Tunnel Rats

by Vincent Zandri

  That is . . . if I live long enough to ever see the place again.

  Sam tries to swallow, but his parched tongue clings to the roof of his mouth. He’d give his knife for a drink of water if someone hadn’t already taken it. The nasty, rancid smell coming from one of the far corners seems to be growing worse inside the hot, humid space with each passing minute. It’s like shit is being manufactured in that one precise spot. When he feels his way to the source of the putrid odor, he discovers t's coming from a squat toilet installed in the floor, and he realizes his instincts aren’t all that far off.

  “Oh, good God,” he whispers to himself. “How the hell did I manage to get myself in this mess? Maybe Dater got it all wrong choosing me for this gig. I’m no spook. I’m no James fucking Bond. I’m a Sky Marshal, and Sky Marshals should stick to what they know best.”

  Then, in his head, he sees himself going over the side of the bridge, his hand gripping Cindy’s. Once again, he relives hitting the water hard and losing his grip on her. He sees the train and the NVC pickup truck tumbling into the river. He finds it impossible to recall much after that.

  Back to the here and now.

  He crawls up to the flat iron bars and presses his face against their rough surface.

  “Cindy, you there?” he calls out. “Cindy, can you hear me, honey?”

  No response. He tries again. Still nothing. Then, a door opening. It sounds like a solid steel door like you might find on a submarine. Its hinges sound rusted and old. It comes to Sam that he’s being held inside an old prison. Perhaps the old prison that once held the Australian and British soldiers used as slaves to build the Bridge over the River Kwai. He’s seen the old film maybe a dozen times, and he hears the troops proudly whistling that famous song, The Colonel Bogey March. He never dreamed he’d become a part of its history.

  As he listens more intently, he makes out two people talking under their breath—a man and a woman.

  Footsteps move toward him and then a bright white light flashes. Sam immediately shields his eyes, but the light burns his retinas.

  “Who the hell are you?” he pleads. “What the hell is this place? Where is Cindy? Where is the woman who was with me? Is she alive?”

  His questions go unanswered. Whoever occupies the other side of the bars refuses to reveal him or herself. A small metal door slides open at the bottom of the cell’s iron bars, and a metal plate is shoved through along with a tin cup. The little door is slid shut, and the light is shifted away from Sam and focused on a metal door at the opposite side of the room.

  “Hey!” Sam shouts. “Who the hell are you? Answer me, goddamnit!”

  The solid steel door squeals open and not one, but two people exit through it. When the metal door is slammed closed, it feels like the entire underground prison trembles. Sam takes hold of the tin plate and cup, places them under the narrow beam of vertical sunlight. The cup is filled with water which Sam immediately drinks down. It’s warm and tastes vaguely of rotten eggs, but he doesn’t care. He only wishes he had more of it to drink.

  He peers at the food—rice. Since he has no spoon to work with, he dips his filthy fingers into the sticky rice. There’s something buried in the rice. He can’t make out exactly what at first. But when he digs deeper, he feels something moving under the white grains. When he slides the plate into the sunlight, he sees a black leg emerge and then another and another. A black tarantula, the size of his fist, pops out of the rice. Horrified, Sam tosses the plate to the other side of the cell with a scream and thrusts his back against the iron bars. Sam can take bullets, bombs, total darkness, and even snakes. But if there’s one thing in this world that spooks him more than anything else, it’s big hairy spiders.

  When he spots the black spider slowly crawling toward him through the beam of sunlight, he jumps to his feet and stomps on the insect, crushing it to death. Stealing a deep breath of foul air, he drops to his knees.

  I’ve got to get the hell of out here, he tells himself. But how?

  Listening for some kind of sound or movement coming from the dark spaces that surround him, he hears nothing. Feels nothing but the relentless heat. But then the sensation of feeling nothing disappears rapidly while his stomach begins to twist and turn in on itself. Something churns inside his belly. It’s almost like cancer has somehow instantaneously sprouted in his stomach. Nausea consumes him. A cold sweat breaks out on his forehead and face. Shifting himself back onto all fours, he crabs his way to the squat toilet and vomits a combination of bile and what he believes is blood. It has to be blood if it tastes like blood.

