The Rat Six: A Tunnel Rat Novel

• Chapter 1 The Iron Triangle
• Chapter 2 Red Earth and Clay
• Chapter 3 Into the Spider Hole
• Chapter 4 Below the Bamboo
• Chapter 5 The Whispering Dark
• Chapter 6 Tripwires and Scorpions
• Chapter 7 Breath of the Jungle
• Chapter 8 Flashlight and .45
• Chapter 9 Blind Corners
• Chapter 10 The Hospital Below
• Chapter 11 Unseen Footsteps
• Chapter 12 Claustrophobia
• Chapter 13 The False Floor
• Chapter 14 Smoke in the Sump
• Chapter 15 Comrades in the Mud
• Chapter 16 Water Trap
• Chapter 17 The Underground City
• Chapter 18 Night at Cu Chi
• Chapter 19 Cave-In
• Chapter 20 Shadows of the Cong
• Chapter 21 The Poisoned Well
• Chapter 22 Point-Blank
• Chapter 23 The Lower Levels
• Chapter 24 The Narrow Escape
• Chapter 25 Breaking Daylight
• Chapter 26 The Ground Above

The heat hit you before the wheels even stopped rolling. It was not the dry, sunbaked warmth of a Kansas summer, but a wet, suffocating blanket that smelled of burning diesel, rotting vegetation, human excrement, and stagnant water. Specialist Fourth Class Thomas Ward stepped off the tailgate of the deuce-and-a-half truck, his boots sinking two inches into the churned, powdery dust of the base camp perimeter. He hoisted his duffel bag onto one shoulder, his olive-drab fatigue shirt already soaked through at the small of his back and under his armpits.

Around him, the 1st Infantry Division’s staging area buzzed with the chaotic, mechanical frenzy of a forward operating base. Huey helicopters banked hard overhead, their rotor blades beating the thick air into a rhythmic thrum that vibrated in the chest. Bulldozers carved perimeter berms out of the scrub, pushing up raw embankments of orange-tinted soil. Men moved with the dull, methodical pace of those who had long ago resigned themselves to being permanently filthy, sunburned, and exhausted.

Ward was twenty years old, built like a lightweight wrestler—five feet six inches tall, broad in the shoulders, with narrow hips and short, wiry limbs. In basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, the drill sergeants had ridden him mercilessly about his height, but the Army’s combat engineering corps had looked at his compact frame and decided he was precisely the sort of resource they needed in Southeast Asia. At the time, Ward hadn't understood why small statures were suddenly in high demand among men whose primary job was supposedly building pontoon bridges and clearing minefields.

"Ward! Thomas J.!" a voice bellowed over the roar of an idling generator.

Ward turned to see a staff sergeant with rolled-up sleeves, a clipboard tucked under one thick forearm, and a half-smoked cigar clamped between his molars. The sergeant’s skin looked like cracked boot leather, cured by years of tropical sun and cheap tobacco.

"Here, Sergeant," Ward called back, trotting over through the dust.

The sergeant glanced up from his roster, squinting against the glare of the noon sky. He looked Ward up and down, lingering for a second on his boots, his beltline, and the top of his head. A faint, knowing smirk tugged at the corner of the man's mouth.

"You're the replacement from the 1st Engineer Battalion?" the sergeant asked.

"Yes, Sergeant. Transferred in from the rear echelon at Di An."

"Well, Ward, welcome to the Iron Triangle," the sergeant said, making a brief checkmark with a stubby pencil. "The Big Red One’s favorite piece of real estate. Sixty square miles of jungle, bamboo, and pissed-off locals who’ve had twenty years to dig themselves into the scenery. Head over to Tent Six by the motor pool. Report to Lieutenant Miller. Don't leave your gear lying around unless you want the local rats to chew it for breakfast."

"Rats, Sergeant?"

"The four-legged ones, Ward. The two-legged ones don't steal your boots; they just blow them off your feet. Move along."

Ward nodded, shouldered his gear, and set off down the rutted dirt track between rows of canvas tents. The Iron Triangle was a notorious tract of land wedged between the Saigon River and the Thi Tinh River, running north from the district of Cu Chi. The brass in Saigon treated it like a splinter under their fingernails—a permanent insurgent stronghold situated barely twenty-five miles from the capital city. For years, the French had tried and failed to clear it. Now, the Americans were attempting the same feat with B-52 strikes, Rome plows, artillery batteries, and massive sweep operations.

