The Jungle

9

WITH THE DOORS PULLED OFF AND ALL THE SOUNDPROOFING bats removed, the interior of the chopper was as loud as an iron foundry during a pour. And that was just with the turbine at idle. Only Gomez Adams had a proper chair. All the others had been removed to save weight. This left Linda, MacD, and Smith strapped directly to the rear bulkhead with tie-downs intended for cargo. Juan sat next to the pilot on a jerry-rigged folding lawn chair that had been screwed to the deck.

Between the passengers was a mound of personal gear, including food, weapons, ammunition, a GPS tracker, and tactical headsets for the combat radios. Along with Smith’s sat phone, Cabrillo and Linda had phones of their own.

Juan had never considered stowing their gear in the boat on the off chance something happened to it on the flight in. The only provisions he would allow to go with the RHIB were twenty gallons of drinking water. With the tropical heat and soaring humidity, he figured each of them would drink nearly a gallon per day.

Gomez finished the preflight warm-up and asked, “Everybody ready?” His voice was muted through the headphones everyone was wearing.

He didn’t wait for a response before putting on more throttle. Rotor wash whipped through the chopper like a gale-force wind. The headphones kept Linda’s baseball cap in place, but her bunched and rubber-banded hair danced like the tail of an agitated cat.

The noise and wind built to a crescendo that rattled the helicopter within what seemed like an inch of its life. And then the ride smoothed as it lifted gingerly off the deck. The Oregon was at a dead stop, and there was no crosswind, so Gomez easily kept the craft centered over the large H painted on the cargo hatch. Ahead of them a loadmaster was watching the steel cable trailing up to the aircraft’s winch. As the chopper rose higher into the air, more and more cable was taken up until it went taut. The whole time, Gomez had inched the chopper forward so that at the exact instant the line started taking the load he was directly over the rigid hulled inflatable.

As delicately as a surgeon, he lifted the boat off its cradle. They were at the very limit of what the helo could take, and for a moment Adams paused, as if to let the chopper get used to the great weight hanging from its belly. And just as quickly he heaved it farther off the deck and sent the helicopter crabbing sideways, plucking the boat from between the stern derricks. As soon as they had cleared the rail, Adams applied even more power, and they started eastward to where the jungle crouched just over the horizon.

“How’s it feel?” Juan asked the pilot.

“Like we’ve got a two-thousand-pound pendulum swinging free under us. That boat might be pretty sleek in the water, but it’s got the in-flight aerodynamics of a barn door. I hope you aren’t expecting to chopper it back to the ship when you’re done.”

“I’d like to, if we can,” Juan told him. “I recall, though, that our contract does mention being reimbursed for expenses.”

“Good. Write the damned thing off. The strain we’re putting on the airframe and rotors ain’t worth bringing it home.”

Cabrillo laughed. Complaining was Adams’s way of dissipating stress. Max Hanley was the same way. Juan felt humor helped him a little, but the truth was that before a mission he liked to keep that stress bottled up inside. It was like the coiling of a watch spring; it was energy he would release later as he needed it. The more dangerous the situation, the tighter, and thus more explosive, he became. Right now, and until they crossed the border into Myanmar, he was truly relaxed. After that, he knew the tension would mount. Like always, he hoped he wouldn’t need to let it out, at least not until he was back aboard the ship soaking in a hot shower after a hundred or so laps in the Oregon’s indoor swimming pool.

Because the chopper was so grossly overloaded, Adams kept the speed down to around sixty knots, but it seemed only a couple of minutes passed before they thundered over a white sand beach at just enough elevation for the bottom of the RHIB to clear the mangrove swamp beyond. That was it, a thin pale strip of sand delineating a world of blue water from an equally monochromatic world of green jungle.

It seemed to stretch forever, rolling and undulating with the vagaries of the topography, but always covering every square inch of the ground below them. They were still in Bangladesh, but Juan knew the jungle stretched uninterrupted all the way to the coast of Vietnam and that it really was terra incognita—land unknown. Neil Armstrong once described the surface of the moon as “magnificent desolation.” This was the same, only this landscape was verdant yet nearly as hostile to human life.

