The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (16 page)

“It’s like Speed said outside. It’s their view. It’s not the truth, it’s just their version of it.”

“Remember Hue? February 1968, when we finally cleared out the VC. They moved in during the Tet Offensive, January 31, and it took us until February 25 to retake it. We discovered almost 3,000 bodies in mass graves. A lot of them had been buried alive, almost all of them had been mutilated. Heads chopped off, and worse. Much, much worse. When the VC moved in they had death lists, names of bureaucrats, teachers, police, religious figures. A quick court-martial and that was that. I don’t see any mention of that here, Dan. And I don’t see any mention of the cinemas and restaurants they bombed in Saigon. The innocent women and children the VC killed. Fuck them, Dan. Fuck them all!” He shouted the last curse and his words echoed around the room. Judy stopped her commentary and looked over at the two men. Horvitz snorted and stamped out of the room. Lehman saw Tyler slip away from the group and follow him.

Lehman stayed with the group as Judy continued her guided tour of the exhibition, and was surprised at her vehemence as she needlessly described what was going on in the different photographs. She hadn’t acted that way at the Military Museum or the Revolution Museum; her commentaries there had been straightforward and unemotional and Lehman wondered if she was putting on a performance for the museum employees who were standing at various points around the exhibition.

She led them to another room which contained a display of American weapons, including M16s, M14s, M18s, mortars, an M72 anti-tank rocket launcher, M20B1 and M9A1 bazookas and shotguns. At the far side of the room sat a bored museum employee, a young girl in a yellow
ao dais
and white pantaloons, who studied her nails and yawned. Tyler and Horvitz were standing by a cluster of mortars. Tyler was whispering to Horvitz, who appeared to be a good deal calmer than when he’d stormed out of the other room. They both looked up when the rest of the group appeared and wandered away outside.

Speed and Henderson took it in turns to pose in front of the anti-tank weapons while the other took pictures, and the salesman from Seattle told his wife war stories. Cummings and his wife walked arm in arm, she asking him quiet questions, he answering and occasionally resting his forehead on her shoulder. Judy continued to harangue the American actions in Vietnam, reading out the notices on the walls and then embellishing them with more details before leading them to yet another room, this one with an exhibition of America’s attempt to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam.

She showed them flight plans of the planes which had criss-crossed the countryside dropping eighteen million gallons of herbicides on the forests of South Vietnam, and photographs of victims who, years later, had developed cancers. There were photographs taken through microscopes showing the effects the dioxin in Agent Orange had on human chromosomes, and there was a morbid display of specimen bottles containing deformed human foetuses. “The legacy of American poisons continues to kill our children,” said Judy as if accusing each and every one of them for the birth defects. Carmody giggled nervously at the back of the group and Lewis turned round and glared at him.

“Man, this isn’t funny,” he hissed. “We had no right to do this. No right at all.” His eyes were blazing and Lehman thought that he might take a swing at Carmody but then the anger seemed to be replaced by sadness and the black man turned away, waving his hand in the air as if swatting an annoying insect.

Lewis listened carefully to Judy as she catalogued the number of cases and types of cancer that were still being reported, and the number of babies that were born dead because of the poisons in the ground and in the water, especially around what had been the demilitarised zone. As he listened he slowly rubbed his stomach.

Lehman came up behind him. “Are you okay, Bart?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just fine.”

“Don’t let this stuff get to you. It’s propaganda, that’s all.”

Lewis shook his head. “It’s more than that, Dan. Yeah, I know that a lot of the rest of that crap about torture and stuff don’t mean nothing but this is different. We did this, we dumped millions of gallons of poison on their land. At the time I didn’t know what we were doing.”

“None of us did, Bart. We were just obeying orders. They didn’t give us time to think about what we were doing. Hell, they probably didn’t even know themselves. I mean, they knew it was a defoliant but I don’t think they knew what the long-term effects would be.”

