The Jungle

12

TO SMITH’S SURPRISE AND HER CREDIT, THE WOMAN DIDN’T argue when he said they should head into the jungle after the rope bridge parted. They stayed just long enough to see that the Burmese soldiers were hauling up their two new prisoners before they ran for cover in the forest. With the bridge out, the soldiers wouldn’t be able to follow until they could find a place to land their chopper. Smith and Linda would have more than enough of a head start to elude capture. But just in case the Burmese had a tracker as accomplished as Lawless, they made certain to sweep the trail behind them.

After an hour of hard going, covering ground they had just crossed that morning, Smith called for a five-minute break. His companion wasn’t even breathing hard. Smith plopped himself onto the ground, panting heavily. In the background was the omnipresent sound of birds and insects. Linda squatted next to Smith, her expression grim, her mind doubtlessly on the fate of her captured companions.

She wiped at her eyes and turned away from Smith. It was the opening he’d been waiting for. He silently drew his pistol and placed the barrel at the back of her head.

“Drop your rifle, carefully,” he ordered.

Linda had drawn air through her teeth and gone stiff. She had the REC7 across her knees. She slowly placed it on the ground in front of her. Smith kept up the pressure with his pistol as he reached out and dragged the rifle out of her range.

“Now pull out your pistol. Two fingers only.”

Like an automaton, Linda unsnapped her holster and, using just her thumb and index finger, drew the Glock 19 she favored. The instant her fingers opened, she ducked her head and spun, throwing up a blocking arm to push Smith’s pistol into the air. She’d known his attention would be on her weapon and used that as a distraction. She stabbed out with stiffened fingers and caught Smith in the throat just above where the collarbones met. Then she hit him in the side of the head with a left cross. The punch wasn’t her best because they were close together, but with his airways constricted from the jab it dazed the former Legionnaire.

Linda sprang to her feet and reared back to kick Smith in the head. Fast as an adder, he grabbed her foot out of the air and twisted it over so that Linda had no choice but to fall to the ground. He leapt onto her back with both knees, blowing the air from her lungs, and his weight made it difficult for her to refill them. He slammed the pistol into the nape of her neck.

“Try something like that again and you’re dead. Understand?” When Linda didn’t reply, he repeated the question and screwed the barrel deeper into her flesh.

“Yes,” she managed to croak.

Smith had a length of wire ready in his pocket. He grabbed Linda’s arms and placed them at the small of her back. One-handed, he looped the wire around her wrists and twisted the two ends closed. The wire was high enough up her forearms that she couldn’t reach it with her fingers. A second piece of wire bound her wrists to the reinforced belt loop of her camouflage fatigues. In just seconds Linda Ross was trussed up like a Christmas goose. Only then did he take his weight off of her. Linda coughed violently as her lungs began working again. Her face was bright red, and her eyes burned with rage.

“Why are you doing this?”

Smith ignored her. He retrieved his satellite phone from his pack and powered it up.

“Answer me, damnit!”

He stripped the baseball cap off her head and stuffed it into her mouth. With so much jungle overhead he couldn’t get a clear signal. He grabbed Linda and started walking toward a clearing about fifty yards away. He dumped her into the grass and sat opposite her. He noticed he had an e-mail that had come in first thing this morning:

Change of plans, my friend. As you know my intention all along was to use official channels for our search. Going with the Corporation was a risky choice. My negotiations have finally paid off. I have made expensive arrangements with a Myanmar official for a squad of soldiers to be sent out to the monastery. They know who you are. Together, you should be able to wipe out the Corporation team and complete the mission.

Smith scratched at the stubble on his jaw. This changed everything, and explained how the chopper happened to show up at the exact right time. This meant the first team sent into the jungle was probably attacked by smugglers rather than the army. Just bad luck on their part.

Smith wrote out his text:

Wish I’d read your e-mail sooner. I’ve spent the last hour running from the patrol. No harm done. BTW I have them. Cabrillo and another taken prisoner. I have their woman with me. Bound and gagged. Instructions?

A minute passed before the reply lit up the screen:

I knew you could do it! And three Corporation members grabbed in the process. Interesting. It seems the Oracle gave them far more credit than they deserve. It appears they are no longer a threat. What of the other team I sent? Any ideas?

Smith replied:

Basil was shot, most likely by drug runners. Munire drowned. He had them in a bag. They had been under the dais, just like it said in the Rustichello Folio I stole in England. I am about an hour away from the army unit. How do I make contact?

The response came a moment later:

I will get word to them that you are coming back to their location. They will stand down. You can fly with them back to Yangon. A jet is waiting.

That beat having to hike out. In the cosmic scheme, it made up for being in a firefight where he was never a target. He thumbed in another message and hit SEND:

What do I do with the woman?

Is she attractive?

Smith looked over at Linda and assessed her the way a butcher looks at a cut of meat.

