I’d never felt so scared, or so alive. After the village, after what I did there, I didn’t feel much of anything. But now, surrounded by death, and the fear of something worse than death, I felt alive again. My heart hammered in my chest, and every breath was a glorious thing, despite the stench. I was here among things that couldn’t be, shouldn’t be…and I wanted to know more.
The men I killed never got up again. That would be awful, if they should rise up again and look at me with knowing, accusing eyes. The men who served beside me, who were cut down by an often unseen enemy—they never rose up again either. In Viet Nam, death was the one thing you could depend on. Except…not here. What had Major Kraus done, here, so far from civilization and sanity? Who knew what might be possible here, so far from science and logic and all the other things man depends on to make sense of his world? Perhaps…if you went back far enough, into the past, into the jungle, you could leave reality behind in favor of a whole new world where anything, anything at all, was possible.
My dead guards brought me to a great hole in the ground and stopped. They let go of me, and just stood there, looking at nothing. I rubbed my arms hard, where their cold flesh had touched mine, without menace or care or any feeling at all. I looked down into the hole. It seemed to fall away deep into the blood-soaked earth, but there was light at the bottom. A metal ladder had been roughly attached to one side of the wet earth. I started down it. I wanted, needed answers; if answers there were to be had.
The ladder went down and down, a descent long enough to raise fierce cramps in my arms and legs. It ended in a tunnel, dug deep into the earth of the tall river bank, lit by oil lamps set in niches in the earth walls. The red clay in the walls gave them a disturbingly organic quality, as though I was invited to go stumbling through the guts of some long-dead colossus, buried ages ago.
The tunnels were a maze, a warren of narrow inter-connecting passageways, and I soon lost all sense of place, or direction. I just lurched along, following the lit tunnels, sweating profusely in the close hot air. The lamps had to be for my benefit; dead men wouldn’t need them. It was no wonder the CIA man’s maps had been so vague about Major Kraus’ secret compound. He’d hidden it underground, to conceal just how big it was—hidden it underground, where only the dead men go. If the CIA had even suspected how big Kraus’ base was, how extensive his army, they would have sent the fly boys in long ago to burn the whole place back to bare unliving stone.
Clever Kraus.
Finally I came to the heart of the labyrinth, to the place of the monster, to the awful court of Major Kraus. There was no sign, no warning, no preparation. I just rounded a corner and found myself standing in a clean, brightly-lit earth chamber. There were rushes on the floor, shelves on the walls holding books and oil lamps and an assortment of presumably precious objects. There was a table, covered in maps and papers, and two surprisingly comfortable-looking chairs. But there was no clock anywhere, or even a calendar; nothing to tell you what time it might be, as though time had no meaning here, as though it had become irrelevant in this old, old place where the dead walked. I was in the Past now, in the deep Past, in the ancient primordial jungle, and that was all that mattered.
Kraus sat in a chair behind his table, hands clasped lightly on the tabletop before him, and he watched me with calm, amused eyes. He was alive. His chest rose and fell easily as he breathed, and his smile was real if thin. His simple vitality was like a shock of cold water in the face, breaking me out of the nightmare I’d been wandering through.
I studied the man I’d come so far to find. He was stick thin, without a spare ounce of fat on him, as though all such physical weakness has been burned away in some spiritual kiln. He had sharp, aesthetic features under close-cropped hair, and even though he was sitting perfectly still and at ease, he blazed with barely suppressed nervous energy. His spotlessly clean Army uniform hung loosely about him, as though it had once fitted a much larger man. His smile was slight but genuine, and his eyes were disturbingly sane.
I nodded slowly, to the man I’d been sent to kill. I never know what to say, on occasions like this. All my old certainties had been thrown down and trampled into the dirt, but still some small spark of stubborn pride wouldn’t allow me to blurt out the obvious question. Major Kraus just smiled and nodded back at me, as though he quite understood. I had no gun or knife. Dead hands had taken all my weapons from me, before I was allowed down the ladder into the underworld. I could still kill him with my bare hands. I’d been trained. But if I should fail…I didn’t want to die here. Not in this awful place, where the dead didn’t stay dead.