“Damn! They’re gone!”
“The tunnel,” said Choir.
“Where’s the entrance?” Freeman asked Mao.
Mao was silent.
“You think your buddies are trying to save you?” asked Freeman. “They’re trying to kill you, Mao. So tell me, where’s the entrance?”
Mao remained silent.
Freeman looked into the rearview mirror. “Aussie, tell Sal to bring Granny here.” The general glanced across at Mao, the waiter badly shaken by the attack. “See how much your buddies care, Mao. They wanted to kill you as much as they did us. Either way—” Freeman tapped his watch. “—you’ve got thirty seconds to show us exactly, I mean exactly, where the hidden entrance is. Otherwise I’ll shoot Granny.”
Mao was stroking his face, beaded with perspiration. He shouted, “She not my granny. She my mother.” He began to sob.
“Then,” said Freeman, eyes afire and drawing his 9mm, his face so close to Mao that their noses were all but touching, “I’ll shoot your goddamn mother!”
Brentwood had a flashback to the portrayal of Patton drawing his ivory-handled pistol, about to shoot one of his soldiers who, trembling, said he couldn’t take it anymore. Brentwood felt revulsion. First the young woman, now the older—
Mao was nodding so vigorously he looked as if he was suffering from an acute neurotic disorder. “I–I show you.”
“Get ’im out!” said Freeman.
Aussie, his adrenaline still up from the speeding firefight, hopped out the passenger door and hauled Mao after him. The fog was clearing as Mao, stumbling, barely able to walk, began dry retching.
“No, no!” said Aussie. “You throw up on your own time. Show us the friggin’ entrance.” Aussie saw Brentwood’s jaw clench tightly. What the hell had happened to David anyway? he wondered. Did he hunker down in the Humvee just because he couldn’t fire from mid-seat, or was he scared, so scared that he wouldn’t have fired if he’d had the chance? And now David was giving everyone a censorious look. Well, the trouble with Davy, Aussie concluded, was that he hadn’t seen the sea literally red with American blood, pieces of goddamn meat, heads floating about, thousands more than were killed on 9/11. So he had a big trauma in ’Ghanistan. All soldiers in combat have traumas; warriors live with it — night sweats, the screaming, recurring nightmares. But Aussie knew that he himself had no compunction about pushing Mao to his limits. The bastards had killed the young Coast Guardsman Jorges Alvaro near the falls, his body still not found, and the SEAL diver Albinski, and poor, bloody Dixon. This lot was as cold-blooded as—
“Jesus!” said the general, his blasphemy now a measure of his immediate if begrudging soldier’s admiration for the ingenuity of the tunnel’s camouflaged entrance.
“Best I’ve ever seen,” concurred Aussie.
Freeman ordered everyone back ten yards. “All right, Mao,” he said. “Go open it.”
Mao looked blankly at him.
“Work the combination safe,” added Aussie. “You know, the old booby trap.”
“C’mon,” said Freeman impatiently, all of them startled by the ringing of Choir’s phone.
“Son of a bitch!” said Aussie. “Put that friggin’ thing on vibration!”
It was Sal informing them that he should be there in “about five.”
Mao approached the camouflaged tunnel entrance, its trapdoor not horizontal, as one would expect, but vertical, a soil-impacted root end of a fallen, charred spruce. The roots’ four-by-four trapdoor had been exquisitely carpentered so that any saw marks were invisible to the naked eye.
Mao swung open the door and pointed inside the hollow tree trunk, the actual entrance to the tunnel being a second four-by-four trapdoor flush with the earth.
“You all set, David?” Freeman asked Brentwood.
As it dawned on Brentwood that the general expected him to go down into the tunnel, the cold-clammy feeling of incipient panic closed in and his head and neck felt feverishly hot.
“Didn’t think I told you to bring your sidearm for nothing, did you?” said Freeman. “Fort Lewis CO says you can take out a dime at thirty feet. And you’re lean as a stick — like these guys.” He pointed at Mao. “You know what it was like in ’Nam. Most of us’d get stuck halfway down the damn shaft, never mind the damn tunnels, which are even narrower.” Freeman turned around, asking for a 7-flashlight. Aussie took out his from his combat pack.
CHAPTER FIFTY
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.