The Tunnel Rats (44 page)

'Parachute silk,' said Bamber. 'Watch where you put your feet. According to the map they didn't check all the floor area. There could be traps.'

They walked together to the centre of the chamber. 'What is this place?' asked Wright.

'The map says it's an ammunition chamber,' said Bamber. He played his flashlight on the ceiling. It was reinforced with sheets of corrugated iron and thick steel beams that had turned brown with rust. Long-disused oil lamps hung from the beams.

Wright shivered. He was still soaking wet from the water trap. He stood close to Bamber, not wanting to get too far from the flashlight in the FBI agent's hand. The disc of light travelled along the roof and down one of the walls. It picked out a row of machines, vertical lathes and grinding equipment, covered with THE TUNNEL RATS 317 dust and cobwebs. Behind the lathes was a stack of wooden boxes. Bamber went over to them and pried off one of the lids.

'Ammunition,' said Bamber, peering into the box. 'For AK-47s by the look of it.' He replaced the lid.

He ran the flashlight along the bottom of one of the walls and picked out a tunnel. 'We go along there for about six hundred feet, through two more chambers, then we should find the way down to the fourth level.'

Wright nodded. His feelings of claustrophobia had lessened, mainly because of the sheer size of the chamber he was in. He wasn't sure how he was going to cope with the fourth level, but if he was ever to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Tunnel Rats, he had no choice but to go deeper.

Mrs Hampshire returned with a tray filled with tea things. She poured weak tea into three delicate cups, handed a cup and saucer to Hunter, then sat down on the overstuffed sofa next to her husband, almost bouncing him into the air. 'Well now, it's about May, is it?' she asked.

Gerry Hunter nodded and pulled out his notebook. 'When was the last time you saw her?' he asked.

'Nineteen eighty-six,' said Mrs Hampshire.

Hunter frowned. 'Nineteen eighty-six?' he repeated. 'That was when she graduated, wasn't it? You haven't seen her since?'

'That's right,' said Mrs Hampshire. 'She didn't even tell us that she was graduating. We weren't invited to the ceremony.'

Mrs Hampshire heaved herself up off the sofa and waddled over to a sideboard that was bedecked with bowls and vases. She bent down, opened a cupboard and took out a framed photograph. She handed it to Hunter without looking at it. It was a family group, an Oriental girl in her teens with a much younger Mr and Mrs Hampshire either side. The girl had a tight, nervous smile as if she didn't like being photographed. Mrs Hampshire was beaming proudly at the camera and Mr Hampshire was looking across at them, adoration in his eyes. Hunter stood 318 STEPHEN LEATHER up and went to look at the picture. 'When was this taken?' he asked.

'About nineteen seventy-seven, I think.'

'She's a lovely girl,' said Hunter. 'Did something happen?' he asked. 'Is there a reason you haven't kept in touch?'

'You'd have to ask her that,' said Mrs Hampshire, her voice loaded with bitterness. 'We gave her everything: we gave her a home, an education, a good start in life, and how did she thank us? We don't even get Christmas cards from her. It was a mistake, right from the beginning. I said so, but Peter insisted, said that it was a chance for us to have a family. A real family.' She glared across at her husband and he winced from the intensity of the look. 'He can't have children, you see. We've seen specialists.'

Peter Hampshire stared silently out of the window, his hurt and embarrassment making Hunter's stomach churn. Resentment and suppressed anger hung in the air like a storm about to break. Hunter could picture Peter Hampshire taking an axe to his wife one day, then sitting in court and pleading guilty with a satisfied smile on his face. 'So she's adopted?' said Hunter.

'She came to us when she was ten years old,' said Mrs Hampshire.

'From?'

'From Vietnam.'

Hunter stiffened at the mention of Vietnam. 'She was Vietnamese?'

'Didn't you know? She was an orphan. The Daily Mail helped rescue her, along with almost a hundred others. Flew them out just before the end of the war. In nineteen seventy-five. She was quite a celebrity for a while; her picture was always in the local paper.'

Hunter picked up his cup and sipped his tea, giving himself time to gather his thoughts. Mrs Hampshire put two heaped teaspoons of sugar into her tea and stirred it slowly.

'A journalist from the Mail rang us a few years ago. They were doing an article about what had happened to the orphans, twenty years on. I had to tell the girl that I didn't know where May was. I was so embarrassed, I can tell you.'

