Thai Horse (2 page)

The Huey was a hundred feet away, hovering over the river.

Over here, over here! he urged silently. He started to get up, to wave at the chopper. And watched in horror as it peeled away and headed back downstream.

No, he cried to himself, No, no

‘I’m here,’ he screamed desperately.

He stood up, determined to jump i
nto
the water and swim to the safety of the other side, at just the moment the sky erupted in fire as the plane disintegrated in flames. The heat roared down over him like a blanket. He covered his face and fell to the ground, huddled against the raging fire in the trees overhead. And as the inferno baked his back and legs he kept crawling toward the river.

Freedom was ten feet away when he gave up.

The commander burst into the radio shack, his face frozen in a scowl.

‘What the hell is it, Wicker?’ he snapped.

‘We just lost a bird, Commander,’ the radio operator answered forlornly.

The commander’s shoulders sagged. He shook his head.

‘Damn!’ he barked. ‘Who was it.’

The radioman hesitated for just a second.

‘Chili one, sir, Lieutenant Cody.’

The commander closed his eyes for a moment and his jaw twitched as he clenched his teeth. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he moaned. And a moment later: ‘Okay, get me GHQ, Saigon. I gotta tell the Old Man we just lost his son.’

CENTRAL AMERICA

1985

LOS BOXES

The river had been broad and energetic at the beginning of the journey, but the jungle had gradually encroached on it until now, after four days, the tortured umbilicus between Madrango, the capital, and the forlorn outpost 160 miles away was a mere trickle. The ancient riverboat, scarred by years of heat and rain and pilote
d
by a captain who could barely stay awake, chugged feebly up the last few cramped miles. Trees and ferns snapped at its gunwales and rattled its portholes. The old tub groane
d
as it fought the brush. The only passenger was an obese grotesque, his delicate face squinched by layers of fat, his faded blue eyes, tiny mouth and pointy nose lost in folds of flesh. He sat on a decrepit old lawn chair near the bow, knees and ankles tucked together, his chin pulled down, a white hat hugging his brow, his soft, dimpled hands clutching a white umbrella to shield him from the broiling sun. His white suit was skimpy, ill fitting and sweat-stained, and his unbuttoned shirt cuffs hung loose, for they no longer fit around his massive wrists.

His name was Randall Wilfred Pratt III, and he was with the U.S. State Department in Madrango, much to the chagrin of the embassy staff. On paper, Pratt had looked good, an honor graduate of Har
v
ard whose father was a major contributor and leverage broker for the party in power, and a confidant of the president.

In person, Pratt III was an embarrassment to all, a closet case who came in the package, along with the donations and endorsements. Banished to the minute, unstable Central American country, he was kept discreetly out of sight and used only when some undesirable occasion arose. This job was perfect; it required no diplomacy at all.

For two days he had sat thus, all tacked in, waiting and watching for his first glimpse of a place so foul, so unforgiving, so terrifying by reputation, that even the judges who condemned men to its depths whispered its name. With each passing hour Pratt’s anxiety grew until it was a scream waiting to happen, a scream that could not be suppressed.

The old scow burst through the trees and the place rose like a specter before them, a towering stone bastion tortured by vines, smothered with damp green moss, and choked by the forest that entrapped it. Pratt was so undone, so utterly terrified by the sight that he -yelled out loud, a piercing cry that jarred the master of the boat awake and brought him immediately to his feet. Pratt quickly recovered. Turning with embarrassment, he dismissed the outburst with a wave of his chubby hand. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and furiously mopped his face.

My God, he thought, was Hatcher still alive? And if so, was he sane enough to be worth this trip?

HATCHER

Christian Hatcher had been there for three years, two months and twenty-seven days
—
1,1
8
3 days, to be exact. Nobody in Los Boxes knew his real name, which was not uncommon; nobody in Los Boxes knew anybody’s real name. To be sentenced here was
to
be sentenced to oblivion.

There was no escape from Los Boxes. It loomed like an apparition from the jungle floor, encircled by two hundred miles of steamy jungle as deadly as it was verdant, an emerald paradise whose green canopy concealed a floor crawling with venomous snakes, jaguars and wild hogs, pocked with quicksand bogs, and teeming with vines that grew so fast in the hot, fertile forest that a man could be strangled by them as he slept. There were no paths here; the jungle devoured them in hours.

