The Jungle

10

JUAN HAD THOUGHT THE EASIEST WAY TO TRAVEL WOULD BE to keep to the little stream, but it was a muddy morass that sucked at their boots with each step. When he lifted his foot from the muck, thick clots of it clung all the way to his ankle, and every step seemed to accumulate more. After just a dozen paces he could barely lift his legs free of the ooze.

This forced them out of the streambed and into the bush.

Juan knew immediately what soldiers fighting in the barbwire-entangled trenches of World War I had gone through. The sharp leaves pulled and ripped at his clothing and opened shallow yet painful cuts on his arms and face. There was no trail to speak of. He had to battle his way through snarls of vines and shrubs with the finesse of a bull in a china shop.

MacD, who marched directly behind Cabrillo, tapped him on the shoulder and made a gesture to say that he should take point. Cabrillo silently bowed to him. Lawless stepped ahead of the Chairman, studied the wall of bushes facing them, and moved a few feet to the left, closer to where tree trunks were just barely visible. He started forward, moving his body like a contortionist. It looked awkward, but he more than tripled their pace, with each team member mimicking the moves of the person ahead. And where Cabrillo had sounded like a rhinoceros crashing through the bush, Lawless moved as silently as a snake.

Still, the going was slow, and thirty minutes later so little sunlight was filtering through the canopy, it was as if they were fifty feet underwater.

“We should stop for the night,” MacD said in a whisper. “Ah can’t see nothin’.”

“All right,” Juan had to agree. Looking upward, it was next to impossible to see any daylight at all. “We’ll start out again at first light.”

Everyone’s first order of business was to get the flameless heating units from their MREs to start chemically warming their entrées. Next came laying out nylon sleeping pouches with built-in mosquito netting. Finding areas big enough to lie comfortably in the dense jungle was a chore unto itself, so the single machete MacD had been carrying was put to good use.

By the time their food was ready everyone had their pouches rolled out but still tightly sealed to keep the armada of insects, which had plagued them from the moment the RHIB had come to a stop, from joining them for the night. No one said a word the entire time. When the meal was over, Juan pointed at Smith, then himself, then at MacD, and finally at Linda. This was the order for guard duty. He checked his watch, calculating in how many hours the sun would rise again, and held up two fingers. They nodded their understanding.

Cabrillo deliberately gave Smith the first watch because he knew he himself could stay awake to make sure the Legionnaire did his job.

The night passed smoothly, if not exactly comfortably. A jungle at night contains an earsplitting symphony of bird and monkey cries, with a backup chorus of insects’ incessant chirping. Juan’s concerns about Smith were unfounded.

A clammy mist clung to the ground when they awoke, deadening the sounds of the forest and giving everything an eerie, otherworldly mien. They broke camp as silently as they made it, and within ten minutes of there being light enough to see they struck out again, MacD at point and Cabrillo in the drag position.

Mercifully, the jungle began to thin, and when MacD found a game path, they could move on at an almost-normal pace. Lawless paused every so often, to listen, for one, but also to check the trail for any signs that a human had used it recently. Given the amount of rain that fell on a daily basis, Cabrillo doubted he would find anything and was amazed when after a quick detour into the adjoining bush he came back holding a balled-up piece of silvered paper. A gum wrapper. He opened it and held it under Cabrillo’s nose. He could still smell the mint.

“Our Miss Croissard,” he whispered, “is no environmentalist, littering like this.”

Lawless pocketed the scrap while Juan checked the GPS. They had about a quarter mile to go.

Their pauses became longer and more frequent the closer they got, and everyone held their weapon at the ready, not knowing what to expect but prepared nonetheless. It was a good sign that birds and tree-dwelling animals cavorted in the canopy. It was usually a sure sign that there was no one else around.

The forest suddenly opened up into a small glade of kneehigh grass. They paused at the edge, like swimmers contemplating jumping into a pond, and surveyed the area. A gentle breeze made the stalks of grass sway and ripple, but otherwise nothing moved. Cabrillo judged that Soleil had made her final transmission from the right side of the open field near where the jungle started again.

