Thai Horse (20 page)

THE HIT

The big, stocky black guy turned off Suriwong Road and headed through Patpong toward Tombstone. At nightfall the city of Bangkok was transformed, as if by some perverse genie, from a frantic, cr
o
wded, noisy business hub into a blazing neon jungle. Topless tigresses stalked the jungle, performing in nightclubs, whorehouses, massage parlors and storefronts. Promising everything and delivering a great deal of what it promised, the frenetic section known as Patpong exemplified the attitude, catering, in a bizarre distortion of A
m
erican rowdiness, to European and U.S. tourists. Patpong was for
the farang,
the foreigners, who flocked to the area every night seeking out the legendary sexy naughtiness of B
a
ngkok as part of their ‘Thailand experience.’

Except for an occasional ‘Hey,’ the big man ignored the pimps, barkers and ladies. Most of them knew him anyway. He passed Jack’s American Star and the San Francisco Bar, where topless go-go dancers
performed
special ‘shows,’ and turned down a side street, away from the neon glare, the bellowing loudspeakers and the
hawkers
. It was not a dim street, but it was more Phoenix than New Orleans. Were it not for the signs printed in both English and Thai and the nature of the buildings themselves
w
ith their characteristic Thai architecture, this section called Tombstone might have been mistaken for a street in
a
ny Western American town. The only thing missing was dirt streets and hitching posts. In fact one establishment did have a hitching post on the edge of the sidewalk.

There was a store that featured traditional Western clothing, including Tony Lama boots and Stetson hats; a restaurant called Yosemite Sam’s, whose menu consisted of barbecue, Brunswick stew and ribs; the Stagecoach Deli, which, although more West Side New York than Western, had swinging doors and an imitation Tiffany window. It might be argued that Langtry’s Music Hall, with its naked Thai and Chinese dancers, was more Patpong than Tombstone, but it too catered to the Western motif that dominated the street. There were old pesters of Lillie Langtry and Eddie Foy beside the color g
lo
ssies of its star attractions. The entrance was straight out of a John Ford movie.

Across the Street was Pike’s Peak, an ice cream parlor whose decor was perhaps more turn-of-the-century than Western, and the Roundup, a twenty-four-hour corral
styled cafeteria specializing in coffee, doughnuts and eggs. The tiny hundred-seat movie house that was next on the block was called the Palace and played old double features, everything from classics to B flicks from the thirties, four shows a day, and changed programs every Tuesday and Friday.

And there was the Longhorn, as Western as a bar could get. It sported the one hitching post on the street. A rowdy Texan had once tied his rental car to the post and, hours later and several drinks drunker, had forgotten and driven off, taking the front of the place with him. Sweets Wilkie, the proprietor, had settled for a thousand dollars and repaired it himself for $346.

On this night Wilkie was in heaven, his gold tooth glittering from the corner of a broad smile. The jukebox was booming ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ by Creedence Clearwater, and the place was jammed to the walls, mostly by some of the five hundred or so expatriate Americans who lived in the city. Few tourists found their way down the Tombstone back street, and if they did, the Longhorn was hardly what they were looking for.

The burly black man, whose inner-tube-size arms strained the sleeves of a blinding
H
awaiian shirt, strolled through the noisy Longhorn, nodded to Wilkie, went up the two steps and through the glass-bead curtain into the private sector of the bar known as the Hole in the Wall, a section reserved for regulars. The
H
onorable was sitting in his personal easy chair, reading the
Wall Street Journal.
On the table beside him was a bottle of wine and a rack of poker chips.

Two men were shooting eight ball, and beyond them six men were seated around a poker table playing five card stud under the glare of a green shade. The black man didn’t have to check out the players; he knew who they would be. Gallagher, Eddie Riker, Potter, Johnny Prophett, Wonderboy and Wyatt Earp. A strange-looking crew, particularly Wonderboy, who looked li
k
e a mime. His face was divided by a thin red line that ran fro
m
his hairline down his forehead and the bridge of his nose to his chin. His face was painted black on the left side and white on the right.

The black man pulled up a chair and sat down next to a tall, lean man in a flat-brimmed Stetson. He had white hair and a white handlebar mustache, and wore a black Western shirt, jeans and a tattersall vest, which concealed the .357 Cobra that he called his Buntline Special under his arm.

‘Decided who’s on the roster, Mr. Earp?’ he asked quietly, studying the cards on the table.

‘Early and me for starters, Haven’t decided who the third man’ll be yet,’ Earp answered.

‘You ain’t discriminating, are you?’ the black man asked with half a grin.

‘You went last time, Corkscrew,’ he said.

