Tunnel Rats

by Vincent Zandri

  Sam can’t resist laughing out loud at his own stupid joke.

  Channy belts him again with the Maglite grip. This time, Sam not only feels the pain in his skull, he sees stars. He does his best to shake it off. He also tastes the blood in his mouth. It tastes different from the blood he tasted earlier. This blood is coming from a now loose tooth.

  “Answer me!” Channy demands. He gets back in Sam’s face. “What do you know about the NVC mission? Answer me, damnit!”

  Blood fills Sam’s mouth. He spits it in Channy’s face. Enraged, the terrorist pounds Sam’s head repeatedly with the Maglite until Sam feels himself once more going out-of-body.

  Then, he becomes draped by total absolute blackness.

  When Sam finally opens his eyes again, he realizes he must have passed out for a time. Channy is no longer standing directly over him. Instead, he’s standing square on the opposite side of the room where he seems to be consulting with Cindy and the two goons.

  Sam’s head feels like his brain is about to explode out of his skull. He’s not lost any teeth, but for certain, two of them are loose and possibly even chipped. His bottom lip is split, and a combination of blood and spit is running down his chin and onto his shirt. His eyes are filled with tears. One of them is swollen. He can’t go on like this much longer. Another savage beating like that one and he’ll most likely die or slip into a coma. Doesn’t matter how tough you are, your head can only take so much trauma before the lights go out for good.

  Channy turns and slowly approaches Sam. He’s wearing a grin.

  “Sam, Sam, Sam,” he says, “how long am I to endure the silent treatment? I am only asking you what you know about my mission. I’m not asking you anything difficult. Tell me the truth, and all this can be over. You’ll receive proper medical treatment, plus good food and fresh water. I’ll even move you to a nice place with a beautiful view of the river. Now, how wonderful does that sound? It will be a happy ending to a very difficult day.”

  Sam struggles to hold his head up, but he gathers what strength he has left to slowly raise it enough so that his eyes meet Channy’s.

  “Go to hell, terrorist,” he says.

  For what seems like hours, Channy stares into Sam’s eyes, unblinking. Until finally, he shifts his gaze to his two goons.

  “You both know what to do,” he says.

  The two goons approach Sam. One of them presses his full weight against the Sky Marshal’s left hand while the other latches onto the fingernail of Sam’s index finger with the business end of the pliers.

  “Pull it out,” Channy insists. “But do so slowly. I really want it to hurt.”

  The goon with the pliers begins to pull on the fingernail while the second goon vice grips Sam’s hand. For Sam, it’s a whole new level of agony. The hot pain screams through his already tormented body as if he’s stepped barefoot into a fire pit. He begins to go in and out of consciousness. He’s not sure if he’s screaming. So many sensors are going off inside his brain that he’s not aware of anything happening around him other than the excruciating torture. He vomits, and he’s not sure if he’s pissed himself.

  When the fingernail is extracted, the goon displays the bloody, fleshy stump for Sam. Does it with a smile.

  “Now,” Channy says. “What do you know about my mission? What does your agency know?”

  “Come . . . here,” an exhausted Sam utters, his voice so low it’s barely audible. “Come . . . here.”

  The terrorist slowly approaches, leans down, places his ear only inches from Sam’s mouth.

  “Closer,” Sam grunts.

  Channy comes so close that Sam’s lips are almost kissing the terrorist’s ear.

  “I . . . don’t . . . fucking . . . know.”

  Standing up straight, Channy nods.

  “Cut him loose and toss him back in the cell,” he says. “Perhaps a little solitary confinement with no food or water will help jog your memory, Sam Savage.”

  The goons cut Sam loose. He falls out of the chair onto his face. They pick him up by his arms, drag him across the floor, toss him into the cell, and slam the door closed. Channy shines the Maglite on Sam’s face as he proceeds to lock the metal barred door.

  “Wow, you look like hell, Mr. Savage,” he says. “I sure hope you live through the night. But if you don’t, I will make sure to have your remains tossed into the river where the fish and the snakes will devour what’s left of your bloated, rotting corpse.”

