Easter Sunday (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 7) Page 9

  At the presentation one Vietnamese woman, unannounced, proceeded to the back of the garden plot and inserted a small white crucifix into the earth.

  Mudman, however, was assigned the task of going into a tunnel complex along with two other American soldiers. Within ten minutes both of the other men were shot dead from ahead. He wanted to turn back but on the radio his officer ordered him to continue. The tunnel was dark. He told Hank that he smelled this strange perfume. He had no way to use any light because the beam might draw fire. He couldn’t use a grenade because the explosion might collapse the tunnel on him. He had to keep crawling forward, hoping he could find the enemy before the enemy found him. After a few more minutes he entered a small tunnel to the side of the main tunnel. He stopped and listened. The perfume grew stronger.

  He had told Hank that he heard a click. He suspected it was a rifle bolt closing. He wasn’t wrong. Rounds went by him, flashing but not making enough light so he could see ahead in the tunnel. He immediately shot into the darkness, the flashes from his bullets skipping over the walls, ricocheting back and forth. When his rifle magazine was empty, he reloaded and emptied a second magazine. After that was empty, he waited in the silence. He still smelled the perfume. After a few more minutes, he moved ahead.

  In the dark, he began to crawl over arms and legs of human bodies, wet and still warm. He turned on his flashlight after he placed it aiming away and several feet from him, in case he had to draw fire to it. No return fire came. The angle of the light revealed the collapsed bodies of several women, a young man and some boys and girls. Guns and grenades were in the hands of the each of the dead and he knew that he would have been dead if he had not fired and killed them. The light displayed a cave room with a small wooden platform decorated with Viet Cong flags. On the ground was a tiny set of plastic figures including one stretched on a wooden crucifix. On a folding table were the remains of several plates of rice and a bottle of water. All over the dirt floor were scattered hundreds of blossoms, great aromatic blooms of local flowers. Mudman said it looked like Ho Chi Minh on the cross and some kind of religious symbolic supper. Also, written with paint on the wall were the English words of Bob Dylan’s song about blowing in the wind.

  “Bobby, this is Captain Steele.”

  Hank heard Captain Steele repeating his message. Beside him, Charlie, with his earphones clipped under his fire helmet, twisted and adjusted dials of the transceiver alert for any possible sound that might be human. At the side of the tent, their faces glaring from the work light and the glimmer from the radio dials were Melissa and Will, stern-faced and attentive. Also Pete stood with them, taller, his eyes alert. Sammy came and went from his tractor always supervising the trench and wall construction, and coughing from time to time. Bob Johnny and the reporters stood at the edge, behind the others, like strangers at a party who were not really welcome. The two children were at the hole in the center of the mound, holding the wire. Betty, in turn, stood near him.

  It was an eerie moment, this attention by all of them to the speakers. Hank found himself like his former wife, and Pete and Sammy, mouthing the Captain’s messages as they were repeated, saying them to themselves like a common prayer, like a chant, that the words would be heard by Bobby. As the minutes went by and the rain continued to come down harder and harder, Hank hoped that soon the speakers would broadcast the first sound of hope, not some click of death.

  Chapter Twelve

  A sound, a thump as of a fist against a wooden table top, smashed over the speaker, then repeated. The noises came through at random intervals, sometimes every minute then only every two or three minutes, but louder over the ensuing minutes as the microphone descended inch by inch, the speaker giving out much static and scraping noises.

  Charlie called up to Cathy, “That’s like what I heard before. How far down are we?”

  “About fifteen feet of wire,” she replied.

  “Can you bring them in better?” asked Captain Steele.

  “I’m trying.” Charlie nodded and shifted another of his switches with no improvement.

  “Sammy, shut her down,” the Captain called out. The tractor sound stopped and the firemen working with shovels were suddenly quiet. Everyone waited and listened to the thumping sounds.

  “It must be human. No animal could make that noise. He’s alive, Hank,” said the Captain leaning out of the tent. He reached over Charlie’s shoulder and adjusted another dial. “This might help,” he said.

  Charlie shook his head. “That will make it worse.” He moved the switch back to where it had been set.

  The Captain picked up the microphone and broadcast again. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. Do you hear us? This is Captain Steele. Speak out. We got a transmitter down there with you. We’ll hear you. Speak out as loud as you can.”

  The thumps suddenly stopped.

  “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, answer me back. This is Captain Steele. We’re all here to rescue you.”

  They heard a garble of sounds that could have be Bobby’s voice. The noises were weak, perhaps the chatter of a family of muskrats or perhaps, as Hank hoped, jumbled words saying, strangely, over and over, “Get back, and get back.”

  Following the so-called words, they heard another thump. Then the Captain stood up and walked out into the rain, carrying his microphone. He stood by the edge of the mound, looking at Cathy and Richard on their perch out on the top of the mound.

  “Bobby, we hear you. It’s all right, Bobby,” his steady voice repeated slowly.

  Hank wanted to jump up on the mound and tear at the hole in the earth to free his child. He was halfway up the side of the muddy slope when the Captain grabbed his shoulder.

