The Black Echo

brother and all.”
    “I do want to hear. Please.”
    “So this point got shot by a sniper who was in a spider hole. That was what they called the little entrances to a tunnel network. So somebody took out the sniper and then me and Meadows had to go down the hole to check it out. We went down, and right away we had to split up. This was a big network. I followed one line one way and he went the other. We had said we’d go for fifteen minutes, set charges with a twenty-minute delay, then head back, setting more along the way… I remember I found a hospital down there. Four empty grass mats, a cabinet of supplies, all just sitting in the middle of this tunnel. I remember I thought, Jesus Christ, what’s going to be around the bend, a drive-in movie or something? I mean these people had dug themselves in… Anyway, there was a little altar in there and there was incense burning. Still burning. I knew then that they were still in there somewhere, the VC, and it scared me. I set a charge and hid it behind the altar, and then I started back as fast as I could. I set two more charges along the way, timing everything so it would all go off at once. So I get back to the drop-in point, you know, the original spider hole, and no Meadows. I waited a few minutes and it’s getting close. You don’t want to be down there when the C-4 goes. Some of those tunnels are a hundred years old. There was nothing I could do, so I climbed out. He wasn’t up top either.”
    He stopped to drink some beer and think about the story. She watched intently but didn’t prod him.
    “A few minutes later my charges went off and the tunnel, at least the part I had been in, came down. Whoever was in there was dead and buried. We waited a couple hours for the smoke and dust to settle. We hooked a Mighty Mite fan up and blew air down the entry shaft, and then you could see smoke being pushed out and coming up out of the air vents and other spider holes all around the jungle.
    “And when it was clear, me and another guy went in to find Meadows. We thought he was dead, but we had the promise; no matter what, we were going to get him out and send him home. But we didn’t find him. Spent the rest of the day down there looking, but all we found were dead VC. Most of them had been shot, some had cut throats. All of them had ears slashed off. When we came up, the top told us we couldn’t wait anymore. We had orders. We pulled out, and I had broken the promise.”
    Bosch was staring blankly out into the night, seeing only the story he was telling.
    “Two days later, another company was in the village, Nhuan Luc, and somebody found a tunnel entrance in a hootch. They get their rats to check it out, and they aren’t in that tunnel more than five minutes when they find Meadows. He was just sitting like Buddha in one of the passageways. Out of ammo. Talking gibberish. Not making sense, but he was okay. And when they tried to get him to come up with them, he didn’t want to. They finally had to tie him up and put a rope on him and have the patrol up there pull him out. Up in the sunlight they saw he was wearing a necklace of human ears. Strung with his tags.”
    He finished the beer and walked in off the balcony. She followed him to the kitchen, where he got a fresh bottle. She put her half-finished bottle on the counter.
    “So that’s my story. That was Meadows. He went to Saigon for some R and R but he came back. He couldn’t stay away from the tunnels. After that one, though, he was never the same. He told me that he just got mixed up and lost down there. He just kept going in the wrong direction, killing anything he came across. The word was that there were thirty-three ears on his necklace. And somebody asked me once why Meadows let one of the VC keep an ear. You know, accounting for the odd number. And I told him that Meadows let them all keep an ear.”
    She shook her head. He nodded his.
    Bosch said, “I wish I had found him that time I went back in to look. I let him down.”
    They both stood for a while looking down at the kitchen floor. Bosch poured the rest of his beer down the sink.
    “One question about Meadows’s sheet and then no more business,” he said. “He got jammed up at Lompoc on an escape attempt. Then sent to TI. You know anything about that?”
    “Yes. And it was a tunnel. He was a trusty and he worked in the laundry. The gas dryers had underground vents going out of the building. He dug beneath one of them. No more