The Tunnel Rats (Coronet books)

by Stephen Leather

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ asked Doc.

  Hammack lowered his knife. He was staring at Wright in amazement.

  Bamber’s flashlight came on and Doc and Hammack whirled around to face him.

  ‘What happened down there?’ asked Wright.

  ‘There was a booby trap,’ said Doc, breathing heavily. ‘A cage full of scorpions rigged to open when a bamboo trigger was touched.’ He took off his cap and used it to wipe his forehead. ‘If Bernie hadn’t yanked me away, I’d be dead for sure.’

  ‘Scorpions?’ said Wright. ‘They can’t have been there for long, can they? Days, at most.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Doc. ‘It was set up by someone who knew we were coming. Someone who knew we’d be using the tunnel.’

  Doc sat down with his back to the wall. He shook one of his water canteens, but it was empty. Wright took his remaining bottle of water from his knapsack and gave it to him. Doc drank gratefully.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Doc asked. He poured water into a cupped hand then splashed it on to his face, wincing as it got into the cuts and scratches.

  ‘Following you,’ said Wright.

  ‘You must be mad. Stark raving mad.’ Doc handed the bottle to Hammack.

  Wright grinned ruefully. ‘Yeah, you might be right,’ he said. He sat down next to him. ‘What’s it all about, Doc?’ he asked. He gestured at the open grave at the far end of the chamber. ‘Who was he?’

  Doc shook his head. ‘Still asking questions, Detective?’

  ‘Fuck you, Doc!’ Wright hissed. ‘I’m down here with you, I’ve earned the right to ask.’

  ‘You’ve earned nothing,’ said Doc.

  ‘We’re in this together now,’ said Wright. ‘Whoever killed Horvitz and Eckhardt killed Ramirez, too. That means he’s down here with us.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’

  Hammack gave the bottle of water back to Wright, who put it into his knapsack.

  ‘Think about it for a moment, will you?’ said Wright. ‘He wants to kill you and Bernie and he’s damn well going to want to make sure that there are no witnesses. Jim, am I right?’

  Bamber nodded slowly. ‘Makes sense to me,’ he said.

  ‘And who the fuck are you?’ asked Doc.

  ‘He’s with the FBI,’ said Wright.

  Doc stared at Bamber in disbelief. ‘The FBI?’ he said.

  ‘What happened, Doc?’ said Wright quietly. ‘What happened all those years ago?’

  Doc shook his head and looked away. He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Tell him, Doc,’ said Hammack. ‘If you don’t, I will.’

  Doc stared at the open grave.

  ‘Doc,’ prompted Hammack.

  Doc took a deep breath and held it for several seconds, then he sighed and began to speak, hesitantly at first. ‘There were eight of us,’ he said. ‘To start with, anyway. It was my mission, I was the ranking officer. Not that rank meant anything in the Tunnel Rats. Experience was the only thing that mattered. Experience and luck.’

  He rested the back of his head against the damp clay wall. ‘Bernie, Sergio, Eric, Max and Dennis, you know about. There were two others, a Tunnel Rat we called Jumbo and an intelligence guy called Rabbit. We were down here for three days. Three fucking days.’

  Hammack squatted down against the wall facing Doc. He put his massive forearms on his knees and interlinked his fingers.

  ‘We were tracking a VC major, a guy called Vin,’ continued Doc. ‘Dennis had been mapping the network for months, and he added to his maps as we went deeper and deeper. We used string and compasses, measuring it inch by inch, all the time getting closer and closer to Vin.’

  ‘As part of Operation Phoenix?’ asked Bamber.

  Doc shook his head. ‘We were on some Phoenix operations, but this was something else. Half a dozen bombs had gone off in Saigon, big ones. More than twenty of our boys had been killed, fifty civilians. Vin was behind the bombs and we knew there were more on the way. Cinemas, bars, shops, the VC didn’t care who they killed. You know about bombs, don’t you, Sergeant Wright? You’re from London, you’ve seen what terrorists can do.’

  Wright nodded. He took off his Mickey Mouse knapsack and placed it on the floor next to him.

  ‘Rabbit was an interrogation expert,’ Doc continued. ‘Our mission was to get Vin and find out where the next bombs were going to be planted. We knew he had a command centre down in the fourth level, but we’d never been further than the second level before. Three days, can you imagine being down here for three days?’

