He let the drone of the others' voices return him to the past. Despite the sense of urgency that gnawed at his gut, he could not escape the feeling, vague as it was, that his history with the Tunnel Rats somehow related to the current situation in which he and his family found themselves. As Digger and Smitty ate, their voices drew him back to Cu Chi.
Always Cu Chi.
Fucking Cu Chi.
KIT
Before she could open her mouth, the men's boss, the lion-haired man, strode into their cell.
He was clearly the man in charge, the one on whose desk rested the cake platter that held Jill's head. One of his thugs, Pervy Man, had thrown open the door, followed by a couple other overgrown goons she was sure had worn cartoon masks earlier. The boss saw Kit and Anne Marie and stalked up, swinging his open hand before he'd even reached Kit.
The thick palm caught her like a two-by-four on the side of the face and nearly knocked her out of her shoes. In fact, it would have, but Kit was being held by Pervy Man and she couldn't roll with the punch, instead absorbing it with a grunt.
This fresh pain was just beginning to start up and down the various tributaries of her nervous system, when the thug leader swung again and caught her unprepared, snapping her head back and forth like a balloon.
"Boss, not the face!" Pervy Man said.
Spittle on his lips, the thug stopped himself with effort. "Yes, we don't want to sell defective merchandise." He turned his awful gaze on Kit. "After she is sold, take her to me. I have some implements that will not mark the attractive face. But she will remember me, I guarantee this."
"About the other?"
"Kill her."
Anne Marie suddenly tilted, her whole body coming unglued like a mannequin with the pins removed. She collapsed and they left her where she lay.
"No!" Kit shouted.
The big man was amused. There was a bulge in the front of his pants. "Okay. Okay, I changed my mind," the thug leader said. "Take her to the Showroom. Customers there who have been waiting with patience. I have promised they will have the test ride of their lives. A gift from me, Goran the Serb." He gritted his ugly teeth and stared at Kit. "And she will wish I had killed her."
Kit shivered.
Anne Marie stirred, moaning, talking nonsense in a little girl voice.
It was over. Their plan, their courage, their heart, all taken out of them in one swoop.
"Tell the customers she is my gift, but she must be enjoyed here. Tell them she cannot be returned." He turned to Kit and smiled malevolently. "This is your fault. You have killed your friend."
Kit groaned, then her voice turned into a shriek of frustration and hatred as she lunged for the thug and spit in his face before rough hands pulled her back and forced her to her knees.
The Serb wiped the spittle from his chin and mouth with the back of his hand, anger flashing like lightning in his eyes. He barked an order in a guttural language, and his men set to obeying him. They held her face steady against her struggles, driving her knees painfully into the concrete floor and holding her in position. The Serb reached down and felt himself through his trousers as he approached the wild one. She must be the thug's niece, it was clear she had the same violent streak in her that he did. Goran stroked himself and took pleasure in seeing the girl's eyes widen with fear and disgust. He let her digest the thought of what he was about to do for a full minute. Seeing her struggle excited him and drove him closer. He unzipped his trousers and reached inside. Kit screamed from behind the gagging hands, her eyes wide with terror. But there was rage in her eyes, too. No amount of fear could trump the rage she felt building up at her captors' cavalier attitude toward rape.
Goran smiled and lowered his face nearer to hers, all the while stroking himself inside the fabric of his pants.
But then he suddenly stepped back and barked more orders. He leered at Kit as he readjusted his clothing. "You would have been a good time for me, but I think my friends who are waiting will enjoy having both of you to test drive. I give you to them." He turned to his men and spoke English, so the girls could understand. "As before, afterwards kill the thin one. This one —" he pointed at Kit, "– this one should be brought back to me after they are done, whatever shape she is in."
The men saluted and two dragged Anne Marie into the hall, while the other two picked up and threw Kit off her knees onto the floor roughly and lifted her like a carpet to follow. Goran chuckled at her plight. Kit made no sound, but hatred burned in her eyes.
TWENTY-NINE
It was fucking Cu Chi again, and Brant felt like a visitor to his own life.