Yet every time the battalions swept through, burning base camps and leveling tree lines, the Viet Cong seemed to evaporate into thin air, only to reappear the moment the American units pulled back to their fortified firebases.

Tent Six was a long, dusty shelter beneath a screen of green camouflage netting. Inside, the air was marginally cooler, though it still felt like the inside of a laundry press. A single wooden desk made of discarded ammunition crates sat at the far end, behind which sat a young first lieutenant studying a grease-pencil map covered with acetate overlays. A floor fan buzzed weakly in the corner, merely stirring the hot dust from one side of the room to the other.

Ward stepped inside, took off his soft cap, and snapped a crisp salute. "Specialist Ward reporting for duty, sir."

Lieutenant Miller looked up. He was pale despite the climate, with hollows beneath his eyes that spoke of chronic sleep deprivation. He returned the salute with a tired flick of his wrist.

"At ease, Ward. Set your gear down." Miller leaned back on his folding chair, folding his hands over his stomach. "Let me see your paperwork."

Ward handed over the manila envelope containing his service records. Miller flipped through the pages with a practiced, indifferent flick of his thumb, skimming through the test scores, the marksmanship badges, and the physical evaluations.

"Kansas boy," Miller noted aloud. "Grew up on a farm?"

"Yes, sir. Just outside of Salina."

"Used to hard labor, tight spaces, getting dirty?"

"I've crawled under my fair share of combines and grain silos, sir."

Miller offered a dry, tight-lipped smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Well, that might help. But a grain silo doesn't have an NVA regular sitting in the dark with a French carbine waiting for your head to appear." Miller closed the folder and tossed it onto the desk. "You know why you were assigned to this detachment, Ward?"

"Combat engineering, sir. Obstacle clearance, demolitions, defensive perimeters."

"That’s the textbook definition," Miller said, standing up and walking around the desk. He stood half a head taller than Ward, but his posture was slightly stooped. "Out here, the infantry walks on top of the ground, and the artillery tries to smash the ground to pieces. But our enemy doesn't live on top of the ground. He lives beneath it. He eats down there, stores his ammunition down there, trains down there, and plans his ambushes down there. And when the grunts find a hole in the dirt, they don't want to go in. They call us."

Ward kept his expression neutral, but a slight prickle of cold ran down the nape of his neck. "Sir?"

"Search and Destroy doesn't work if you only search the canopy," Miller continued, pointing toward the grease-pencil markings on the map. "We call the assignment tunnel exploration and neutralization. The grunts call it something else. You're small, you're quick, and you've got steady hands with high explosives. You’re going to be a Tunnel Rat, Ward. Rat Six is our call sign."

"I see, sir."

"No, you don't," Miller said flatly. "Not yet. You won't see a damn thing until you’re fifty feet deep in the pitch dark, smelling rotten rice and cordite, wondering if the next three inches of clay contain a tripwire tied to a rusty grenade. But you’ll learn."

Miller walked to the tent flap and yelled into the bright sunshine. "Doc! Jenkins! Get in here!"

A moment later, two men shuffled through the entryway. The first was a lanky, dark-skinned corporal with an easygoing slouch and a medic's caduceus pinned crookedly to his collar. The second man was stocky, pale, with arms covered in faded tattoos and eyes that darted constantly from left to right. He carried a customized web belt stripped bare of everything except a canvas holster, two canteens, and a k-bar knife.

"Ward, this is Corporal Jenkins," Miller said, gesturing to the tattooed soldier. "Jenkins is your team leader. He's been down the holes for six months, which means he’s either very good, very lucky, or completely out of his mind. And this is Doc Alvarez. If you get bitten by a pit viper or catch a piece of shrapnel in the dirt, Doc patches you up before the gangrene sets in."

"Pleasure," Jenkins said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. He looked Ward over with the cold, assessing eye of a butcher weighing a cut of meat. "He’s small enough. That's a start. Can he shoot with his left hand?"

"I'm right-handed," Ward said.

"You'll learn to shoot with both," Jenkins grunted, crossing his arms. "When you're crawling on your stomach through an eighteen-inch bore, you don't always get to pick which elbow is propping you up and which hand has the iron. Can you hold your breath for two minutes?"

"Never tried."

"You'll try tomorrow," Jenkins said. "The bastards like to throw CS gas or rotten animal carcasses down the shafts to smoke us out when we find an entrance. If you panic and hyperventilate, you die."

