The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (35 page)

Tyler clapped him on the back.

“And Josh can have the container shipped straight through to Hong Kong,” said Lehman. “It’s that easy?”

“It’s not easy, but it happens all the time,” said Tyler. “Hong Kong is a major clearing centre for a good percentage of the heroin from the Golden Triangle, and most of it goes by sea. Arms, too. You’d be amazed at how many weapons go through Hong Kong’s ports, and most of them are described as heavy machinery or spare parts. It’s just a matter of knowing who to bribe and how much. This is Asia, remember, and bribery and corruption are a way of life here. When somebody gets caught smuggling it’s usually because they haven’t greased the right palms, not because of smart detective work on the part of the authorities.”

Lehman nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve obviously got it all thought out,” he said.

“That’s the key to a successful operation, Dan. Planning. Taking care of all contingencies. Thinking ahead. I promise you, I’ve pre-planned every step of this mission. Nothing can go wrong.”

Doherty had put on the flight helmet and was looking up at the radio switches. Lewis finished his inspection of the Huey and walked over to join Tyler and Lehman, wiping his big hands on his trousers. “It’s going to work,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to work.” His enthusiasm for the project was obvious.

“Good,” said Tyler. “When we get back to Bangkok you can write out a full set of instructions for Josh and his men. They’ll do all the work.”

“But what about the mad monk?” asked Lehman, nodding towards Doherty.

Tyler’s eyes narrowed. “He wants to come back with us,” he said quietly.

“Say what?” said Lehman.

“He says he wants to come with us. To Hong Kong. He wants to be part of it.”

Lehman turned to face Tyler. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “This guy is a spook pilot with Air America. He flies his slick to Thailand, builds a hut around it and joins a monastery. He shaves his head, goes native for twenty years, and yet within minutes of meeting you he wants to sign up for the robbery of the century. Are we supposed to buy that?”

Tyler shrugged. “I’m as surprised as you are, Dan. It wasn’t my intention to have him along. I knew about the helicopter, that was all. Josh told me Doherty had become a Buddhist and I figured that I could persuade him to part with the Huey. He’s in the country illegally so I was sure he wouldn’t take too much convincing. He agreed to let us take it, but he insists that he comes along.”

“Why? Why would he give up what he’s spent more than twenty years achieving?”

“Part of it is that he feels he’s gone as far as he can within the community here. Despite their willingness to accept him as a novice, they never let him forget that he is a
farang
. He has always been an outsider, and I think that seeing me brought that home to him. I was the first non-Thai he had spoken to since he arrived here. But there’s more to it than that. I think he’s frightened that others will trace him here. If we found him, others could, so this place is no longer a sanctuary for him. And I think he realised that if we could get his Huey out of the country, we could do the same for him. He doesn’t have any papers, you see. No passport. No visa. Nothing. He’s been pretty much a prisoner in Thailand.”

“Can you do that?” asked Lehman. “Can you get him out?”

“Oh sure. Josh can fix him up with all the papers he needs, good enough to pass muster anywhere in the world. He can probably get him a Social Security number as well. He can have a whole new identity, and with that he can go back to the States.”

“That’s what he wants? To go back?”

“I think he’s confused,” said Tyler. “I don’t think he knows what he wants. But the one thing he’s sure of is that he wants to be part of what we’re doing.”

Lehman shook his head in bewilderment. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “He’s a monk. Monks don’t steal.”

“He’s confused,” said Tyler. “Besides, he’s so unstable it’d probably be a good idea to have him in Hong Kong where we can keep an eye on him. God knows who he’ll tell if we leave him here.”

“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.”