Yes.

Bring her along. In case the Oracle didn’t misjudge as badly as we think, she makes a good bargaining chip. If we don’t need her, we can sell her. See you soon, and well done, my friend.

Smith shut off the satellite phone and put it back in his pack. He again looked over at Linda. She glared at him with laser intensity. He smirked. Her anger had absolutely no effect on him.

“On your feet.”

Linda continued to stare defiantly.

“I was just told to keep you alive,” he said, “but that is an order I needn’t worry about obeying. Either get on your feet or I shoot you now and leave your corpse to the vultures.”

Her defiance lasted another heartbeat or two. He could tell when she finally accepted that she no longer had choices. The fire remained behind those eyes, but her shoulders sagged just a little as tension ran out of her body. Linda rose. With her in the lead, and Smith just behind her enough so that she couldn’t try anything, they retraced their path and headed back to the monastery.

JUAN MARKED TIME by the twin ravages of hunger and thirst. The hunger was a dull ache that he could handle. It was the thirst that was driving him mad. He had tried pounding on the door to get someone’s attention, but he knew that they hadn’t forgotten him. They were breaking him down bit by bit through deliberate deprivation.

His tongue felt like a seared piece of meat that had been rammed into his mouth, and his skin had stopped sweating so that it felt papery and brittle. No matter how he tried not to think about it, images of water flooded his mind—glasses of it, lakes of it, whole oceans of it. It was the worst form of torture. They were letting his mind betray him the way Croissard and Smith had. He realized that the waterboard treatment had only been a lark, a way for them to amuse themselves. If it had worked, fine. If not, they already had the second phase of his interrogation mapped out.

This was their tried-and-true method of breaking prisoners, and he was quite sure it had never failed.

Suddenly the bolt securing his door snapped back with a metallic echo, and the hinges squealed like nails on a chalkboard. Two guards were there. Neither had weapons other than the rubber truncheons slipped under their belts. They stomped into the room and lifted Cabrillo from the floor. The Burmese are not usually big people, and these two were no exception. In his exhausted state, and with only one leg, Cabrillo was deadweight, and the soldiers staggered under him.

Cabrillo was dragged down the corridor toward where he had been waterboarded. The dread he felt was like a load of stones had been packed around his heart.

But they continued past the door and went farther down the hallway to another interrogation room. This one was square, cement, and had a table and two chairs. One was bolted to the floor, the other was occupied by the interrogator with the cultured voice. On the table was a carafe of water, its sides dewy from the humidity, and an empty glass.

“Ah,” the interrogator greeted him with a smile that was part bonhomie, part reptilian. “Good of you to join me, Mr. Smith.”

They were still using that name, Juan thought. They either hadn’t tortured MacD or he hadn’t broken. Or this guy was smart enough not to reveal what he’d learned from their other prisoner.

Juan was dumped into the chair, and it took everything in him to remain erect and keep his eyes on the interrogator and not ogle the pitcher. His mouth was too dry to speak.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the interrogator said, pouring water into the glass so that the ice cubes clicked musically. “I am Colonel Soe Than. In case you were wondering, you have been our guest here at Insein for two and a half days.”

He set the glass in front of Cabrillo. Juan sat as still as a statue.

“Go ahead,” Than encouraged. “I will not think any less of you.”

With a studied deliberation, Juan reached for the water and took a measured sip.

Then he set the glass back onto the table, less than a quarter of it gone.

“I do admire your strength, Mr. Smith. You are one of the most disciplined men I’ve ever come across. By now, most people would have upended the carafe and sucked it all down. Of course, the abdominal cramps that accompany such a foolish mistake are as brutal as the original thirst.”

Juan said nothing.

“Before our time together comes to an end”—he glanced at his watch; it was the black military-style chronograph that Cabrillo had brought on the mission—“which should be in a half hour or so, I wonder if you would at least tell me your real name.”

Cabrillo took another slow sip of water. His body craved it, but he forced himself to put the glass back on the table. He cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse croak. “No joke. It really is John Smith.”

Than’s forced civility vanished in an instant, and he swung a fist into Juan’s hand, which was lying palm down on the table. The blow wasn’t enough to break bone. He could see a smug look cross Than’s otherwise bland face. By reacting like he had, he was telling Juan that he knew the truth. MacD had broken.

“Chairman Juan Cabrillo,” Tran said, civility back in place, “of the Corporation. Preposterous name, by the way. You’re based out of an old freighter called the Oregon. Which, as of first light this morning, our navy and air force are searching for. They have orders to sink it on sight. That was what I got out of a bargain that’s been made: the satisfaction of punishing your people for transgressing on our soil.”

“Bargain?” Juan asked.