They were so overloaded the chopper was barely able to keep the dangling boat from smashing into the taller trees. Gomez Adams wasn’t so much as flying the aircraft as he was fighting to keep it airborne and on course. His snarky comments had long since dried up. The sweat that shone on his face was only partially due to the high humidity.

Cabrillo plucked a handheld GPS from a pouch hanging from his combat harness. In a moment it told him that they were about to cross into Myanmar’s airspace. He didn’t bother announcing it to the others. But he kept a sharp eye on the jungle below for any sign the frontier was protected.

They had planned their route in to avoid rivers or major streams because any settlements in this remote part of the country would be built along their banks. There were no roads, and for as far as Cabrillo could see there were no signs that loggers had been attacking the jungle. Judging from the view alone, it was as if the human race had never existed.

The ground below started rising, and Adams matched the earth’s contours. Below them their shadow leapt and jumped across the canopy. It was not as crisp had it been earlier because clouds were moving in from the north. Behind the grayness loomed ominous black thunderheads that towered into the sky. They flickered with lightning.

“I’d say you’re in for a spot of weather,” Gomez said, his first words since making landfall.

“Of course we are,” Cabrillo replied. “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

They continued on for another hour and were now deep into Myanmar. Adams had flown masterfully, and, just as they had planned, they crossed over a hillock and there was the target, the river, a narrow slash through the jungle with trees almost meeting overtop. The pilot checked his fuel gauge and did some quick calculations.

“Sorry, but this is as far as I go. As it stands, I need the ship to come east to meet me if I’m going to make it back.”

“Roger that.” Cabrillo twisted in his makeshift seat so he could look at the trio in the cargo area. “Did you hear that? We need to do this quick. Linda, you’ve got point, then MacD and you, John. I’ll be right behind. Linda, make sure you wait to unhook the boat.”

“You got it,” she replied, and kicked a rappelling rope out the hole where a door had once been.

Adams maneuvered the big chopper into a hover directly over the fifty-foot-wide river. The tops of the trees danced and swayed in the rotor wash as he threaded the RHIB through them on its way to the water below. Such was his skill that the boat barely made a splash as it hit. And no sooner was it in place than Linda Ross threw herself down the rope. She dangled precariously for a moment, then arced her body over the RHIB’s inflatable skirt and landed on her feet on the deck. MacD Lawless was halfway down and dropping fast. Linda positioned herself to release the winch hook and waved up at Adams, who was watching the procedure through the Plexiglas windows at his feet.

“See you later,” Juan said to the pilot as he unstrapped himself for his turn down the line.

Before following the others, Juan clipped a D ring from the bundled packs to the line and looked down at the three people in the boat. All were looking up at him. Linda made a gesture to indicate they were ready, so Juan pushed the packs out. They hit the deck hard, but there was nothing in them that could break. Juan slung his carbine over his shoulder and threw himself down the rope, his hands protected by special gloves with leather palms and fingers. He arrested his fall an inch from the boat before letting go. No sooner had his boots hit than Linda released the winch, and Gomez Adams torqued the chopper up and away, heading back to the ship, and flying even closer to the ground now that he didn’t have to worry about the RHIB.

After so much time in the helicopter, it took several minutes for the ringing in their ears to subside.

They were on a deserted stretch of the river, which at this point flowed at a snail’s pace. The banks were about a foot above the water, composed of reddish soil that crumbled in places. Immediately behind the banks exploded a riot of vegetation that was so dense it appeared impenetrable. Cabrillo stared at a spot as hard as he could and estimated he could only penetrate maybe five feet before his view was completely blocked. For all he knew, a division of Myanmar’s Special Forces was lurking six feet in.

The temperature hovered around ninety degrees, but the lack of wind and the thickness of the moisture in the air made it feel like they were breathing in a sauna. In moments, perspiration stains bloomed under Cabrillo’s arms, and sweat trickled down his face. The coming rainstorm would be a welcome relief that couldn’t get there fast enough.

