Thai Horse (19 page)

Fraser: There’s doing it and there’s doing it. He was a maniac, you ask me. ‘Get it in the gutter, get it in the gutter!’ he’d scream. Christ, we were
. . .
(Another pause while a jet took off) flying down tunnels as it was. Lost half our planes to ground fire. Shit, we blitzed some Charlie, burned some boats, whacked out some villages. Next day they were right back. Like stepping in a puddle, you take your foot out and never know it was there. All those guys gone for that.’

Hatcher: C’mon, nobody goes into combat expecting room service and the Holiday Inn.

Fraser: He was like all those military academy grunts. All they care about is looking good on the record so they’ll be sure to make admiral before they retire. Listen, do you think you’d be here now if Cody wasn’t a general’s son.

Hatcher: (Pause) No.

Hatcher snapped the machine off.

‘Well, hell, we were all crazy as loons after a few weeks on the line with him,’ Schwartz said. ‘I mean, we were dragging the gutter every time out. I used to come back with tree limbs stuck in my wings. But Cody didn’t like it, Hugh’s wrong, Murph wasn’t any war lover, quite the opposite. It ate him up, sending all those guys out there day after day. He knew most of us were jet pilots who hated fighting a ground war in those old De Havillands. They were just
. . .
twin-engine crates loaded down with hardware
—
Gatlings, a twenty mike-mike in the nose, four fifty-caliber machine guns, cluster bombs. But we flat tore up the fucking Mekong Delta. Trouble was, everybody had a bullet with his name on it. We were flying so much, sooner or later it had to be your turn. Our losses were running sixty, sixty-five percent, about
—
a third of them MIA or POW. You can understand
w
hy Cody’s outfit wasn’t considered Shangri-la by the flyboys.’

A steward brought their lunch and Schwartz attacked his hamburger with animal fervor.

‘God was good to me in one respect,’ he said, his mouth half full, ‘I don’t grow any taller when I eat a lot, but I don’t get any fatter either.’ He took another bite. ‘What happened to Fraser, it gets to me a little. I’ll tell you something, I may have done four years’ hard time but I’m lucky.’

‘That’s a generous attitude,’ Hatcher whispered hoarsely.

‘Reality,’ Schwartz said.

‘What happened the day Cody bought the farm?’ Hatcher’s grinding voice asked.

Schwartz didn’t have to think about it, the scene was still fresh in his mind after
all
the years. It had been raining that morning and Cody was jumpy. There were reports of Charlie activity upriver and the infantry was asking for help. As soon as the weather lifted, Cody called a scramble. They went off so fast, Cody had to give them the coordinates of the ground action after they were airborne. They had made two passes, dropping cluster bombs along the river’s edge, then suddenly he heard Cody’s ‘Mayday!’

At first Cody didn’t seem to be in trouble. His D
e
H. was a half mile in front of Schwartz. Then Schwartz saw the plane begin to weave. Its one wing dipped and began to crumble. He’s taken an R
P
G or some kind of rocket, Schwartz thought, and then: My God, he’s going in, as he watched the cumbersome plane begin to dive toward the green blanket below. Schwartz clipped his nose and began raking the woods in front of Co
d
y’s plane, blasting a path with twenty millimeters and fifty calibers. Jesus, Schwartz thought, all he needs is about five hundred yards and he’s got the river and, on the other side, friendly country. Come on, come on, Schwartz repeated to himself as he continued to riddle the forest in front of the stricken plane. Then the scratchy voice over the radio,
‘ . . . I’m
going in
. . .‘
and suddenly the plane rolled over like a large animal dying, and almost flopped into the trees. The green carpet streaked beneath Schwartz, and as he pulled over the shattered wreck of the D
e
Havilland and swept out over the river, he saw an SAR Huey below him heading toward the crash site, then the jungle seemed to erupt. A geyser of fire shot up from the wreckage and he felt the wave of the explosion wash over him. He banked sharply trying to circle back, then heard the voice of the Huey pilot, ‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue one
. . .
We lost him.
. .

