The Rat Six: A Vietnam Tunnel Novel

• Chapter 1 Fresh Meat at Cu Chi
• Chapter 2 The Call of the Hole
• Chapter 3 Into the Dark
• Chapter 4 Caliber and Flashlight
• Chapter 5 Whispers in the Clay
• Chapter 6 The Tripwire Instinct
• Chapter 7 Confined Spaces
• Chapter 8 Blood on the Bamboo
• Chapter 9 The Trapdoor
• Chapter 10 Below the Iron Triangle
• Chapter 11 Scorpions and Smoke
• Chapter 12 Ghost in the Shaft
• Chapter 13 Surface Air
• Chapter 14 The Mapmaker's Ledger
• Chapter 15 A Knife in the Narrow
• Chapter 16 The Flooded Sump
• Chapter 17 Blind Faith
• Chapter 18 Echoes of the Guerrilla
• Chapter 19 Cave-In
• Chapter 20 Cold Sweat and Cordite
• Chapter 21 The Underground Hospital
• Chapter 22 Devil's Labyrinth
• Chapter 23 The Final Descent
• Chapter 24 Point-Blank
• Chapter 25 Breaking Daylight
• Chapter 26 The Weight of the Earth

The air that hit Corporal Tommy Phillips when the door of the C-130 kicked open was not air in any sense he had previously understood. It was hot, wet, and smelled intensely of scorched earth, diesel exhaust, and human excrement burning in half-cut oil drums. It settled over his face like a wet Woolworths blanket left out in an August thunderstorm.

"Get 'em off! Move it, move it, move it!" a sergeant shouted over the deafening whine of the turboprops.

Tommy swung his canvas duffel bag over his shoulder and stumbled down the metal ramp onto the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut. The sun beat down on the concrete with a white-hot intensity that made his eyes water despite his dark olive-drab cap. He was nineteen years old, five feet and five inches tall, and weighed barely a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet in his combat boots. Back in Columbus, Ohio, his size had made him an afterthought on the high school football field, relegated to holding the clipboard or running the scout team. Here in Vietnam, within forty-eight hours of stepping off the plane, that modest frame was about to become the single most valuable thing he owned.

They piled into the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck, two dozen replacements with clean jungle fatigues, starch still stiff in the collars, staring at one another with a mixture of boredom and quiet terror. The truck bounced out through the main gates, joining a chaotic stream of military jeeps, civilian mopeds, and ox-drawn carts clogging the red-dirt road heading northwest toward Hau Nghia Province.

"Where we headin'?" asked a tall kid from Pennsylvania named Miller, whose pale skin was already turning a bright lobster red under the tropical sun.

"Cu Chi," said the driver, a weary specialist four who didn't bother turning his head as he chewed on a dead cigar stub. "Base camp of the 25th Infantry Division. Tropic Lightning, boys. Welcome to the electric strawberry."

"Is it rough?" Miller asked.

The driver let out a dry, barking laugh that was swallowed by the roar of the engine. "Rough? Nah. It’s paradise. Just don't walk around at night, don't touch anything leaning against a rubber tree, and if you hear a pop, hit the dirt before your brain processes the sound."

Tommy sat with his hands clamped between his knees, watching the countryside slide by. The lush green foliage of the Mekong Delta gave way to vast expanses of scrub oak, bamboo thickets, and vast plantations of rubber trees standing in neat, endless rows. The soil was different here. It wasn't the dark, rich loam of the Midwest; it was a bright, rust-colored clay, iron-rich and caked onto everything that touched it. It powdered the leaves of the vegetation, coated the tires of the truck, and stained the hems of Tommy’s clean trousers within twenty minutes of riding.

The base camp at Cu Chi came into view an hour later. It was a sprawling tent city encased in miles of concertina wire, watchtowers, and sandbagged bunkers. To a casual observer, it looked like an impregnable fortress of American industrial might. Heavy artillery pieces lined the firing pits, their long barrels pointed out toward the surrounding wilderness. Helicopters—slender Cobras and fat, bellied Hueys—clattered overhead in continuous, deafening swarms. Heavy earthmovers were tearing up the ground, leveling the red soil to build staging areas and supply depots.