  “That won’t work, Hank.” The Captain continued, “I’d like to go out there and start digging myself. We all know better. The surface is too soft. That’s why the kids are the only ones we can have out there. Any more weight and the whole thing could collapse.”

  The Captain said, slowly, with more emotion than usual, “Give us a chance to do this right.”

  “What do you make of it?” Hank asked.

  “I know that was him we heard. I’m just not sure he heard us,” said Charlie. “That microphone has gone over a few bumps.”

  “Can you lower it more, Cathy?” the Captain called.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  Charlie had tension on the end of the line to keep it taut. “Give her and Richard slack to let it down more,” the Captain ordered him. Charlie reached over and loosened the reel of wire beside his table.

  Cathy yelled, “Hey. The line slipped down a couple of feet more. It just dropped down.”

  She left Richard controlling the line and crawled back to Charlie’s side. “Let me try,” she said as she took the microphone from the Captain. “Bobby, it’s me.”

  For a moment or so there was silence, except for some background static. Then Hank heard sobs mixed with the sounds of gasping for breath, and Bobby’s first distinct word to them came over the speakers.

  “Cathy,” a voice said. It sounded like Bobby, but weak and distorted.

  The voice paused, then spoke again, this time louder, “Cathy. Help me. It’s so dark.” The voice stopped and they heard only the slight crackling noise.

  “Bobby,” she said. Her hand was trembling.

  Bobby, his voice this time clear and full and recognizable, replied, “Cathy, you got out OK. What about Richard?”

  “We’re all right, Bobby. Here’s Captain Steele.” She handed the microphone back, almost dropping it she was so excited.

  “I’m cold, Captain Steele,” said Bobby. “I want to get out.”

  “Bobby, this is Captain Steele. We’re all here, your mother and father and the firemen. We’re going to get you out as soon as we can.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “Just keep on being brave. We won’t leave you, Bobby.”

  “It must be raining,” said Bobby. “I keep hearing the sound of water dripping.”

  “
How far away?” asked the Captain?

  “At least ten feet. I’m standing on something so I don’t fall in the water.”

  “Tell me what you are standing on, Bobby?” continued the Captain.

  Bobby started crying. They listened to his sobbing. The Captain waved to Sammy and the tractor started up again. Hank thought the speed of the men’s shoveling was faster.

  Bobby spoke again, “When the cave fell in, there was no more light. I felt my way along. On my right, the hole got bigger for a little while. I gave up calling.”

  “Your friends went for help, Bobby.”

  “I didn’t hear anybody. The hole behind me started to fill up so I figured the best thing was kept moving ahead to where the air was. I crawled a long way.”

  Static interrupted the words. Charlie fiddled with the radio knobs and it cleared.

  “Tell me where you hear the speaker,” said the Captain.

  “Your voice is coming from my right side. I can’t reach the radio but I think I know where it is. I don’t want to move too much.”

  “That’s all right. You just keep talking from where you are.”

  “I started to crawl out of the caved in section. The roof was very wet and I was afraid that it might come down. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel the walls of the passage coming closer together and I knew I was going down deeper. I felt fresh air on my face. I hoped for a while I could find a way out. On my left the wall got real smooth and curved in, smoother than the wall on the right. I thought it might be metal, because it was cold compared to the soil. I came to a place where I was crawling on what felt like a lot of roots. The passage got more level, not going up but just level.”

  When he had controlled his sobs, he said, “It smells bad here, like a toilet that has been plugged up for a long time.”

  Bobby went on, “Then my knees were on top of what I thought was a large round cylinder. I figured it was a big root, maybe of an old tree. I also thought it might be some Native American stuff, like a mummy or something. I got even more scared.”

  The Captain turned to Hank and Pete and covered the microphone. “If this is a P47 in there, that’s probably part of the plane’s high altitude supercharger that he is describing. I think he’s up in the fuselage.”

  Will bent closer.

  Bobby’s young voice continued from the speaker, “In the dark I felt a lot of space around me. My face brushed against roots hanging in the air.”

  Bobby forced himself to swallow a sob. “Then I found a flat area like a shelf and climbed up on it. That’s where I am.”

  “Tell me about the flat area,” asked the Captain.

  “Lots of bones here. I don’t like sitting next to them.” Bobby paused again. “It stinks. This place has lots of animals living here. One of them just jumped on me. I hit at it several times with my shoe but I know it’s still there in the dark.”

  “What else is around you, Bobby?”

  “Under the flat place I think I feel shoes or boots with bones coming out of them.”

  Sammy said, “The trench is still the closest to Bobby. I figure the boy’s location is about fifty or less feet from the end of our trench, closer than coming in from the sides or the other end of the mound.”

  The Captain said, “I agree. We keep going the way we are. If we come in from any other way, we might disturb the mound more.”

  The loudspeakers boomed out Bobby’s voice, “I can’t keep the animals away much longer.”

  Pete said, “Let’s try to send down a flashlight to him. He can keep the animals back with the light.”

  The Captain said, “Bobby, the passage you came in, what condition is it?”

  The child’s voice said. “It’s filled with muck and water.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Captain Steele nodded as he covered the mike again. “That will be our job, to dig that passage out again, the way he went in.”

