Brant's breathing slowed. His neck shrieked with stiffness and lightning pains shooting through his nerves, his head throbbing with the beginnings of a migraine-level pain that made his eyes blink closed against the bright winter light that surrounded his car.
How had he fallen asleep again? And why?
Jesus. What the hell good was he to Kit if he couldn't stay awake? Or in this decade?
But then wondered, what was she trying to tell him?
And how could he find her? Could she, or this apparition of her, tell him somehow?
This curse, gift, sense — whatever you called it — that he'd had since that time in the tunnel, in the embrace of both a dead man and a man who would not die... could it somehow help him now? In Kit's hour of need?
It had helped him before. He should have had a psych discharge himself, back then, in 1967 Cu Chi province, among the tunnels. But instead it had helped him avoid death on numerous occasions. He had managed to save his men, too, more than once. He'd made nothing of it in public, though he had secretly pondered long and hard about it, but his men's talk had found willing ears in Intelligence. He'd become the Tunnel Rat with Sixth Sense: Rat Sixth Sense, they called him — a play on his Rat Six officer's designation as an explosives engineer attached to an intelligence company. Somebody in Intelligence had heard enough stories and before long he was summoned to Cu Chi base.
Cu Chi base was a cream puff assignment. Except for the enemy tunnels that criss-crossed the earth beneath it.
Brant closed his eyes. Pinpricks of pain bloomed against his eyelids. He allowed himself to go back, one more time.
***
The hot shower has almost managed to wipe the feel and smell of the red clay off his body, but he still feels the grittiness on his skin.
Brant looks around the office. It's bare except for several generic military art prints and a Frederic Remington. Tan file cabinets line one wall, a large desk with two chairs huddled around it dominates the center of the room, and a window air conditioner built into the wall kicks out a column of cool air that ruffles the fine hair on Brant's neck. He's bald, having shaved to simplify hygiene and tunnel work, and the air feels almost too cold on his bare scalp. Yet it's luxurious to feel cool in the heat of the goddamn jungle.
He's standing at ease, waiting for a Major Kampmann, who summoned him through his battalion command. Brant's squad has just killed another VC tunnel fighter, and Brant figures this is about that. He's surprised there's no paperwork on the desk, just an intercom, a telephone, and a writing tablet. No window, no papers, no personalization.
All this makes Brant nervous and he fidgets, uncomfortable in a clean uniform he hasn't worn in weeks — in the field, out in the tunnel country, he's taken to stripping down to shorts and a tank top, or even bare skin. If it's good enough for the VC, it's good for Rat Six. His men have become hardened to their arduous missions, but nothing's gone wrong for a month, and Brant has successfully led them through miles of tunnels, a handful of captures, and several kills, with only a few superficial shrapnel wounds to show for it. Brant smiles cynically. Maybe he's here for a commendation.
While he's been in the bush, hopping from tunnel hole to tunnel hole, they've built up Cu Chi Base into a behemoth of prefab buildings lined up in streets and blocks, clubs and stores lit up inside with smuggled neon, tennis courts, swimming pools for both officers and enlisted men, and cushy barracks outfitted with televisions and radios.
Not like the jungle, where snakes routinely send men to the infirmary, and tropical-size centipedes crawl into toothpaste tubes left open. Not at all like the jungle, the base is almost decadent. Yet, there is only an illusion of safety.
Brant wonders whether this Major Kampmann will mention the infiltrators who keep breaching security. Brant frowns. It's more tunnels — the base is built on them, because the engineers who scouted the location never realized they were sitting on a honeycomb. Brant knows this, and he knows some of the brass knows it, and quite a few of the enlisted men know it, but there is so much activity, so much rotation in and off-base, that the knowledge pool seems to shrink rather than increase. Brant personally knows that here, grunts sleep with their guns cocked. VC have been known to come up through the floors of supply huts and empty offices, setting up satchel charges or mortars for lightning-quick attacks and suicide strikes.