Sarge and Digger and Smitty were gathered around a belly-shaped table in the club's beer garden, numerous empty bottles of Bamiba beer between them. Rat squads never seemed to take rank seriously, so officers and enlisted men fought, drank, and whored together. Sarge always said, "You can save my ass in a fuckin' tunnel, I can sure as shit pour you a beer at my table!" They were practicing what he preached, but looking morose.
Brant approached them and pulled out the single chair that waited for him.
"Loot, how they hangin'?"
"Straight and true."
"Good enough. Here, drink." Sarge popped the top off a beer and handed it over.
Brant drank half the beer in one swallow. The humidity outside had climbed steadily since morning, and wetness clung to his fatigues, reducing them to heavy rags. He let the cool liquid soak through his system. The moisture would be sucked out of him as sweat in minutes flat, but that was why you bought more beer. He waited. They had invited him, and he suspected he knew why.
"Loot, we got a problem," Sarge said. The others nodded agreement. "Things are goin' to shit since you left. These fucking 'tunnel kits' they want us to try out, for starters. Idiots think they can teach us how to fight in tunnels. Man, they should come out here and try it. Then there's the new Rat Six they saddled us with..."
"What about Six? What's the rap on him?" Brant avoided the problem kits. They could weasel their way out of that on their own. He sucked down the last half of the rapidly warming beer and opened another. More bottles stood in ranks, sweating, waiting to be had; Sarge had laid in a case. All around them flowed the everyday commerce of a capital city, with colorful people and clothing brightening up the hazy heat of the day. The bustle of the capital belied the bloody warfare going on not many clicks away in the jungle.
"The rap is, he's a weenie who won't go into the holes," said Smitty.
Digger spoke up too. "He's a college guy, a half-officer who thinks you can just look shit up in books all the time."
"I was a college guy," Brant said. He wondered. They seemed half-high to him, not quite firing on all cylinders. Maybe he was biased.
"Sure, but you were willin' to learn. You went into the holes like us, with us, and you learned what the shit was. There's no one I'd rather have on point or watchin' my backside than you, Loot. You earned your stripes with us, and you don't have to work every hole now." Sarge popped another beer and drank. "This guy, he's different, he don't wanna learn. He's great on writing reports and those after-action rags, but he wants nothin' to do with the crawlin' and wrestlin'. Frankly, the guys are down on him and I'm worried they're gonna do somethin' stupid."
"You're not-?"
Sarge held up one meaty hand as if he were stopping a truck. A fragmentation grenade would be dwarfed in his grip, but Brant could see it. He could see it, all right. "Not saying nothin', mostly they just don't listen to him. But he's not street-smart, he doesn't understand what we do and how it should be done, and why, and he argues with everything. He's a fuckin' liability pure and simple. You think you can talk to him, man to man? Tell'im his squad's not full of respect for a guy who won't get his hands dirty at least once in a while. Tell him to at least fuckin' try."
Brant sighed. His new CO would have shit his uniform trousers if he knew his newest intelligence operative was going around talking to green officers about their duty and command style. On
the other hand, Sarge was right. With a lead officer too spooked to do the necessary recon or clean-up on a tunnel, the men would start to distrust his judgment and eventually they'd just avoid taking orders. At some point, the lack of trust and respect would become mutual, and the unit would be doomed. Rat squads already carried enough burdens on their shoulders – without the respect of his men, this new lieutenant would get them killed. Or they would kill him. It was just a matter of time.
"What's this guy's name? I'll bump into him. You know, accidentally."
"Zimmerman," Digger spat out. "Can you believe it? Robert Fuckin' Zimmerman."
"Ain't that Bob Dylan's name?"
"Who?"
"You know, guy who can't sing? Plays the harp pretty good, though."
"Fuck I know."
"Yeah, fuck you know! Am I right? Loot?"
Brant drank another full beer. Almost daily he felt the gulf widening between himself and his former squad, but he could at least do this one thing for them. He decided it would happen as soon as he could maneuver his schedule and be in the same place at the same time as the new Rat Six.