  Laughing, Channy steps away from the cell, goes for the steel door. That’s when Cindy presses her back against the iron bars. With her hands behind her back, she drops something onto the floor and makes a loud cough in order to conceal the noise. Or so, an exhausted and beat to a pulp Sam Savage can’t help but believe as he gazes at his asset through his one good eye.

  “You coming, Cindy?” Channy questions.

  “Yes, Channy,” she says. “For a moment, I was feeling nauseous.”

  “It’s the heat and humidity,” he says. “Let’s head to an air-conditioned bedroom, and you can give me a nice slow, full tissue massage. I deserve a little pampering after all that work. A nice little happy ending.”

  When the steel door closes, Sam finds himself awash in total, impenetrable darkness. He’s been in some hairy situations before, especially in Afghanistan. He’s found himself pinned down for hours at a time by enemy sniper fire. He’s nearly been blown up by roadside IEDs and RPGs in Kuwait and Iraq. He’s suffered frostbite from agonizing winter hikes and dehydration from marathon summer marches in the Kandahar Valley. As a Sky Marshal, he was nearly killed along with a two-hundred-thirty other souls when a terrorist attempted to detonate a laptop bomb at thirty-three-thousand feet. He’s even been forced to stop a runaway locomotive about to crash into a deep mountain gorge. But never has he been subjected to the kind of torture Channy Lin just put him through. For the first time ever, he wants to just lie down and die.

  But he knows he can’t do that. That would be giving in. That would be handing Channy, and the entire NVC, a victory. It would also be letting his country, his boss, and worst of all, himself down. In the end, despite the pain and despair, he has no choice but to rally himself. He has no choice but to stay alive.

  He feels for the objects Cindy dropped into his cell. He recalls the sound of more than one item hitting the floor. Using only his left hand makes it more difficult since his right index fingertip is swelled and tender where the fingernail once was. He sweeps his good hand across the floor until it makes contact with the first, rectangular, candy bar-shaped object. Instinctually, he knows it’s food.

  Using his good fingers, he tears open the package and shoves the food in his mouth. It’s a power bar—a peanut butter and chocolate power bar. It hurts to eat. His face is beaten up, a couple of his teeth are loose, and his bottom lip is punctured, but Sam doesn’t care. His body needs sustenance. It needs strength and recovery, and the only way to do that is to feed it.

  He feels the other object. It’s a plastic bladder filled with liquid. It’s the same kind of water bladders the U.S. Army would distribute to the troops in the field.

  “Water,” Sam whispers. “Fresh . . . water.”

  Using his undamaged front teeth, he makes a hole in the plastic and sucks out all of the fresh water in one massive swallow. When he’s finished, Sam turns over onto his back. He might be pounded into submission and hurting like never before. But he feels one-thousand times better after ingesting fresh water and some nutritious food. For the first time since being tossed into the hell hole of an underground cell, he’s holding out hope. He believes he might actually make it through the black night.

  Cindy, he thinks. She is on my side after all. She might be working both sides, but ultimately, she’s on my side.

  Sam could be angry with her. He has every right in the world to be furious with her. At one point, while he was duct taped to that chair, getting his brains beaten in and his fingernail yanked from his index finger, he wanted nothing
more than to kill her—she and Channy. But after her assistance with food and water, Sam realizes it’s important to Cindy to keep him alive. And if she wants to keep him alive, he believes she’s going to find a way to get them the hell out of there. Meanwhile, if he can trust his gut, he knows she is presently trying to squeeze vital information out of Channy. Doing it the old-fashioned spook way—by being nice to him, by massaging him, by giving him as many happy endings as one man can take. She might be a masseuse by trade, but deep down, she is the Mata Hari.

  Sam lies back on the filthy floor as if it were a king-sized mattress. He stares at the ceiling and listens. He deduces that he’s surrounded by the dense, thick riverside jungle. The underground cell is now completely blacked out with the night. Mosquitoes are buzzing and swarming all around him— stinging his face, making it swell, drawing blood from his flesh. He pictures spiders spinning webs on the ceiling above him, and rats scurrying in and out of the squat toilet. He’s too exhausted to do anything about insects or rodents. He’s in too much pain and despair. But soon, the sun will come up, and there will be light again. He prays to God that he will not have to spend another night in the hole. Eventually, complete exhaustion takes hold, and he falls into a deep sleep.