We'll never beat them as long as they're so willing to give their lives to defeat us. This is their anthill, not ours.
Brant looks at the comforts imported from the States and laughs, comparing this excess with the cramped dirty and dark tunnels somewhere below them.
We just don't get it.
"I'm glad to see you smiling, Lieutenant."
Brant starts. The Major, presumably, has thrown the door open and caught him with a cynical smile he tries to cover up with a salute.
"As you were, Lieutenant." Kampmann returns the salute half-heartedly. He's a short, squat man with a black and silver crew-cut and a sharp jaw. "I'm with you, it's a silly convention. Sit down." He waves Brant to one of the empty chairs and sits himself behind the desk. "I don't have anything to offer you right now. I have a fridge coming, but they seem to have misplaced it. Base is too big, too frenzied. For all I know, the damn thing is sitting in a tunnel below us."
"You know about the tunnels? Sir?" Brant's shock is obvious.
"Yes, somebody reads your reports. At least, some somebodies. Sit. Fine, there you go. Relax a little — you're relatively safe here." He barked a laugh. "Inside the wire and the minefields, and you're relatively safe. Ain't that a hoot, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir." Brant doesn't know where to go with this guy.
"I'm going to keep this short, Brant. You probably want to get a drink before packing up your things."
"Packing up, sir?" Brant leans forward. What is this?
"Packing up. A replacement officer has been assigned to your squad — sit down, Lieutenant!"
Brant has leaped up like a spring. "Sir, whoever he is he'll get my men killed. Without experience..."
"That's where you're wrong, son. This guy was with the Big Red One and he's crawled down his share of tunnels. I had him mark the holes on a topo map — it's almost as much as you've logged yourself, both before and after your Lazarus act."
"Still, sir, the men are used to me..."
"Nonsense, they'll get along. Hell, you have at least four first-class tunnel fighters in your group, and top-notch above-ground support. Less casualties than any other Rat unit, and higher success rate. This is the perfect time to pull you and let somebody else get all the glory." He grins, but it's an empty gesture.
Brant frowns, unconvinced. This idiot representative of the brass doesn't understand the bond forged underground, around the tunnel mouths and under constant danger of explosive booby traps.
"Sir," he begins, but Kampmann waves him off.
"Listen, Lieutenant, you're being transferred. To Military Intelligence. Effective immediately, or as soon as you can gather up your gear and say some good-byes. Tell your men you think you're heading home, nothing else for now. You may or may not know this, but you will soon — the Pentagon has begun a slow withdrawal of troops from in-country. It'll take over a year, but we're turning over more and more territory to the ARVN — they're getting better at defending it themselves, and we've held off the bad guys long enough. But we'll still be here for a while, and we'll continue to need men with your skills, uh, coming in the back door and getting around undetected."
"A spook? You want me to be a spook?" Brant is so surprised he's forgotten to emit the laugh that would be his first instinct.
Kampmann frowns again. "We don't like the term 'spook,'" he says.
And so Brant's Tunnel Rat career almost comes to an end — with several exceptions, and one particular mission still months in the future — and his file emigrates from an Army record dump to a much smaller, more exclusive record-keeping system. For the first three months, he works hand in hand with local
intelligence and is flown in for the occasional tunnel that yields enemy documents needing translation. Later he will be transferred back to Saigon, and from 1968 on his assignment is altered. By now he has graduated to a low-profile unit operating under the radar of Congressional oversight.
Occasionally, he'll miss the tunnels.
There, you know where you stand. Who the friends and the enemy are.
Now everything is shadows.
***
Brant wiped his bleary eyes. His troubled and missing sleep had begun to take its toll. He felt time running out like a stream of sand grains. He also felt Kit trying to catch his attention and lead him to her. She could have been killed by a serial murderer, tossed in a shallow grave or dismembered. It happened to so many girls every month, he had to consider it. But his years of experience, the evidence — and his intuition — all pointed to a kidnap. Not the ransom kind, but the kind where the victim would never be found again.
