Thai Horse by William Diehl

you.’
    ‘You could do that, but you’re not going to,’ Sloan said, confidently shaking his head.
    ‘I’ve done worse to better than you. Hell, you ought to know, I was working for you.’
    ‘You think I don’t know you’re n u rsing a hard-on two miles long?’ Sloan said, and for a moment there was almost a touch of sadness in his voice. ‘Look around. Did I come in here with the whole brigade at my back? Did I come in waving around a lot of iron? Hell, no.’
    Sloan had spent his life studying faces, learning to recognize the slightest nuances: the vague shift in a muscle, the almost imperceptible twitch of an eyelid, the slightest tightening of the mouth, the subtle shift of focus in the eyes. They were all signals to him that in an instant something had changed. Then it was like having a fish on a line. Time to reel in. Hatcher was good about concealing his emotions, but it was there, Sloan sensed it. I’ve got him, he thought. We’re past the real touchy part. He leaned toward Hatcher and his eyes glittered as he put in the fix. ‘I’m here on a mission of mercy, pal.’
    And Hatcher thought, Shit, here it comes. Now he’s got that tongue of his going full speed, now he’s on the con.
    ‘Let’s stop horsing each other around, okay?’ Sloan said. ‘So you’re tough and I’m tough, we don’t have to prove that to each other anymore. I know you, Hatch. I know you know I’m not here to get a tan, so you’ve got to be real curious. Why don’t you put that thing down and listen to me before you do something real crazy?’
    Hatcher sighed. He leaned his gun arm on his leg. The pistol dangled loosely in his hand, pointed at the deck somewhere between Sloan’s feet.
    ‘Okay, let’s hear the part about the mission of mercy,’ he snickered. ‘That ought to be a classic.’
    CODY
    Sloan gathered up his file folders from the deck and put them back in order. He dropped one in Hatcher’s lap.
    ‘Read this,’ he said.
    It was the service record of Lieutenant Murphy Roger Cody, USN. Murph Cody. Hatc h er hadn’t heard that name since Cody died in Vietnam a long time ago.
    ‘What’s this all about?’ Hatcher asked. ‘Cody’s been history for fifteen years.’
    ‘Fourteen actually.’
    ‘Fourteen, fifteen, what’s the difference.’
    ‘Read the file, then we’ll talk.’
    Hatcher leafed through the 0—1 file. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the record. It began when Cody entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1962, and ended abruptly when his twin-engine OV- 10 crashed and burned while flying a routine search-and-destroy mission near Binh Thuy in the Mekong Delta, April 13, 1972. Cody had been assigned to Light Attack Squadron 6, Naval Riverine Patrol Forces, and had gone ‘in-country’ in July 1971, nine months before he was lost. There were two commendations for outstanding service and a recommendation for the Navy Cross, which had been approved and awarded posthumously.
    Supplementary reports included a tape of the debriefing interrogation of two of Cody’s wingmen and the gunner of an SAR Huey crew that had tried to rescue Cody and his radioman; a confidential report by the MIA commission dated January 1978, confirming that no trace of Cody had been found;. a tape of the review board and the official certification of death in 1979; and another commission report filed when the crash site was located in 1981, reporting that charred bones had b een found on-site but were unidentifiable — they could have been the remains of either Cody or his crewman, Gunner’s Mate John Rossiter, or parts of both.
    The only mention of Cody’s father was on the service form under ‘next of kin.’ It said merely, ‘William John Cody, General, U.S. Army.’ Not the Buffalo Bill Cody, commander of all the field forces in Vietnam. A typical bureaucratic understatement.
    There were two photographs, a drab black-and-white that was Cody’s last official Navy photo and a five-by- seven color shot of