  When Sam wakes, the sun has returned. A narrow beam of bright sunlight is shining down on the concrete floor. It is a welcome sight. He hears something. The solid steel door opening. His heart jumps into his throat. Quickly and instinctually, he rolls over onto all fours. Through sleepy, semi-swelled eyes, he makes out someone stepping through the opening.

  Oh Christ, he thinks, they’re coming for round two. I barely lived through round one. How can I be expected to live through round two?

  His thoughts of Cindy go south. Maybe she gave him the power bar and the water not because she plans on helping him stay alive so they can escape the place together. Maybe, instead, she did it to keep him alive for the night so Channy could torture him once more this morning. The tip of his index finger is swollen and probably infected. His right eye is partially closed. His teeth are still loose, and although his bottom lip has stopped bleeding, it’s still swollen. To add insult to injury, his skin is covered with insect bites. And as for his head? It feels like somebody parked an Airbus A380 jumbo jet on top of it.

  God grant me strength, Sam silently prays. He also recalls the combat soldier’s prayer which he memorized a long time ago. Now I’m lying here still, in sunshine and in shadow, longing to hear, ‘brother next door, I love you so.’”

  The steel door isn’t slammed shut, but instead, gently closed. Sam focuses his eyes as best he can. Despite the sunshine leaking through the opening in the ceiling, the cell remains almost too dark to see much of anything without straining. When he sees that the visitor is Cindy and she is alone, his cautious optimism returns. She quickly crosses over the floor. When she arrives at the iron bars, she places a key into the barred door and opens it.

  “Up on your feet, Sam,” she orders in a shouted whisper. “We don’t have much time. Soon they’ll be awake, and they will want to torture you again. This time, they will do unspeakable things to you, and in the end, they will kill you. You need to get up, and we need to leave this place.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” Sam mutters, rising to his feet as fast as his battered body will allow.

  He stands a bit unsteady, feeling the aches and pains from the previous afternoon’s niceties. His clothing is filthy and blood-stained, and he could use a really good washing. No, scratch that. He could use a thorough disinfecting. But he’s alive and sometimes that’s all one can ask for. Or so Sam believes.

  God continue to grant me strength . . .

  “So, how are we gonna get out of here, Cin?” he asks.

  “The only way possible,” Cindy answers.

  “And that is?”

  “Through the front fucking door.”

  Cindy takes Sam’s hand, snatches him out of the cell. He pulls his hand free.

  “You don’t need to be my mother,” he says.

  “You need to move fast, Sam,” she says, “and I’m surprised to hear you even have a mother.”

  Together, they cross the concrete floor and slip through the open steel door. They enter a concrete stairway with an old rusted metal staircase that accesses several floors. Sam follows Cindy up the numerous flights of stairs. He’s still in pain, but he wants out of that prison so badly, he has no trouble keeping up with the spitfire of a woman. He also can’t help but notice how good she looks in her tight shorts, black t-shirt, and lace-up combat boots.

  Coming to the top of the staircase, Sam finds himself in a concrete bunker, most of which is battle-scarred from artillery rounds and heavy shelling. He suddenly realizes precisely where he is. Not more than one-hundred-feet away is the entrance to the Bridge Over the Rover Kwai Museum. His instincts were right on. He was being held inside the same underground cells the Japanese imprisoned the enslaved POWs who were forced to construct the first wood railway bridge.

  “Follow me,” Cindy insists. “Try not to talk.”

  They head out a gaping opening in one of the concrete walls and enter the dense jungle. The thick leafy forest is damp. Monkeys scream and insects buzz. The trail they take is narrow and probably left over from World War II. As they make their way through the thick foliage, Sam spots a yellow snake slithering across the path. He hesitates but keeps going. Mosquitoes are biting him relentlessly. They pass a tree covered in red ants.