Lewis looked at him with watery eyes. “You think that would’ve stopped them?” he asked. “Shit, they’d probably have used even more of the stuff. Scorched earth, they called it. Ain’t that the truth?”

Judy called the group together and told them that the tour of the museum was over and that it was time to return to the bus. Lewis was the last to go and he walked slowly, his head down and his right hand massaging his stomach.

Neil Coleman sifted through the computer print-out which listed all the stolen cars which had been recovered over the past twenty-four hours. He also had a list of cars which had been stolen since the beginning of the year, and he methodically crossed off all those which had been found. Normally he would have given the task to Yip or Hui but both were conveniently absent.

His eyes were starting to ache so he leaned back in his chair and looked out of his window. Offices were emptying and the streets were crowded to capacity. The sound of horns and shouts and the rattle of trams penetrated the double-glazing. There was always noise in Hong Kong, Coleman thought. There was always noise and there were always people around you, you couldn’t escape either. Down the corridor he could hear the chatter of Cantonese, three women gossiping by the coffee machine. Cantonese was a language that was shouted, never whispered.

There was a black lamp on his desk and he reached forward and switched it on. He leaned back again and ran his fingers through his thick, sandy-coloured hair. With the desk lamp on he could see his reflection in the window, superimposed on the bustling scene outside. His hair was short and parted on the left and continually stood up at the back no matter how much he smoothed it down. It was always easier to keep his hair under control when it was long, but the Royal Hong Kong Police Force required it to be kept to regulation length. He reckoned he was fairly good-looking, in a boyish way, though he thought that his lips were a bit too thick so he tried to smile a lot because that made his mouth look better. His ears stuck out a bit too, but not so much that anyone had commented on them. Not since he’d left school, anyway. His eyes were deep blue and his eyebrows were as sandy and as bushy as his hair. It wasn’t the face of a movie star, he admitted to himself, but it didn’t send girls screaming for the exit, either.

He wondered how Debbie Fielding felt about his looks. She still hadn’t called even though he’d left several messages. The previous evening he’d gone to the disco where he’d first met her, hoping to see her again, but there’d been no sign of her and he’d ended up drinking too much. He’d got back to his apartment at two o’clock in the morning and decided that it would be a good idea if he called her again. He came to his senses when a man’s sleepy voice answered and he slammed down the receiver before collapsing back on his bed and falling asleep. It must have been her father, William Fielding.

Coleman drummed his fingers on the desk. He wanted a cigarette, badly, but he settled for a coffee instead. He waited until the chattering in the corridor tailed away before fetching himself a cup. As usual the hot brew burnt his fingers by the time he got it back to his office. He found Phil Donaldson, a senior inspector from Serious Crimes, lounging in Yip’s chair.

“Whotchya, Neil,” said Donaldson in his east London accent.

“Hi, Phil, what’s up? You want a coffee?”

Coleman put the plastic cup on his desk.

“That stuff makes me wanna puke,” said Donaldson, rubbing his black moustache with the back of his hand. He was balding and had taken to combing hair from the left side of his head across his crown in a vain attempt to cover his bald patch. Donaldson had been on the force for twelve years, and it was his rough manner and lack of tact which had held him back from rising above the rank of senior inspector. Now it was too late: the government’s localisation policy meant that he, like Coleman, would rise no higher.

“I know what you mean,” agreed Coleman, taking his seat. “But I get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t have coffee every couple of hours.”

“Honest?”

“Sure. It’s the caffeine, I guess.”

“And you can’t give up?”

“I suppose I could, but I’m trying to give up smoking and that’s more than enough for me to handle. So what’s up?” He sipped his coffee.

Donaldson grinned, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on his knees. Like Coleman he worked in plain clothes and was wearing a dark blue suit which had gone baggy around the knees. His black shoes were scuffed, his shirt had gone several days without a wash and his Foreign Correspondents Club tie was loose and his top button was undone. Donaldson’s dress sense was as sloppy as his manners, but he was well liked by his colleagues and reckoned to be a first-class detective. His Cantonese was virtually perfect, and Yip had told Coleman that when he spoke he had a Chinese accent.

