Read The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) for Free Online

serve him in supermarkets. Waiters had sneered and spilled soup on him. College kids had taunted him and scratched “Murderer” on his car.
    Horvitz had been back in America only two weeks when he was drawn into his first fight. He got into an argument with two redneck mechanics about whether or not the United States should have been in Vietnam in the first place. They had been old enough to escape the draft and told Horvitz that anyone stupid enough to fight another man’s war deserved everything they got. He’d tried to walk away but they’d pushed him and taunted him and eventually he’d snapped and put them both in hospital for the best part of a month. Horvitz was lucky: he came up before a sympathetic judge who’d served in the Korean War and he let him walk free on condition that he sought psychiatric help. Horvitz didn’t, and before the year was out he was behind bars on an assault charge.
    According to the file on the back seat of the Jeep, Horvitz must have been holding himself back to merit only a charge of simple assault. Eric Horvitz was a man who had been trained to kill in a thousand different ways, and had used most of them during his three tours of duty with the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols and later with Special Forces teams. Even the stilted military language of the citations in the file couldn’t conceal the horrors that Horvitz had been through, or the fact that he was a very, very dangerous man. After his release from prison Horvitz did go and see a psychiatrist but it didn’t appear to have done him any good because he kept on getting into trouble, usually following arguments over the Vietnam War. He was back in prison in the early eighties after killing a man with a pool cue in a bar in Cleveland after they’d called him a baby killer. This time Horvitz’s war record didn’t help and he only escaped a murder charge because the guy he’d hit had had a heart condition and Horvitz’s lawyer managed to produce a doctor who told the court that the blow to the chest wouldn’t normally have resulted in death.
    Horvitz was released in the summer of 1991, just in time for the celebrations of America’s victory in the Gulf. He’d gone down to New York to see the parade to welcome back the veterans of Desert Storm, men and women who had seen less than one hundred hours of combat in a conflict where there had been more injuries playing sports than there had been from enemy fire. He’d been sickened by the sight of the cheering, waving crowds and the way the parading troops revelled in the adulation, heads held high and chests out, heroes one and all. That hadn’t been in the file, the details had come out during Marks’s later conversations with Horvitz. Horvitz had vividly described the marching bands, the ticker tape, the children sitting on parents’ shoulders waving flags, and the displays of military hardware. And he’d recalled the Vietnam vets he’d seen at the back of the crowds: guys in wheelchairs, guys with limbs missing, guys with blank looks in their eyes. He’d felt red-hot anger rise in his throat then, he’d wanted to lash out, to kill indiscriminately, to pick up an M16 and blow away as many of the rosy-cheeked heroes as he could. He’d wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands, to tear out their hearts and eat the warm flesh. He’d wanted to kill so much that he could taste it, and he’d seen his hatred reflected in the faraway eyes of the other Vietnam vets who’d waited silently for the parade to pass as each of them recalled the way they’d been treated when they returned home, not as heroes but as the vanquished, an embarrassment that America could well do without. The baby killers. That was the moment when Horvitz decided that he could no longer live as a normal member of socalled civilised society, and that he faced only two possible futures: to spend the rest of his life behind bars, or to live alone in the wilderness. Four days later he was living