Floating City by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

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