Thai Horse Read online

  When his best friend vanished, Christian Hatcher, the Shadow Warrior, had no choice. He had to follow the heroin pipeline . . . from Hong Kong to Bangkok, to the deepest darkness of Vietnam. The sensational new national bestseller by the author of Chameleon and Sharkey's Machine.

  THAI HORSE

  ‘William Diehl has turned all the tools of the adventure-writing trade loose in his newest novel. Hot stuff, this Thai Horse. It’s got a hero who’s a mixture of Ollie North, James Bond, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, with a plot that takes us from Central America to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, New York and, briefly, to an island off Georgia, and combines elements of The Maltese Falcon, The Dirty Dozen, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Man Chu books and The Wizard of Oz. . . I was barely able to put this number down’

  The Washington Post Book World

  ‘Mr Diehl knows how to tell a story, arid his novel moves along at a good pace’

  New York Times Book Review

  ‘Accurate background detail and vivid .characterization lend authenticity to a scenario of nonstop chills and thrills’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘A superior adventure novel from the author of Sharky’s Machine. . . A taut plot, interesting sub-plots and good characterization are the hallmarks of the story. It’s exciting, plausibly horrific and light on the gung-ho excesses which usually stalk the genre’

  Knave

  ‘Everything a summer beach read should be’

  Time Out

  William Diehl lives on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, with his wife, four dogs, two cats, a goat, twenty birds, and a lot of tropical fish. He is the author of three previous international best sellers, Sharky’s Machine, Chameleon and Hooligans, and is currently at work on his fifth novel.

  THAI HORSE

  William Diehl

  CORGI BOOKS.

  THAI HORSE

  A CORGI BOOK 0 552 13355 8

  Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Bantam Press edition published 1988

  Corgi edition published 1988

  Corgi edition reissued 1989

  Copyright © Hooligans Inc. 1987

  Conditions of sale

  1. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  2. This book is sold subject to the Standard Conditions of Sale of Net Books and may not be re-sold in the U.K. below the net price fixed by the publishers for the book.

  This book is set in 10/11 Plantin

  Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers

  Ltd., 61—63 Uxbridge Road, Ealing, London W5 5SA, in

  Australia by Transworld Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.,

  15—23 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 2170, and in New

  Zealand by Transworld Publishers (N.2.) Ltd., Cnr. Moselle

  and Waipareira Avenues, Henderson, Auckland.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berks.

  To four treasured friends: my agent, Owen Laster, my editor, Peter Gerhers, my adviser, Buddy Harris, and, as always, to the love of my life, Virginia

  Some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD

  VIETNAM

  1972

  BLACK PONY DOWN

  He hardly felt the hit, but he heard it. The muffled roar shook the stick slightly, and he looked out to see the end of his right wing shatter and flake away. A moment later the familiar and frightening sound of .50 caliber shells rattled the fuselage behind him as the bullets ripped the twin- engine OV-1O. Suddenly the plane began to yaw, then it made a wrenching slip in the opposite direction. The plane dipped slightly toward the good wing and dropped a hundred feet. Cody was fighting the aircraft, trying to get it stable. He pressed the radio button: ‘Mayday’..

  Mayday. . . this is Chilidog one to Corkscrew. I’m hit and out of control. . .

  The voice was remarkably calm, almost resigned. The only hint of trouble was in the timbre of his voice. It was shaking from the violent action of the plane, like a stereo with too much bass.

  They were too low to bail out. Cod y always played it like that, treetop-level stuff. ‘Get down .where you can see the whites of their eyes,’ he would tell his men. From under the umbrella of green foliage, deadly ground fire chewed at the twin-engine assault plane. Fifty-calibers rattled the fuselage.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ he told his gunner. There was no response. Cody turned in the cockpit and looked back. Rossiter was slumped in the seat, his canopy riddled, his face shot away. But Cody lad no time to feel sorry for the youngster, he was losing the plane. The jungle catapulted toward him. Two hundred yards in front of him was the river an d on the other side of the river was freedom. He knew he’d never make

  Before HQ could answer, the pilot was back on.

  ‘This is Chilidog one . . . half mile north of checkpoint Charlie . . . I’m down to five hundred feet . .

  The radio operator answered immediately.

  ‘Chilidog one, can you make it across the river?’

  ‘. - . trying . .

  The radio operator switched bands and called Rescue. ‘Rescue, this is Corkscrew. I have a Black Pony going in half mile north of checkpoint Charlie, a couple of hundred yards into Indian country . . . Do you read?’

  The answer came immediately. ‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue . . . we hear him . . . Got a Huey on the way . .

  ‘Chilidog one, we have a Huey in the area. Can you stay aloft to the river?’