The truck ground to a halt near the replacement center, a row of long, corrugated-tin hootches baking under the midday sun.

"Alright, ladies! Out! Let's go!" a sergeant first class barked, stepping up to the tailgate. He wore a faded, sweat-stained slouch hat and had a silver star pinned alongside his combat infantryman badge. His name tag read HARRIS. "Line up by height! Luggage at your feet!"

Tommy dropped his duffel bag and stood at attention in the back row, his head barely reaching the shoulders of the farm boys flanking him. Sergeant Harris walked down the line, clutching a clipboard, his eyes scanning the faces of the new arrivals with the unfeeling precision of a butcher inspecting a side of beef.

"Look at you," Harris grunted, stopping in front of a heavy-set recruit from Texas. "They're sending me kids who look like they haven't missed a Sunday dinner in their entire lives. The Viet Cong are going to eat you alive and use your bones for toothpicks."

He continued down the row, pausing when he reached Tommy. Harris stopped, leaned down slightly, and peered into Tommy's eyes.

"What's your name, short round?"

"Phillips, Sergeant. Thomas Phillips."

"How tall are you, Phillips?"

"Five-five, Sergeant. On a good day."

Harris squinted, looking at Tommy’s narrow shoulders and small hands. "Where are you from?"

"Ohio, Sergeant."

"You play any sports back in Ohio?"

"Wrestling, Sergeant. Ninety-eight-pound weight class in middle school, hundred and twelve in high school."

Harris nodded slowly, a dark, unreadable expression passing over his weathered face. It wasn't pity, and it wasn't humor. It was the look a handyman gives a specialized tool he didn't expect to find in his toolbox.

"Wrestling," Harris repeated. "So you know how to move in tight spots. You don't get claustrophobic, do you?"

"No, Sergeant. I used to hunt raccoons in the drainpipes under Route 40."

Harris let out a low chuckle that sounded like grinding gravel. "Is that right? Well, Phillips, you might just be the luckiest man in this whole damn division. Or the unluckiest. We'll find out soon enough. Grab your kit and follow me."

"What about the rest of us, Sergeant?" Miller asked from down the line.

"The rest of you report to the clerk in Hootch Three for assignment to the line companies," Harris shouted over his shoulder, already walking away. "Phillips, move your ass!"

Tommy hoisted his bag and hurried after the sergeant, his boots crunching on the sun-baked red dirt. They walked past rows of living quarters, mess halls, and motor pools. Despite the superficial order of an American military base, there was an undercurrent of strangeness Tommy couldn't quite place. Soldiers moved with an odd, hyper-alert tension. Every few hundred yards, men were digging—putting down sandbags, reinforcing bunkers, or staring intensely at small depressions in the earth.

"Sergeant?" Tommy asked, jogging slightly to keep pace with Harris's long strides. "Where are we going?"

"First Engineer Battalion," Harris replied without looking back. "Company B."

"I'm infantry, Sergeant. MOS 11-B Bravo."

"You were infantry twenty minutes ago," Harris said, swinging around the corner of a motor pool shed. "Now you're special duty. The division commander issued an order three weeks ago. Every regiment needs men who can fit into places the rest of these big corn-fed boys can't."

They stopped in front of a wooden orderly room built on stilts. A faded wooden sign hung above the door, painted with a crude emblem of a rat holding a flashlight and a .45 automatic pistol. Below it were the words: THE RAT HOLE - 25TH DIVISION TUNNEL EXPLORATION UNIT.

"Wait here," Harris commanded, opening the screen door and stepping inside.

Tommy stood on the wooden catwalk outside, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. The heat was relentless, pulsing off the corrugated iron roofs of the surrounding buildings. A hundred yards away, an artillery battery fired a three-gun salvo—BOOM-BOOM-BOOM—that rattled the teeth in his skull and made his stomach drop. None of the men walking past even flinched. They just kept trudging through the red dust, heads down, cigarettes dangling from their lips.