Anyway, I overf
l
ew him and started to peel around and I saw this SAR Huey coning up the river and then the plane blew,’ Schwartz said, finishing his story.

‘How long after he crashed?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Long enough for me to maybe do a one eighty.’

‘Long enough for him to maybe get out?’ Hatcher whispered.

‘Murph?’

‘Yeah.’

Schwartz shrugged. ‘Sure, I guess so. I disagree with Fraser
—
the notion Cody may have gotten out of the plane isn’t crazy.’

Hatcher nibbled at his soup, then asked, ‘How did his girlfriend take it?’ he whispered.

‘Inscrutably, the way hoochgirls always did. Hugh’s a little off-base there, too. The bottom line is, Cody didn’t like Fraser. Or maybe he sensed Fraser didn’t like him. Whatever, Fraser was never invited to join Cody.’

‘And the rest of you were?’

Schwartz nodded. ‘Hell, I’d go over there every once in a while, she’d cook up dinner for a couple of us. Viet shit,
it
was great.’

‘Does the expression “Thai Horse’’ mean anything to you?’ Hatcher asked.

‘You mean heroin?’

‘Does it mean anything else to you?’

‘Nope. What’s that got to—’

‘Did Cody have a drug problem?’

Schwartz looked shocked. ‘You gotta be kidding. Murph Cody? Cody didn’t even smoke. Where are you going with this?’

‘No place, just touching all the
b
ases.’

The question about Thai Horse and dope had upset Schwartz, made him suddenly wary.

Hatcher quickly changed the subject. ‘Tell me more about the girl.’

Schwartz hesitated, still suspicious, but his obvious respect for Cody won over. He began to relax again. ‘Y’know, in a funny kind of way I think maybe Murph was in love with Pai.’

‘Pai?’

‘Yeah. I think what it was, he was kinda proud of her, was showing her off.’

He sat strangely quiet for a minute or two, sipping his beer, then he said, ‘You know, I went down three weeks later. Just
—
north of Binh Th
u
y. The first four, five months I was a prisoner, we were in transit camps. They just, like, y’know, moved us around a lot. Then finally they took us to Hanoi. Anyway, I heard rumors about this camp over in Laos. It was like a mobile unit, y’know, and they supposedly had a big shot over there.’

What kind of big shot?’

‘That’s it, a big shot. I heard everything from Westmoreland to Bob Hope. You know how rumors are. Anyway, until they took us north, I heard about this camp all the time. They called it, uh,
H
uie-kui, the spirit camp, I guess because it
—
seemed to disappear all the time.’

‘It wasn’t uncommon for them to move their camps around.’

‘I know. It never occurred to me before, I always assumed he was dead, but maybe the celebrity was Murph.’

‘Do me a favor, will you, Commander? Keep this under your hat. If Cody is alive, give me a chance to find him.’

Schwartz stared hard at Hatcher and then slowly nodded. ‘He deserves that.’

Hatcher’s thoughts went back to the hoochgirl. ‘Did you like his girl?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Are you kidding? She made Natalie Wood look like Porky Pig.’ Schwartz paused for a minute and then said, ‘Would you like to see her? I got a picture of her in my scrapbook.’

On the way to the airport, Hatcher’s pulse began racing, his nerves humming. Forty-eight hours before, the whole notion that Murph Cody was still alive had seemed like a big joke to Hatcher. Now there was a question in his mind. When Hatcher was studying criminal detection, Sloan, his mentor, had once said,
‘
Don’t
ever trust written reports. When it’s in writing, people tend to make themselves look good.’

It had cost him forty-eight hours to run that theory, but he was glad he had. He thought about the three men he had interviewed, each with a different
v
iew of Cody, each affected in a different way by his own role in the events of that fateful day when Murphy Cody had disappeared.