  “Watch yourself, Sam,” Cindy says. “Even a single bite from one of those ants can send you into anaphylactic shock.”

  “Duly noted, boss lady,” he says.

  Soon, they come to an opening that gives way to a cliff and a spectacular view of the Kwai River. Sam is beat up, exhausted, starving, and dying of thirst, but he’s amazed at the natural beauty before him. He wonders how this place could have ever been the site for so much pain for so many enslaved prisoners. But then, war is hell, and that will never change. No one knows this better than Sam Savage.

  “There’s our boat,” Cindy says. “Hurry, Sam.”

  Descending a sheer cliff in Sam’s fragile condition isn’t exactly the easiest physical maneuver in the world. But if there’s one thing that separates men like him from others, it’s his ability to survive almost any circumstance, and often do so with a smile on his face. Or a smirk anyway.

  If there’s one single reason Dater chose him for this mission, Sam’s certain it was due to his chances of survival. Should things get hairy, his chances of living are better than most. Thus far, Dater’s prophecy has proven correct.

  Coming to the bottom of the cliff, Sam and Cindy board a long, narrow fishing boat with an attached outboard motor. The shaft connected to the motor’s propeller is long. Maybe ten feet long. It operates on the water’s surface instead of below it like outboard motors you might find in the West. The river is very shallow in spots, and a traditional motor would get stuck in the mud. Thus, the need to be propelled on the surface.

  The three men operating the boat are of three separate generations. One young, one middle-aged, and finally, one old. As Sam boards the boat, he guesses they must belong to one extended family. Grandfather, son, and grandson. Their life is so simple and singular, Sam thinks, it’s almost a perfect work of art. All they need to be concerned about is their boat, their fishing, and each other.

  “There is a bunk below, Sam,” Cindy says. “Go get some rest. Sleep first, then, you can clean up and eat something.”

  Turning, Cindy issues an order in Thai to the boy. Without hesitation, the boy goes below and returns with a plastic bottle of cold spring water. Cindy opens the bottle and hands it to Sam. He drinks it down in one, long, pleasing swallow.

  “Now,” she says, “go rest, Sam. When you wake, we will enjoy a feast. But for now, we need to get away from this place before Channy finds out we are missing. When that happens, he will send out a war party in search of us.”

  “Thank you, Cin,
” Sam says, kissing her as gently on the mouth as he can, considering his sore bottom lip. “For a while, I thought you wanted me dead.”

  “Never underestimate a spook like me, Sam,” she says, kissing him again . . . kissing him like she means it.

  The boy catches Sam and Cindy kissing passionately, and he smiles like he’s embarrassed. Cindy blows a kiss to the boy. The kid scrunches his face like, gross me out why don’t ya?! Laughing, Sam goes below, finds the narrow mattress, and collapses on it.

  He’s asleep before his head hits the pillow.

  “Sam . . . Sam. Are you awake yet?”

  Sam is dreaming of being waist deep in a warm bath. It’s like he’s been transported back to Roman times and he’s found himself immersed in a Roman bath with a half dozen gorgeous naked women tending to his every need. He’s never felt so wonderful in his life. The women run their wet, soapy hands all over his body and he just lies back and enjoys it.

  When Sam opens his eyes, he finds Cindy using a wet washcloth to clean him while he’s still lying on the mattress.

  “You awake, Sam?” she asks. “Your eyes are half-mast.”

  He notices that, except for his fingertip which has been bandaged, he’s entirely naked. Cindy has a small bucket of soapy water by her side. Occasionally, she dips the washcloth into it then concentrates on a different part of his body. She runs the wet towel down his thigh. It feels nice. The polar opposite of the torture he experienced just hours ago. He’s aware of the boat rocking under him, and he feels the humidity prickling his skin, but somehow, it’s not nearly as oppressive as it was inside the prison cell.

  “How long have I been out?” he asks.

  “Couple hours,” Cindy says. “We’ve already hooked up with the Mekong River, and soon we’ll be at the Cambodia border. From there, we’ll hop a private plane to Ho Chi Minh. Time is short, Sam.”