‘Shit, I’m the best you got and you know it,’ Corkscrew answered with a touch of arrogance.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Earp answered, repeating a line he heard at least once a week from Corkscrew.
“I once had every pimp in De-troit right there.”
He
pressed his thumb down on the table.

“But this ain’t Detroit,”
Corkscrew answered with a smile, incanting Earp’s customary reply.

‘Next time I’ll scratch you in,’ Earp promised, turning over his hole card, which, added to
the
pair on the table, gave him trips and the pot.

Earp looked at his gold Rolex. Nine o’clock. Thirty minutes until show time.

He looked around the table, making his final decision. For the most part, a tough bunch All of them had suffered their share of grief in
Vietnam
.

‘Take my seat,’ he said and got up.

‘What you got?’ Corkscrew asked.

Earp counted his chips with one hand. ‘Three hundred,’ he said.

‘I owe ya,’ Corkscrew said, slipping into his chair.

Earp had planned this operation carefully, as he always did, and he was feeling comfortable a
b
out the whole thing. Keep the team small and run the show fast, that was his motto. It had worked for him for years. He moved away from the orb of light into the shadows, checking out the regulars, also as he always did.

The man who had been sitting next to him was Max Early, who was wearing a light tan safari jacket, which hung open. He had no shirt under it and his trim body, like his hard-angled face, was well tanned
—
a man who worked in the sun. Unlike the others, who wore their hair trimmed short, Early’s auburn locks tumbled from under a weathered and sagging safari hat down to his shoulders. Early stood quietly when Earp got up. ‘I’m out,’ was all he said, gathering up his chips.

Earp knew all their stories by heart.

Max and the big kid, Noel, and Jimmy, who had a problem with acne, were sitting in the jungle staring down at the hole while the rest of the patrol was shaking out the grass nearby. It looked as if it was abandoned. There were no fresh footprints and Jimmy had been lying on the damp ground with his ear to the hole for ten minutes and didn’t hear a sound.

‘So whose turn is it?’ said Noel, the big hunk of a kid from Oklahoma. Typical Army, picking
a
man who weighed 270 pounds to be a tunnel rat when he could hardly get his leg down the hole.

‘I went last time,’ said Jimmy, the skinny kid from San Berdoo.

Early was the oldest. He was twe
n
ty-six and he felt ninety and he had this feeling that he was responsible for the other two.

‘Shit, I’ll go down,’ he sighed. ‘Ain’t been anybody down this hole for a week or two. Look there, there’s spider webs over the entrance.’

‘You know these gooks,’ said Noel. ‘Lay down in there for weeks, they can.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Early, slapping afresh clip in his M-16 and charging it and checking the K-Bar
i
n
his boot and the clip in his .45. He hated dusting these tun
n
els, hated it more than anything else about the war, but it had to get done and the sooner the better, so why waste time.
H
e tied his hair back with a bandana and quietly slid over the edge of the tunnel headfirst and slithered down into the black pit. He lay, holding his breath, listening. He didn’t smell the
m
.
And
he didn’t hear any breathing. It’s okay, he thought, Charlie left this one behind. He started through headfirst with his knife between his teeth and his M-16 probing the darkness. These tunnels could go forever, sometimes twisting and turning for a mile or two. He hated the darkness and the damp, musty feeling, but he didn’t want to use his light yet, not until he
w
as sure the tunnel was abandoned.

Damn, what’s an outdoorsman from Utah doing in this piss-hole, he thought.

Then he heard the first faint sound.

A scratching sound.

Then a squeak.

Then a flapping.

And then suddenly the tunnel was alive with squealing, flapping, biting, hung
r
y bats, dozens of them, surrounding him in the darkness.

Early screamed a scream of pure terror. He started firing. He emptied his rifle, heard the bullets thumping into the earth as the bats kept coming, started to back up, slashing the darkness with his knife, clawing for his pistol. The screeching creatures were all around him, and his scream was endless and ear-piercing as he thrashed in the dark
n
ess. Pulling himself up against the side of the tunnel, he emptied his .45 into the blackness around him, firing blindly. He clawed out another clip as he backed through the tight confines of the tomb toward the entrance. He was disoriented in the dark and his hands were shaking. There were bats in his hair, biting his cheeks. He slammed another clip in the .45
a
nd emptied it. Then he pulled out the flashlight and began sweeping it around the tunnel, hoping the light would scare them off. Finally he could feel the cool draft from the opening s
w
eeping past him and he reached back to get a grip on the edge of the shaft; his hand touched something soft and wet and a
t
first he thought it was mud. He twisted around and flashed the light back. The big kid, Noel, was hanging upside down, his arms resting on the floor of the tunnel. His face was mush. Blood bubbled out of the gaping bullet hole under his eye and poured out of his nose and mouth.