A moment later, the screen door slapped shut and a man stepped out onto the porch. He was a lieutenant, young, perhaps twenty-four, but his eyes were sunken and shadowed by deep black circles. He was thin, almost gaunt, wearing a dirt-smudged olive fatigue shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, revealing lean, sinewy arms covered in small red scratches.

He looked Tommy up and down, his gaze stopping at Tommy’s boots, then moving slowly up to his face.

"Corporal Thomas Phillips?" the lieutenant asked. His voice was soft, devoid of the bark Tommy had grown accustomed to in basic training.

"Yes, sir." Tommy snapped a crisp salute.

The lieutenant didn't return it immediately. He just looked at Tommy's hand, then lowered his own eyes to the wooden planks beneath them. "Drop the salute, Corporal. We don't do that much around here unless you want some sniper across the perimeter to know who to shoot first. I'm Lieutenant MacLean."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

MacLean stepped down from the porch and walked around Tommy, inspecting him like a horse trader at a county fair. He tapped Tommy's ribcage gently with the back of his fingers.

"Ribs are narrow. Shoulders aren't too broad. Can you crawl on your belly for fifty yards without breathing through your nose?"

"I... I guess so, sir."

"You'll need to know so, not guess," MacLean said dryly. "Come inside."

The inside of the hootch was cool compared to the stifling heat outside, though it smelled strongly of damp earth, gun oil, and stale coffee. Maps were pinned to the plywood walls—topographical surveys of the Cu Chi district crisscrossed with red grease-pencil lines. On a long wooden table in the center of the room sat an array of non-standard gear: short-barreled .38 caliber revolvers, heavy brass flashlights taped with black electrical tape, ball-peen hammers, bayonets, and coils of thin nylon commo wire.

"Sit down, Phillips," MacLean said, tossing his slouch hat onto the table and sinking into a folding metal chair.

Tommy sat down on the edge of a wooden crate marked EXPLOSIVES - DANGER.

"What did they tell you about Cu Chi back at Fort Benning?" MacLean asked, pouring himself a cup of black coffee from a sweating tin pot.

"Not much, sir. Just that it was near Saigon, and that the 25th was setting up the main base camp here."

MacLean let out a soft, mirthless laugh. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, shook one out, and lit it with a brass Zippo. He blew a plume of blue smoke toward the rafters before speaking.

"They didn't tell you because they don't know," MacLean said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. "We built this base camp six months ago. We cleared the rubber trees, plowed the ground, put up the wire, and brought in twenty thousand men. We thought we controlled the ground."

He pointed a nicotine-stained finger toward the floorboards beneath their feet.

"We don't control shit, Phillips. The Viet Cong have been digging under this district for twenty years. They started against the French, and they just kept going. Right now, as we sit here talking, there is an entire enemy division living underneath us."

Tommy blinked, processing the words. "Underneath the base camp, sir?"

"Directly underneath," MacLean said flatly. "They have barracks down there. They have hospitals, command posts, weapons caches, kitchens, and supply depots. They come up at night through trapdoors hidden inside our own perimeter, steal our food, shoot our sentries, take our ammunition, and disappear back into the dirt before the flares go out."

He reached into his drawer and pulled out a piece of dark, dried clay the size of a grapefruit. He tossed it across the table to Tommy, who caught it automatically. It was surprisingly heavy, dense as concrete, and crisscrossed with tiny fibrous root lines.

"That's Cu Chi clay," MacLean said. "In the wet season, it turns into sticky glue. In the dry season, like now, it bakes into natural ironwork. You can fire a fifty-caliber round into it and it barely chips. The VC dig through it with small hand hoes, pack the walls smooth, and let the sun and air cure it. It doesn't collapse easily, and it swallows sound."

Tommy held the chunk of earth, feeling its rough, cold texture. "And what do we do about it, sir?"

"Up until now, we tried blowing the holes from the surface," MacLean said, taking another drag of his cigarette. "We'd find an entrance, throw in a couple of grenades, dump in some tear gas, or pump in diesel fuel and light it up. You know what happens?"

