Floating City (9 page)

“I swore an oath, as we all did. My duty to the Godaishu comes first.” Ushiba’s hands, jammed deep in the pockets of his overcoat, were clenched into fists. “The Godaishu is of paramount importance to me because I have seen that it can accomplish what our government never will—mastery over international trading in everything from computer chips to arms dealing, petrochemicals to drug traffic.”

Ushiba grunted. “The time of the Godaishu is here at last. Our economy is in a shambles. Profits across the board are down, and many major
keiretsu
have given in to the unthinkable: downsizing operations by laying off employees and abandoning factories. Most troubling, the extent of the damage to our banking structure is still unknown. How many more will fail before we have seen the end of the disaster? And the crafty Americans are determined to see a strong yen. They claim it helps their trade deficit with us, but I know the real reason: they know that a strong yen cripples our recovery because it erodes our sales in all overseas markets. The Americans have us down and mean to keep us there for as long as they can.”

“Ah, but all of this havoc plays right into the hands of the Godaishu,” Akinaga said. “The chaos of financial disaster is the perfect environment for us to flourish and expand, don’t you agree?”

Ushiba nodded. “Yes, I do. But this is all the more reason for the council to strive to work toward the one goal of the Godaishu: total global economic domination.”

The night sky was red and purple, as if it had undergone a savage beating. In a moment, Nicholas understood that this weird illumination came from the convoy of vehicles that straddled the last section of road toward Cu Chi. He cupped his hands around his eyes, saw to his horror not merely police cars but army mobile troop carriers.

“They’ve called out all the dogs,” he said softly.

“That’s right,” Bay said. “You must have some very powerful enemies,
Chu
Goto.”

“Perhaps we both do.”

Bay gave him a hard look. “I pay a great deal of money each year to make certain I don’t.” She turned away, slid back down the hillock against which they had flung themselves.

They were perhaps three hundred yards from the road. Already Nicholas could see the bus they had been on stopped at the checkpoint. The driver, hands on his head, was being questioned by an officer while a squad of soldiers swarmed over the vehicle like ants over a cube of sugar.

“There are too many of them,” Bay said as if to herself. “We’ll never make it overland to Cu Chi.”

“Let’s get back to Saigon, then.”

“Impossible. It’s already past three in the morning. It will be light before we can get there on foot and we’d be without cover. Besides, I have a feeling we’d run right into another checkpoint long before then.”

“Shouldn’t we at least try?”

Bay shrugged, and they headed over the hillock, back toward Saigon. But within a hundred yards, she pushed him to the damp earth, pointing ahead of them where the headlights of jeeps and trucks lit up the horizon.

“You see, I was right,” she whispered. “They’re waiting for us. We are in the middle of a gigantic trap with the jaws slowly closing on us. We have only one way to go.”

They turned, heading back to Cu Chi, but by the time they reached the hillock, the situation had already changed. At
kokoro,
the heart of Tau-tau, Nicholas had allowed his senses free reign to quest outward through the darkness, and immediately he had encountered a host of malign presences on the move. He crouched beside Bay. “They’re coming this way,” he said.

Bay scrambled up to the crest of the hillock. “How can you tell? I can’t see anything.”

Nicholas, closing down his
tanjian
eye, said, “Now you must trust me, Bay. There are at least a dozen soldiers coming this way. Maybe the driver betrayed us.”

“No, he wouldn’t. He—” She broke off, closed her fingers around his wrist. “Come on,” she whispered as if they could already be overheard. “This way!”

Crouched over, she led him down off the right side of the hillock. Then she headed obliquely away from Cu Chi and the tightening net of Vietnamese soldiers. The land rose slightly, and Nicholas could smell the standing water of rice paddies. They ran like this for perhaps half a mile. Then, abruptly, Bay led them to her left. A moment later, the ground began to slope downward, and at some point she changed direction again, heading more or less directly toward Cu Chi.

Nicholas could hear the sound of water. He heard Bay’s whispered warning, “Careful now!” and the ground, mucky with sand and bits of stone, gave way. Buried roots and rotting branches clawed at them, tearing their clothes and abrading their skin.