Rather than cross the glade, they backtracked into the bush and approached the site from the side. When they were fifteen feet away from the GPS coordinates, Cabrillo spotted stuff on the ground at the very edge of the field. He realized immediately it was what remained of a camp. He spotted a dark green tent that had been slashed apart, its lightweight frame mangled beyond recognition. Stuffing from shredded sleeping bags looked like cotton balls. There were other items too—a small camping stove, plastic plates, articles of clothing, a hiker’s walking stick.

“Looks like we are much too late,” Smith said in a low voice. “Whoever attacked here is long gone.”

Cabrillo nodded.

He hadn’t known what to expect they would find, but this confirmed his worst fears. All that remained was to find what the animals had left of the bodies. It was a grisly but necessary step to prove to Croissard that his daughter was truly dead.

“You and MacD watch the perimeter,” Juan said. “Linda, you’re with me.”

With the two men keeping guard, Linda and Cabrillo moved closer to the little encampment. As they did, they saw that the tent had been riddled with small-arms fire. The nylon was peppered with tiny holes whose edges were singed black by the heat of the bullets.

Linda hunkered down to pull open the collapsed tent fly, her arm reaching out to the zipper like it was on automatic pilot. Her expression was one that said she wanted to be anywhere but here and doing anything but this. Juan stood bent behind her

The viper had been resting in the cool shadow of the tent, just out of view. The vibrations of two large animals’ hearts beating and their lungs breathing had woken it seconds earlier, so when it struck, it did so with the fury of the disturbed.

It moved so fast that high-speed cameras would be necessary to capture its strike. As its hood opened, and its needlelike teeth hyperextended from its mouth, drops of clear venom had already formed on their tips. It was one of the most powerful neurotoxins on the planet and worked by paralyzing the diaphragm and stopping the lungs. Without antivenom, death occurs about thirty minutes after the bite.

The lightning-quick snake aimed straight for Linda’s forearm and was about three inches from clamping its jaws around her skin and sinking its teeth an inch into her flesh when Juan’s hand snapped around its neck and used the awesome power of its uncoiling body to redirect the strike and hurl the serpent into the jungle.

The entire episode took a single second.

“What just happened?” Linda said. She hadn’t seen a thing.

“Trust me,” Cabrillo said, a little breathlessly. “You don’t want to know.”

Linda shrugged and bent back over her task. There were more items inside the tent—food wrappers, a mess kit, more clothes—but there was no body, or even blood. Juan reached over Linda’s shoulder, moving stuff around with his hands, concentrating on what he wasn’t seeing more than what he was. He cast around in the grass, eventually finding Soleil’s satellite phone, or what was left of it. A bullet had passed clean through the sleek high-tech device. He also found a bunch of spent shell casings. 7.62mm. They were doubtlessly fired from AK-47s, the old Soviet Union’s legacy to the world of violence.

He called softly for Lawless and Smith.

“They’re not here,” he informed them. “I think they were ambushed but managed to slip into the jungle. The attackers swept through the camp, took what they wanted—food, apparently, since we didn’t find any—and then went off in pursuit.”

Smith’s expression didn’t change except for a little tightening at the corners of his eyes.

The guy really was made of stone, Juan thought.

“MacD, think you can track them?”

“Give me a sec.” He ambled over to the edge of the jungle closest to the ruined camp. He dropped to a knee, studying the ground, and then examined the branches of the nearest shrubs. He took almost five full minutes before waving the others to him. Cabrillo had used that time to call the Oregon and give Max Hanley an update. In return, Max had told him that everything was quiet on their end.

“See here?” MacD pointed to a broken branch. The pulpy wound had turned ashen. “This here looks like sumac to me. This level of discoloration means the branch was snapped a week ago, maybe ten days.”

“So, you can track them?” Smith prodded.

“Ah sure will try, but no guarantees.” He looked at Juan. “Did y’all find any shoes or boots?”

“No.”

Lawless put himself into the minds of two terrified people running for their lives. They would go in as straight a path as possible. They hadn’t found shoes, which meant they weren’t asleep when the attackers struck, meaning it had probably still been daylight, or dusk. Yes, they would run in a straight line since the pursuers would be able to see if they veered left or right.

He entered the jungle, confident that the rest of his team would keep him covered so he could concentrate on the hunt. Twenty yards in he found a red fiber that had been snagged by a thornbush and knew he was on the right path.