Kit. Jesus Christ, why the hell did they have to take Kit?
Brant's neck pains began to subside as he massaged the twanging muscles in his throat.
He found his thoughts returning to the cop, Danni Colgrave. Guilt also returned, guilt for letting his sudden interest in her intrude on his mission. Brant had never filled the empty space Abby left when she died, not that anyone could really fill it. But the chronic gnawing emptiness in his belly had come to symbolize the void in his heart, and even the thought of a woman who looked at him with some interest and who might fill some of Abby's abandoned spaces... well, Brant hated his weakness in the face of more important matters, but he let Colgrave's face fill his thoughts as he started the engine and moved toward whatever the day would bring.
KIT
The new girl who had landed in the mouth of Hell was Anne Marie, a runaway they'd picked up on the state highway. She was seventeen, running away from an abusive household — apparently more than just her father, there were two sadistic brothers, too, and an enabling mother — and she'd been without a meal for three days when a tall, thin man had asked her in an exotic accent if she could stand some food and a babysitting job.
Anne Marie wasn't foolish, but she'd grasped foolishly at the hope that finally she might have found a kind and gentle man, maybe an employer who would convert her life from miserable to valuable. Instead, she now found herself here, with two other girls who were clearly opposites in many respects even though they all seemed to be in the same predicament.
Kit thought Anne Marie was going to make herself sick stuffing the sandwiches (they'd given her two, the bastards) into her mouth and barely swallowing, her eyes hardening as if she thought the other two girls were going to make a grab for her food.
"We're chained, Anne Marie, so you're safe," said Kit. She ate her own sandwich slowly and savored it not for its taste, but for its strength-giving qualities. She wasn't worried about being drugged again, because what choice did she have?
Marissa hadn't spoken since their return from the Studio, but Kit had gotten Anne Marie to first tell them some of her story. Once breached, the dam that held back details was overwhelmed and she told them everything in a halting voice, a voice which seemed perfectly suited to storytelling. She didn't think it would matter to those monitoring the camera (if there was one), and she didn't think it would hurt Anne Marie in the long run. Without saying so, Kit tried to let Anne Marie know that she was the one to latch onto, not Marissa. But would Anne Marie get it?
Marissa stayed out of the conversation and watched — a silent gargoyle perched across the room. Radiating hate.
Kit wondered what a psychiatrist would make of this chick. Marissa was a mess, sure, but had she been like this before being kidnapped? Had she been forced to become like this? How does someone look at kidnapping and see it as some vacation getaway with rough sex thrown in for fun?
Kit shook her head and swallowed the last of her sandwich, then drank half her water. It wasn't enough to be filling, but it would have to hold off the hungries until the morning sandwich. These fuckers served sandwiches every part of the day, never mind the clock. Besides everything else, Kit was starved for an omelet from Andrea's, a favorite hang-out, and for a pizza from Lisa's, near the university.
Jesus, she could almost agree to the porn like Marissa if they'd just get her some decent food.
No, fuck that.
She'd rather die.
And, she figured, that was what would happen. But she'd take some of them with her.
Unless her uncle could find her. If anyone could, it was her Uncle Rich.
It was more than just kindness – he was almost more of a father to her than her own dear dad, except maybe for the last year or so, when she'd come to live near the university. Her Uncle Rich was something else — a tough guy with a soft heart and a touching sadness that had dimmed his bright eyes since the loss of Abby, his wife. He had a secretive, adventurous past about which she'd heard only a little. He'd done something with tunnels, in Vietnam.
Vietnam. Everything he was had something to do with Vietnam.