  Wright shuddered, and shook his head.

  ‘We ate cold rations, drank the minimum of fluid, just enough to keep going. We were living on our nerves. They had snakes, you know? Snakes tethered with wires. The VC knew how to pull the wires back so that they could get by, but we shot the snakes, shot them with silenced guns. The VC had trip wires connected to grenades, others that caused cave-ins. Pits with stakes smeared with shit. With shit, Sergeant Wright, so that any wounds would get infected. They were sick bastards. Sick, sick bastards. They weren’t soldiers, they were terrorists.’ He ran his hands through his hair.

  Hammack had rested his forehead on his arms and was breathing heavily.

  ‘On the third day we found the way down to the fourth level. Jumbo went down first and they cut his throat. He died in my arms, begging me to help him. There was so much blood.’ He put a hand up to the bridge of his nose. ‘So much fucking blood. You wouldn’t believe there was so much blood in a man.’ He shook his head, then put his cap back on.

  ‘We killed half a dozen VC to get here. Took us three hours to find Vin.’ He gestured at the room. ‘We caught up with him in here. Jumbo’s blood was still wet. It was dripping off me, like sweat.’ He took a deep breath as if gathering his strength for what was to come. ‘Vin was a tough motherfucker. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t say a fucking word. Just stood there with a secret fucking smile on his face like he thought there was nothing we could do to stop him. Rabbit threatened him, offered him bribes to change sides. He tried everything he could to get him to talk. Nothing worked. Then Rabbit hit him. Just a slap, across the face. Wasn’t even that hard.’

  Doc leaned forward and took off his rucksack. He reached inside and took out a plastic bag containing a pack of Marlboro and his Zippo lighter. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke up to the ceiling.

  ‘Vin just glared back at him, smiling the way they do. Smiling like he didn’t give a fuck. So Rabbit hit him again. Harder. Vin’s lip started to bleed but he just kept on smiling.’

  He took another long pull on his cigarette. ‘Max was close to Jumbo, really close. Jumbo had saved Max’s life more times than either of them could remember. He started urging Rabbit to hit him harder. And Rabbit did. Punched him in the gut, in the face, in the balls. Vin didn’t even flinch. He was like a fucking rock. Like there was nothing Rabbit could do to get to him. He just kept staring at the wall.’

  He flicked ash on to the floor, then stared at the alcove that had been carved into the wall of the chamber. His eyes widened. ‘He wasn’t staring at the wall,’ he whispered. ‘He was staring at the hiding place. Making sure that whoever was there stayed put.’ He closed his eyes and banged the back of his head against the wall. ‘I should have guessed,’ he whispered. ‘That’s why he didn’t cry out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Wright.

  ‘No matter what we did to him, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry out, he didn’t even beg us to stop. Now I know why.’

  Wright looked across at the alcove, then at the pile of parachute silk that had previously lined the walls. ‘Someone else was down here?’

  Doc nodded. ‘Someone was down here and they saw what we did to Vin. And afterwards, after we’d buried the body and gone, whoever it was crawled out and took Max’s dogtags.’

  ‘Dogtags?’ repeated Wright.

  Doc stubbed the butt of his cigarette on the ground. ‘When
we eventually got out, Max discovered that his dogtags were missing. He remembered that Vin had grabbed them.’ He gestured at the open grave. ‘They’re not there now.’

  ‘So whoever was hiding there knew who Eckhardt was. Are you saying they spent twenty-five years tracking you all down?’

  ‘That’s the way it’s starting to look,’ said Doc.

  ‘That’s a hell of a long time to wait for revenge,’ said Wright.

  ‘You don’t know the Vietnamese,’ said Doc. ‘They dug most of these tunnels by hand, knowing that it would take years before they were finished. Time doesn’t mean the same to them, it’s the passing of seasons, that’s all. Part of the cycle.’

  ‘What exactly did you do to Vin?’ asked Bamber.

  Doc looked across at the open grave. He shook his head.

  ‘You butchered him,’ said Wright. ‘You cut him up. You cut him up and you cut off his dick.’

  Doc winced under Wright’s verbal attack. ‘We lost it,’ said Doc. ‘We’d been through hell, we’d seen Jumbo die in front of us, and we knew that the bastard was in the process of planting more bombs in Saigon, bombs that would kill our boys. We had to get him to talk.’