“I’ve just heard from a pal over in Tai Po,” he said. “They’ve just caught a ship trying to smuggle a BMW out of Tolo Harbour.”

“So what?” said Coleman, frowning. “Happens all the time. Tolo, Tai Long, Double Haven, all those east-coast ports are used by the triads.”

Donaldson shook his head, his grin widening. A long wisp of hair slid along his bald patch and down the left side of his head. “No, mate, you don’t understand. They were smuggling it underwater! They were towing it behind a small junk.”

“Underwater?”

Donaldson nodded. “You’re not going to believe it, but they put the fucking thing in a rubber bag. A huge rubber bag. They sealed it, leaving enough air so that it floated about twenty feet down, and they towed it.”

“So how did they get caught?”

“The bag snagged on a rock before they’d gone more than a few hundred yards. The car dragged the back of the junk in the water and it started to sink. Marine Police had to rescue them. Massive loss of face, Neil, massive loss of face all round.” He laughed, throwing back his head and wiping his hands on his trousers. Coleman laughed with him. It was funny, no doubt about it. Donaldson sighed and shook his head. “You’ll probably get a report on your desk, but you’ll see it in tomorrow’s
Hong Kong Standard
. One of their photographers lives out there and he took pictures of them dragging the waterlogged BMW on to the shore.”

“What the hell can they have been thinking of?” asked Coleman. “Most of the stolen cars we know about are whisked over on speedboats, so fast that even the Marine Police can’t catch them. Why use bags?”

Donaldson shrugged. “Amateurs maybe. Maybe they were just taking a gift over for relatives on the mainland. According to the boys in Tai Po, they weren’t triads, just fishermen. Whatever, it’s a bloody laugh, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” agreed Coleman.

Donaldson looked at Coleman and raised an eyebrow. “How’s business?” he asked.

“Overworked, underpaid, you know how it is.”

“How’s the group, staff-wise?”

“We’re about thirty per cent understaffed right now. Two constables are working out their notice. I’ve been promised a transfer from one of the district offices, but I doubt it’ll come through. Recruitment is down about eighty per cent from three years ago. Hell, Phil, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. They just can’t get the people.”

“What about you? You got anything yet?” Both men had been looking for other jobs for at least a year. It had already been made clear to them that they, like the rest of the expatriates on the force, had no future with the Royal Hong Kong Police. Any promotions were to go only to locals, in preparation for the handover in 1997. And only Beijing knew what would happen then.

Coleman snorted. “Two rejection letters, one from Avon and Somerset, another from Devon and Cornwall.”

“You gotta thing about the West Country, or what?”

“It’s not that, it’s just that I’ve already been rejected by the big city forces. It’s down to the provinces, now. What about you?”

“I’ve given up on the UK,” said Donaldson. “But I was never keen on going back, anyway, not with the taxes they have over there. I’m trying Taiwan.”

“Taiwan? What’s there?”

“Pat Dugan set up a private detective outfit over there some years back, after his brother-in-law got killed. I’ve been on the blower to him and he’s given me a few leads. There’s a couple of American firms hunting down counterfeiters in the region; it sounds like fun. I’ll give them a try.”

“Good luck,” said Coleman. “I’m getting nowhere. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? They say that they want to phase out the expats, but they can’t get enough locals to sign up. So the strength of the force keeps falling, morale is at an all-time low, and meanwhile the crime rate is going through the roof as the triads try to milk Hong Kong for everything it’s got. You know robberies are up forty per cent this year? There are almost twice as many cars being stolen than three years ago. And more and more of the criminals are carrying guns. They’re getting to the stage where it’s all or nothing. Their only chance is to make a big score now and buy their way off this stinking island. I tell you, Phil, I know just how they feel.”