“Okay, we’ve got about sixty miles to cover. I want MacD and John on the bows as lookouts. Linda, you’re with me, but keep an eye on our six. The guys back on the ship beefed up the outboard’s exhaust, but anyone upstream will still hear us coming, so stay sharp.”

With that, Juan took his place at the control console slightly aft of amidships. Other than the ring of rubber fenders that encircled the boat, it was the only thing that stuck up above the deck of the spartan assault boat.

“Gear all secured?” he asked.

“Yup,” Linda said, straightening from where she’d bungeed the packs to a flip-up pad eye.

Cabrillo pressed the starter, and the engine immediately rumbled to life, as he knew it would. He let the single outboard warm for a moment and then bumped the throttle. The boat fought the river’s current until they were holding still relative to the banks. He pressed the accelerator harder. Water boiled behind the transom as the prop bit into the black tannin-laced river. In seconds he had them up to about fifteen miles per hour, far below the boat’s capability even with one of its engines removed, but a speed he judged would allow them plenty of reaction time if someone was coming downstream.

The wind created by their forward progress was a blessed relief.

When they neared a sharp bend in the river, Cabrillo would throttle the boat down so it was barely making headway and peek it around the corner to make sure there was nothing lurking in their blind spot.

After a half hour, two things happened almost simultaneously. The nature of the river changed. The banks drew in closer, which sped up the current, and boulders appeared, creating eddies and pools that Cabrillo had to steer around. These weren’t exactly rapids, but they quickly could become so. The second thing was that, after a brutal spike in humidity that seemed to soak their lungs with each breath, the rain clouds, which had arrived overhead and washed all color from the jungle, opened. It was a constant drumming rain that hit like fists. It came down in sheets, it came down in buckets, it came down as if they were being blasted by fire hoses.

Juan fumbled a pair of clear goggles from the tiny compartment under the wheel and slipped them over his eyes. Without them, he couldn’t see the bow of the boat. With them, his vision wasn’t extended too much farther, but enough for them to keep going.

He gave thanks that tropical downpours, while brutal onslaughts to the senses, were blessedly brief. Or so he kept telling himself as ten minutes turned into twenty, and their speed barely made headway against the still-strengthening current.

The three others hunched miserably at their stations, looking like drowned rats. When he glanced down at Linda, who had her back against the rubber fender, she was hugging herself, and her lips were quivering. MacD was making a halfhearted attempt to bail out the RHIB using his boonie hat. A solid inch of water sloshed back and forth whenever Cabrillo steered them around an obstacle.

The riverbanks rose higher still, hemming them in, oftentimes looming over the boat. Loose soil had given way to gravel and rock. The once-tranquil river was becoming a torrent, and as much as Cabrillo thought it might be a good idea to pull over and wait out the storm, there were no sheltered coves, no places to tie off a line. They had no choice but to forge ahead.

Visibility was measured in inches, while overhead thunder cracked an instant after the lightning snaked across the heavens.

But he kept them driving onward. Every time the boat hit an obstruction, or the stern sank deep as they powered over a cataract, he was grateful that the single propeller had a shroud to protect the blades. Otherwise the prop would have chewed itself apart on the rocks.

It took a keen eye to notice when the water suddenly turned muddy brown, and an even sharper mind to understand what it meant.

Cabrillo reacted instantly. He turned the boat sharp right to get out of the center of the raging river just as the rubble of a collapsed bank farther upstream choked the waterway with debris. Whole trees arrowed down the river, their branches reaching out for the RHIB, each easily capable of capsizing the craft or at the least tearing away the rubber fenders that acted as the boat’s gunwales. Had Juan not twisted the wheel, they would have been sunk for sure.

Trunks as big around as telephone poles hurtled past, their rootballs exposed. Erosion was eating away at the soil that had been ripped from the ground when the trees tumbled into the river. At one point Juan had to slew the boat around the drowned body of a water buffalo, its horns coming close enough to brush the boat’s flank before the current carried the pitiable creature away.

Some objects were too low in the water for Cabrillo to see, so he maneuvered the boat by listening to MacD’s shouted warnings. They were forced to cut left and right as the river continued to throw flotsam at them. Juan had reduced power as much as he dared, but still trees and shrubs flew past at dizzying speeds, while the sky continued to rage overhead.