‘Oh God, oh Jesus!’ Early screamed as the bats continued to assault him and flew past him and attacked the dead soldier’s bleeding face. And Early, still screaming, clawed frantically past his fallen comrade, gasping for the fresh air that rushed down the shaft, knowing deep down that in his panic he had just killed his own buddy.

Eddie Riker, who would very humbly tell you that he was the best slick pilot in the whole damn Vietnam war, was the next man at the table.

They sent a light colonel in from Saigon to interrogate Riker. The first thing Riker noticed was that the colonel didn’t sweat. A hundred degrees in the shade with the humidity running about 98 and his shirt was still starched. Dry as the Sahara. Riker was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt and was soaking wet. The colonel came to the barracks where Riker was under house arrest. An arrogant little man impressed with his own importance, carrying an alligator briefcase and a little stack of files. He spoke in a monotone and never looked Riker in the eye. He stared down at the report the whole time, tapping his pencil slowly on the table
w
hile Riker told him the story. Riker knew the type, just another scummy lawyer sitting out the war in Saigon.

‘You are charged with criminal assault on an officer,’ the colonel said.

‘I know it,’ Riker said.

‘I’d like to hear your version of this,’ the colonel said, leafing through the report in front of him. The pencil went tap, tap, tap. Riker knew whatever he said
w
ould go right past the colonel. To people like this, combat
w
as running out of toilet paper in the middle of the night.

‘Okay,’ Riker said. ‘First of all, you got to understand I’m the hottest damn slick pilot in the outfit. We been evacuating wounded along the DMZ in Song Ngan for five months now.

It’s about thirty minutes by air from here. A real shit situation. A lot of action and heavy casualties. I been doin’ six, seven runs a day, which puts a lot on the Huey. I tell you this so you understand, with that kind of schedule, maintenance is critical.

‘Anyway we inherit this lousy little fig-leaf major
—
a real fugazi, man
—
in charge of maintenance. Short-sticker, y’know, had about two months to go, sat around carving notches in this piece of wood keepin’ track of his time. All he cared about, gettin’ out of here. And
w
e’re losin’ choppers left and right, maintenance was so shit-ass bad. The other mornin’ I’m dropping down to pick up a bunch of wounded kids and all of a sudden I don’t have any power. I’m at maybe ninety, a hundred feet, all of a sudden my slick d
r
ops like a
fucking body bag. I hit, the Huey rolls over, the blades shower off A dozen kids are chopped liver. Ever seen
a
human being after a chopper blade works ‘em over?’

The colonel sighed but didn’t look up. He turned away, staring out the window.

‘Just stick to the facts, Lieutenant,’
h
e said.

‘These are the facts, Colonel. A dozen kids down there waiting for salvation and I fell in and butchered them.’

Riker paused long enough to light a cigarette.

‘Me? I end up with a bruise on my neck and a headache. They fly me back here to base and all the way back I’m thinkin’, That son of a bitch, all he’s g
o
tta do is keep the slicks up to snuff and he can’t do anything but carve notches in his Goddamn stick. That’s his whole fuckin’ job. It really ate me. When I got back, I went straight to that little short-sticker and I took his stick and I rammed it where the sun don’t shine and then I broke it off and I whipped the shit out of him with the rest of it. I whipped that sorry bastard till he looked like a bowl of ravioli. I was gonna shoot his ass off, but I didn’t. I just whacked him. Then I called the provost marshal and they put me under house arrest and that’s the whole story.’

‘That’s all you have to say?’ the colo
n
el asked.

‘What else is there?’ Riker answered_

‘You have no remorse?’ the colonel said with surprise.

‘Remorse?’ Riker said after a moment’s thought. ‘Yeah, I got remorse. I think now I should have killed that worthless s
h
it. God knows how many body bags he filled.’

The colonel looked up at him for the first time. He looked ang
r
y. ‘I’m recommending that you be arraigned for criminal assault,’ he said. ‘You’ll be assigne
d
an attorney. You’ll also be returned to Saigon for incarceration.’

‘So what else is new,’ Riker said with a shrug.

The colonel flipped the file folder shut and meticulously arranged things in his case and stood
u
p
and brushed some lint off his sharply creased trousers.

‘You have a bad attitude problem,’ the colonel snapped.

‘No, Colonel, what I got is a bad maintenance officer.’

The colonel stalked out of the
barracks
.

Riker watched him priss across the yard and get in his jeep and drive off. He stood there and he thought, What the hell, this is a waste. The hottest slick pilot in Nam and I’m playing solitaire in a fuckin’ Quonset hut and kids are out there dyin’. So he walked out and grabbed a chopper that was warming up and went back to work.