“Isn’t there a better way to go?” he asked.

Bay hooked a thumb. “Above us, the ground is packed hard and makes for easy travel. The only problem is, there’s a minefield that runs for three hundred yards. Even the locals don’t go near it.”

They continued scrambling down the treacherous bank and eventually found themselves heading along a riverbank. Their pace slowed as they searched for firmer footing in the morass close to the river. The musky scents of tropical foliage and decay lay heavy on the air, and the thick drone and chirrup of insects filled the night.

At a bend in the river, where a fallen tree reached out into the water, Bay held up her hand. She crouched down, staring fixedly at the tree for some time.

“Are you ready for a swim?” She slipped into the water.

She waited for him at the head of the fallen tree. The water was not so deep, but the current was surprisingly powerful. Movement along the dark, gleaming hulk caught his attention. A long adder slithered toward them, but Bay appeared unconcerned. She gave him a sardonic smile.

“If you lose your balance, turn on your back,” she advised him. “You’d be astonished at how quickly you can drown.”

She let go of the tree and they began to make their laborious way upriver. It was impossible to swim against the current, which meant they had to half-walk along the silty, quicksandlike river bottom while the water rushed at them in an unending torrent. Nicholas guessed they had gone perhaps half a mile when Bay turned and pushed him against the smooth face of a rock.

“Wait here,” she said in his ear.

“What’s going on?”

“The VC built many trapdoors into the Cu Chi tunnels. A number of them came out into this river. The problem is nowadays they’re never used or even explored, and the VC had a nasty habit of booby-trapping these exits.”

Nicholas watched her as she drifted away from him. For a moment she stood steady near the bank, then she ducked below the surface of the rippling water. Nicholas could feel the tension come into his frame, and he went into meditative breathing. He opened his
tanjian
eye and immediately sensed Bay moving toward the near riverbank. He was also aware of the trapdoor and knew that the downed tree half a mile back had been some kind of marker. The projection of his psyche could find no evidence of a booby trap, but that meant nothing. His powers were normally blind to non-sentient things. Though he could sense a path in utter darkness, the essential nature of man-made energy was still beyond his current powers.

He could feel the stealthy encroachment of death, and so near to it, his thoughts strayed to Justine, his wife, who had died some months ago in a fiery car wreck. He would never quite get over the fact they had been estranged when she died. And, even now, he could not say whether there would have been a reconciliation. Too much damage had been done, too many wounds had been inflicted that, though healed on the surface, ran deeper into flesh and bone where they remained, hidden and all the more painful for that.

Celeste, the beautiful woman he had met and fallen in love with while trying to protect Mikio Okami, had returned to Venice. After the disaster with Justine he would not have asked her to stay in Japan against her will. Where had he been at the moment Justine’s car had burst into flames? Entwined with Celeste or... The horror was that he would never know.

Bay had been down a long time. But Nicholas, whose own skill at breath control was formidable, was not particularly concerned. His
tanjian
eye would have picked up any sign of distress in her.

When she breached the surface of the river, she shook water out of her eyes, turned to him, and said, “The way is clear. Let’s go.”

He held on to her ankle as they swam beneath the water. Dimly, he saw her push aside a small door, slither through. He went in after her, felt her push back past him, close the door.

There was barely enough room for the two of them. He was very much aware of being pushed against her body, their heat warming the water. Her fingers grabbed on to an iron ring at the far end of the underwater chamber, and a moment later another door opened and they were moving upward, out of the water into air, musty and humid, but breathable nonetheless.

“Inside,” Bay said. A small beam of light came on, and Nicholas saw that she had produced a mini-flashlight. Obviously, she had been prepared for this when she had come to his hotel room.

The beam of light swept across the narrow width of the passage, illuminating for an instant what appeared to be an odd-looking skull. Then Bay played the beam very slowly in a series of vertical passes. Nicholas estimated that the passage could not be more than two feet wide by three feet high. The light stopped on a shining thread not unlike a spider’s web silk.