If anything, the storm was intensifying. Along the banks of the river, trees were bent nearly horizontal by the wind, and leaves the size of movie posters were stripped off and tossed through the air. One whipped across Cabrillo’s face and would have gouged out an eye if he hadn’t been wearing the goggles.

If there was a bright side to this, he thought fatalistically, the chances were nil that anyone else would be crazy enough to be on the river with them.

The last of the trees schussed down the river, and the water regained its black-tea color, and all at once the rain stopped. It was as if a tap had been turned off. One second, they were enduring the worst torrent any of them had ever experienced, and, the next, the water that had been pummeling them for so long was gone. Moments later the dark storm clouds cleared away from the sun, and it beat down on them with a mocking cheeriness. The humidity spiked. Steam rose from the forest, creating a fog that was at first eerie and spectral but quickly grew to an impenetrable haze.

“Is everyone all right?” Cabrillo asked. He received nods from three dripping heads. From the storage cabinet under the steering console he grabbed a hand pump and tossed it to Smith. “Sorry, but the mechanical pump was removed to lighten the boat.”

The craft wallowed under the hundreds of pounds of water that sloshed across the deck and filled its bilge. MacD continued to bail with his hat, and Linda made do with her hands, dumping palmful after palmful over the gunwales. The pump was by far the most efficient means of clearing the craft, but its stream seemed insignificant when compared to the volume of rain the boat had taken on.

Twenty laborious minutes later the craft still wasn’t empty, but they had come upon an obstacle that looked like it had doomed the trip before they had really gotten started.

A three-foot-high waterfall spanned the width of the river, its flow a glossy black over the rock. The banks here were high sloping hills of loose gravel and till.

“How far have we come?” Linda asked, her clothes not yet dry.

“We have at least another sixty miles to go,” Juan said without looking at her. He was studying the riverbank behind the RHIB.

“I guess we have to start hoofing it,” MacD said with the eagerness of a prisoner heading for the gallows.

“Not so fast. Linda, did you bring explosives?”

“About two pounds of plastique and some timer pencils. A girl has to be prepared.”

“Excellent. MacD, I want you to reconnoiter at least two miles upstream. Make sure there aren’t any villages within earshot. John, sorry, but you get to keep bailing. We need to get the draft as shallow as possible.”

“Oui,” the taciturn man said, and just kept pumping the handle back and forth, shooting a thin jet of water over the side with each stroke.

MacD grabbed up his REC7, shook water from the receiver, and leapt over the side of the boat. He waded to the right bank, climbed up, using his free hand for purchase on the shifting mound of gravel, and disappeared over the crest at a jog.

“You’re not thinking—” Linda began.

“Oh, but I am,” Cabrillo said.

He had her rummage through her gear for the explosives while he fashioned a shovel out of a carbon fiber oar. They jumped from the boat, Cabrillo with a line in his hand to tie off around a piece of beached driftwood. The bank was steepest about thirty yards behind the RHIB, so they slogged their way there, loose rock sliding and hissing wherever they stepped.

Cabrillo eyed the hill, which rose a good fifty feet above the river even as flooded as it was. He had one shot to get this right or they were looking at a days-long march through the jungle. They were already so far behind Soleil Croissard that her trail was ice cold, and getting colder by the minute.

Satisfied with his decision, he dropped to his knees and started digging. For every awkward shovelful of pebbles he pulled from the hole, half as much tumbled back in. It was frustrating work, and soon his breathing was labored because of the soggy and molten air. He finally reached a depth of about three feet, then moved down the hillside about eight feet and repeated the process, while Linda separated her explosives into five equal measures.

It took nearly thirty minutes to complete the holes. Cabrillo’s pores were like faucets, and he’d drunk nearly a quarter of the camelback water harness he’d had Linda fetch from the boat. He was just getting back to his feet when he sensed movement behind him. He whirled, drawing a pistol in the same motion so that when he completed his turn he had a bead on the man who emerged from the scrub.

He lowered the weapon the instant he recognized MacD Lawless. If anything, the native Louisianan was breathing even heavier than the Chairman.