  Then, he feels his bowels turn to water. Spinning himself around, it’s all he can do to unbuckle his belt, unbutton his jeans, and pull them down. He releases everything inside him into the hole. When it’s over, he locates a small roll of damp, mold-covered paper. No choice but to use the fragile paper to clean himself. Pulling up his pants, he feels the need to vomit once more. He turns, lets loose with whatever is left inside his stomach. He is trapped in hell on earth.

  He crawls back to the bars and sits with his back against them, his knees tucked to his chest. His eyes focus on the small square of sunlight and the crushed tarantula.

  The water, he thinks. The motherfuckers poisoned the water in the tin cup. They’re trying to dehydrate me. It’s an old Viet Cong trick.

  Sam recalls a story told to him by one of his far older Army superiors about the Vietnam War. How a half-dozen captured American POWs were forced at gunpoint to hike the Ho Chi Minh Trail from South Vietnam all the way up through Cambodia and Laos to North Vietnam. They hiked for days without food and water in searing temperatures and ninety-nine percent humidity until, finally, they were given a much-needed rest. Their captors set out what appeared to be fresh rice and fish on green banana leaves and tin cups filled with fresh water. The starving men ravaged the food, drank down cup after cup of the apparently cool, crisp, clean water—the first clean water and substantial food they’d enjoyed in days.

  When they’d had their fill, they lay back on the soft grass and went to sleep. But something began to happen. Something horrid. One by one, they awoke with severe abdominal pains. Pains so relentless they doubled over. It was all they could do to gather their strength to find a suitable spot in the bush to relieve themselves. They were also projectile vomiting a mixture of blood and bile. After nearly a day of this, the men found themselves severely dehydrated and dangerously close to death. After the second day, half the men had died, and the survivors were well on their way to the same fate.

  An American cavalry column arrived by chopper and engaged the enemy. The Viet Cong were decimated in the battle and had no choice but to pull back. The surviving prisoners, being too weak to travel, were left behind. By sheer luck, a mop-up patrol came along and found two out of the six barely hanging on. Not long after the dead and the living were choppered out, all sorts of tests were done on their bodies to determine what had caused such severe intestinal pain and grief. It was determined that both the food and water included in the meal were laced with rat poison.

  “Rat poison poisoning,” Sam’s Army superior had said, “was consistent with severe diarrhea, vomiting, and internal bleeding.”

  Sam wonders if he did indeed drink rat poison with his water. He knows he needs water if he is to survive another full day in this jungle climate. But how can he begin to trust the water they give him to drink? There’s only one answer to the question. He’s got to find a way out.

  He stands, grabs hold of the rusted iron bars. He pushes and pulls as hard as he can. In his mind, he thinksmaybe the old bars are rotted enough from constant exposure to the extreme humidity that they’ll eventually break or snap out of place. He’s encouraged when he feels some give in the bars. Maybe it’s possible to loosen them. And if he can loosen them, maybe he can manage to pop them out of their old concrete base.

  Sam uses all his strength to shake the cage loose, but other than that small bit of give, it doesn’t seem to budge. He
drops down onto his back and kicks at the bars with his booted feet. The bars tremble slightly, but it soon becomes apparent they aren’t going anywhere.

  Breathing heavily, Sam returns to a standing position. He takes a step toward the center of the cell and stares up at the small square opening in the ceiling. The sun isn’t nearly as brilliant as when he awoke, telling him it will be nightfall soon. He can’t bear to imagine what it will be like living inside an entirely black hole in the ground until sunrise—solitary confinement on steroids. It will be the black heart of darkness. He’ll go batshit crazy.

  He looks around for something to stand on—a chair or a stool . . . a fucking stepladder and he could access the opening. But then, the opening isn’t much bigger than his fist. It’s not like he can squeeze his way through it. For the first time in what seems like forever, Sam begins to experience real despair. Throughout his tenure both as a soldier, a CIA operative, and a member of the Department of Homeland Security, he’s heard tales of men and women who enter a dangerous field operation never to be heard from again. What the general public isn’t aware of is that, all too often, these people are not dead but, instead, being held captive inside a miserable dungeon-like cell just like this one. They are kept alive—but barely—because so long as they have breath in their lungs and a voice in their throat, they are an invaluable source of information for their captors. They can also be used as leverage should the enemy feel they need to exchange the prisoner for something of greater value.