Centuries-old vines entwined the crumbling citadel and seemed to hold it together. Insid
e
, there were 212 rooms carved from dirt and stone, each
ten
feet square and eight feet high, and each lit by a single bulb, the electricity supplied by an aged and unreliable generator. The barred windows were hardly more than slivers in the wall, barely wide enough for a man to get through. The only adversary here was nature. Nobody could remember why this fortress had been built, but it had served as a political prison for more than a century, surviving one feeble government after another. In Madrango its
n
ame was whispered in fear.

There were no records of names or arrival dates. A new inmate was simply assigned a bo
x
and its number became his identity.

Three years, two months and twenty-seven days ago, Hatcher had become no. 127.

The rules of Los Boxes were simple: You did your work, you never spoke to another prisoner. That was it.

Nobody refused to work, it was the only way to get outside, where there was fresh air and exercise. Those who did refuse, out of obstinacy or re
b
ellion, were locked away in their box and forgotten.

If one prisoner spoke to another, the guards simply cut out his tongue.

There were no second chances here; Los Boxes was ferociously expedient.

The guards
—
there were
only
six
—
had once been inmates themselves. When the
fe
d
erales
quit or went mad or died from belly worms, they were replaced with inmates. The inmate guards were no better or worse than the regulars. And although they were armed, they used weapons only to protect themse
lv
es or to shoot occasional predators.

Escape? To escape was to die. Those who tried to were never pursued. The guards chuckled and waited, and when the fugitives realized the
f
u
tility
of escape and returned, they were put back in their box, fed twice a day, and forgotten.

In the beginning there had been incredible frustration. Like a poet without paper or an orator without a voice, Hatcher had no way to express his rage. Only that ruthless, sleepless inquisitor called conscience kept him company. Unable to escape from a constant evaluation of his deeds, his anger turned inward, and as the months turned to years the specifics of his arrest and the politics behind it merged into philosophical abstractions.

Had he betrayed a trust? Had cynicism robbed him of all sense of value? Was this the price for intolerance, for the arrogance of pride? The cross-examination was endless. He went to sleep with the questions on his lips and awoke with no answers, for even his memories had convoluted into fiction.

His calendar scratched out on earthen walls, Hatcher’s clock was a shadow flitting across the floor. Only a dream of freedom kept him alive, and after three years that had dwindled to a mere flicker of hope, hardly enough to inspire escape.

At first, Hatcher seriously considered escape. He had survived five months in the steamy backwaters of Laos and Cambodia and walked out to tell about it, had led two crewmen out of the southern jungles of Madrango when his planeload of arms had crashed, although one had died of snakebite just before they got out.

So memories helped to stave off madness
—
memories and the dream of escape. There was no rush. He would take his time. He studied his prison carefully until he knew the layout. He memorized every niche and crack in the walls, studied the jungle paths and made elaborate escape plans, which he drew on the dirt walls and floors of his box so he could revise them. The cell window was easy. Time and erosion had crumbled the wall around the bars.

A little work with sticks he could smuggle back to his box could work it loose. From outside he carefully studied the face of the prison. It was old a
n
d rotten. Climbing the sheer wall to the top of the citadel would be a breeze. He had learned that lesson well from Cirillo.

It was a day he would never forget and he played and replayed it in his mind.

Hatcher had clung to the rock as if it were a magnet while the wind tore at his clothes and pulled at his bleeding fingers. If he could have, he would have dug a hole in that rock and crawled in. He was seventeen years old and
petrified
.

It was not a mountain
—
no way you could have called it a mountain. It was a spear, a slender spear a hundred feet high with a flat top and sheer sides, snuggled against the foothills of the Green Mountains, three hours from Boston. And what had started out as a warm clear-
skied
September day had suddenly turned ugly.

Ciril
l
o was ten feet above him, inching like a spider up the face of the cliff. Cirillo had
n
o equipment. No rope. No ax
e
. Just a canteen and a small bag of resin, which he ha
d attached to the back of his b
elt. Free climbing, he called it, and the only way to start vas to do it.