Juan looked at his watch as Lawless stepped gingerly down the bank.

“Two miles?” he queried.

“I can keep a seven-minute-mile pace for five miles,” Lawless said, blowing like a stallion after the Kentucky Derby. “That slows to ten minutes with a full pack.”

Juan was impressed with both Lawless’s stamina and the fact that he knew his body’s capabilities and limitations. Information like that could one day save an operator’s life.

“Anything up ahead?”

“Just jungle. The good news is, it looks like the worst of the rapids are behind us.” He sucked at the water tube from Cabrillo’s camelback and used a dingy tan bandanna to wipe his face. “Man, it’s thicker out there than the swamps of Lafourche Parish.”

“Get back aboard. We’ll be ready in a minute.”

The Corporation used digital devices rather than chemical timers to set off the explosives. These had an accuracy unmatched by their older brethren and would allow Cabrillo split-second timing. He set the timers and quickly laid the explosive in each hole, frantically shoveling dirt back in to cover the plastique.

He was back aboard the idling RHIB, painter line in hand, with about two minutes to spare. He edged the boat closer to the waterfall to put as much distance as possible between them and the blast. Everyone lay flat on the deck, not even peering over the gunwale because of the debris that would be blown from the beach.

The blasts went off in a sequence that was so tightly controlled, it sounded like one long, continuous explosion. Rock and debris erupted from the earth in fountains of flaming gas that echoed across the river and sent hundreds of birds into startled flight. Seconds later, pebbles peppered the RHIB, bouncing off the inflatable fenders or pinging against the plastic deck. One fist-sized rock gave Smith a charley horse when it hit his thigh. He grunted once but said nothing more.

Before the dust had fully settled, Juan was on his feet, looking aft. The underpinnings of the riverbank had been excavated by the explosion, and, as he watched, the entire mass—nearly forty feet of it—slid ponderously into the river, bulling aside the water, before the leading edge smashed into the far shore with enough force to block the waterway entirely.

“Voilà,” Cabrillo said, obviously pleased with himself. “Instant cofferdam.”

With its outlet cut off by the landslide, the water trapped between it and the falls began to rise. It was now a race to see if the river would erode the temporary dam before the level got high enough to force the boat up and over the falls.

“I’ve got another idea. Linda, take the helm. John, MacD, with me.”

Cabrillo grabbed up the boat’s painter once again and used hand signals to get Linda to tuck the boat directly below the waterfall. It was barely higher than the RHIB’s bow. The three men leapt atop the falls and found footing on a rock poking up from the water like a tiny island.

The area between the falls and the dam continued to fill. But, at the same time, the downstream current was eating at the cofferdam, exploiting any crack or flaw to tear it away. The RHIB’s bow rose higher still until the front of the keel rested on the rock face of the falls. The men coiled the nylon line around their wrists in the most important game of tug-of-war they’d ever fought. Linda kept the engine revs up, forcing the craft higher and higher. Behind them, a trickle of water worked its way through the cofferdam, rejoining the river’s normal flow. The breach was tiny, no more than a few seeping drops, but would expand exponentially.

To make matters worse, the lowest section of the dam, near the bank opposite of where Cabrillo had set off the explosions, was close to being overtopped by the rising water.

“We’re going to have one shot at this,” Juan said, bunching the muscles in his arms and shoulders as they prepared to pull the boat over the falls. “Linda, watch behind you and tell us when.”

Linda peered at the cofferdam and the riverbanks to make sure the water was still filling their man-made lagoon faster than the earthen dam was letting water pour through. She judged it finely. The water level reached its crest, with the falls being no more than a six-inch riffle, when the dam let go in a gush of mud and debris.

“Now!” she shouted, and firewalled the outboard.

The three men heaved back on the line, their bodies as taut as marble statues, the effort playing across each of their faces. The ten minutes it took to fill the basin was washed away in seconds. As the level dropped, more and more weight pressed the RHIB’s keel into the rock and made the load on the men that much heavier.

The river sluiced out from under the outboard’s prop so that it screamed as the blades met air. And still the men pulled, gaining fractions of inches with every strained heave.