  Sam is fully aware that, to this day, there are missing American servicemen and CIA personnel who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars who are still very much alive. The likely scenario is that they are not, in fact, being held captive inside a Korean or Vietnamese prison, but instead, a Russian controlled gulag in Siberia. Some of these men would be in their eighties and nineties by now, not having known what freedom is since they were very young men.

  Sam doesn’t want to be one of those unfortunate men made to live out the balance of his days on the endless, bitter, cold Siberian plateau.

  He feels along the walls for something—anything—that might give him some hope. A crack or a fissure. Maybe a piece of rotted brick that he can work out with his bare hands. Once one brick comes loose, it’s possible the others will crumble, and he can tunnel his way out. Or maybe he’s just out of his mind already. Maybe he hasn’t been trapped inside that cell for only a few hours, but instead, days, weeks, months, or years. Maybe he’s become so insane that time has become entirely warped and twisted.

  Sam stares up at the ceiling opening. The light is almost entirely gone. In a matter of moments, he will be surrounded by total darkness and won’t be able to see his hand in front of his face. The fine hairs on the back of his neck rise up, and a cold sweat breaks out on his skin.

  “Fuck this,” he whispers. “Fuck this all to hell.”

  Then he hears the solid steel door opening again and someone stepping through.

  “Hello, Sam,” says the voice of a woman.

  How could I have been so stupid? So naïve? So willing to be taken in by a beautiful woman? How’s it going to feel to die at the hands of a woman who gave you one of the happiest endings in your life? The ending that’s about to come will be a far cry from happy.

  Sam asks all these questions of himself in rapid fire.

  How could I have been so incredibly stupid? By thinking not with your big head but the other head, he scolds himself.

  Behind Cindy, a man appears. He’s holding a Maglite, and he shines it directly into Sam’s eyes, making them burn and tear up.

  “Did you enjoy your dinner, Sam?” the man asks.

  The voice is familiar. Way too familiar.

  “Channy,” Sam says to himself. “Fucking Channy.”

  The terrorist takes a step forward. He shifts the flashlight until the light is shining directly upward at his own face, making him look ghoulish and frightening. But Sam isn’t afraid of him. He wants to get his hands on him. If he could, he would tear down the bars, wrap his hands around Channy’s neck and squeeze the life out of him, like the juice out of an overly ripe grape.

  “You were afforded a great delicacy,” Channy goes on. “A tarantula direct from Spiderville in Cambodia. People kill for Spiderville tarantulas. Did you know that more than one American celebrity chef has enjoyed the country’s tarantulas?”

  “That so?” Sam says. “Gave me great pleasure to stomp the little bitch out. It’s exactly what I’m going to do to you one day.”

  Channy laughs. “Now, that’s rich considering which side of the bars you’re on.” Then, taking hold of Cindy’s hand, pulling her to him. “And I’m happy you and Cindy get along so well. Makes our jobs so much easier.”

  That’s when it comes to Sam . . . how this whole thing was a set up from the very beginning. When Cindy gave Trah Bing the ticket for the free massage, she was doing so as an agent working both sides of the street. She’s a CIA operative and also a New Viet Cong operative.

  Who knows who the hell else she sells her soul for? Sam thinks.

  Sam glares at Cindy. Now that his eyes have adjusted to the semi-darkness, he gazes into her dark eyes and issues a look that could kill. But looks can’t kill, nor can they tear down iron bars.

  “Cindy,” Channy says, “retrieve my men. It’s time Mr. Savage and I had a little talk.”

  Sam doesn’t like the sound of that. A little talk.

  Channy doesn’t want to talk. He wants to mine information.

  Sam’s guess is the NVC terrorist is willing to get it any way he can, too. Cindy opens the metal door, shouts something in what Sam guesses is Vietnamese. There comes a commotion and two men dressed in black, tight-fitting uniforms and jackboots enter into the chamber.