"No, sir."

"Nothing," MacLean said. "The tunnels aren't straight pipes. They're built with sharp ninety-degree turns, trapdoors, water traps, and multiple levels. A grenade blasts five feet of tunnel and the pressure wave stops at the first turn. The gas gets trapped in the upper levels while they sit three feet lower in a chamber eating rice and listening to us celebrate. An hour later, they crawl back up and shoot the sergeant who ordered the demolition."

MacLean leaned back, his eyes narrowing as he looked straight into Tommy's face.

"The generals finally figured it out. You can't destroy what you can't see, and you can't see it from a helicopter or a tank. The only way to clear a tunnel is to send a man down inside it with a gun and a light to map it, clear it, and plant the charges from the inside."

The room went quiet, save for the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a generator humming outside.

"That's where you come in, Tommy," MacLean said quietly. "We call ourselves the Rat Six unit. Officially, we're attached to the 65th Engineer Battalion. Unofficially, we're the guys small enough to crawl into the dark when everyone else is too big or too terrified to try."

Tommy felt a cold knot tighten in the pit of his stomach. He looked down at his boots, red with the dust of the surface earth he had stepped on less than an hour ago.

"Is it just us, sir?"

"There are six of us in the unit right now," MacLean replied. "We lost two last week near the Filhol Plantation. One hit a tripwire connected to a rusted French grenade. The other... well, the other got stuck in a narrow choke point and an NVA soldier met him coming from the opposite direction."

MacLean stood up and walked over to the table loaded with equipment. He picked up a small flashlight—a standard-issue two-cell brass unit—and tossed it to Tommy. Tommy caught it in his left hand.

"That's your primary light," MacLean said. "Never turn it on unless you have to. A light in a dark tunnel is just a bullseye for a man sitting at the end of the corridor with an SKS rifle. You learn to feel your way. You use your hands to probe for wire, for stakes, for drop-offs, and for scorpions."

Next, MacLean picked up a Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver with a four-inch barrel and set it on the wood in front of Tommy.

"Why a revolver, sir?" Tommy asked, staring at the blued steel weapon. "Doesn't the Army use the .45?"

"Fire a forty-five inside a wooden tube eighteen inches wide and see what happens to your ears," MacLean said grimly. "The muzzle blast in a confined space will blow your ear drums out instantly. You'll be deaf, disoriented, and bleeding from your nose. The thirty-eight is bad enough, but it's manageable. And it doesn't jam if dirt gets into the slide like the automatic does."

Tommy reached out and picked up the revolver. It was heavy, reassuringly cold, and smelled of heavy gun grease. He broke open the cylinder; it was empty, the six chambers gaping like hollow eyes.

"You're not going down today," MacLean said, watching him handle the weapon. "You'll spend the next three days learning the gear, learning the signs of a trap, and getting used to being squeezed into spaces that would make a sane man scream. Sergeant Harris will take you out to the training trench behind the perimeter this afternoon."

"Yes, sir," Tommy said, closing the cylinder with a sharp click.

"One more thing, Phillips," MacLean added, his tone sharpening slightly.

"Sir?"

"Down there, there are no rank badges. There are no salutes, no officer-enlisted bullshit, and no artillery support. You can't call in an airstrike when you're twenty feet under the clay. It's just you, your light, and whatever is waiting around the next turn. If you freeze, you die. If you panic, you get the guy behind you killed. If you feel like you can't handle the dark, tell me right now. I'll send you back to the infantry line companies, and you can take your chances with the landmines and the ambushes in the open jungle."

Tommy looked at the revolver in his hands, then at the bright red clay stuck to his boots, and finally into the hollow, shadowed eyes of the lieutenant. He remembered the cramped, pitch-black storm drains under Route 40 back home, where he used to crawl into the dark with a pocketknife and a flashlight while his friends waited safely on the road above, too scared to follow him into the drain.

He set the gun down on the table, met MacLean's gaze, and spoke in a steady, flat voice.