  He smiled at Cathy. “Good work on reaching Bobby. You must have talked on a radio before,” he said.

  She grinned. Hank, like most people in town, knew she and the Captain had a secret, that she was taking flying lessons from him, lessons that her father, Will, would have forbidden if he had known. She took figure skating lessons as her father wanted, then sneaked to the airfield a mile away and flew, returning to the rink just in time for her father to see her perform her jumps. Cathy Ellingham’s flying lessons were a River Sunday cover-up that many, including Hank and Bobby, helped maintain.

  “Bobby, can you still hear me?” asked the Captain.

  “Yes, Captain Steele.”

  “Good. We’re going to send down a light. I want you to describe more about the area where you are.”

  “It’s a big space. I could stand up if I needed to. I’m afraid though. The platform is weak. When I push some of it too hard, my fingers just press through because it’s rotten.”

  “No, don’t stand up. Just feel around you. In front of you is there a lever sticking up from the floor?”

  Bobby was silent for a few minutes. Then he said, “I found it. Yes, there is a lever straight up. How did you know that?”

  “We think you are inside an airplane fuselage, Bobby.”

  “An airplane? Down here?”

  “Everything points that way, as strange as it seems.”

  “I might have figured that out too, if I could have had some light.” He paused. “Maybe I’ve found Zinnie’s plane,” he said.

  A noise, like scraping metal, came over the speakers.

  Then they heard Bobby scream.

  “What happened?”

  “The whole thing shifted under me. It keeps moving forward, a little at a time,” he said, his voice shaking.

  “Is your foot all right?”

  “I think so. I stepped into the muskrats. I could feel them moving around my foot.”

  He screamed again, and then sobbed, “Oh, get me out of here. Get me out of here. Please get me out of here.”

  Melissa tugged at Captain Steele’s arm. “Stop all these damn questions. You’re going to get him killed. Now see what you have done?”

  “We have to know all we can,” said Captain Steele patiently.

  Pete put his arm around Melissa. “The Captain’s right. We need to know. This airplane frame, if that’s what it is, will help keep the mud from falling in.”

  The screams subsided.

  The Captain tried again, “Bobby, are you all right?”

  Bobby had stopped sobbing. They heard sounds of Bobby’s hard breathing.

  “There. I’m back up on the platform,” he said. “When I was near that lever I felt something else.”

  “What?”

  “I felt what might be the instrument panel of the plane.”

  “Now, listen to me. Don’t touch that instrument panel again,” said the Captain.

  “Why?”

  “Some of those instruments were made with radium. The stuff is radioactive. It will hurt you. Just stay back on your seat.”

  “Lots of animals in here,” Bobby’s voice was getting nervous again, “It’s like a giant nest of animals.”

  “Melissa, maybe you can calm him down,” said the Captain, offering her the microphone.

  Melissa was unsteady as she walked toward the Captain. Hank thought she might still be drunk from her Easter party, but then he realized that she was walking hesitantly because she was scared.

  “What should I say,” she whispered to Hank, before she took the mike.

  “You’ll do fine,” Hank said, his hand touching hers.

  Melissa grimaced and took the microphone. She stared at it for almost a minute then began to talk to Bobby. At first her voice was low, barely audible in the speakers, as she gathered confidence.

  “I love you, Bobby.”

  “I love you too, Mommy.”

  Hank heard her pause her normally cocky voice, as if she were searching for something positive, something reassuring, to say to their son. She needed something to cover
up the trembling and stop the tears in her eyes.

  “Your birthday party is all set for next Saturday night,” she said.

  The child’s voice came back, calm and steady. “I know. All the kids are coming.”

  While she was speaking to Bobby, the Captain and Charlie were devising an apparatus to slide a flashlight down the radio wire.

  “Test it again. Turn it on,” said the Captain and as Charlie did, the small beam lit up their intense faces.

  “Last thing we want is for that light to get all the way down there and then not work. We’ll lower it with the beam turned on.”

  “Yes,” Melissa was talking to her son. “I’ve arranged for the man you like from the radio station to come and play tapes.”

  “You can come too, Mommy.”

  “I hope you will dance with me,” she said.

  “Did you ever dance with your father?” he asked.

  “I used to dance with the General. My father was always away in sailing races and regattas.”

  “I wish the General was still alive so he could come.”

  “He’d be proud of you. I miss him too, every day. He saw you when you were a baby but you don’t remember that.”

  “I don’t remember the General. I remember seeing you and Daddy, that’s all.”

  Bobby moved and they could hear the creaking of the structure he was inside.

  “Did you like my other grandfather?”

  “Of course I did,” said Melissa.

  “You never told me so,” Bobby said.

  “Both grandfathers were friends,” said Melissa.

  “Kids told me your father was not brave,” said Bobby.

  “Your Dad’s father told me something about my dad. He sat down with me on the porch one night when we were still living at the garden store and he told me.”

  “What did he say?” asked Bobby. “I want to know now, Mommy.”

  Melissa glanced around her at the firemen, their faces rapt as they listened to the speaker. Then she whispered into the microphone. “He said that he would have surrendered the boat, too. He said that the lives of the men were more important.”