To Schwartz, Cody was a hero doing a dirty job; to Fraser, a war-loving madman; to Simmons, a haunting ghost whose cold fist squeezed Simmons’s heart. To Fraser, escape from the flaming wreckage of Cody’s plane was impossible; to Schwartz, it was a toss-up; to Simmons, it was a reality.

And, too, there was Schwartz’s report of this ghost camp, Huie-kui. Could that be the reason Cody had never turned up? Had he been a prisoner for all those years? And if so, how did he get out?

There was one other thing that gnawed at Hatcher’s brain. If Murphy Cody had died, where had Wol Pot, the Thai, come up with his name? Wol Pot had a lot of questions to answer.

There was only one thing on which Fraser and Schwartz seemed to agree
—
that Pai, Cody’s hoochgirl, was special. Looking at the photograph Schwart
z
had given him, Hatcher had to agree. It was a colour photograph, dog
-
eared and faded. In the picture, Cody was standing in front of his thatched hooch, his ar
m
around a small, almond-colored beauty, her chin down, staring mystically up at the camera. She looked al
m
ost childlike. But while her body was the body of a young girl, her eyes seemed to reflect some inner knowledge that was far beyond her years. Hatcher stared at those eyes, felt them connect, could almost see them blink. He put the photograph back in his wallet.

He looked at his watch. In twelve hours he would be in Bangkok. He hoped Windy Porter would have a lot of answers for him. He had no way of knowing that at almost that same moment Windy Porter was dying in the dark waters of the Phadung Klong, fo
u
r thousand miles away.

A
good man who thinks he’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’ is hard to bring down.

—A
TEXAS RANGER

STORK

The stork’s legs were four feet long from its knees to the soles of its feet. It bobbed through
the
crowd and every move was perfect. The four-foot stilts lifted the surreal bird a foot above the rest of the bizarre crowd, which it stalked, chin out, butt out, butt in, chin in, a rainbow- hued spray of feathers sprinkled with glitter bursting from its yellow bustle, its face painted white, its lips exaggerated and bright yellow, vertical blue streaks painted from its forehead through its eyes all the way down to its chin, a wig of bright blue feathers sweeping straight back from its forehead, its body encased in a yellow feathered body stocking. There was no way to tell whether the person encased in the costume was male or
female
.

Surrounding it was an eerie
assortment
of other surreal creatures, their heads jogging in waves to the Eurythmics’ ‘Would I Lie to You Baby,’ which thundered from a dozen monster speakers. Spinning spears of flashing strobe lights
augured
down from the ceiling. Below the clear lucite dance floor, a six-foot Mako shark circled in its tank, agitated by the beat.

The Annual Critter Ball had attracted its biggest crowd yet to Split Personality
—
known as the Split
—
Atlanta’s environment club, a fancy name for a disco. In the balcony, Spears and Hedritch surveyed the crowd dubiously. In a roomful of bizarre people, they stood out by the very nature of their normalcy, dressed as they were in dark blue suits, even though they had taken off their ties and opened their shirt collars.

‘Christ, this is absolutely insane,’ said Spears, the taller of the two, a six-footer, blond and square-jawed, with the look of a forty-year-old surfer. Hedritch was five foot nine with balding dark hair, a neck the size of a tire and big ears. Very big ears.

‘Let’s call it off,’ Hedrich said, looking around the supercharged dance floor. ‘We don’t need this shit.’

‘You don’t call
off
Campon and you know it,’ Spears replied. ‘He does whatever the hell he wants.’

‘This goes way beyond a security risk,’ Hedritch snapped nervously.

‘So what’s new? Let’s give him the bad news. Maybe he’ll take our advice for a change.

‘Yeah, sure he will,’ Hedritch answered.

They turned and went back through the crowd to the balcony entrance. The stork’s eyes, glittering, watched them all the way.