Hunter was finding it harder and harder to smile at Mrs Hampshire. He sipped his tea again. Mr Hampshire II THE TUNNEL RATS 319 was still staring at the window. Hunter wondered if he, too, was considering running away and never coming back.

'You never said why you were looking for May,' said Mrs Hampshire. She offered him a plate of custard cream biscuits but Hunter shook his head.

'There's no easy way to say this,' said Hunter. 'I'm afraid her husband was murdered several weeks ago.'

'She was married?' said Mrs Hampshire. She looked sharply across at her husband as if accusing him of keeping secrets from her. 'She didn't even tell us she'd married.' She looked back at Hunter. 'Does she have any children? Do I have grandchildren?'

'Not that I know of,' he said. 'The thing is, Mrs Hampshire, I need to talk to May and I was hoping you might have some idea where she'd be.'

Mrs Hampshire shrugged her large shoulders. 'Now you know different,' she said. She took Hunter's empty cup and put it on the tray with the rest of the tea things. 'She got what she wanted from us and then she made a life of her own. You know what I feel like, Mr Hunter? I feel like I had a .cuckoo in my nest. I fed her, nurtured her as if she was my own daughter, but all the time she was just using me, waiting for the opportunity to take wing.' She stood up and dusted her flower-print dress with her hands. 'She was the biggest mistake of my life,' she said, her voice trembling.

She picked up the tray and left the room. Hunter could tell that she was close to tears.

The three Americans stood in the antechamber, breathing heavily. Doc stood at the threshold, Ramirez and Hammack at either shoulder. They played their flashlights around the main chamber, their beams reflecting off the shiny silk lining that covered the walls. Ramirez took off his headscarf and used it to wipe his face.

The room was about thirty feet square and just over ten feet high. At the far end was a wooden desk which had once been 320 STEPHEN LEATHER painted brown but which was now rotting and peppered with white fungus. An oil lamp stood on one end of the desk.

'I remember it being bigger,' said Hammack, his voice a hoarse whisper.

'This is definitely it,' said Doc. He aimed the beam of his flashlight at the far corner of the room.

'I know,' said Hammack. 'I know this is it.'

'Come on, let's get on with it,' said Ramirez. 'The air's bad down here.'

Doc stepped into the main chamber. He walked slowly across the reed mats. There were rusty-coloured patches all over the floor. Old bloodstains. Doc tried to avoid stepping on them, like a child jumping over the cracks between paving stones. There was a rhyme that went with avoiding the cracks, something that Doc had sung as a child, but he couldn't remember the words. Something about breaking a grandmother's back. Hammack and Ramirez followed him into the chamber.

Doc jumped at the sound of water splashing and whirled around, his hand groping for the knife in his belt. Ramirez was holding his water canteen above his head and dousing himself. He grinned sheepishly at Doc.

Doc turned his back on Ramirez and pulled the reed mats away from the corner. He threw them to the side, then took off his rucksack. Ramirez and Hammack stood just inside the entrance as if trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what was buried in the chamber. Doc took the folding shovel from his rucksack and straightened it out. He took a deep breath, then began to hack away at the earth, the blows echoing around the chamber like the crunching of a giant's footsteps.

Wright's arms and legs were shaking uncontrollably and he closed his eyes and imagined he was outside, above ground, forcing out the images of being buried alive and replacing them with pictures of Sean: Sean at the zoo, Sean playing football, Sean falling asleep in front of the television. He opened his eyes. The walls and THE TUNNEL RATS 321 floor of the tunnels were damp and in places pieces of wet clay had fallen from the roof. The tunnel they were in had dipped down and he figured they must be close to the water table. He wondered what would happen if it began to rain, whether the water would rise. He dismissed the idea. The Viet Cong would never have constructed the tunnels so that they'd flood every rainy season.

Bamber was crawling purposefully forward and Wright had to struggle to keep up. The back of Bamber's shirt was caked with wet mud from where the FBI agent had scraped against the tunnel roof. The tunnel forked and Bamber headed down the left-hand section.

'Where does the other one go?' asked Wright, peering into the darkness. The air smelled fresher in the right-hand tunnel.

'The map doesn't say,' said Bamber. 'We'd better keep clear of any areas that aren't mapped.'

