Emerald Buddha

Chapter 20

Clouds darkened the night sky as a storm moved north, and the air was heavy with the smell of incipient rain. The airport was still and the surrounding homes in shadows as three figures ran from the brush toward the silhouette of the helicopter parked on the cracking tarmac. All wore muted clothing and moved like wraiths, their footsteps soundless as they neared the aircraft.

Two of the men stood by the fuselage, assault rifles in hand, as the third approached the turbine cowling, a satchel with tools in it hanging from his shoulder.

Fifteen minutes later the three returned to the brush, where their motorcycles had been hidden for a quick getaway. They started the engines and roared off, back toward the porous border from whence they’d come. Their leader, a prominent drug lord, had recognized the helicopter that was working its way toward his meth labs, and had ordered his best men to arrange for it to have maintenance issues. Word had gone out, a small fortune by Myanmar standards had changed hands, and an ex-Myanmar Army sergeant who’d worked on helicopters for four years had agreed to incapacitate the aircraft.

Tomorrow the annoyance would be ended, and the labs could return to normal, their production schedule back on track to meet the endless demand for the stimulant whose annual cash value was estimated to be greater than the entire legal Myanmar economy. With the vast majority of the country’s population living in abject poverty, working in the drug trade was the only way for most to support themselves, be it from growing opium or trafficking narcotics, or on the manufacturing side. For all the effort to quash the trade, drugs remained the only viable solution to endemic impoverishment, and sustained most of the hill tribes that lived in the Golden Triangle.

Uncle Pete wiped his brow with a stained rag as he sat in the helicopter, waiting for Daeng to start the engine. Dawn had come and gone a half hour earlier, and the whole group had a sense of time passing by, no closer to their objective than they had been the prior day.

Spencer passed out the weapons again as the turbine growled to life, and soon they were hovering over the third of six quadrants on the Laos side of the border. Daeng watched the line of storm clouds over Myanmar with a wary eye as they began the grid search, coaxing the helicopter along ten stories above the tree line. They’d agreed to move in as close as possible the prior day, fearful of missing a telltale sign of wreckage, given that the canopy was so thick in places that they couldn’t make out the ground.

“Didn’t spend any extra money on the cushions back here, did he?” Allie muttered to Spencer, shifting on the bench seat.

“If I never see this miserable contraption again, it will be too soon,” Spencer agreed from beside her.

Uncle Pete remained silent, and Allie’s nose wrinkled at the sour smell of alcohol and cigarettes seeping from his pores. Apparently their guide liked a morning eye-opener after a night of festivities on the company account, though Uncle Pete’s hangdog expression announced that he was regretting his celebratory enthusiasm today.

Daeng tapped one of the gauges and furrowed his brow.

Drake leaned toward him. “What is it?”

“Our oil temp is in the red. Something’s not right,” Daeng said, his voice tight.

“That’s bad, right?”

Daeng was about to speak when the helicopter shuddered and the turbine groaned. Daeng battled the controls as they lost altitude, and then alarms shrieked in the cockpit as the rotor blades froze and the helicopter plunged at a sickening angle toward the earth.

Allie was screaming when the aircraft crashed into the surface of a tributary that fed the Mekong River, the force of the impact so jarring her gun flew from her hands. The windows shattered, spraying safety glass all over them, and water gushed through the gaps.

Uncle Pete was the first out, unbuckling his seatbelt and kicking what remained of his window free before climbing from the wreckage and plunging into the river. Spencer helped Allie get her belt loose, and she crawled through the opening as the helicopter sank. When she was clear, he leaned forward to where Drake was fumbling with his harness.

A glance at the unnatural angle of Daeng’s head told him that the pilot had taken his last flight. Spencer wedged himself into the gap between them and freed Drake.

“You okay?” he yelled.

Drake nodded. “I think so. Bruised.”

“Get out of this thing. It’ll be on the bottom in a few more seconds.” Spencer glanced at Drake’s submachine gun still clutched in his hands. “Don’t let go of that, whatever you do.”

Water rose to chest level and Spencer fumbled for the duffle handle. After retrieving it, he launched himself through the cabin window as Drake scrambled out the windshield opening. The current was strong, and muddy water swirled around them as they pulled for the nearest shore.