Doc Alvarez stepped forward, offering a warm, calloused hand. "Don't let Jenkins scare you, kid. He talks tough because he hates buying beer for replacements. Just listen to what he says, don't touch anything made of wire or string, and never fire your piece unless you're staring right down the barrel of theirs."

"Understood," Ward said, shaking Alvarez's hand.

"Take him down to the bunker," Miller told Jenkins. "Get him outfitted. Show him the standard kit. The infantry found a complex near the riverbank this morning during a sweep. Third Brigade is sitting on the perimeter right now, waiting for us to clear it before they bring in the engineers to blow the entrances. We move out at dawn."

"Right, Lieutenant," Jenkins said. He turned to Ward. "Grab your duffel, farm boy. Let's go see if you're afraid of the dark."

The supply bunker was an underground bunker built from heavy wooden timbers and stacked sandbags, dug deep into the red dirt to keep the munitions cool. The smell inside was a pungent mix of gun oil, insect repellent, and dry earth. Jenkins walked behind a wooden counter and began tossing items onto the surface with careless precision.

"Standard issue gear doesn't work down there," Jenkins explained, pointing at Ward's standard M14 rifle leaning against his pack. "That cannon is almost four feet long. You take that into a crawlspace, and all you’ve got is an expensive club that gets you stuck between two walls of hard dirt. You leave the rifle here."

Jenkins laid out a standard government-issue Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol. Beside it, he placed a modified angle-head flashlight with the red lens filter removed, replaced instead by a piece of translucent plastic to diffuse the glare. Next came a bayonet with a filed-down crossguard, a spool of lightweight comms wire, a pair of earplugs, and a simple compass on a lanyard.

"That's it?" Ward asked, staring at the meager pile of equipment.

"That's too much," Jenkins replied without humor. "Every ounce of metal you carry drags against the clay. If you bump a canteen against your belt buckle, it makes a sound that carries fifty yards through the tunnel. If you wear a helmet, it scrapes the ceiling and brings down half a pound of dust right into your eyes. You go down with your drawers, your boots, your gun, and your light. Everything else stays in the sun."

Ward picked up the Colt .45. The steel was heavy, cold, and solid in his palm. He dropped the magazine, checked the spring, and racked the slide. The mechanical click echoed sharply in the bunker.

"You ever fired one of those inside an enclosed room without earplugs?" Jenkins asked quietly.

"No."

"It feels like someone shoved an ice pick through your eardrums. You fire one round in a three-foot tunnel, you won't hear anything for the next three days. That means you won't hear the Cong creeping up behind you with a sharpened bamboo spear. So, you don't shoot unless you can feel his breath on your knuckles. You got that?"

"Yes, Sergeant."

"I'm a Corporal," Jenkins corrected him. "Ranks don't mean a whole lot once your head goes beneath the dirt anyway. Down there, whoever sees the tripwire first is the general."

Jenkins reached into a crate beneath the table and pulled out a small, roughly carved wooden figurine. It was an awkward, primitive representation of a human face, scorched by fire and stained with dark mud. He turned it over in his hands for a second before tossing it to Ward.

"Found that three days ago near the river," Jenkins said. "In a rest area twelve feet down. They had tea sets down there. Bicycles. A fully functioning printing press turning out leaflets about how the imperialist invaders are going to rot in the jungle. They’ve been building this network since they were fighting the French back in fifty-four. They know every root, every drop shaft, and every dead end."

Ward turned the wooden idol over in his fingers. The wood was dense, heavy tropical teak, smoothed down by hundreds of hours of handling. It felt strangely intimate, a direct, tangible connection to an enemy he had only seen as blurry silhouettes in briefing films or heard about in barracks rumors.

"They're not just digging holes, Ward," Jenkins continued, leaning across the counter. "They’re building an entire world beneath our feet. And our job is to crawl into that world and tear it out by the roots, one room at a time."

Outside, the heavy thud of an artillery battery shook the earth, sending a fine shower of red dust down through the gaps in the ceiling timbers. The dust settled on Ward's arms, sticking to his sweat, coating his skin in the pale, iron-rich earth of the Iron Triangle. He looked down at the short barrel of the .45, the small flashlight, and the dark doorway leading back out into the heat. Dawn was less than twelve hours away.

