Thai Horse

‘In this business there’s no such thing as a crazy fluke.’

‘Well, there’s always the exception. . . .‘ Sloan said, his attitude, as always, cavalier. ‘One thing I am sure of, nobody but Porter knew what was going on.’

‘Did they catch the killer?’

‘Killers,’ Sloan corrected and shook his head.

‘Can we assume Porter was tailing Wol Pot when it happened?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Who knows,’ Sloan said with a shrug. ‘Maybe he lost Wol Pot. Maybe Wol Pot ditched him. Maybe he took the night off.’ Sloan looked over his sideways grin. ‘The way I understand it, he got stabbed trying to break up a fight between a couple of slopes and a whore on one of the klongs. But if I were guessing, I’d say, yeah, he was tailing the little bastard when it happened.’

‘And Wol Pot was mixed up with the White Palm Triad.’

‘That’s what immigration thinks.’

‘So the question now is, is the Thai still alive? And still on our side?’ Hatcher said. ‘That is, if he was ever on our side to begin with.’ He stared out at the harbor for a moment and added, ‘And you called this a simple job?’

‘Come on, Hatch, don’t go jumping to conclusions. So we got a glitch in the program.’

‘We’ve got a man dead, that’s what we’ve got, and that’s all we’ve got. I’d call that more than a glitch.’

‘Shit,’ Sloan said, ‘we’ve been in the soup too long to let a thing like Porter’s death stop us,’

‘You’ve been in the soup,’ said Hatcher. ‘I was in Los Boxes.’

Sloan sighed. ‘Let’s keep it pleasant,’ he said, still smiling, still Mr Sincerity, ‘for old times’ sake.’

‘Old times’ sake got all used up.’

‘I was just doing my job.’

‘You were doing what a bunch of weasels in the White House basement told you to do.’

Sloan leaned closer to Hatcher, his fingers wiggling like those of a magician about to perform a trick, his smile so constant it might have been permanently implanted on his face.

‘That is my job,’ he said with oily finality.

Though his smile never faded and his voice was quiet and level, Sloan felt suddenly uneasy. There had been a time in all the years they worked together when he didn’t have to explain anything to Hatcher; when he laid out the parameters and Hatcher instinctively knew the program. Was Hatcher rejecting the whole concept of the brigade? That had not occurred to Sloan. He had assumed that Hatcher only felt betrayed.

Sloan, his eyes narrowing but the smile remaining, said quietly, ‘You getting religion on me, pal? You’re gonna get yourself wasted, you start worrying about the wrong things. I taught you better than that.’

‘Sometimes I get a little confused about just what the hell you did teach me. Besides, it was different then, there was a war on. . .

Sloan threw back his head and laughed heartily.

‘For Christ’ sake, there’s always a war on someplace. You need a war? Shit, we got Lebanon, Israel, Iran, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. We got a whole supermarket full of wars, take your pick.’ He poured himself a stiff drink of scotch and dropped an ice cube in it. ‘Hell, we do what we have to do, Hatch. We got two choices on any given day — do it or don’t do it. If you don’t know the options going in, if you haven’t made the decision, they’ll get you. You don’t have time to figure the odds, that’s the way you get dead. All you got is clicks and reflexes. And if you don’t do it, they’ll do it to you. Have I ever told you any different? Was there ever any question in your mind about that?’

‘My whole bullshit career is questionable,’ said Hatcher. ‘I can’t even tell anybody what I did in the war.’

Still chuckling, Sloan said, ‘Is that it, you want to write about your war experiences?’

‘That’s not the point. There’s sixteen, seventeen years of my life that are blotto, like they never existed.’

‘You think I betrayed you, and that’s clouding your judgment,’ Sloan said softly. His tone had turned compassionate. Sloan had all the buttons. Push one, you got compassion. Push another, you got patriotic fervor. Push another, you got flattery. Hatcher remembered their first meeting, in a private room of the Occidental Restaurant in Washington where Sloan — as always, confident, almost fatherly — first outlined his personal gospel, describing the Shadow Brigade as a ‘golden opportunity, a chance to do something for your country that’s necessary, and which also offers a freedom of thought and action you don’t find in other branches of the service.’ No mention that this ‘branch of service’ had no records or that it was privately funded and did not even exist officially. Hatcher, the wet-eared kid out of the academy, all full of himself, was stroked and sweet-talked and razzle-dazzled and bought the whole package, no questions asked. That lunch had changed Hatcher’s life forever.

‘It was more than betrayal, Harry. Hell, you were my mentor. You got it done. You got the mission done and I looked up to you for that.’ Hatcher stopped for a moment, got himself a cup of coffee. ‘All those years in Los Boxes, all I thought about was you burning inc for some bum in the State Department. It wasn’t just doing the time. I trusted you, Harry, and you turned me up. And you’re still doing it.’

‘You’re getting holy on me,’ Sloan said with a chuckle and a shake of his head. ‘What’s your way of doing it? Take the river pirates to court for running dope to our boys in Saigon? Let our double agents dance on our graves? Compromise with the triads? Shit. Let me tell you something, pal, we learned to fight in dirty wars. And that’s what we’re gonna have from now on, dirty wars. Well, you don’t win dirty wars with Marquis of Queens- berry Rules. You kick ass and go for the body mass.’

‘The way they do it in Brazil and Argentina?’

Sloan sighed. ‘You know your trouble, Hatch? You’re trying to equate morality and warfare. Totally incompatible. If the rest of the Army had fought the war in Nam the way we fought it, we wouldn’t’ve got our ass