Linda idled the engine and jumped out of the RHIB so that she was standing on the very lip of the falls, inky water rushing past her shins. But that last one hundred and eleven pounds of extra weight was all the men needed removed to do the trick. The boat slid over the rocky bottom and then hit deeper water and began to float. The current turned it sideways against the escarpment and gave it a bad list, but it was now too low in the water to be forced back over the falls.

MacD and John Smith both fell back into the river when the boat lurched forward. They came up sputtering, and laughing that they’d done it. Cabrillo had somehow kept his balance, and when Linda cut the boat across the current and brought it up to his little rock island, he stepped over the gunwale as casually as a commuter gets aboard a train.

In turn, Lawless and Smith hauled themselves out of the river and lay panting on the deck, big grins plastered on their faces.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Juan remarked as he took his place behind the console.

“Like hell,” MacD said when he noticed he had leeches stuck to his arms. “Oh God, there’s nothin’ Ah hate more than leeches.” He fished in his pocket for a disposable lighter.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Linda warned as Lawless worked the little flint wheel to dry it out.

“That’s how my daddy taught me.”

“Oh, the leech will drop off, but it will also regurgitate everything it ate. Which, a, is disgusting, and, b, might carry disease. Use your fingernail and scrape its mouth off of you.”

Following her advice, and making faces that a little girl might make, MacD got four of the bloodsuckers off his arms, and one off the back of his neck with Linda’s help. Smith hadn’t been attacked by the loathsome parasites.

“You must have sour blood, John,” Lawless teased, putting his shirt back on. With a tightened belt and drawstrings closed around his ankles, he wasn’t worried about anything getting into his pants.

Smith didn’t reply. He took up his station at the bows and prepared to act as lookout once again. MacD exchanged a look and a shrug with Linda and Cabrillo, and went to join Smith at the bow.

Because of the waterfall covering their rear, there was no need for Linda to keep watch for anyone overtaking them. And with riverine transportation the only way to negotiate the jungle, Cabrillo drove with the confidence that there wouldn’t be any villages up ahead either. The people wouldn’t have been able to get back upstream once they floated past the falls, and he had seen no indication of portage paths on either side of the cataract.

He kept up a good twenty-five-mile-an-hour pace and slowed only at the truly blind corners as the river meandered deeper into the jungle. Their speed finally dried everyone’s clothes.

As the sun arced its way across the sky, the river remained as tranquil and easy to negotiate as a meandering canal. The rain forest was the other constant. It lined the waterway as dense as a garden hedgerow. Only occasionally would there be a gap, usually when a small stream fed into the main channel, or where the banks were especially gentle and animals coming down to drink had worn away game trails. One of the trails was particularly large. Juan suspected it might have been cleared by some of the country’s estimated ten thousand wild elephants.

Lurking in that impenetrable wall of broad-leaved plants were Asian rhinos, tigers, leopards, and all manner of snakes including the biggest pythons in the world and the most deadly species of cobra, the king cobra. All in all, he thought, not exactly a good place to be lost.

It was nearing early evening when Juan cut the power so that the boat was barely making headway against the gentle current. The dramatic reduction in engine noise left their ears ringing for a moment.

“We’re about ten miles from Soleil’s last-known GPS coordinates. We’ll stay with the motor for maybe another five and then we break out the oars. Everyone, keep sharp. We have no idea what we’re going to find, but Soleil was convinced there was someone else in the jungle with her.”

Cabrillo’s eyes never lingered on any one spot for more than a moment. He scanned the forest ahead and off to the sides, knowing that someone could be watching them with total impunity. If there were rebels, or drug dealers, or an army patrol out here, they wouldn’t know until they had walked into the ambush. He had to resist the urge to glance over his shoulder. He knew Linda was watching their back, but he couldn’t shake the sense that someone was watching him.

A bird screech high in a nearby tree squirted a healthy dose of adrenaline into his bloodstream. Linda gave a little gasp, and he saw MacD jump. Only Smith hadn’t been startled. Juan was beginning to suspect the man had ice water running through his veins.

