lewis raised a hand. “Hey man, it’s not me!” he protested.

  “Well it’s not me either!” said Lehman.

  Both men looked at the driver. He grinned at them in the mirror, showing the glint of a gold front tooth. “Smell from typhoon shelter,” he said. “Many people live there on boats. Much shit!” He cackled and swerved to avoid an old man on a bicycle.

  Lehman and Lewis grimaced and tried to breathe through their mouths until they were away from the junk-filled shelter and its offensive odours. Eventually both taxis turned away from the harbour and the roads grew narrower and more crowded, with housewives and delivery men spilling off the sidewalks and wandering in between the traffic without looking where they were going. Their driver pounded on his horn and on his brake pedal with increasing regularity, cursing good-humouredly. They went around a bend and then, on the left, they saw a huge multi-tiered grandstand facing away from them. Around what appeared to be a group of soccer and rugby fields were powerful floodlights atop spindly metal poles.

  “Soccer?” asked Lewis.

  “No, it’s the racetrack,” said Lehman, craning his neck to get a better look. There was a line of black letters set in the wall above the entrance announcing “The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club” and he saw that there were two tracks running around the playing fields, the inner one of sand and the outer of grass. Around the racecourse was a haphazard forest of residential tower blocks, each appearing to be trying to peer over the shoulder of its neighbour to get a better view of the track below.

  Ahead of them they watched the first taxi turn right and followed it. It turned right again, then stopped outside the hotel. Horvitz and Carmody got out of the first cab and waved at Lewis and Lehman before paying their driver and manhandling their suitcases into the lobby. Lewis and Lehman followed them. They checked in and two young bellboys in smart white uniforms helped them take their bags upstairs. Tyler had booked them all on to one floor, the eighteenth.

  Lehman tipped the bellboy and closed the door behind
him. It was a large, comfortable room with a king-size bed, a marble-topped desk by one window, a small sofa and two small side tables by a second window. A neat dressing-table with a padded seat faced a large wall-mounted mirror. A large wooden cabinet housed a television and a mini-bar, and behind sliding louvred doors he found a closet and small safe. He opened the door to the bathroom and smiled at the telephone on the wall next to the toilet. It would be a pleasant enough place to stay for a while; Tyler hadn’t scrimped, that was for sure. As Lehman suspected, there wasn’t much of a view. His room overlooked a steep wooded hill at the bottom of which was an untidy line of old buildings, each between three or five storeys high and peppered with air-conditioning units. The roofs of the buildings had all been put to use: several had been packed with pots of tall green plants, one was used as a child’s play area with a swing and a red and blue plastic slide, others had been turned into pleasant sitting areas with seats and large, spreading umbrellas. He leaned closer to the window and far over to the right he could see half of the racetrack.

  The phone rang and he picked it up. “Yes?” he said.

  “Dan? That you?” It was Lewis.

  “Yeah, it’s me. What’s up?”

  “Man, can you believe this place? My room is fantastic. You see the size of that bed? Have you ever seen a bed as big as that? I’ve never been in a place like this before. It’s just mind-blowing.”

  Lehman smiled at the man’s open enthusiasm. “Yeah, it’s great,” he said, not wanting to burst his optimistic bubble.

  “And what about the phones? Two phones. And one of them in the john.”

  “Yeah, ain’t that something,” said Lehman. “Look, why don’t you ring around the rest of the guys and tell them to meet downstairs in an hour. We’ll go out and get some food, maybe hit a few bars later on. That sound good?”

  “Sounds great to me, man.”

  When the vets met in the lobby, nobody had any idea where they should go. Lehman was the only one who’d been to Hong Kong before so they all looked to him for guidance.

  “Come on, guys, it’s been almost ten years since I was here.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, Dan,” childed Lewis.

  “Yeah, you must know where the action is,” said Carmody.

  “Okay, okay. Let me think,” laughed Lehman. “The red light area was Wan Chai, and I guess it still is. And there were some pretty good places over the harbour in Kowloon. It all depends on what you guys wanna do. I mean, do you want to eat, drink, have a massage, see a movie?”

  “Or E, all of the above,” said Carmody.

  “A drink would be a good start,” said Lewis.

  “What about you, Eric?” Lehman asked Horvitz who had barely said a word since they’d arrived in Hong Kong.

  “A drink’s fine by me,” said Horvitz. He’d tied his long hair back in a ponytail but it didn’t make him look at all feminine.

  “McDonald’s,” said Carmody. “I feel a Big Mac attack coming on.”

  “McDonald’s?” repeated Lehman. “You’re in the food capital of the world and you want a burger?”

  “Not just a burger,” said Carmody. “A Big Mac.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Horvitz. Lewis shrugged his shoulders as if to say he didn’t care.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Lehman, shaking his head.

  “Come on, Dan. Don’t tell me you’re not fed up with all this noodle and rice crap. Think about a nice, thick, juicy burger with all the trimmings,” said Carmody.

  “And French fries,” said Horvitz.

  “And a thick strawberry milkshake,” said Carmody.

  “I give in,” said Lehman. They went outside the hotel and flagged down a cab.

  “Where you want to go?” the driver asked, chewing a toothpick.

  “McDonald’s,” said Lehman who had taken the seat next to the driver while the other three crammed in the back.

  “Americans?” said the driver as he slammed the cab into gear and roared off.

  “How did you guess?” asked Lehman. Behind him he heard three sniggers.