  Jesus, they’re big motherfuckers, Sam thinks to himself. They must be Channy’s personal armed guards.

  One of them is holding a plain wood chair which he sets down on the floor. The other is carrying duct tape and a pair of pliers.

  “Oh shit,” Sam says, to himself, his mouth suddenly drier than it ever has been, his heart pounding against his ribs, his stomach in knots and throbbing in pain.

  Channy produces a key from the pocket on his black trousers. He opens the iron door, and its rusted hinges cry out as they struggle against the wall of iron bars they are built into.

  “Please step out of the cell,” Channy says.

  “You’re gonna have to make me,” Sam says, not without a smile.

  He knows, in the end, they’re going to get their way. But that doesn’t mean he’s got to make it easy for them. The two goons enter the cell, grab Sam by both his arms, drag him out. They force him into the chair and strap him there by duct taping his ankles to the chair legs and his wrists to the arms. Being weak from lack of water and dehydration makes it’s impossible to put up much of a struggle. The two goons step away from the chair. Sam eyes Cindy and Channy standing only a few feet before him.

  “Here’s the good news, Sam,” Channy says, the long black Maglite flashlight still gripped in his hand. “Since I already know who you work for, how long you’ve worked for them, and what your mission is, I don’t need to beat that information out of you.”

  “Hey,” Sam says. “No pain no gain.”

  Channy smiles, fakes a laugh. “You are very funny, Sam,” he says. “Even now, strapped to a chair in this shithole of an abandoned prison, you are still making jokes. I envy your spirit, your joir d’ vivre.”

  “I envy your waistline and girlish figure, Channy,” Sam adds. “How do you do it? Do you take biologics to empty your colon? Or maybe you swallow fistfuls of stool softeners. You must shit your brains out morning, noon, and night.”

  Cindy snickers. Her laughter enrages Channy, or so Sam can’t help but notice. Even in the semi-darkness, he can see the terrorist’s face turn red with fury.

  “Wow, who would have thunk it?” Sam adds. “You just can’t joke around with Channy, can you?”

  Inverting
the Maglite’s grip so that it can be used as a bat, Channy swings and nails Sam on the jaw. The pain is electric, and the Sky Marshal’s bell is rung. But still, he somehow manages to work up a smile.

  “Now, that might have hurt,” Sam says, “if only a little girl hadn’t hit me with it.”

  Channy steps toward Sam, bends over, places his face only inches from the Sky Marshal’s. “You have no idea the pain I can inflict upon you,” he says, his expression tighter than a snare drum. “If I were you, I’d dispense with the jokes and answer only when spoken to. Understand?”

  “Roger that, tower,” Sam replies.

  Channy takes a step back. “Now,” he says while shining the flashlight directly into Sam’s face. “What do you know about the New Viet Cong’s ongoing mission?”

  Of course, Sam knows quite a bit—they are gathering weapons, ammo, explosives, and trucks to attack a hotel frequented by both Chinese and American businessmen and women in Ho Chi Minh City or what’s also known as Saigon. What he doesn’t know is which hotel exactly. If the tables were turned and it was Channy taped to the chair, he’d be flashing the light in his face and asking him that exact question. Maybe he’d be waterboarding him or depriving him of precious sleep for days and nights on end. But things being the way they are, Sam can only clam up.

  “I asked you a simple question, Sam,” Channy says, his voice louder, more insistent. “Again, what do you know about the NVC’s ongoing mission?”

  “According to the Geneva Convention, all I have to tell you is my name, rank, and serial number.”

  “That does not apply to spies, Sam,” Channy says.

  “Who says I’m a spy?” Sam questions. “I sell cardboard boxes, remember?”

  “Enough!” Channy shouts, reinverting the Maglite and spraying the bright LED light directly into Sam’s eyes. “What exactly do you know about the NVC’s mission? Tell me, or you will be beaten into submission.”

  Sam purses his lips, tries to work up a smile. A smile that mocks.

  “Okay, Channy,” Sam says. “You’ve broken me. Far as I know, the NVC is planning on stealing a whole bunch of ladies’ underwear from the Victoria Secret in downtown Ho Chi Minh. I guess that would make you guys hoes of Ho.”