The Black Echo

of himself, no one else in the frame. He clearly remembered setting the camera down on a wooden table in a hootch and setting the timer. Then he moved into the frame. The camera had snapped as he was shirtless, the tattoo on his deeply tanned shoulder catching the falling sun through the window. Behind him, but out of focus, was the dark entrance to a tunnel lying uncovered on the straw floor of the hootch. The tunnel was blurred, forbidding darkness, like the ghastly mouth in Edvard Munch’s painting
The Scream.
    It was a tunnel in the village they called Timbuk2, Bosch knew as he stared at the photo. His last tunnel. He was not smiling in the picture. His eyes were set in dark sockets. And neither was he smiling as he looked at it now. He held the photo in two hands, absentmindedly rubbing his thumbs up and down the borders. He stared at the photograph until fatigue and alcohol pulled him down into sleepy thought. Almost dreamlike. He remembered that last tunnel and he remembered Billy Meadows.

    ***

    Three of them went in. Two of them came out.
    The tunnel had been discovered during a routine sweep at a small village in E Sector. The village had no name on the recon maps, so the soldiers called it Timbuk2. The tunnels were turning up everywhere, so there weren’t enough rats to go around. When the tunnel mouth was found under a rice basket in a hootch, the top sergeant didn’t want to have to wait for a dust-off to land with fresh rats. He wanted to press on, but he knew he had to check the tunnel out. So the top made a decision like so many others in the war. He sent three of his own men in. Three virgins, scared as shit, maybe six weeks in country among them. The top told them not to go far, just set charges and come out. Do it fast, and cover each other’s ass. The three green soldiers dutifully went down into the hole. Except a half-hour later, only two came out.
    The two who made it out said that the three of them had separated. The tunnel branched into several directions and they split up. They were telling the top this when there was a rumble, and a huge cough of noise and smoke and dust belched from the tunnel mouth. The C-4 charges had detonated. The company loot came in then and said they wouldn’t leave the zone without the missing man. The whole company waited a day for the smoke and dust to settle in the tunnel and then two tunnel rats were dropped during a dust-off-Harry Bosch and Billy Meadows. He didn’t care if the missing soldier was dead, the lieutenant told them. Get him out. He wasn’t going to leave one of his boys in that hole. “Go get ’im and bring ’im out here so we can get ’im a decent burial,” the lieutenant said.
    Meadows said, “We wouldn’t leave any of our own in there, either.”
    Bosch and Meadows went down the hole then and found that the main entry led to a junction room where baskets of rice were stored and three other passageways began. Two of these had collapsed in the C-4 explosions. The third was still open. It was the one the missing soldier had taken. And that was the way they went.
    They crawled through the darkness, Meadows in front, using their lights sparingly, until they reached a dead end. Meadows poked around the tunnel’s dirt floor until he found the concealed door. He pried it open and they dropped down into another level of the labyrinth. Without saying a word, Meadows pointed one way and crawled off. Bosch knew he would go the other way. Each would be alone now, unless the VC were waiting ahead. Bosch’s way was a winding passage that was as warm as a steam bath. The tunnel smelled damp and faintly like a latrine. He smelled the missing soldier before he saw him. He was dead, his body putrifying but sitting in the middle of the tunnel with his legs straight out and spread, the toes of his boots pointed upward. His body was propped against a stake planted in the floor of the tunnel. A piece of wire that cut an inch into his neck was wrapped around the stake and held him in place. Afraid of a booby trap, Bosch didn’t touch him. He played the beam of his flashlight over the neck wound and followed the trail of dried blood down the front of the body. The dead man wore a green T-shirt with his name stenciled in white on the front. Al Crofton, it said beneath the blood. There were flies mired in the crusted blood on his chest, and for a moment Bosch wondered how they found their way so far down. He dipped the light to the dead soldier’s