"When do we start, sir?"

MacLean stared at him for a long moment. A tiny, almost imperceptible trace of a smile flickered at the corner of the lieutenant's mouth before disappearing back into his worn, lined face.

"Grab your canteen, Corporal," MacLean said, turning back toward his desk. "Harris is waiting in the dirt."

The training trench lay two hundred yards behind the southern perimeter wire of the base camp, tucked away in a dusty hollow where the air smelled permanently of diesel soot and dried brush. It was a crude, man-made imitation of the real thing, dug into the stubborn red earth by combat engineers who had taken obvious pleasure in making it as miserable as possible.

Sergeant Harris stood on the rim of the excavation, a wooden broom handle resting across his thick shoulders like a yoke. He wore no shirt, revealing a torso crossed with faded white scars and skin tanned to the color of an old boot. When Tommy arrived, sweating through his fresh fatigues and clutching his canteen, Harris didn't say a word. He simply gestured with the broom handle toward a narrow black square cut straight down into the dirt at his feet.

"That's a tunnel mouth, Phillips," Harris said, his voice flat and gritty. "Standard Viet Cong entry hole. It’s fourteen inches wide by sixteen inches tall. If you're wearing a cartridge belt, you won't fit. If your canteens are on your hips, you won't fit. If you take a full breath of air while your shoulders are passing through the frame, you'll get stuck, panic, and die like an oversized rat in a drainpipe."

Tommy knelt beside the opening. Up close, the red clay looked dry and flaky on the surface, but a few inches down it turned dark, slick, and cold. The hole dropped vertically for three feet before disappearing into a horizontal crawlspace that swallowed the afternoon sunlight instantly. A faint, cool draft puffed up out of the darkness, smelling faintly of old root systems and turned soil.

"You want me to go down there now, Sergeant?" Tommy asked, swallowing hard.

"I want you to get down on your belly, arms stretched out straight over your head like you're diving into a swimming pool," Harris instructed, stepping closer. "Hold your revolver in your right hand. Keep the flashlight in your left, but don't turn it on. If you turn that light on before your feet clear the rim, I'm going to kick a sandbag down on your head."

Tommy unbuttoned his fatigue shirt, stripped it off, and dropped it into the dust, following Harris's earlier observation about bulk. He stripped off his undershirt too, leaving his bare chest exposed to the sharp, gritty soil. The air felt hot on his skin, but as he lowered his upper body toward the mouth of the hole, the temperature dropped five degrees instantly.

He extended his arms into the opening. The clay walls were tight—so tight that his collarbones scraped the damp earth on either side. He exhaled slowly, flattening his chest against his spine, and let gravity pull his shoulders past the narrow wooden frame that reinforced the collar of the hole.

"Legs straight," Harris yelled down from the sky above. "Don't bend your knees! If you bend your knees, your boots catch on the frame and you're locked in place. Pull with your elbows and push with your toes!"

Tommy slid into the dark. The transition from the blinding white heat of the Vietnamese sun to the pitch-black cool of the earth was abrupt and total. For a second, his mind revolted. The weight of the world seemed to press down directly on the small of his back, squeezing the air from his lungs in a sudden, icy surge of panic. His heart hammered against his ribs, the sound booming in his ears like an engine running out of oil.

Think about the drainpipes under Route 40, he told himself, closing his eyes against the absolute blackness. It's just dirt. It's just a hole in the ground. You used to do this for fun.

He paused, resting his cheek on the cool, damp floor of the tunnel. The clay was surprisingly smooth, packed dense by wooden trowels and hundreds of creeping knees. He forced himself to take three long, slow breaths through his nose, feeling the panic recede like an ebbing tide.

"Phillips!" Harris's voice echoed down the vertical shaft behind him, sounding muffled and strange, as if muffled by heavy velvet. "You dead yet?"

"No, Sergeant!" Tommy called back, surprised by how thin and reedy his voice sounded in the confined space.