When they’d covered the allotted five miles, Juan cut the engine and lifted the outboard from the water so it wouldn’t act as drag. With two rowers on each side of the RHIB, they started paddling. Smith had pumped most of the water out of the bilge, but it was still a big boat, and, no matter how mild the current, it was tough going.

In times like these they usually deployed a small electric motor that could power them along silently, but like so much other equipment it had been left back on the Oregon in order to save on weight.

People who have never rowed a boat together before usually go through several awkward minutes as they adjust to one another’s timing. Not so here. Despite the fact that Smith and MacD were virtual strangers, all four set a tempo instinctively and worked the carbon fiber oars with the symmetry of the Harvard crew.

Every few minutes Juan would check his handheld GPS, and when he spotted a rare clearing ahead on the right bank, he knew they had reached the end of their time on the river. It was a natural trail into the jungle, and he suspected this was where Soleil and her companion—Cabrillo couldn’t recall his name—had exited the water.

He steered them toward the small open glade, noting that a thin trickle of water was running through it. Beyond towered a riotous wall of vegetation. Soleil had last been heard from three miles from this spot.

They edged the boat into some reeds lining the tributary, pushing it as far into cover as possible. No sooner had they stopped than Smith had his machine pistol up high on his shoulder, scanning the area through its scope. There was nothing but the background din of insects and birds and the sound of the water burbling past the RHIB’s transom.

It took just a few minutes to gather up their gear. All of them wore camelbacks for water and lightweight nylon rucks, weighing from twenty-five pounds for Linda to nearly forty for Cabrillo and the other two men.

With luck, they wouldn’t need anything other than the water.

Cabrillo looked back at the RHIB to make sure it was well concealed. He walked a few paces from the others to check from a different angle and that’s when he saw the face. It was watching him through hooded, unblinking eyes. It took him a breathless moment for his brain to comprehend what he was seeing. It was the head of a statue of Buddha that had toppled to the jungle floor just up from the river. Behind it, cloaked in creepers and vines, was a stone building much like the step pyramids at Angkor Wat in neighboring Cambodia, though nowhere near that massive scale.

The structure was maybe thirty feet tall, with the Buddha head once resting on the roof of the tallest tier. It all looked ageless, as if the complex had been here since time immemorial and the jungle grew up around it.

“I think we’re at the right place,” he muttered.

“No kidding,” Linda said. “Look.”

Juan tore his eyes away from the pyramid and glanced over to see that Linda had pulled aside a leafy branch to reveal two one-person plastic kayaks. The sleek craft were commercially available at outfitters all over the world. The pair were dark green in color, and were a logical choice for getting upstream because they could be carried around obstacles by the paddler.

“They must have carried them overland from Bangladesh,” Smith said.

Cabrillo shook his head. “It’s more likely they entered the river where it meets the sea. They must have chartered a boat in Chittagong to carry them on the first part of the trip. Soleil definitely had a destination in mind. She knew right where she was heading. Check that out.”

They all followed his pointed finger to where the last rays of the sun shone on the head so that for a brief few seconds the gray stone visage appeared gilded.

Linda’s hand went to her mouth to stifle a cry of surprise. “It’s beautiful,” she said breathlessly.

“Ah guess we ain’t in Lafourche Parish after all,” Lawless remarked.

Smith made no comment. He looked at the temple for just a second before tucking his machine pistol under his arm and glancing at Cabrillo with an expression that said gawking at antiquities wasn’t on their agenda.

Juan didn’t doubt Smith’s loyalty to Roland Croissard, nor his desire to rescue his employer’s daughter, but he thought the former Legionnaire needed to lighten up a bit and enjoy the surprises life sometimes throws at you. There were probably less than a handful of outsiders who’d ever seen the temple complex. Knowing that sent a charge through his system, and he wanted nothing more than to explore its mysteries.

But he also knew Smith was correct. They were on a mission, and studying archaeological treasures wasn’t part of the deal. They could cover the remaining miles to their GPS target before the jungle became too dark to see. He did let Linda snap a few pictures and slide her cell phone camera back into its waterproof sleeve before giving the order to move out.