They drank Bamiba like water until the night people took over the Saigon sidewalks.
The time turned out to be less than a week later, when Brant's office phone startled him out of a particularly nasty daytime nightmare, the sort of which he thought leaving the tunnels behind would have cured him. After all, it had to be the pressure of the tunnels that had exploded his instinct, and the annoying jabbing pains, headaches, and nightmares that went along with it. The visions, the sensations, the premonitions. He picked up the phone and listened, images forming clearly in his mind.
It was Kampmann, patching through a scratchy call from the field. Sarge sounded flustered, which was almost unlikely, but which made Brant realize how serious this must have been.
"Fuckin' Zimmerman got himself stuck in a goddamn tunnel and we can't get him out," the gruff sergeant screamed into his field telephone.
Brant pulled his receiver away from his ear. "Sarge, explain what happened. Take it one step at a time."
"Fuck! Okay. Here it is."
Zimmerman had taken enough ribbing about the new Rat Six's fear of the tunnels, so he had determined that this one he would explore on his own. They'd found several spider holes in the vicinity, but the square opening indicated a connection to a much larger tunnel complex, and perhaps this entrance would lead them to equipment caches, or maybe even an underground field hospital. Brant remembered well enough his own experience in the tunnel infirmary they'd collapsed on him. He let Sarge continue. Lieutenant Zimmerman had nixed any kind of back-up, deciding he would go in alone and flush whatever VC might be hunkered down below, then follow them to the larger complex. The problem was that he had entered the tunnel, but a half-hour later they had heard two pistol shots. And when Sarge and Digger had gone in to pull Zimmerman out, dead or alive, they'd found him alive – but unwilling to move in either direction. He claimed to have killed a VC nearby, but they couldn't verify because Zimmerman himself was in the way. And later, after the frightened Lieutenant had been removed and they could find no VC, he would claim that other VC had come and taken the body away with them.
Lieutenant "Loot" Brant hopped a Huey gunship out to the tunnel site, about six clicks into the heart of Cu Chi, with Kampmann's whispered parting instructions banging around his tender head. "If you can't get him out, terminate the problem. It's a war zone and we don't do ballistics checks out here. He's risking the lives of his men, and I consider the Rat squads members of the intelligence community, as you know, Richard. Do what you have to do, and it'll be smoothed here at HQ."
Brant shook his head, wishing the high-pitched whine of the engine above his head could just be terminated as easily as Kampmann thought erasing the new Rat Six might be. Brant's hands shook, and it wasn't the chopper's jagged flight path. Near him, the door gunner watched for enemy sniping. Brant mused that he felt safer on this bird than he would down that black hole of a tunnel. There could be a half-dozen other tunnels connecting to the main branch, where Zimmerman was stuck. Maybe he'd be already dead by the time they got there. But six clicks goes by quickly in a chopper, and before he knew it, Brant was sliding off the whirlybird and watching it lift up into the drab, rain-bloated sky. It was almost monsoon time, and he could feel the moisture starting to build. Sweat gushed from his pores. Fear rode with it, chilling him even in the heat of the jungle.
Sarge, Digger and Smitty, plus another kid he'd only seen once before, trotted up at the chopper left them in jungle's ominous silence. "Loot, I hope you know what you're doing!"
"Yeah, Sarge. I'm hoping to get this guy outta there. The hard way."
Digger and Smitty muttered amongst themselves, and Sarge laughed. "Just don't get your balls shot off in the confusion. You never know, down there, what's going on in the dark."
Brant whispered. "I'm surprised you called me. I figured you would've taken the opportunity..."
Sarge stared him straight in the eye. "Fuckin' new kid on the radio, he sent out a distress call before I could stop'im. Otherwise, I'd be buyin' you a beer about now."
Brant nodded. He knew Sarge's loyalty was good, but very selective. "I'll hold you to that beer."
"Shit yeah."
It took Brant an hour on his belly in the pitch dark to work his way down to where Zimmerman was wedged, and another hour to convince him to help by pushing backwards.
