The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) Read Online Free PDF Page A

1991, when he’d been in Washington for the Desert Storm celebrations. He’d visited it but hadn’t managed to get close to the wall because it was obliterated by tourists in T-shirts and shorts clicking away with cameras and chattering inanely.
    Spend time with your family and friends, the doctor had said. The only family he had now was Victor, and that was only on one weekend in four. And the best friends he had were dead. That’s why he’d driven from Baltimore to Washington. To spend time with them. Just like the doctor ordered. As he locked the door to his Saab two men and a girl jogged by, talking and laughing as they ran. They were followed by a middle-aged man, balding and with unsteady, flabby legs, whose training shoes slapped on the ground with an irregular rhythm. His running vest was wet with sweat and his shorts were too tight around the tops of his legs and his breath was coming hard and fast. He was wearing a Sony Walkman with bright yellow headphones and his eyes had the glazed look of a tortured animal. Lewis stopped to watch the man wobble past. They were probably about the same age, he thought. What the hell was he keeping fit for? Why was he bothering? It didn’t matter how many press-ups you did or how much you ran. When you died, you died. The cancer grows and kills you, the heart goes into spasm, the blood vessels burst, the body dies. Lewis wanted to call after the man, to tell him that he was wasting his time, that he should take it easy and enjoy what little life he had left.
    He didn’t. He walked across the grass towards the memorial. He could see that there were far fewer visitors gathered around the slabs than there had been on his last visit. He went first to the bronze sculpture at the side of the memorial, three life-size grunts, war-weary and carrying their weapons as if they’d marched a long way. One of the three figures was black, and it looked uncannily like Lewis had done when he was in Nam: short, curly hair, squarish face, medium build, an M16 in his left hand, a towel slung around his neck to soak up perspiration. Yeah, thought Lewis. That was then. Now he’d put on another twenty-eight pounds, most of it around his waist, and the taut neck muscles had become flabby, giving him the jowls of an old bloodhound. The hair was longer, but greying at the temples and not as curly. It was tired, like the rest of him. But it was nothing compared to what the cancer would eventually do to his body, he was sure of that. He shuddered and turned away from the evocative sculpture.
    To the left of the cobbled path which led down to the memorial were a number of metal lecterns containing bound volumes protected from the weather by perspex shields. He flicked through one of the volumes with his left hand and took a leaflet on cancer which the doctor had given him and a pen from the inside pocket of his sports jacket. There were six names he wanted, all of them childhood pals from Baltimore, kids he’d grown up with, played games with, stolen cars with, back in the days when he thought stealing was a game and that he was too smart to get caught.
    The book was an alphabetical list of all those whose names were carved into the black marble, along with details of the city they came from, their rank, unit, and date of birth. The six weren’t the only friends that Lewis had lost in Vietnam, but they were the ones he missed the most because they were part of his childhood, a time when he had truly been happy despite the poverty and deprivation of Baltimore. He carefully wrote down the slab and line numbers of the six names, then walked along the path to the memorial. The slabs were all the same width but they started small and grew deeper as he walked until they were taller than he was. The blocks of marble had been set into the side of a hillock so it appeared that he was looking at a solid cliff face of names. The lettering was brutal in its simplicity. Just names, nothing else. No details, no