  ‘Negative . . . I’m going in . .

  The transmission ended suddenly.

  ‘Shit, we’re losing him,’ the radio operator muttered. He turned to his assistant. ‘Get the Skipper over here fast, Wicker.’

  ‘On it,’ the assistant, a ruddy-faced seaman first, snapped back and snatched up the phone.

  The plane suddenly jerked again - The stick was useless. Cody was trying to get it under control with the rudder pedals, but that, too, was futile. The ship went up on its good wing and then slowly began to roll. The green jungle rushed toward him as he rolled upside down. Cody slammed the stick forward in a last attempt to get control and the plane’s nose rose sharply. Its tail raked the treetops and disintegrated, and the black craft was snapped down into the green tapestry below. Cody shoved the stick forward, away from his chest, and braced himself against the instrument panel, his forearms shielding his face. He heard the plane crumpling around him, the metal screaming as the trees tore it apart. Then it all stopped — the noise, the forward thrust — everything seemed suspended in time.

  Cody, hanging upside down, looked over his head and stared straight down at the ground, about twenty feet below hint. The plane was a twisted wreck around him. He looked back at Rossiter, his gunner. The kid’s arms hung down toward the ground.

  The canopy was half off, dangling from its tracks. Cody slammed the flat of his hand into it and it toppled away into the trees. He smelled smoke.

  He started talking to himself, rattling off the drill. ‘Got to get out,’ he said and, loosening his safety belt, tried to hang out of the plane and drop to the tree limbs. The smell of smoke grew stronger, and suddenly he was free of the plane, arcing through the air. He reached out toward a branch, felt it slap his palm and then slip away. It spun him around so his fee
t were now below him. Just like a bail-out, he thought as he hurtled toward the ground. Knees together and bent, roll when I hit.

  But he hit wrong, and as he landed he heard his kneecap pop, felt the pain burn deep in the leg, coursing down to his ankle. He trapped the scream of pain between his teeth. Sweat boiled out of his skin.

  He looked up. The river was twenty yards away, shimmering in the early morning sun. He got up and started hobbling frantically toward it He knew there were bandits all around, but maybe he’d get lucky. Then overhead and behind him he heard a sizzling sound and a moment later the dull thumpf as the gas tanks went. Heat from the explosion wafted down over him, but he kept hopping toward the river, dragging his ruined leg behind him. He didn’t look back. Then he heard the familiar chump, chump, chump of the chopper, off to his left, coming upriver.

  Oh God, c’mon, baby, he thought.

  Twenty yards to freedom.

  ‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue one. We have the Black Pony in sight . . .

  The Huey was suspended twenty feet above the river. In the belly, Harley Simmons, a young gunner, squinted and peered into the thick foliage, looking for signs of life. The pilot’s voice crackled through the earphones.

  ‘How about it, Simmons, anything?’

  ‘I’m looking, Captain, I’m looking. . .

  The explosion cut him off. It was almost like slow motion. First the shock wave of the burst rippling through the trees, then the Black Pony disintegrating, then the bright orange fireball boiling up into the sky. Seconds later the ping of bullets sang off the fuselage a few feet from Simmons’s head.

  ‘We got bandits shooting at us!’ Simmons screamed into his mike.

  ‘How about our man?’ the pilot relied back.

  Then Simmons saw him; he was hobbling from under the awning of fire, heading toward the riverbank. He was almost there-. twenty, thirty feet maybe. But before Simmons could say anything, another round of bullets ripped into the edge of the open hatch, tearing it up. Bits and pieces rattled off Simmons’s helmet. He heard the whine of 9 mm. shells wailing inches from his ear, and fear .charged deeply into him like a bolt of lightning. The plane in the forest exploded again and fire raged through the treetops.

  He can’t make it, Simmons said to himself as more gunfire tore at the Huey.

  ‘I don’t see nothing, Captain,’ he lied. ‘We got bandits chewing us up back here.’

  The pilot rolled the belly of the chopper toward the forest and spun around, heading back downriver.

  Simmons dropped weakly to his knees. He was shaking all over. Oh God, he thought, what have I done .

  But he was too frightened to say it aloud. He heard the pilot’s voice on the intercom: ‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue one . . . We lost him . . .

  Cody almost reached the bank when the chatter of an automatic weapon off to his right startled him. He dropped to the ground and crawled to the edge of the water.

  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 into 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 piloted 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 groaned 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 Harvard 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 — 1,183 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. Inside, 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 enou
gh 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 name was whispered in fear.

  There were no records of names or arrival dates. A new inmate was simply assigned a box 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 rebellion, 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 federales 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 themselves 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 futility 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.