And so it went. At times, there were plenty of signs that a group of people had passed through the forest. At others, they’d go a quarter mile before spotting some vague clue, usually a broken twig or a smeared and barely discernible footprint. The morning wore into a steamy afternoon. They didn’t pause to eat but rather wolfed down protein bars and drank from their camelbacks.

Cabrillo thought they’d come at least ten miles when the jungle ended in a gorge that cut through the landscape like an ax stroke. At the bottom, nearly a hundred feet down by his estimation, raged a churning river that twisted and curled around rocks and fought against the stony banks.

“Left or right?” he asked MacD.

He scanned the ground in both directions, casting ahead nearly a hundred yards. “Oh my,” he called.

The others jogged to where Lawless stood, and they all saw what had given him pause. It was another temple complex like the one they’d seen when they left the main river only this one was built on the opposite cliff, clinging to the rock almost organically. It reminded Cabrillo of the Anasazi cave city at Mesa Verde, Colorado, only this had typical Oriental architectural flairs, with gracefully arching roofs and round, tiered pagodas. Some of the structure must have collapsed over time because under the buildings, down in the river channel, were mounds of dressed stonework, some with decorative carvings still visible. Amid the rubble was the remains of a waterwheel that must have powered a mill inside the temple. Most of it had rotted away, but there were enough of its metal struts and supports left to show it had been enormous.

Very little of the complex rose above the far rim of the chasm, and what little bit did was covered in vegetation, like the vines and creepers that snaked their way down the façade. The original builders had constructed the temple so that it was next to impossible to find.

“I’m definitely getting that Lara Croft vibe,” Linda said as she gazed awestruck at the remarkable feat of engineering.

They moved farther along the edge of the canyon and came across two additional surprises. One was that a village had once stood on this side of the river. Though the jungle was reclaiming it bit by bit, the land had been cleared and diked to form rice paddies, and there were remains of several dozen stilted huts. Most were piles of rotted wood, but some still stood on shaky legs, like tottering old women too proud to rest. The people who’d lived here must have tended to the monks who resided in the temple.

The other surprise was the rope bridge that spanned the eighty-foot-wide chasm. It sagged in the middle and looked ready to collapse with the next puff of wind. The main cable was at least a foot around, with two guide ropes that were at shoulder height secured to it with strands of line like the cables of a suspension bridge. Because they were thinner and more susceptible to rot, many of these supports had parted and hung dejectedly from the main hawser.

“You don’t think?”

“It’s possible,” Juan answered Linda’s almost-asked question.

“There is no way I’m crossing that,” she said.

“Do you fancy climbing down, crossing what looks to be class five rapids, and then free-climbing up the other side?” He didn’t wait for her response. “MacD, see if you can tell if Soleil or her partner came this way.”

Lawless was standing next to the stone pillars that anchored the bridge. They’d been set into holes carved into the rock and then reburied so that about four feet of each of them rose above ground level. Bronze caps with dragon heads had been placed over both pillars. One of them had snagged a small patch of red cloth in a dragon’s open mouth, the same shade as the fiber he’d found earlier.

“They came this way, all right,” he said, and showed off his discovery.

“Juan,” Smith called. He held a dull brass shell casing like the ones they’d found at the campsite.

Cabrillo eyed the rickety bridge with little enthusiasm, but he figured that if others had crossed it in recent days, it should support them. He slung his assault rifle over his shoulder as he approached the span. “Keep an eye out,” he said, and grasped the shoulder-high guide ropes.

The main cable was made of woven fiber and felt as hard as iron, though the guidelines had the slimy feel of rotting vegetation. He made the mistake of looking down. Below him the river looked like it was boiling, stones as sharp as knives littering the roaring waterway. Everything seemed jagged and deadly. If he hit the river, he’d be drowned for sure, and an impact with the rocks would split him open like a ripe melon.

Carefully placing one boot in front of the other, and testing each spot before putting his weight on it, Cabrillo inched his way out over the gorge, the sound of water cascading below him like a screaming jet engine. When he hit the halfway point, he glanced back and saw his companions watching him. The cable had sagged enough that he could only see their faces. Linda looked anxious, MacD intrigued, and Smith bored.

Climbing up the catenary-arced rope was trickier than going down, and once Juan’s foot slipped off completely. He clutched at the guideline, which shivered with tension. He slowly rebalanced himself and glanced back with a rueful shrug. He made it the rest of the way without incident and exhaled a long relieved sigh when his feet hit solid ground.