  The driver dropped them off outside the familiar Golden Arches. The only difference between it and any of the thousands back in the States were the Chinese characters up on the sign next to McDonald’s. There was even a life-size Ronald McDonald standing to the left of the entrance. They walked up together to the counter and waited until it was their turn to be served.

  Lehman had a cheeseburger and white coffee, Carmody ordered two Big Macs, a large fries, a chocolate sundae and a strawberry milk shake, Lewis had a regular burger, fries and Coke and Horvitz asked for a double cheese-burger and black coffee.

  They paid for their order and carried it over to a table. “Ketchup,” said Carmody. “We forgot the ketchup.” He went back to the counter and came back with three packets of red sauce. He ripped one open and dribbled it over his fries, picked up one of his Big Macs and took a big bite. He chewed and rolled his eyes. “Home,” he sighed.

  “Oh God,” moaned Lehman, not sure whether or not Carmody was being serious. But after he’d taken a few bites of his cheeseburger he had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that he had missed junk food all the time they’d been in Vietnam and Thailand. Rice and noodles were all well and good, but there came a time when a man needed to get his teeth around a good old all-American burger. Lewis didn’t seem to feel the same way. He left most of his.

  When they’d finished eating they walked to the Star Ferry Terminal and caught a green and white ferry across the harbour to Kowloon. They sat at the back of the ferry and watched the sky darken over the towering office blocks of the island, turning the hills behind them from green to purple. Lights were coming on in most of the blocks, the sign of office workers staying late. The city that never sleeps, thought Lehman.

  Before the ferry docked at the Tsim Sha Tsui terminal housewives and businessmen got up from their seats and stood impatiently by the gangway while the ferry’s ropemen helped manoeuvre the ferry against the dock.

  “They’re always in such a hurry,” said Carmody. “Why is that?”

  “Borrowed place, borrowed time,” said Lehman. “This whole place gets given back to China in 1997. Everyone’s just trying to pack in as much as they can before the communists take over. Remember what the communists did to Saigon? Think what they’ll do to Hong Kong.”

  “You think it’ll go that way?” asked Lewis.

  “Hell, Bart. I know nothing about it, just what I read in the papers back home. But I do know that tens of thousands are leaving every year, just like it was before the Americans pulled out of Vietnam. You don’t get panic like that unless there’s something in the wind.”

  They stood up and walked across the gangplank and up a concrete slope to the outside. The first thing they saw as they walked out of the terminal was another McDonald’s outlet. The shops of Tsim Sha Tsui were all still open, despite it being after eight thirty p.m., and the Americans had to weave their way through the crowds. It wasn’t just tourists who were wandering around, there were Chinese families out for a promenade, grandparents, parents and young children walking and talking, stopping to stand and stare as if window-shopping was a hobby the whole family could enjoy.

  “Where are we going, Dan?” asked Lewis, dodging a girl pretty enough to be a fashion model who was talking into a portable telephone and checking out the display of a jewellery shop as she walked, seemingly on autopilot.

  “A surprise,” said Lehman.

  He led them past the Peninsular Hotel and its display of green Rolls-Royces, and then turned left into Nathan Road and threaded his way through side-streets, looking for landmarks that would let him know he was heading in the right direction. He took a couple of wrong turns, fooled by the fact that the streets were all so similar, lined with shops selling high fashion, others touting cheap T-shirts, some selling gold jewellery and precious gems, others offering cheap watches, windows full of jade and coral, others full of colourful plastic earrings and
brassy hairclips, and everywhere the eagle-eyed salesmen in sharp suits standing in their doorways trying to tempt them inside. There were restaurants, too, of every nationality: Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Western, Singaporean, Korean – a bigger variety than Lehman had ever seen together in one place before. Even the gaps between the buildings had been put to use, with shoeshine boys squatting beside the tools of their trade and hawkers behind trolleys covered in red cloth on which were spread out gold-plated jewellery, digital watches and key-rings that buzzed when you whistled at them. Above the shops were the metal-framed windows of apartments, scattered with air-conditioners supported by rusting metal stands. Between the apartment windows and the ranks of shiny shops were jungles of colourful signs that reached halfway across the roads below, signs that seemed almost to defy gravity in their attempts to draw attention to themselves. The Star Gem Company. Khyber Indian Cuisine (Members Only). KO’s Jewellery. Bob Tailor. Tuxedos For Hire And Sale. And then he saw the one he was looking for: a sign in the shape of a pair of pouting red lips with white lettering which announced “Red Lips Bar”. He pointed at the sign and urged the group across the road along which crawled taxis full of businessmen, cream and green minibuses loaded with schoolchildren and housewives, and tour coaches packed with holidaymakers heading back to their hotels. In among the traffic, bare-chested youths manhandled cardboard boxes from wooden-sided trucks into the shops, their tattoos writhing on their backs as if alive. The traffic had been slowed by construction which had been surrounded by yellow-painted metal barriers and red and white plastic cones. There were piles of earth, broken tarmac and exposed cables, but there was nobody working in the hole.

  “Red Lips Bar?” said Lewis. “What den of iniquity is this you’re taking us to, Dan?”

  “I think you’ll like it,” said Lehman, ducking into a dark alley. The entrance to the bar was a hole in the wall guarded by a frumpy Chinese woman of indeterminate age wearing a jet black wig which seemed to have slipped on her head. She had on thick black mascara and too-red lipstick which overlapped the edge of her lips and gave her a clown-like smile.