Thai Horse

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 about 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 twenty-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 in his boot and the clip in his .45. He hated dusting these tunnels, hated it more than anything else about the war, but it had to get done and the sooner the better, so why waste time. He 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 them. 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 was 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.