Avenger by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online

outfit, sir?"
    "They call me Rat Six. Shall we go?"
    The officer signed the prisoner out and they adjourned for breakfast to the smallest and most exclusive mess hall in the whole 1st Division. No one was allowed in without permission and there were at that time only fourteen members. Dexter made fifteen, but the number would go down to thirteen in a week when two more were killed.
    There was a weird emblem on the door of the 'hootch', as they called their tiny club. It showed an upright rodent with snarling face, phallic tongue, a pistol in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. Dexter had joined the Tunnel Rats.
    For six years, in a constantly shifting sequence of men, the Tunnel Rats did the dirtiest, deadliest and by far the scariest job in the Vietnam War, yet so secret were their doings and so few their number that most people today, even Americans, have hardly or never heard of them.
    There were probably not more than 350 over the period: a small unit among the engineers of the Big Red One, an equal unit drawn from the Tropic Lightning (25th) Division. A hundred never came home at all. About a further hundred were dragged, screaming, nerves gone, from their combat zone and consigned to trauma therapy, never to fight again. The rest went back to the States and, being by nature taciturn, laconic loners, seldom mentioned what they did.
    Even the USA, not normally shy about its war heroes, cast no medal and raised no plaque. They came from nowhere, did what they did because it had to be done, and went back to oblivion. And their story all started because of a sergeant's sore bottom.
    The USA was not the first invader of Vietnam, just the last. Before the Americans were the French, who colonized the three provinces of Tonkin (north), Annam (centre) and Cochinchina (south) into their empire, along with Laos and Cambodia.
    But the invading Japanese ousted the French in 1942 and after Japan's defeat in 1945 the Vietnamese believed that at last they would be united and free of foreign domination. The French had other ideas, and came back. The leading independence fighter (there were others at first) was the Communist Ho Chi Minh. He formed the Vietminh resistance army and the Viets went back to the jungle to fight on. And on and on, for as long as it took.
    A stronghold of resistance was the heavily forested farming zone northwest of Saigon, running up to the Cambodian border. The French accorded it their special attention (as would later the Americans) with punitive expedition after expedition. To seek sanctuary the local farmers did not flee; they dug.
    They had no technology, just their ant-like capacity for hard work, their patience, their local knowledge and their cunning. They also had mattocks, shovels and palm-weave baskets. How many million tons of dirt they shifted will never be calculated. But dig and shift they did. By the time the French left after their 1954 defeat the whole of the Iron Triangle was a warren of shafts and tunnels. And no one knew about them.
    The Americans came, propping up a regime the Viets regarded as puppets of yet another colonial power. They went back to the jungle and back to guerrilla war. And they resumed digging. By 1964 they had two hundred miles of tunnels, chambers, passages and hideouts, and all underground.
    The complexity of the tunnel system, when the Americans finally began to comprehend what was down there, took the breath away. The down-shafts were so disguised as to be invisible at a few inches range at the level of the jungle floor. Down below were up to five levels of galleries, the lowest at fifty feet, linked by narrow, twisting passages that only a Vietnamese or a small wiry Caucasian could crawl through.
    The levels were linked by trap doors, some going up, others heading down. These too were camouflaged, to look like blank end-of-tunnel walls. There were stores, assembly caverns, dormitories, repair shops, eating halls and even hospitals. By 1966 a full combat