"Then keep crawling! There's thirty yards of lateral tunnel ahead of you. It makes a right-angle turn fifteen feet in. When you hit the turn, search the corner with your fingers before you move your head around it. If you feel a wire thin as a guitar string, don't pull it."

Tommy began to pull himself forward, inch by agonizing inch. He dragged his pelvis through the dirt, his elbows digging into the clay floor while his toes kicked uselessly against the air behind him. The atmosphere inside the tunnel was thick, heavy with humidity, and tasted like metal and copper. Every time he dragged his body forward, his shoulders brushed against the sides of the shaft, dislodging fine, powdery earth that rained down on the back of his neck and crept into his hair.

He reached the first turn. The wall stopped abruptly, forcing him to slide his right shoulder into a hollow alcove while his hips remained trapped in the straight shaft. He reached out with his left hand, the heavy brass flashlight cold in his fingers, and gently pattered his fingertips across the dirt floor of the turn.

His skin brushed against something smooth and metallic.

Tommy froze. His breath hitched in his throat. He remained motionless for five long seconds, his chest pressed flat against the clay, feeling the quiet thrum of his own pulse. Carefully, using only the tips of his middle two fingers, he traced the object. It was a wire—a thin, taut strand of steel stretched three inches above the dirt floor, tied to a wooden stake jammed into the corner wall.

"Found a wire, Sergeant," Tommy shouted back into the dark.

"What kind?" Harris called out from the distant daylight.

"Feels like commo wire. Stretched tight across the floor."

"Good boy," Harris said, his voice carrying a rare trace of approval. "Now find the charge. Follow the wire with your fingers, but don't put any tension on it. If it's a pull-friction primer, two ounces of pressure will blow your face into the ceiling."

Tommy slid his index finger along the slick plastic coating of the wire, moving back toward the inner wall. His hand found a small, heavy wooden box tucked into a hollow cut into the clay. It felt roughly the size of a brick, with a metallic lever protruding from the side.

"It's a box, Sergeant. Wooden. Lever on the side."

"Booby-trapped grenade assembly," Harris called down. "Simulated, of course. If this was a real tunnel, that box would be packed with five pounds of shredded mortar shell and scrap iron, wired to a French trip flare. You touch that lever the wrong way, and you're sausage meat. What are you going to do about it?"

Tommy stared into the blackness, his head resting against the dirt wall. He thought about the gear MacLean had shown him in the orderly room.

"Bypass it?" Tommy called out.

"Wrong," Harris barked back. "You don't bypass a charge in a narrow turn unless you want the man crawling behind you to set it off when his knee hits the string. You mark it, or you neutralize it. Reach into your back pocket. There should be a wooden safety pin back there."

Tommy reached down with his right hand, straining his arm backward until his fingers found the rear pocket of his trousers. He felt a smooth, carved piece of bamboo shaped like a oversized toothpick. Slowly, working entirely by touch in the absolute dark, he brought the pin forward to the box.

His fingers trembled slightly. Even though he knew it was a training course, the claustrophobia and the total sensory deprivation amplified every sensation tenfold. He found the small hole above the spring-loaded lever, guided the bamboo pin into the aperture, and pushed it home until it clicked against the far side of the casing.

"Pin's in," Tommy reported, wiping sweat out of his eyes with his dirty forearm.

"All right. Turn your light on for three seconds. Check your work."

Tommy thumbed the heavy switch on the side of the brass flashlight. A narrow, harsh beam of yellow light cut through the dark, instantly blinding him. He blinked rapidly, his eyes adjusting to the glare.

The tunnel was far smaller than it had felt in the dark. The roof was barely eighteen inches above his head, crisscrossed with tiny white rootlets hanging down like spiderwebs. The wooden box sat in its little niche, the bamboo pin sticking out of the trigger mechanism like a slender bone. But what caught Tommy's attention wasn't the box or the wire.

Sitting on the clay ledge three inches from his left ear was a scorpion, black and shiny as polished lacquer, four inches long, its curved tail held high and quivering over its back.