Outside, the line waiting for
e
ntry through the magic portals of the club snaked halfway around the block. The black stretch limo sat in front
o
f the door. Spears and Hedritch got in the backseat; the sweet smell of marijuana permeated the interior. General Hector Campon was leaning in the corner dressed in full military regalia, three rows of ribbons twinkling from the breast of the dark blue uniform, the joint glowing bet
w
een his fingertips. His dark glasses swung slowly toward the two men.

‘Well?’ his Spanish-accented voice asked.

‘Bad news,’ said Hedritch. ‘
T
he place is wall-to-wall crazies in costume. You can’t hear a word. The stage and dance floor are back-lit with strobes.’

‘A security nightmare,’ Spears
a
dded.

‘Ridiculous,’ Campon answered, sitting up, ‘you
caballeros
need to grow bigger
cojones.’

Spears mimed the words to himself. He had heard the line often enough. Big balls was Campon’s answer to every crisis.

‘General,’ he said, ‘this is the worst yet. You go in there, we can’t guarantee anything.’

‘Your job is to protect me, not bore me with your problems,’ he snapped. ‘Driver! ‘The door.’

Six men had been guarding Campon since he escaped from Madalena three months earlier. Spears and Hedritch headed the third team that had worked the trick. Three weeks in Fort Lauderdale and Campon was bored. Two weeks in St Louis and he was bored. He had lasted a month and a half in Chicago, and now for two weeks he had been living in a houseboat on Lake Lanier, fifty miles north of Atlanta. Actually it was just as well; moving around like that made it harder to .get a fix on him. The security force of ten comprised Cam
p
on’s four bodyguards and the Americans. What was needed to guard a reckless bastard like General Campon was a smal
l
army.

‘Six men to cover the insanity inside,’ Spears mumbled as they followed Campon out of the car to where he stood like a ramrod, waiting for his entourage to get in position. He was over six feet tall, making
him
an easy target, and with the medals on his chest there was no way to miss him.

Campon was hotter than boiling water. The president was browbeating everyone in Congress to approve a $50 million appropriation to back Ca
m
pon’s planned overthrow of the leftist government
th
at had deposed him. Campon was biding his time, lobbying influential friends with phone calls by day, raising hell every night, while his army, or what was left of it, was cooling its heels across the border in a neighboring country. ‘To throw off his enemies, the Feds had leaked lies to the press: that the general was supposed to be in the Bahamas; that he had moved on to Canada; that he was hiding out n a ranch in the Far West.

At times Spears and Hedritch felt like Campon’s pimps, rounding up women, checking their backgrounds, paying for his sex and for secrecy. But this behavior, appearing in public this way, was a violation of all the rules.

So, what else was new? Hedritch
o
rdered two of his men to go in ahead and work the stage at the back of the dance floor. The other two he sent to the balcony. Spears looked around the shopping center, checki
n
g the rooftops, while Hedritch checked out the line. Hell, thought Spears, if they want to get him, they’re going to get him. But they were sure they had not been followed, and that reduced the odds a little. They moved to the door.

‘Names?’ asked the king of the portals.

‘Campon,’ the general said.

The doorman’s finger ran down the list and stopped. ‘Yes, sir, General,’ he said, unsnapping the red cord.

Spears looked at Hedritch with panic as the entourage moved into the club.

‘Did he make a reservation?’ Hedritch asked incredulously.

‘Yes, sir, yesterday,’ the doorman answered.

‘Shit!’ he snapped as they rushed after the general. They caught up with him as Campon was about to enter the main room, a sprawling semicircle of tables crowding up to the dance floor.

‘General, at least go upstairs, please,’ pleaded Hedritch. ‘You can see better from up there and we can cruise the room a lot easier.’

‘The action’s down here,’ Ca
m
pon answered curtly, following his four beefy men int
o
the club. Spears and Hedritch trotted along behind hum, looking frantically, futilely, around the club as the dep
o
sed dictator walked to the edge of the dance floor where he stood watching the madness. He was a stationary target.

