David Brentwood felt all eyes on him, even Mao’s.
“In ’Nam,” Freeman told David quickly, “guys tried to take regular weapons down tunnels. Couldn’t move. Only thing that’d work was this.” He tossed Brentwood the 7-shaped flashlight. “Best shape for tunnel rats. That and a sidearm. It’s the only way.” Brentwood still hadn’t moved. Freeman walked closer to him. It was as if they were in a confessional. “There’s another goddamned sub on the coast, David. We could use a whole division like we did in ’Nam to search and destroy and we still wouldn’t find the damn hiding place. Only way to find it there — in ’Nam — and now here is to go down the tunnel. See where it leads. I’ll call in airborne cav once we find the hideaway.”
But it was Mao, not the general, who would change Brentwood’s mind. The waiter, no longer shaking now that he’d given in, sneered at Brentwood, possibly in an effort to regain some dignity from his own capitulation to the general. The sneer was an unmistakable accusation of cowardice.
Brentwood slid the flashlight switch on and looked at the bulb, its light difficult to see in the flood of sunlight that, after the dreary world of fog, had revealed the Northwest wilderness in all its glory. He glanced up at the mountaintops, the sun so bright it hurt his eyes, the enormous rain-washed green apron that swept down to the coast one of such striking primeval beauty that he knew — if he survived — he would never forget it. And the smell rising from the moss — no longer that of bone-cold damp, but of reinvigorated life. He hated to leave it.
Aussie crawled into the darkness within the partially hollowed tree and, edging his way past the trapdoor that was flush with the earth — no booby trap — waited till David had descended into the shoulder-high shaft. Then he handed him the sonar location beeper, the flashlight, infrared goggles, canteen, knife, and David’s short-barreled Heckler & Koch 9mm self-loading Compact, its control lever easily switchable from left to right for left-handed shooters. “Good luck, mate!” Aussie said softly.
As David moved farther into the tunnel, not even the IR goggles helped. The only things he could see were the tiny wriggles of mice chewing at the base of what appeared to be a crude candle holder set into the tunnel wall, the walls and ceiling in the rain-soaked terrain supported by five-foot-high, four-by-four wooden joists, the rodents and residual warmth from the extinguished candle in the holder emitting just enough heat to be detected by the IR goggles. But beyond this, the tunnel was a black, disorientating unknown.
The air was foul and damp, his back only inches from the N-shaped tunnel. He could hear his heart banging against his chest, as he had in the Afghan cave, so loud that his fear, locked in battle with reason, was convincing him that anyone else in the Stygian darkness ahead must have heard him move in and was lying in wait. And to his train of fear, other terrors quickly attached themselves: the veterans’ stories of how the Viet Cong had booby- trapped the tunnels with pits of razor-sharp punji sticks hidden by thin, dirt-covered membranes of stretched cloth, and how captured U.S. claymore mines had been rigged in the tunnels’ side walls with invisible fish-line trip wires only a few centimeters above the floor. He was struggling to find a hope that he might get out alive.
Trying to make himself concentrate on how to get through, he recalled that a GI had gone down a tunnel, smelled another man coming toward him in the dark, and, rather than fire, had lain flat, “damn near melting into the earth,” his buddies had said. The VC had fired first, emptying an AK-47’s full thirty-round mag, its rounds whipping over the GI, no more than twenty feet away. The GI survived without a scratch, firing just once at the Kalashnikov’s flash, killing the VC. And he remembered how the tunnel rats who had survived said it had taken hours of painstaking work, probing gently every inch ahead with your knife for the little Russian-made “butterfly” mines that would blow your hand or foot off. And the kind of unbelievable pain in neck and elbows as you crawled ahead, the pain David Brentwood was starting to feel now. To reach the coast, where Freeman said the cave was, would take hours, and if the tunnel snaked, had security “double back” loops and sucker dead-end tributaries, it would take an eternity.
But then in the pitch-blackness of the stinking tunnel, David accepted the possibility that if Freeman was right that there was another sub, this tunnel might not be part of an underground complex like Cu Chi, which had held hundreds of fighters, living and working underground, with medical and kitchen antechambers, as well as weapons and ammunition storage. The man they called Mao didn’t live in the tunnel, after all. He lived in Port Angeles and used the tunnel solely as an underground supply road to the cave, an underground throughway to prevent their sub resupply line from being spotted by the infrared-equipped American satellites and UAVs such as Darkstar. The munitions, torpedoes, and mines could be stored deep in the cave, but food — even the American and Russian nuclear subs needed food supply — had been routinely transported in by Mao and his friends. And what better cover than a restaurant?