“There it is,” she whispered. “Just below knee height.”

The booby trap.

“There might be another as backup,” Nicholas said.

Bay glanced at him, nodded her head. She ran her fingertips along first one side of the tunnel, then the other. The beam of light focused on a protrusion.

“Frag grenade,” Bay said. “If the trip wire didn’t get you, the shrapnel in this explosive device would have taken out your legs.”

Bay showed him how to avoid contact with any of the buried triggers, and they clambered over the trip wire, keeping to the center of the passage.

Bay paused. Her beam illuminated the partial skeleton of a large dog, long ago stripped of all flesh by the small scavengers of the Cu Chi tunnels. Nicholas recognized the skull as the one he had glimpsed before.

“An Alsatian,” she told him as she stepped past the pile of bones. “The Americans used the dogs to ferret out the tunnel entrances. Didn’t work, though. The VC used pepper and uniforms from dead grunts to throw the dogs off. They also started washing with American soap, a smell familiar and friendly to the dogs.” She kept the light on the skeleton until Nicholas was past it. “Poor beasts. They couldn’t smell the booby traps the VC laid, and so many of them died or were maimed their handlers eventually refused to send them down here.”

She led him steeply upward, along a rough staircase of packed, claylike earth and rotting timbers. There was a sickly-sweet smell that deepened as they rose. At one point, Bay paused, turned back to him, said softly, “This is not a pleasant place, which was why it was chosen. The current authorities have only a limited knowledge of this warren. It’s widely believed that American B-52 carpet bombing effectively destroyed the majority of the tunnel network, but that’s not true. Lower-level tunnels were protected by this hard-packed earth and by limestone.”

They emerged onto what Nicholas assumed was one of these lower levels. It was like a city in one of the inner rings of hell. Everywhere Bay swung her small beam of light it struck human remains, not littered about as if after a fire-fight, but in all the myriad poses of everyday human existence.

This was the true horror of what he saw, not the bones of the enemy, but the remains of a banal day where people squatted speaking together in intimate groups, or lay napping in mean berths, crouched cooking a meal, or leaned, exhausted, against an earthen wall.

And with his
tanjian
eye open he was aware of not just what Bay illuminated with her mini-flash, but of all the skeletons packed into the darkness of this vast necropolis. He became dizzy with the welter of images, as if these soldiers, so long dead, still possessed weight and energy, instead of merely history.

“We’re safe now,” Bay said, moving ahead through the tunnels. “Neither the police nor the army would come down here even if they suspected where we were.”

“Why not?”

“Because they know this is a labyrinth in which we could survive for months without them ever finding a trace of us. Besides, it’s too dangerous, even for them. As you’ve seen, these unexplored tunnels are still riddled with booby traps. Live ordnance, as well.”

“What about tear gas? They could flood the tunnels—”

“It wouldn’t cross their minds. They know this place is riddled with trapdoors and baffles to keep gas from spreading through the system.”

Nicholas shook his head. “All in all, I’d rather be back at the lice-ridden Ann Dan Hotel.”

Bay smiled. “Speaking of which...” She turned the flash on him and, bending down, began to peel leeches from his ankles, elbows, the back of his neck. “You would have become aware of these in a couple of moments.” She nodded. “You’d better strip.” He did as she asked, his gaze locked on her dark, luminous eyes. She inspected him with all the studied professionalism of a physician.

“You have a beautiful body, an athlete’s body. The muscles are long and lean like a swimmer’s, perhaps.” She had a bemused expression. “This is not the body of a shady businessman or someone engaged in corporate espionage. So now I have seen beneath your mask,
Chu
Goto. I know what you really are.”

She reached out, lifted a leech from the inside of his thigh. The hairs at the base of his neck stirred when he felt her fingertips there.

When she finished, she stood up. “You are not shy about your body so I know you won’t object to seeing mine.”

She peeled off her soaking clothes and handed him the flash. She was younger than he had thought, perhaps just twenty. Her body was beautifully formed, but it was not unblemished. Scars crisscrossed her lower back and the tops of her buttocks.