It was so far out of her reach as a teenager, so far in the past, and so much in the history books, that she'd never gotten a good grasp of what Americans had been doing in a place called Vietnam. It was a lot like the whole Iraq thing, out of her realm of understanding, and she was smart enough to see that both wars had become the same sort of meat grinder that took young men and turned them into monsters or killed them, or, in some cases, both. Her father had told her that Rich had become one of those monsters, but she'd never seen it. He had implied there was something wrong with Rich, something about his mind and his visions, something about what he did for the government after the war, and what he had done since. Her dear old dad had laughed at him, but she had noticed that he seemed afraid of his brother, too, as if he really was a monster.
All Kit knew was that he'd been around when her dad hadn't, he'd taken an interest in her, and now she wanted him very badly to find her. She didn't want to think of what would very likely happen to her the next day.
She shuddered. What she'd seen Marissa suffer through looked painful, no matter what Marissa thought she was doing or what acting she thought she was practicing. Not only painful. Horrifying. Demeaning. Disgusting.
Kit knew she sometimes appeared square, as her uncle would say, or naive. Or even completely innocent. Virginal. Uninterested. People thought her unschooled in the ways of the world because she didn't hang out with boys or men like Irina or some of their other friends. Actually she was student of the world. But not this world.
No, Kit knew plenty about sex — she'd only had some petting experience in grade school and the first half of high school, but since then she'd shared oral sex now and again with casual friends – none of whom were real boyfriends – who viewed it as a sort of relaxation technique. She had no real hang-up about it. Most kids she knew didn't. They just naturally gravitated to oral sex because it was not quite intercourse as they saw it, easier to engage in while still clothed, and couldn't get anyone pregnant. Until now, Kit had considered herself in control of her own sexuality.
However, she was still technically a virgin, and she didn't relish losing her virginity to Harry the Horse out there. Who wanted to be raped by these monsters, other than Marissa? And she was afraid of the pain, too, there was that. Plus, she hadn't forgotten Jill, the first girl who'd shared their room —
cell, it's a fucking cell
— and her screaming. She'd disappeared. Kit doubted they'd dropped her off at a hotel somewhere with cash in hand and told her, have a nice life, maybe we'll see you again someday.
No way, this wasn't that kind of operation.
She'd been thinking about the architecture she'd seen so far, the cells, the hallway, the high ceiling and concrete steps, and she figured it was a converted warehouse of some sort. It had to be large and soundproof, judging by the fact that Marissa's screams hadn't bothered anyone. These fuckers worked their evil with impunity and that meant she'd
be damned hard to find, unless she ended up as a corpse dumped in the lake or on some wooded lot in the middle of the state. Some place with a wood-chipper.
The thought brought her speculation to a stop and made her morose again. She should be freaking out, but somehow her composure hadn't abandoned her yet, and she wondered why. She was clearly in deep shit.
Kit forced herself to memorize what she could about everyone she'd seen. The Warner Brothers masks were of the over-the-head style and so kept her from seeing the men's features. Ears might have been helpful. But without that, she filed away descriptions such as thin, medium, tall, short, and tried to go beyond that as much as she could. The shoes they wore. Mr. Boots. Daffy wore expensive shoes. Elmer wore big blocky running shoes. She'd noted that some wore jewelry, rings and bracelets. Elmer was more effeminate than the others. She tried to figure out their hair color by looking at the hair on their arms or the chest hair that peeked above their buttoned shirts. She also focused on their smells — BO and garlic on Mr. Boots, sickeningly sweet cologne on Elmer, cheap deodorant on Daffy. Maybe, if she managed to get away, this could all be helpful.
She'd have to stay alive for that.
A picture of Uncle Rich formed in her mind.
She tried to picture herself talking to him, calling him, calling out to him. There was no answer.
Of course there wasn't any answer. Why should there be?
She couldn't help wonder what her Uncle Rich was doing.
Had he spoken to Irina yet? Had they gone to the police? What was her dad thinking? Did he even care? Of course he did, she told herself.
What's a dad who doesn't care?
A monster.
Just like what her dad thought of his own brother.
What was up with that? Why a monster? There were so many things dad could have called his brother, so many hurtful names and labels, but he'd settled on monster.
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