  Hammack laughed harshly, a guttural roar that made Wright jump. ‘Bullshit,’ said Hammack. ‘It wasn’t about getting him to talk. It was murder. Cold-blooded murder.’

  ‘Cold it wasn’t,’ said Doc, his voice barely a whisper. ‘We were angry, we wanted revenge, we wanted to hurt him the way he’d hurt our friends.’

  ‘And you were all involved?’ asked Wright. ‘You all had a hand in it?’

  Doc nodded and lit another cigarette.

  ‘Rabbit and Max started it,’ said Hammack. ‘Max telling Rabbit to kick the shit out of him. Then Ramirez pulled out his knife and slashed him across the face. Something happened when we saw the blood. It was like we were with Jumbo again, watching him die.’ He put his forehead down on his folded arms again.

  ‘After a while we stopped asking questions,’ said Doc. ‘We just kept cutting him. Cutting and cutting. The little bastard didn’t cry out once. That just made us madder. If he’d just said something, if he’d begged us to stop, maybe we’d have realised what we were doing. Maybe we’d have stopped.’

  He closed his eyes and banged the back of his head against the wall again. The cigarette smouldered between his fingers.

  ‘It took him hours to die. Fucking hours.’

  ‘Who cut his dick off?’

  ‘Rabbit. He’d lost it by then. He wanted to do more to the body, but Bernie and Eric pulled him off.’

  ‘And the card?’

  ‘That was Rabbit, too. Psyops used to leave them as calling cards.’

  He opened his eyes and looked at Wright. ‘I’m not trying to pass the buck, we were all to blame. Every one of us.’

  ‘You tried to stop them, Doc,’ said Hammack. ‘You told them they were going too far.’

  ‘We were a team, Bernie.’

  ‘All for one and one for all?’ said Wright. ‘Like musketeers?’

  Doc gave him a withering look. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not. But I understand murder.’

  ‘It was a war,’ said Doc.

  Wright pushed himself up against the wall, then went over to the grave and looked down at the skeleton.

  Doc got to his feet. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said.

  ‘How?’ asked Hammack. He nodded at the hatch in the floor. ‘Scorpions down there.’ He gestured at the antechamber with his thumb. ‘The killer’s up there.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Wright. ‘We got down all right.’

  ‘Once we’d moved Ramirez’s body,’ said Bamber.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ asked Doc, dropping his cigarette on the floor and grinding it into the clay with his heel. ‘We go back the same way? Maybe it’s a trap, maybe the killer let you down so that he could kill us on the way back up.’

  Wright stared at the grinning skull. He’d seen bodies before, but never a skeleton. It made him realise what lay ahead. No matter how he lived his life, no matter what he did, he would end up the same way, bones in the ground. He shuddered and turned away. He nodded at Bamber. ‘What about the map, Jim? Does it show any other way out?’

  ‘Map?’ said Doc, wiping his hands on his trousers. ‘What map?’

  ‘We’ve got a Defense Department map of the tunnel complex,’ said Wright. ‘Jim got it from the Pentagon.’

  Doc frowned. He looked at Hammack, then back to Wright. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘We never gave the map to headquarters. Why would we want anyone else coming down here and seeing what we’d done?’ He stared at the map case in Bamber’s hand.

  Wright reached for the case, but Bamber moved it out of his reach.

  ‘What’s going on, Jim?’ Wright asked.

  Bamber said nothing. He tossed the map case to Doc. Doc opened it and flicked through the maps. He looked across at Wright, his eyes narrowing. ‘These belong to Dennis,’ he said coldly.

  Wright turned to look at Bamber, confusion written all over his face. ‘Tell him, Jim.’

  The FBI agent ignored him. He was staring at Doc, the knife in his hand twitching from side to side.

  Gerry Hunter had tried Wright’s number more than a dozen times as he drove back to London. It was ringing, but Wright wasn’t answering and each time a recorded voice cut in asking if he wanted to leave a message. He had begun to hate the prim, prissy female voice and would cheerfully have strangled the woman if she’d been in the car with him. After trying for more than an hour, he called up the company that had supplied Wright’s mobile and asked to speak to somebody on the technical side. A man with a slight stutter explained that the recorded message meant that the phone was responding to the signal sent out over the satellite network. It wasn’t a case of the phone being switched off. If the signal had reached the phone and it had been switched off, Hunter would hear a different message.