'How much further?'

'Fifteen minutes.'

'Feels like the tunnel's getting narrower.'

Bamber chuckled. 'Optical illusion,' he said. A piece of wet clay fell on to Wright's hair and rolled down his neck. He shivered. Every breath was an effort, as if the fetid air had to be pulled into his lungs. He wondered what it would be like to be buried alive, to have the soil force its way into his mouth and nose, to have the dirt pressed against his face, his eyes, to feel nothing but earth around him. How long would it take to die? he wondered. More than seconds, surely. Minutes, at least. It would depend on how much air was trapped with him. He wondered how he'd face death, whether he'd just lie down and accept it, or if he'd die screaming and futilely trying to claw his way out.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on his movements, keeping his crawl at a steady rhythm. There were tons and tons of earth above his head, but Wright tried not to think about it. A tunnel was a tunnel, he told himself, it didn't matter how deep it was. ^He tried to convince himself that the tunnel he was in was just below the surface, that if anything went wrong he could just force his way up through a few inches of topsoil and be able to breathe clean, fresh air. He knew it was a lie, but it helped to calm his V 322 STEPHEN LEATHER nerves. He realised that he was panting and he struggled to slow down his breathing.

'Nick!'

Wright opened his eyes. Bamber had stopped a few feet ahead of him. 'What?'

'Don't move.' Bamber's voice was icily cold.

Wright stopped in his tracks.

'There's a snake here.'

'Can you kill it?' asked Wright.

'It's about four feet long,' said the FBI agent, 'and all I've got is my flashlight. There's a knife in my knapsack, but I don't want to risk reaching for it.'

'What's it doing?'

'It's coiled up in the middle of the tunnel. I think it's asleep. Get my knife out, will you?'

Wright swallowed.

'I'm going to switch the flashlight off in case the light disturbs it.'

'No!' said Wright hurriedly.

The tunnel was plunged into darkness. Wright became suddenly disorientated and his head swam. He felt as if he was falling and he put both hands flat on the tunnel floor, wanting to feel something solid on his skin. He inched forward.

'Come on, Nick. Hurry up. I can hear it moving.'

'Switch the flashlight on,' said Wright.

'Not yet,' said Bamber.

'I thought snakes couldn't see well, anyway. I thought they used their tongues to sense air movements.'

'If you were in front, I'd probably take the risk, but as I'm here, I think I'll stick with the flashlight off. Now get a move on, will you?'

Wright bumped into Bamber's feet. He felt his way up the FBI agent's back and ran his hands over the knapsack. Wright undid the flap and groped inside. It was like a party game he'd played as a child, touching objects under a cloth and trying to recognise them from their shape. He could feel the infra-red goggles, and hard metal cylinders that he assumed were batteries, and the two bottles of water. His fingers touched something plastic, long THE TUNNEL RATS 323 and thin, with a metal edge. He held it in his palm. It was a Swiss Army knife, he realised. Every Boy Scout's best friend. He pulled it out.

He fumbled with the knife, trying to pry out a blade with his thumbnail. 'Turn the light on, Jim,' he said.

'Have you got the knife?'

'Yeah, but I can't open it, I can't see what I'm doing.'

The light flickered on. Wright looked at the knife in his hand. He'd been trying to pull out a nail file.

'Nick. It's moving.'

The knife slipped from Wright's fingers and he cursed.

'Now what?' hissed Bamber.

'I've dropped it.' The knife was covered with red mud, and so were Wright's hands. He picked up the knife but couldn't get a grip on the blade. 'Where's the snake?' he whispered.

Bamber didn't reply.

'Jim? The snake. Where is it?'

The FBI agent had stiffened. As Wright looked up, he saw why. Two glass-hard eyes were staring at him from a diamond-shaped head. The snake had pushed itself between Bamber's legs and was heading purposefully down the tunnel towards Wright. A shiny black forked tongue flicked out as the snake slid forward.

'Can you see it?' whispered Bamber.

The snake stared at Wright, inches away from his face. The tongue flicked out again. Wright was on his knees, the unopened knife in his hands. His centre of gravity was so far forward that he couldn't shuffle back.

The snake began to move its head from side to side, its eyes still fixed on Wright. He managed to get his thumbnail into the groove on the side of the main blade and he eased it out. The snake stopped moving.