Where was he? Some sort of Montagnard hut, was it? Abruptly, a greasy cloth was wrapped around his head, and he felt himself unroped and dragged down, dragged under—not to the bottom of the lake, as in his dream, but into a tunnel, burrowed around and beneath the shallow tree roots of the jungle soil. He was dragged until he started to crawl, simply to spare his flesh the abrasion. The tunnel veered one way and then another; it sloped upward and downward and intersected with others; voices grew muffled and close, then very distant; smells of tar and kerosene and rot alternated with the fetor of unwashed men. When he reemerged into the insect symphony of the jungle floor—for it was the sound of insects that told him he had left the network of tunnels—he was trussed up again and lifted onto a chair. The cloth around his head was removed, and he breathed deeply the clammy air. The rope was coarse, the sort of hemp twine used for tying river sloops to bamboo docks, and it bit into his wrists, his ankles. Small insects hovered around the fretwork of small cuts and abrasions that covered his exposed flesh. His T-shirt and underpants—that was all he had been left with—were encrusted with dirt from the tunnels.

A large-boned man with eyes that looked small beneath his steel-framed glasses approached him.

“Where … others?” Janson’s mouth was cottony.

“Members of your death squad? Dead. Only you safe.”

“You’re Viet Cong?”

“That is not correct term. We represent Central Committee of the National Liberation Front.”

“National Liberation Front,” Janson repeated, his cracked lips forming words only with difficulty.

“Why you not wear dog tags?”

Janson shrugged, prompting an immediate whack with a bamboo stick across the back of his neck. “Must’ve got lost.”

Two guards stood to either side of the scowling interrogator. They each carried AK-47s and a link-belt of rounds around their waists; a Makarov 9.5mm pistol hung just below the ammo belt. One of them had clipped to his belt a U.S. Navy SEALs combat knife, the six-inch blade gleaming. Janson recognized the scars on its Tenite handle; it was his.

“You lie!” the interrogator said. His eyes darted toward the man standing behind Janson—Janson could not see him, but he could smell him, could feel his body heat even through the heat of the moist jungle air—and a crushing blow struck Janson’s side. The barrel of a rifle, he guessed. A bolt of agony shot through his side.

He had to concentrate—not on his interrogator but on something else. Through the bamboo struts of the hut, he could see large flat leaves dripping with water. He was a leaf; whatever fell upon him would drip off like beads of water.

“We hear about your special soldiers who do not wear tags.”