Linda came next, moving with the agility of a monkey, her pixie face set with determination. MacD followed, grinning like this was all a game to him. When he got to their side, Cabrillo looked up to see that Smith had disappeared.

“He said he needed to take a leak,” Lawless said, and went immediately to the vine-shrouded temple entrance. It looked like a perfectly square cave, and the air that whispered from it carried the cold chill of the earth.

Smith emerged from the jungle on the far side and quickly crossed the gorge, with Juan covering him with his REC7 should anyone step out of the forest behind him.

“All set?” Cabrillo asked him.

“Oui.”

“Here!” Lawless’s hushed voice came from inside the temple.

The three quickly stepped inside the stone building, which was just one story and unadorned. Lawless was halfway to a set of stairs carved into the rock that descended down to the lower reaches of the complex. He was hunkered down, holding a flashlight steady on the body of a young man.

He was blond, with a few weeks’ worth of beard, and dressed in sturdy cargo pants, a red long-sleeved T-shirt, and boots. There didn’t appear to be a mark on him. If not for his deathly pallor, it would be easy to imagine he was simply resting. MacD gently pulled him forward. There were four bullet holes stitched across his back. They hadn’t been immediately fatal or he wouldn’t have been able to prop himself against the wall. Or perhaps Soleil had done it as a final act of kindness.

“That is Paul Bissonette,” Smith said. “He was a frequent climbing partner of Soleil’s.”

“Vaya con Dios,” MacD muttered.

“What about Soleil?” Linda asked.

“She either kept running or she’s somewhere down there.” Cabrillo pointed to the stairs.

Flashlight beam preceding them, and pistols drawn because the confines were too tight for their assault rifles, three of them made their way cautiously down the stairs. Cabrillo ordered MacD to remain at the entrance and keep watch.

Unlike the plain walls of the uppermost chamber, the staircase was ornately carved with mythical figures and geometric designs. When they reached the bottom, they found themselves in another windowless room, but this one had a stone bench ringing three walls and a fireplace on the fourth. It was covered in mosaic tiles of deep red and bright yellow that had lost none of their luster over the years. A doorway led to another staircase. This one had windowlike openings that overlooked the cataracts below.

On the next level they discovered small rooms like jail cells that must have been where the priests slept. There was also a kitchen, with a built-in oven, and a fire pit set in the middle that would have been used to boil rice.

Below that was what had to have been the main temple. It had been stripped bare but at some point in the past would have been heavily gilded, with beautiful rugs on the floor and an ornate statue of Buddha high up on a dais overlooking the monks. The windows here all had Juliet balconies of intricate stone.

“Wow!” Linda’s eyes opened wider when she looked out over the gorge.

On the opposite cliff, where they had been when they first spotted the temple, the priests had carved an image of Buddha into the living rock. It was inexactly rendered, as if it were a work in progress. Some parts were beautifully sculpted while other sections were merely crude outlines.

“They must have hung from bosun’s chairs to work on that,” Cabrillo said.

“This place should be a World Heritage Site,” Linda remarked.

“Maybe that’s what Soleil and ...” Why did he keep blanking the poor guy’s name?

“Paul,” Linda offered.

“Maybe that’s what they were doing here.”

Smith was over studying the platform where a statue had once sat. It was constructed of closely fitted wooden planks that had been sanded until they were glass smooth. Wind and rain lashing though the open windows had pitted and stained the side closest, but the one protected by its own bulk still showed the loving craftsmanship that went into making it.

On a closer look, Cabrillo saw that the rougher side had been broken into. The wood had been pried apart, and a few pieces littered the floor amid the leaves that had blown into the room. Because of the age of the wooden dais, it was impossible to tell how long ago the vandalism had occurred. He joined Smith and peered into the hole. It had been a hiding place for whatever the monks considered their holy of holies—a relic of some sort, no doubt.

Had this been what Soleil had come after, a religious treasure that had long since been plundered? It seemed like such a waste. He turned away, shaking his head sadly.

There was one more level to the complex below the main temple. This was the section that had partially collapsed into the river. When they stepped out the doorway from the staircase, they found themselves on a platform maybe ten feet above the raging waters. The stone was wet from the splashing current and slick with moss. Below them was the skeletal framework of the waterwheel, and around them were the remains of a machine made of iron that was so badly rusted it crumbled to the touch.