"Jesus, Zimmerman, the fuck's wrong with you? We could get our asses blasted here, waiting for you. You coulda been out by now."
Zimmerman's reedy voice broke, and then Brant got it. The Lieutenant had panicked, had given in to his fear – of the dark, of the brutal VC tunnel fighters, of the insects, of the claustrophobia, of the weight of clay above him – and he knew that his squad knew, and by extension, that the whole battalion would know. Zimmerman knew he was done as far as command was concerned, and the whispers that would follow him from now on would sound like the word coward no matter what they actually were. Zimmerman had probably held his .38 to his own head, down there in the darkness, where men's souls were laid bare. Too much a coward even to end his own misery.
Only Brant and Zimmerman would know what they'd exchanged down there, but two hours later, when Brant popped out of the square opening leg-first, it was Zimmerman's live body that he dragged behind him. The new Rat Six had been reduced to ragged tears by the experience, but it was over, and when a Huey brought in a new Rat squad to continue the tunnel exploration, it was Sarge's first squad failure and the silence indicated what he and the men thought of their commanding officer, who had lost his cool possibly without ever having been under fire at all in the tunnel.
In a month, Zimmerman was rotated out, and Brant lost track of him until some years ago learning they'd both been from the same state. Sometimes your good deeds track you down and weigh on you like chained cinderblocks.
KIT
After Uri brought word that Boris had somehow been killed by the two girls, Goran returned to pacing his office.
The fool deserves to die, he thought. If Boris had survived, Goran would have had him shot for stupidity, allowing two pieces of merchandise to outwit him so easily.
He slowed his pacing as he approached the computer on his desk, touched a key, and a camera window popped up, showing the two Muslims examining the distraught girls. One touched the thin girl's breasts and she recoiled, but her hands and feet were now trussed with nylon rope and she could not avoid the prying, pinching fingers. The other client began caressing the more athletic girl, the one Goran was certain was the American gunman's niece.
Goran watched for a minute, wishing he'd had them stripped first. He also wished he could hear what they were screaming. He smiled a shark's smile, then switched it off. The feed was to a massive bank of hard drives, so he could watch it any time. And he would. Right now he wanted to hear about this nuisance Richard Brant. Perhaps he could have a talk with the American and show him th
ese scenes from the digital archive before putting a bullet through his forehead. He would do it himself, personally. His hands itched to hold a pistol again, and to cause a human head to deflate under the impact of a high-velocity 9mm round.
The phone buzzed. Goran's ears were assaulted by an excited, frightened voice. His temper throbbed, just below the surface. He listened for a minute, then interrupted the underling. "What have you done? What is going on?"
"Boss, this maniac was like an angel of death-"
"I am not a boss, I am your commanding officer."
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry. Sir. This American-"
"Did you kill him? Wound him? Is he captured?"
"No sir, but we are-"
"Put men on the street! I don't want to hear from you until he is captured or killed. And if there's nothing to tell me, then do not come back. Run far. Understand?"
The man was silent for a second, before blubbering a response. Goran cut him off and dialed a new number.
"Vasily? We have some problem right now. Round up some of the men for quick movement. And bring a van also. We'll move the schedule up again, okay? Call the captain and speak to him on my behalf. Now he must bring the crew back."
"But sir, we-"
"Vasily, I want you to gather up our guests and start to take them to the ship, all facilities. Make the telephone calls now, then send one of your men to each warehouse and execute the plan to destroy the more harmful … evidence. Make sure the emergency wall has been deployed at Lake Drive. Report back to me when it is done." He clicked the phone and cut off the agitated response.
If his men had not lost their heads while under attack, they would have sealed off the prison dungeon from the rest of the basement. It was designed to fool experts with its false moldings and joints. He hoped the house could be salvaged – it had cost over two million American dollars even in this backwater. If the wall did its job and kept the curious away from the cells and the other working rooms, then his superb and even more subtle protection would cover the rest of the carnage. Goran made a fist and felt his misshapen knuckles crack. There would be repayment once he learned which of his troops had failed him.
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