‘S
hit city,’ Spears yelled in Hed
ritch’s ear, ‘keep your head on a swivel.’

The general’s gaze swept the dance floor, stopping once on a woman dressed like a giraffe with her bosom swelling over the top of her striped costume. Beyond her, on the far side of the floor, the yellow stork
j
erked weirdly through the crowd, blurred by the flashing lights. It raised its yellow-feathered wings and turned in a slow circle, bobbing to the beat of the music. Campon laughed and applauded the stork, although it was hard to see it because of the lights flashing in his face.

The stork’s alert eyes checked the general’s entourage, the two men in the balcony, the tw
o
men behind it on the stage, as it turned slowly, making a 360-degree survey of the club. The stork was so bizarre, so visible, the security men ignored it.

Campon clapped his hands again and chuckled gleefully at the spectacle. It was the last sound he ever uttered.

Well concealed amid the feathered wings attached to its arms, the stork held a silenced mini.-Uzi. Only a foot long and weighing six pounds, the submachine gun held a thirty-two-round clip and was equipped with a plastic cup to catch the casings. The stork was an expert. It squeezed off three three-round bursts, watching in the slow-motion flashes of the strobes as the rounds splattered into their target. Campon’s head jerked forward as the first three rounds exploded in his chest; his arms swung out in front of him and then he arched backward as two more rounds ripped into his head. The third struck a waiter behind him in the spine and took down two of the bodyguards.

Spears and Hedritch were caught totally by surprise as Campon seemed suddenly to have a seizure. The music continued to thunder. One of the bodyguards spun around and fell against Hedritch.

Oh my God, it’s happening! Hedritch thought.

The stork swung its feathered arms in a slow arc and sent another burst into the crowd. A young woman and her date spun around as the bullets ripped them. She screamed. Somebody else joined the scream. Nobody was aware yet of what was happening Then suddenly the woman yelled, ‘I’m shot!’

Pandemonium.

The second attack created more confusion in the room.

The security men had no idea
w
here the shots were coming from. They saw the young couple fifty feet away go down. The girl started screaming. Campon was on the floor on his back staring up into the darkness above. Guns appeared in the security men’s hands. Hedritch dropped over Campon, felt his throat for a pulse. The screams swept the room like a hurricane bl
o
wing through. There was a rush for the door. A table went down. Glasses broke. Panic seemed to explode like a bomb in the room.

The men on the stage jumped int
o
the crowd and raced toward the general’s group. In the balcony the other two men stared down at the figure of the general. In the confusion nobody could tell where the shots came from.

The stork sat down on the stage, pulled off the stilts and whirled behind one of the big speakers. It snapped the back open, dropped stilts and gun into the speaker casing and snapped it shut, then dashed through a nearby fire door. It led to a catacomb of tunnels below the dance floor. As the stork bolted down the stairs, it pulled off the wig and stripped off the wings. It ran to a small door that led to a room full of electrical equipment. The stork jumped inside, still undressing. It peeled off the yellow body stocking, grabbed a garbage bag secreted behind an electrical panel and began stuffing the feathers into it. In seconds the stork was transformed into a young man in jeans and a blue T-shirt. He took a towel soaked in cold cream from the garbage bag and wiped his face clean. Then he rushed down the labyrinth of corridors and back up another set of stairs. When he reached the top, he opened the door a crack and looked into the kitchen. The employees were crowded at the end of the large stainless steel room, peering into the main room.

‘My God,’ one of the cooks said, ‘somebody’s been shot!’

The assassin slipped into the kitchen, stuffed the garbage bag into a large can, slipped a dolly under it and wheeled it out the back door. The chaos had not spread outside yet. He shoved the garbage can among a dozen others, took a quick look at his watch, and walked off into the darkness.

Three and a half minutes. Not bad.