The rain came at three in the morning, a sudden, violent deluge that hammered the canvas of Tent Six with the force of falling gravel. Ward lay awake on his folding canvas cot, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up into the pitch-black rafters where the dampness seemed to hang like wet wool. The storm did nothing to cool the air; it only turned the dry dust of the compound into a thick, soup-like mire and raised the humidity until every breath felt like inhaling steam. He listened to the steady, heavy drip of water leaking through a worn seam in the canvas, landing with a rhythmic, maddening splat on the dirt floor just inches from his boots.

He had spent the night trying to visualize what lay ahead, but his imagination was bounded by the flat, open horizons of Kansas. In Salina, the earth was something you plowed, something that grew wheat and corn under a wide-open sky that stretched from one edge of the world to the other. Under the soil of the Iron Triangle, the earth was a hiding place, a shield, and a weapon. He rolled onto his side, his hip bone pressing hard against the taut canvas of the cot, and reached out in the dark to touch the cold steel of the Colt .45 resting on his pack. The metal was cool to the touch, comforting in its solid, unyielding weight, but it offered no answers to the questions keeping him from sleep.

By five, the downpour had subsided to a thick, gray drizzle that hung over the base camp like gunsmoke. The camp woke with a wet, sluggish groan. Ward pulled on his damp utility shirt, the fabric stiff with yesterday’s dried salt and fresh humidity, and laced his jungle boots with practiced, tight tugs. He found Jenkins sitting on an upturned ammunition crate under the dripping eave of the mess tent, nursing a tin cup of black coffee that smelled strongly of chicory and kerosene.

"Eat something, farm boy," Jenkins said without looking up, gesturing with his chin toward a metal tray of lukewarm, grease-filmed scrambled eggs and thick slices of canned ham. "You don't want to go down on an empty stomach, and you sure as hell don't want to go down with a full one if you get nervous. Find the middle ground."

Ward filled a tin plate and sat on the bench opposite the corporal. The food tasted mostly of salt and iron, but he forced himself to swallow it. "Does the rain affect the tunnels?" he asked, his voice sounding dry and thin in his own ears.

Jenkins took a slow sip of his coffee, his eyes scanning the low, leaden clouds rolling over the perimeter wire. "The clay here is something special, Ward. It’s called laterite. It’s got high iron and aluminum content. When it’s dry, it’s like cured concrete. You need a pickax just to chip off a corner. But when the monsoon hits, the topsoil turns to grease. The red clay underneath holds its shape, though. The dinks know how to dig their shafts so the water drains off into sumps. If they didn't, the whole damn network would have caved in during the French war. But it gets slick down there. Slick and heavy. If a tunnel isn't shored up right, the wet clay can squeeze in on you like a giant fist."

Doc Alvarez joined them, carrying a small olive-drab canvas bag stenciled with a red cross. He looked tired, his dark skin shadowed by the pale light of dawn, but he gave Ward a reassuring nod. "The trick is the smell," Alvarez said, sitting down and reaching for a piece of dry toast. "In the dry season, the dirt just smells like old cellar. But when it rains, the water forces all the gas and the rot up to the surface. You can smell a tunnel entrance from twenty yards away if you know what to sniff for. Smells like sour rice, wet charcoal, and old sweat. If you smell that in the middle of a bamboo thicket, you don't take another step until you look down at your boots."

A whistle blew across the compound, sharp and urgent. Lieutenant Miller appeared from the command tent, wearing his poncho and carrying a map case tucked under his arm. "Load up, gentlemen," he called out. "The Third Brigade’s sweep found three fresh shafts along a drainage canal near the river. They’ve got a perimeter established, but the captain is getting twitchy. He wants us on-site before the sun cooks the humidity into a fog."

They piled into the back of an M35 three-quarter-ton truck, the metal bed slick with red mud and pooled rainwater. Ward sat near the tailgate, his knuckles white around the strap of his canvas satchel. Inside the bag, the small flashlight, the bayonet, the wire, and the .45 sat in an orderly, silent row. Beside him, Jenkins lay back against the wooden slats of the truck, his eyes closed, apparently asleep despite the violent jolts of the vehicle as it churned through the deep ruts of the road. Doc Alvarez checked his medical kit one last time, carefully securing a bottle of iodine and several rolls of compressed gauze with heavy rubber bands.

The truck moved south, leaving the fortified perimeter of the base camp behind. The landscape changed rapidly. The cleared, flat ground of the staging area gave way to the tangled, chaotic growth of the secondary jungle. Here, the war had carved deep, ragged scars into the earth. Great swathes of vegetation had been stripped bare by defoliants, leaving standing skeletons of grey, leafless trees that clawed at the wet sky. In other places, the craters from B-52 strikes—the "Arclight" missions—had turned the terrain into a monstrous moonscape of flooded red bowls, some thirty feet across, where the water had turned a sickly, stagnant green.