  ‘I think it’s in Bangkok, would that make a difference?’ asked Hunter.

  ‘Shouldn’t,’ said the man. ‘We cover most of South-East Asia. Parts of Thailand might be out of our range, but certainly Bangkok is well covered. The person you’re calling just isn’t answering the phone.’

  Hunter thanked the man, though he’d been no more help than the prerecorded message. He punched in Wright’s number again and hit the ‘send’ button.

  ‘Jim, what the hell’s going on?’ Wright’s voice echoed around the chamber.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on,’ said Doc. He pulled his knife from his belt and held it out in front of him. He threw the map at Wright’s feet. ‘That map belongs to Dennis. I want to hear how he got it.’ He took a step towards Bamber.

  Bamber stood his ground, his own knife held low, the point aimed at Doc’s stomach. He was smiling.

  Hammack got to his feet, a puzzled frown on his face. He slid his own knife from its sheath and stood holding it as if unsure what to do next.

  ‘Sergio and Bernie went to get it the day after he was killed,’ said Doc. ‘If he’s got the map, he must have seen Dennis. What I want to know is if Dennis was alive when he went around to the house. And if he was, I want to know how he managed to persuade him to part with it.’

  Bamber continued to smile at Doc. He took a step forward, keeping the knife low.

  ‘Come on, Jim, stop this,’ said Wright. Bamber ignored him. ‘Just tell him how you got the map.’

  ‘Yeah, Jim,’ said Hammack. ‘Tell us how you got the map.’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you anything,’ said Bamber. He waved his knife and it glinted in the beam of his flashlight. ‘It’s been a long time since you used a knife, hasn’t it? You’re not really sure how to hold it, are you?’

  Doc threw Hammack a quick glance and Hammack moved to the side, widening the gap between them.

  Bamber moved into the middle of the chamber, closer to the pile of parachute silk. ‘You’re an old man now, Doc. Your
reflexes aren’t what they were. Eyesight’s going. Muscle tone’s deteriorating.’ He moved his knife in a slow circle.

  Doc looked at Wright and made a small gesture with his chin, telling him to move behind Bamber so that the three men were equally spaced around him. Wright wasn’t sure what was going on, but this time there was no mistaking the murderous intent in Bamber’s eyes.

  ‘I guess you’re feeling pretty happy about the odds right now,’ said Bamber. ‘Three against one. I guess you’re thinking that three of you can take me. But you’re wrong, Doc. Dead wrong. Nick here’s a pussycat. You’re an old man, and the nigger, well, I’ve never met a nigger yet that I couldn’t fight one handed.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Hammack. He stepped forward, his knife raised.

  ‘Bernie, no!’ hissed Wright. ‘He’s just trying to rile you.’

  ‘Man’s succeeded,’ said Hammack, but he lowered his knife.

  ‘Always like to see a nigger kept in his place,’ said Bamber.

  Hammack roared and lashed out at Bamber. Bamber moved quickly, stepping to the side and drawing his knife across Hammack’s chest in a fluid motion. Hammack yelled, but Wright couldn’t tell if it was from anger or pain. The black man stabbed at Bamber but Bamber was too quick for him and he spun around like a matador goading a bull before slashing out again, this time to Hammack’s upper arm. Blood spurted in a crimson stream and Hammack’s knife dropped from his nerveless fingers. Blood was flowing down Hammack’s T-shirt in a jagged red curtain and he sank to his knees, a look of despair on his face. Bamber raised his knife once more.

  Wright could see that Bamber was going to slash Hammack’s throat. He yelled ‘No!’ and threw his flashlight as hard as he could. It smashed into Bamber’s arm and the light winked out. Hammack pitched forward and fell on to the pile of parachute silk, one hand clutching the wound on his chest. Doc dashed forward but Bamber struck out with his knife, hacking at Doc’s stomach. Doc moved back.

  Bamber bent down and picked up Hammack’s flashlight, switched it off and tucked it into his belt. He backed up, his bloodstained knife moving in a lazy figure of eight, alternating between Doc and Wright.