When Spencer crawled from the river, he spotted Allie nearby, dripping wet but otherwise with no sign of injury. He made his way to her and she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. He held her for a long moment, and then Drake’s voice called from across the water. They both looked over at where he stood, Uncle Pete beside him, on the far bank. The frothing brown river rushed by as the helicopter settled on the bottom, leaving only the top of the rotor shaft and one blade jutting from the water as evidence of its existence.

“Are you okay?” Drake yelled.

“Yeah. You?” Spencer called.

“Sore and swelling. Allie?”

“Same here.”

“Daeng?” Allie asked Spencer, and he shook his head.

“He didn’t make it.”

The still air exploded with gunshots, and the earth around Drake fountained as slugs pounded into the bank. Uncle Pete ducked and ran into the brush. More shots sounded from downstream, and Spencer squinted at a bend in the river, where a boat filled with gunmen was fighting the current, its outboard laboring as the shooter standing in the bow tried to steady his aim.

Spencer swung his AKM into firing position and squeezed off a burst to buy Drake time, and nodded in satisfaction when at least a few of his rounds thumped into the wooden hull. The men onboard all began firing at him as the bow shooter took cover. Spencer yelled at Allie as rounds sprayed the sloping bank a dozen yards short of him.

“Get out of here. Hurry,” he ordered, and emptied half his magazine at the boat before he turned and sprinted for the brush line where Allie had disappeared. Ricochets whined off the nearby rocks, and then he was in the trees. He spotted Allie ahead and ran in a crouch toward her, the whistle of bullets shredding through the vegetation too close for comfort. She kept up her pace, and they didn’t slow until they’d put a hundred yards between themselves and the river.

Spencer held his finger to his lips and pointed to a small clearing near a thicket of bamboo. She nodded and he took the lead, his pace as fast as the terrain would allow. When he reached the thicket, he slid his hand into the duffle and drew out one of the pistols. He handed it to her wordlessly before retrieving another and strapping the holster onto his belt. She did the same as Spencer groped around in the depths of the bag for a curved AKM thirty-round magazine. When he found one, he swapped it for his nearly spent one and then gestured at the faint impression of a trail leading south from the edge of the thicket.

Allie nodded and they set off, not waiting to see whether the boatload of killers had followed them or gone after Uncle Pete and Drake.

Half an hour of hard pushing later, they slowed. Allie whispered to Spencer, “What do you think that was all about?”

“Probably one of the neighborhood drug gangs. They tend to take a shoot first, ask questions later approach. They were likely in the vicinity and were drawn by the helicopter going down.”

“Were we hit by a missile or something?”

“No. Daeng thought it was a malfunction of some kind.”

“Where does that leave us?”

Spencer looked up at the sky and then at their surroundings. “We’re pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so nobody’s going to save our bacon. Which means we’re on our own. Let’s head to our left. Eventually we should hit the river we crashed into, which will dump into the Mekong. Maybe we can find a shallower part where we can cross.”

“What about Drake and Uncle Pete?”

“First things first, Allie. Uncle Pete strikes me as resourceful, and Drake still has his MP5. Let’s get back to the river, and then we’ll figure out how to find them.”

“What if we don’t?” Allie asked, her voice suddenly small.

“Allie, a lot of survival is about attitude. If you believe you’re done for, you already are — might as well lie down and die. Allie, look at me,” he said, and she tore her eyes from his gun and met his gaze. “We will get out of this, and we will find them. We just need to choose the best way. It may seem like a big jungle, but it’s not as bad as the Amazon, and we walked out of that, didn’t we?”

“Not all of us,” she said, almost inaudibly.

“Well, we did, and we’re going to do the same here. Now, come on. Let’s find someplace to cross the river.”

“What about the gunmen?”

“I doubt they’re going to devote a ton of time trying to track us through rain forest. We don’t have anything they want. They’re just protecting their turf.”

“They were pretty convincing.”

He stared into the trees and then turned to her. “I want to put some distance between us and them before it starts getting dark.”

“That’s hours away,” Allie said, but not disagreeing.

“It’ll be here sooner than you think.”