The road degenerated into a narrow, muddy track hemmed in by dense walls of bamboo and sharp-edged elephant grass that scraped against the sides of the truck with a sound like dry paper. Ward stared out at the wall of green. It looked solid, impenetrable, a curtain of leaves and thorns that could hide an entire division of soldiers just ten feet from the road. He felt a growing tightness in his chest, a sense of constriction that had nothing to do with the physical confines of a tunnel. The jungle itself was a cage.

After forty minutes of bone-jarring travel, the truck screeched to a halt near a bend in a swollen, chocolate-colored stream. A platoon of infantrymen from the 1st Infantry Division was scattered along the bank, their muddy helmets peeking out from the tall grass. They looked exhausted, their fatigues blackened by wet soot and plastered to their bodies. A young lieutenant with a radio telephone operator close behind him hurried over to the truck as Miller climbed down from the cab.

"You the engineers?" the infantry lieutenant asked, his voice tight and breathless. "Thank God. We've been sitting on this bank for three hours. My men found two holes under some upturned roots by the water, and we think there's a third one further up in the brush. We tried throwing some grenades down, but we just got a face full of smoke and dirt for our trouble."

"Did you take any fire from them?" Miller asked, unrolling his map overlay against the hood of the truck.

"No, sir. But we heard movement. Something scraping down there right after the grenades went off. We’re not going down there, Lieutenant. That's not our job. We’re here to sweep the sector, not get buried alive."

"Understood, Lieutenant," Miller said calmly. He turned to Jenkins, who had finally opened his eyes and was climbing over the tailgate. "Jenkins, take a look. Let's see what we're dealing with."

Ward followed Jenkins and Alvarez down the slippery clay bank toward the water's edge. The air here was even thicker, choked with the smell of rotting river vegetation and the sharp, chemical tang of cordite from the infantry's grenades. The stream was rising, its muddy water licking at the roots of a massive, ancient banyan tree that clung to the bank like a multi-legged monster.

Between two thick, woody roots, half-hidden by a screen of dead palm fronds, lay a dark, vertical opening. It was small—barely eighteen inches wide, a rough, irregular circle carved into the heavy red clay. To Ward, it looked less like an engineering project and more like the den of some large, predatory animal. The edges of the hole were smooth, polished by the passage of countless bodies sliding in and out of the darkness.

Jenkins knelt in the mud, completely indifferent to the red slime coating his knees. He pulled his flashlight from his belt, clicked it on, and shone the beam directly into the opening. The light traveled down about four feet before the shaft took a sharp, right-angle turn into the earth, disappearing into absolute blackness.

"This is an entry point, all right," Jenkins muttered, sniffing the air near the lip of the hole. "No smell of decomposition yet, so no one died in the blast. But look at the clay here. See how the edges are rounded and packed? That's not from shovels. They use small hoes, and then they pack the walls with their bare hands and flat pieces of wood. Laterite has high clay content, so once you pack it and it dries, it gets a glaze on it. It’s almost waterproof. But with this rain, the water is starting to pool in the neck."

He reached into the hole, his thick arm disappearing up to the shoulder, feeling along the rim. Ward watched him, his heart thumping against his ribs. The thought of putting his arm into that dark cavity, not knowing if a hand would grab him from the inside or if a viper would sink its fangs into his wrist, made his stomach churn.

"Nothing on the lip," Jenkins said, pulling his arm back out and wiping the red clay onto his trousers. "They like to put a nail or a sharp piece of wire right under the rim to catch your sleeve when you dive in. If you pull back hard, you set off a pull-friction fuze tied to an artillery shell buried in the wall. You have to feel around first, gentle-like, like you're trying to find a fish under a rock."

He stood up and looked at Ward. "Alright, farm boy. This is your classroom. You see this clay? Touch it."

Ward knelt down and pressed his hand against the side of the entrance. The earth was cold, remarkably smooth, and had the greasy consistency of wet soap, yet beneath the surface slickness, it was incredibly dense. It didn't crumble like the sandy loam of Kansas; it stuck to his fingers in a heavy, solid clump that required effort to scrape off.