Before starting, Ci
r
illo had stood looking up the rock face.

‘This looks good,’ he said. ‘Not too high for a beginner.’

‘You talkin’ about
me
goin’ up that?’ Hatcher had said with an edge of panic in his voice.

‘Gotta start somewhere.’

I don’t gotta start anywhere,’ he answered.

‘That’s right,’ answered Cirillo, ‘it takes a little guts.’

He had laid another resin bag at the base of the cliff.

Then Cirillo ran his fingers across the perpendicular face of it until he found a small fissure. He dipped his fingers in the resin bag, blew the excess resin off them, and started feeling his way up, clambering hand over hand, foot over foot, looking like a giant crab as he went up the cliff by his fingertips and toe tips, using cracks and ridges to haul himself up. The kid watched in awe.

‘You’re nuts,’ the kid said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What happens if you run out of cracks?’

‘You fall.’

‘Great, just great!’ Hatcher said.

Cirillo kept going, his muscular arms bulging as he worked his way laboriously up the cliff.. Hatcher watched, began to feel embarrassed. He walked close to the cliff and ran his hands tentatively over its surface, feeling its ridges, cracks and tiny ledges. Finally he picked up the bag of resin, attached it to his belt and, copying Cirillo, started painfully up the wall.

‘Don’t be in a hurry and don’t look down,’ Cirillo said quietly. ‘The ground ain’t goin’ anyplace.’

Hatcher had started up, his fingertips aching, his toes aching, his stomach aching. An hour later he was forty feet up the side, hugging the spear like a found child hugging its mother.

Cirillo was near the dead end, the ledge at the top of the cliff that projected out over his head.

‘I can’t go any farther,’ Hatcher’s wobbly voice yelled. ‘Can’t find anything to get hold of.’

‘To your left, kid,’ Cirillo yelled back. ‘A little farther
. .
up a coupla inches
. . .
there!’

Hatcher’s bleeding fingers found a split in the rocks barely deep enough to get a fingernail in.

‘Not enough,’ he yelled back, still hugging, his eyes closed.

‘It was good enough for me,’ yelled Cirillo, ‘and my fingers’re twice the size of yours.’

Hatcher dug his fingers in, scraped dirt out of the tiny ledge, made a crevice deep enough to slowly pull himself up another six inches. Fear was bile in his throat.

That’s when it had started getting darker. The clouds blew in on a cold, biting wind that carried with it the dampness of rain.

The wind picked up, battering him. He could feel his fingers trembling.

‘It’s turning bad, kid,’ Cirillo yelled. ‘Pick it up, keep movin’.’

‘Can’t
. .

‘Bullshit. Get your ass in gear or you’re gonna be nuthin’ but a puddle.’

‘Shit,’ was all Hatcher could manage. His fingertips were raw and bleeding and his toes ached as they had never ached before. His arms trembled with exertion. Sweat stung his eyes and tickled the corners of his mouth.

He was hanging on for dear life. The first drops of rain had begun to pelt Cirillo’s face and panic began to gnaw at him, too. But he couldn’t let the kid know that.

Cirillo was at the overhang,
h
e reached up and slowly crawled the fingers of one hand toward the edge, stretching out as far as he could until he very cautiously reached around the edge and felt for a finger hold. His aching fingertips found a small trench. He dug at it, making sure it would hold him, then pushed himself up and out and swung free of the face of the wall. He hung there by one arm, staring down at the kid, who clung to the wall, pressing against it like a piece of moss.

Ciril
l
o switched hands. Hanging with his right arm, he extended his left toward the kid.

‘C’mon, another six feet, I gotc
h
a.’

Hatcher inched his way up, snatching a peek at Cirillo and then closing his eyes and feeling for another finger hold. Finally his head bumped the overhang. No place else to go.

‘Grab my hand, kid,’ Cirillo said.

Hatcher looked at him through terror-stricken eyes, stared at the fingertips wiggling an invitation to him.

‘Trust me,’ Cirillo said.

The kid had never trusted anyone before. He started to look back toward the ground.

‘Don’t
—
look down,’ Cirillo said quietly but sternly, and the kid closed his eyes and clung on for dear life.