Had Freeman thought of this? he wondered. That if this was a supply tunnel, wouldn’t it be as straight as possible to the coast? And why bother booby-trapping it? The terrorists had dug the tunnel not as they had in Vietnam, as a conduit from which to attack American ground troops, but merely as a supply line. And why impede an escape route from the cave with dangerous booby traps?
The rushing of blood in David’s ears didn’t go away, but it subsided. He switched on the flashlight, and in that instant knew he was right.
Ahead, instead of narrowing, the tunnel widened to twice its width for about thirty feet, then dipped down and broadened into what seemed a holding area, about as big and high as a good-size delivery van. The dimensions of the excavation at once impressed and told him that in order to get rid of the dirt — always the tunneler’s big problem — the terrorists must have started digging from the sea cave, so they could pass the massive amounts of soil back and dump it into the ocean. That way, if seen from the air, it would have been attributable to the runoff of the 112-inches-a-year rainfall.
By the time David reached the “holding area,” his confidence was growing, and he sped up his pursuit of the escaping terrorists who Freeman hoped would lead them — via David’s sonar beeper — to a second lair.
Beyond the holding area, using his flashlight in quick on/off snatches, he saw flattened cardboard. The labeling in Japanese and Chinese told him nothing, but the manufacturers’ stamps, with their illustrated pictures of contents, indicated that the boxes had contained dried noodles, rice, and other such foodstuffs. He sat down, getting his breathing under control. He was so dehydrated from the strain, his initial freeze-up at the entrance to the tunnel, and the constant bent-over position required to negotiate the five-foot-high tunnel, that he wanted to gulp down all the water in his canteen. But warning himself not to drink too much, he rescrewed the cap and slid the canteen around his belt behind his back. Then he resumed his trek, walking slowly, moving his flashlight from side to side in rapid sweeps.
In fifteen minutes he had passed through what he estimated must have been a quarter mile of tunnel. This wasn’t a tunnel rat’s crawl, he thought, this was Nascar. He checked his beeper. It was working fine. He couldn’t stand up and his back was aching, but, his “dead” right hand notwithstanding, he was in reasonably good physical condition and anticipated that he would soon reach the cave or the branch-off that had to exist if Freeman’s theory of a second sub lair had any substance.
He heard a sound like a spit and the flashlight flew from his hand, flung somewhere behind him. He dropped to the floor and, through the IR glasses, saw a smudge of white — heat — in the tunnel, probably twenty feet away, and double tapped his compact’s trigger, the two rounds striking a human form that collapsed into an indistinguishable shape. He could hear someone moving, running, away. And then he was running too, the hunchbacked position slowing him more than he would have believed, the human diaphragm not built to sustain a sprinter long in such an unnatural position, the man fleeing from him obviously much shorter. Passing the stilled body, he saw it was a woman, her face no longer there. Two hundred feet farther he had to stop.
Sweat pouring off him, Choir Williams prodded Mao with the barrel of his HK, he, Freeman, and Aussie wearing full battle packs, not knowing what they might need if there was another sub lair, or what Freeman had begun calling a “branch plant” of the terrorists. They were close to the coast.
Aussie Lewis could hear the surf ahead. “We must be damn near the cave!” he said, looking over at Freeman.
The general heard him but refused to comment. Instead, he beckoned Mao with a gesture. “You led me on a wild goose chase, comrade,” he said. “This tunnel’s leading to the cave we already found. I told you what I’d do to Mommy, eh? Didn’t I?”
“I only know the cave tunnel,” said Mao. “We bring — we brought food to the cave. That is all. I swear. You kill my mother — you kill me — I can tell you no more. I only know this tunnel.”
Freeman believed him, and saw that Choir, red-faced with exertion, also believed him. He thrust his gloved finger hard in the direction of a thick treeline that Aussie felt certain marked the high cliff’s edge. “There’s a—” he began, and had to stop for breath, which made him more irritated. “—a goddamn sub nearby. I know it.”