"That's the red earth of Cu Chi," Jenkins said. "It’s our enemy, and it’s our shield. It’s what keeps the American artillery from blowing these guys to hell. When a shell lands up here, the shockwave travels through the ground, but these tunnels are built with zigzags and drop-junctions that baffle the blast. A hundred-pound bomb can detonate thirty feet away, and the guy sitting in the third level down won't even spill his tea."

"How deep do they go?" Ward asked, staring down the dark shaft.

"Some of them are three levels deep," Doc Alvarez answered, leaning against the banyan tree. "The first level is usually three to ten feet down. That’s where they have their fighting positions, food storage, and sleeping quarters. The second level is twenty feet down, where they keep the command posts, hospitals, and weapons factories. The third level goes all the way down to the water table—thirty, forty, sometimes fifty feet. They use that for long-term shelter during heavy bombardments. They’ve got air shafts disguised as hollow bamboo stalks rising up into the brush, and wells dug straight down into the groundwater. They don't ever have to come up if they don't want to."

Jenkins pulled his Colt .45 from its holster and checked the chamber, the slide returning with a sharp clack that seemed incredibly loud in the quiet of the riverbank. He handed the weapon to Ward.

"Your turn to prep," Jenkins said. "Take off your web gear. Everything. Leave your canteen, your compass, your first-aid pouch. You only take the gun, the light, and the knife. If you get stuck, your gear will anchor you like an anvil, and we’ll have to drag you out by your boots. And believe me, Ward, if I have to drag you out, I’m not going to be gentle about it."

Ward stood up, his hands shaking slightly as he unbuckled his heavy canvas utility belt. He let it drop into the mud, feeling suddenly naked and vulnerable in his green fatigues. He took the flashlight and the .45, holding one in each hand as he had been shown in the supply bunker.

"Now, listen to me," Jenkins said, his voice dropping to a low, serious whisper that commanded Ward’s absolute attention. "When you go down, you don't look straight ahead. Your flashlight beam is only three inches wide, and if you keep it focused on the floor, you'll miss the wire hanging from the ceiling. You sweep the light in a figure-eight. Floor, left wall, ceiling, right wall, floor. You do that every single step. If you see a root that looks too straight, or a vine that doesn't have leaves on it, you stop. You don't move a muscle until you know where both ends of that wire go."

"And if I find a trap?" Ward asked.

"You don't try to disarm it," Jenkins said flatly. "You're not a hero, and you don't have the tools down there. You mark it with a piece of string from your pocket, you back out, and we let the demolition guys handle it from the surface. Your job is to find out where the tunnel goes, how many branches it has, and if anyone is home. If you run into a dink, you shoot. You don't talk, you don't ask for a surrender, and you don't try to take prisoners. It’s too tight for manners down there."

"What about the gas?" Ward asked, remembering the conversation from the day before.

Doc Alvarez stepped forward, holding a small, green canvas bag containing an M17 protective mask. "The infantry has some riot gas canisters, but we don't use them unless we're sure the tunnel is empty. If you put this mask on, your field of vision drops to zero, and the glass will fog up within thirty seconds in that humidity. It's better to rely on your nose. If you feel your eyes start to water or your throat start to burn, you turn around immediately. Don't try to be brave. CS gas lingers in the low spots, and if you get a full lungful of it in a narrow bend, you'll panic, throw up in your mask, and suffocate."

Ward looked down at the dark circle of the hole. The water from the river was slowly trickling in, forming a small red puddle at the first bend. The red clay seemed to be waiting, silent and patient, a heavy mouth ready to swallow him whole.

"I'll go first," Jenkins said, stepping in front of him. "I'll clear the first twenty yards and establish a foothold at the first junction. Once I give you two tugs on the comms wire, you follow me down. Keep your head low, keep your elbows in, and don't make a sound."

Jenkins didn't hesitate. He sat on the edge of the hole, dangling his legs into the darkness, and then, with a smooth, practiced motion, he slid his body forward. He disappeared into the earth headfirst, his boots trailing behind him for a fraction of a second before they, too, vanished into the red clay.

The jungle seemed to grow suddenly quiet, the only sound the steady, monotonous drip of the rain on the broad leaves of the banyan tree and the distant, muffled thud of an artillery shell miles to the north. Ward stood in the mud, the heavy .45 cold in his hand, staring at the empty hole where his comrade had just been swallowed by the earth. He looked down at his own boots, already stained a deep, indelible orange by the clay of Cu Chi, and realized that from this moment on, his world was no longer measured by the horizon, but by the narrow, suffocating limits of the dark.