Tommy let out a sharp gasp and instinctively tried to pull away, but his right shoulder wedged firmly into the clay wall. The flashlight beam flickered wildly across the roof of the crawlspace as he hit his elbows against the dirt floor.

"Phillips!" Harris shouted, hearing the sudden scramble of activity. "What's going on down there?"

Tommy forced himself to hold still. The scorpion didn't move; it sat motionless on the red ledge, its tiny, beaded eyes glittering in the yellow flash of the bulb. The creature was as trapped in the narrow space as he was.

"Scorpion," Tommy wheezed, his heart hammering wildly against his ribs. "Big one. Right next to my head."

"Did it sting you?"

"Not yet."

"Then leave it alone," Harris said calmly. "It doesn't want to be down here with you any more than you want to be down here with it. The VC put 'em in jars and hang 'em from the ceiling so when we push through, our helmets smash the glass and the bugs drop down our shirts. That one's just a stray. Blow on it."

"Blow on it?" Tommy asked, thinking he had misheard.

"Gently," Harris said. "They don't like moving air. Blow on it and it'll back into the crack."

Tommy held his breath, cleared his throat, and directed a soft stream of air toward the creature. The scorpion's tail quivered, its front claws twitched, and then, with agonizing slowness, it shuffled backward into a dark fissure in the clay wall, disappearing from sight.

Tommy let out a long breath and clicked the flashlight off, returning the world to pitch blackness.

"It's gone," Tommy said, his voice steadying.

"Good," Harris said from above. "Now back up. Crawl backward all the way to the entrance. You don't turn around down there unless you find a chamber, and you haven't found one yet."

Reversing in a tight tunnel was far harder than moving forward. Tommy had to push himself backward with his toes and elbows, dragging his bare chest across the rough earth. The clay bit into his ribs and scratched his shoulders, but he kept moving, keeping his hands low to feel for any other wires Harris might have rigged in the entry crawl.

When his feet finally broke into the bright sunlight at the base of the entry shaft, strong hands grabbed him by the belt and hauled him up out of the hole like a bucket from a well.

Tommy collapsed onto his back on the rim of the trench, shielding his eyes with his dirty arm. The sky was a bright, glaring blue, and the air felt miraculously sweet and cool compared to the damp, stagnant oxygen inside the earth.

Harris stood over him, looking down with his hands on his hips. He threw a sweat rag into Tommy's chest.

"Not terrible," Harris grunted. "You didn't scream, you didn't freeze, and you found the wire. Most of the farm boys they send us pass out from heat stroke before they even reach the first turn."

Tommy sat up, wiping the thick red dust from his face and chest. His skin was crisscrossed with small red scratches that were already beginning to sting as his sweat ran into them.

"How long was I down there?" Tommy asked.

Harris checked his wrist watch. "Twelve minutes."

Tommy stared at him. "Twelve minutes? It felt like an hour."

"Time moves different under the dirt," Harris said, offering a hand and pulling Tommy to his feet. "Ten minutes down there feels like an eternity. Ten hours feels like a lifetime. You get used to it, or you go crazy. There isn't much middle ground."

He tossed Tommy his fatigue shirt.

"Put your clothes on, Phillips. Lieutenant MacLean wants us at the battalion intelligence bunker. A chopper just came in from the 1st Infantry Division sector up near Ben Cat. They found something big in the rubber trees."

Tommy pulled his stiff, dirt-smudged shirt over his shoulders, his arms aching from the tension of the crawl. "What did they find?"

Harris looked toward the flight line, where a pair of heavy CH-47 Chinook helicopters were coming in low over the tree line, their twin rotors churning up vast clouds of red dust across the perimeter.

"They found a command post," Harris said softly. "Three levels deep, complete with a printing press and a field hospital. The 'Big Red One' tried to dump satchel charges down the shafts, but they're hitting steel trapdoors every twenty feet. They need someone small enough to go down and find out where the deep shafts lead."

Harris turned and started walking back toward the center of the base camp, his heavy boots kicking up small puffs of red soil.

"Welcome to the Rat Six, Corporal," Harris added over his shoulder. "Your honeymoon's over."