Cabrillo studied what remained of the contraption, following along where gears and axles connected, and determined that it had been a large pump. He could tell that there had once been a bellows, most likely leather, which would have formed the vacuum chamber. It was sophisticated for its day and, judging by the size, very powerful.

This begged the question of its intended use. Even though it was large, it couldn’t have made a dent in the level of the river, even during the dry months. It had to be something else.

He walked to the right side of the platform, moving carefully in case the stonework was unstable, and peered over the edge. All he saw was white water shooting by like it had burst from a dam. Then he saw that directly below him was the entrance to a cave that bored back into the side of the cliff below the temple complex. It would have been accessible through the waterwheel building before it gave way.

“I bet they built here because of the cave,” he muttered to himself. It had to have some religious significance. His knowledge of the Buddhist faith was limited, but he knew that some caves and caverns were considered sacred.

The cave opening was out of reach without sophisticated climbing gear and more rope than the team had brought with them, but he wondered if Soleil had made the attempt. Is that why they hadn’t found her? She had slipped trying to reach the cave entrance, and her body was swept downstream?

“Hey, Juan. Come here for a sec.” Linda waved as she called him over. She and Smith were staring down into the river just above where the waterwheel sat in the current. “Do you see something down there, tangled with the wheel?”

Juan looked over the edge of the platform. It was difficult to make out any details—the rapids turned the river white from bank to bank—but it did look like something was ensnared in the upstream side of the wheel. He first thought it was branches that had been swept along with the flow. The metal framework would be a trap for such flotsam. And then he put two and two together. When he did, the picture came into focus. It was a body wedged into the wheel’s spokes.

“Jesus! It’s her!”

He quickly shed his pack and dug through it for the twenty-foot coil of rope he had packed. As he tied it to the back of his combat harness Linda secured the other end around the stone foundation of the ancient pump. The metal was just too brittle to trust.

“Should you have MacD here instead of me?” she asked.

Lawless had more physical strength than she, but Cabrillo didn’t want to be belayed by two people he barely knew. He shook his head. “You and John can handle it.”

He scooted to the edge of the platform directly above where Soleil’s body was trapped. He wished he could remove the boot on his real foot to keep it dry, but the metal and rocks were as sharp as knives. “Ready?”

“Yes,” the pair said in unison.

Cabrillo flipped onto his stomach and eased himself over the precipice. Linda and Smith took his weight and slowly lowered him down. The droplets of water that bubbled up from the river were icy cold. Juan twisted a bit as the rope unkinked, then stabilized. They let out more line, and he reached with the tip of his foot for the waterwheel. As they lowered him farther still, his weight shifted to the old contraption, and soon the line went slack.

Now that he was closer, he could see that the body was slender, but it was facedown so he couldn’t make a formal identification. He got down on his knees and reached an arm into the frigid water. The current almost plucked him off his perch. He steadied himself and reached again. He grabbed on to the shirt collar and pulled back with everything he had.

At first the body didn’t move. It was too tangled and the river too powerful. He shifted to get more comfortable and tried again. This time he felt her shift. Soleil’s corpse twisted around the stanchion that had pegged her in place since she fell into the water and for a fleeting second almost took Cabrillo with her. He managed to hang on, but the current was brutal. He fought to drag the body up onto the wheel. His grip was slipping on the wet clothing, and his hand was going numb. He realized that she had a bag over her shoulder, and his fingers soon slipped so he was only gripping its strap. When that happened, her body slipped free of the carryall and vanished down the river. It happened so fast there was nothing Cabrillo could do. One second he had her and the next she was gone.

Juan cursed at his own stupidity. He should have tied her off before trying to move her. He looked up at his companions.

“Was it her?” Smith asked over the river’s roar.

“Yeah,” Cabrillo said. “The hair color and build were right. Though I never saw her face. I am sorry.”

He slipped the strap for the leather satchel over his shoulder and let Linda and Smith haul him up. As soon as he could reach for the stone platform he used the strength in his arms and shoulders to scramble over the lip. He lay panting on the stone platform for a moment, more in disappointment than exhaustion.

Linda finally extended a hand to help hoist him to his feet.

That’s when they heard the unmistakable whooping beat of a fast-approaching helicopter.