“Oh, I should tell you that when we told our friends to the north your identity—you see, we share everything with them since they are so supportive of our government—they were very interested to hear of your capture.” Cabrillo knew Than was talking about China, Myanmar’s largest trade partner and only real ally in the region. “They very much want to speak with you. Your compatriot, young Mr. Lawless, as well, but I get the impression that General Jiang is most anxious to speak with you. It seems you were once in the employ of the CIA and that you might have insight into certain espionage events that have taken place over the years.”

Juan had never worked in China during his time with the Agency and couldn’t fathom why a Chinese general would think he would know anything. He couldn’t even guess why his name would pique their interest. He’d been out of the game for years.

Than went on. “Though I’ve never worked directly with the general, I must tell you his reputation precedes him. You will look back at our time together with fondness in the coming months and wish that you had remained in my gentle and loving care.”

Another thought struck Juan just then. He still had his tracker chip, so the crew would know where he was, but getting him and MacD out of China was going to be damned close to impossible. His hand was a little unsteady when he drank more water. Than refilled his glass.

“Not so glib now, eh, Chairman?” Than taunted. “Still want to remain defiant?”

There came a knock on the door. Than nodded to the guard stationed next to it to open it. In strode a middle-aged Chinese man in a beribboned uniform with a peaked cap placed firmly on his salt-and-pepper head. His face was deeply wrinkled, the skin of a man who spent a great deal of time out in the field rather than in an office, pushing papers. Behind him was a tall woman, also in uniform. She was about thirty, with long, straight black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, with her bangs obscuring parts of her face.

Than stood quickly and extended a hand. He and the general conversed in Chinese. Jiang didn’t introduce his aide, nor did the general even glance in Cabrillo’s direction. Juan took the opportunity to keep sipping at the water, hoping that the fluid would give him strength for whatever hell Jiang had planned for him. Cabrillo studied the general a little closer. There was something familiar about him, but he was certain he’d never met the man before. Maybe he’d seen a photograph in a briefing. He wasn’t sure.

“On your feet,” Than said in English.

Cabrillo stopped wracking his brain and did as he was ordered, balancing as best he could on his only foot. One of the guards grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back so he could whip on a pair of Flex-Cuffs. The plastic bit deep, but Juan had kept his wrists slightly apart so when the guard stepped away the binding wasn’t so tight. It was an old trick that on rare occasions had allowed him to get out of bindings or, at a minimum, make them a heck of a lot more comfortable. Well, less uncomfortable.

A minute later, MacD appeared with two more guards. They had to prop him on his feet. His uniform was hanging off him in rags, and fresh bruises covered his face, masking the old ones inflicted by the Taliban. His head lolled drunkenly, and if not for the guards, he would have collapsed. Spittle oozed from his lips. Jiang hardly gave Lawless a look, but his aide gasped when she saw him and had to stop herself from reaching out to him in a gesture of compassion.

They made a sad little procession. MacD was barely conscious, and Juan had to be dragged because he didn’t have the strength to hop. His guards sort of carried him under the shoulders and let his good leg take long steps.

They were taken into a large loading dock/motor pool. Sunlight blasted through the big overhead doors, forcing Juan to squint. The air reeked of diesel and spoiling food. Prisoners under the watchful eyes of more guards were unloading sacks of rice from the back of a Chinese-made stake truck with the baldest tires Cabrillo had ever seen. Its driver sat in the cab and smoked. Another truck was being loaded with produce grown on the prison grounds.

Parked just outside the big room was a white van without rear windows. The back doors were opened to reveal a cargo bed separated from the cab by a metal grille. The two prisoners were tossed into the back. MacD’s head hit with a thump and he lay still. There was nothing Cabrillo could do.

More Flex-Cuffs were used to secure the two men to hooks built into the floor. This wasn’t a regular prison vehicle, just a commercial van, but without internal door handles it was just as effective as an armored car. The doors slammed shut with a finality Juan felt in his bones. This was not going to end well.

A few more minutes went by. He could imagine Than and the general comparing torture techniques the way housewives swap recipes. Even with the front windows open the rear of the van grew as hot as a Dutch oven.

Jiang finally broke free from Than and got behind the wheel himself, his demure aide at his side in the passenger seat. They didn’t speak to each other as the engine was fired and the vehicle put into gear. A little wind puffed into the cargo area as they threaded through the prison grounds and headed toward the main gate. Juan couldn’t see anything but sky from his position on the floor, but he recalled that Insein Prison was a massive complex in northern Yangon built around a central hub like the spokes of a wheel. He also remembered that families were allowed to bring nonpolitical prisoners food at the perimeter wire and that, without it, many would simply starve to death.

Society is said to be measured by the condition of its prisons. Myanmar had to be at the bottom of the barrel.

The van slowed to a stop at the main gate. Guards checked the underside and opened the back doors. One pointed first at Juan, then at MacD, checked a clipboard, counted them a second time, and nodded. The doors were slammed closed.

They were a block from the prison, and Juan was about to try talking to the general when his aide opened the steel grille confining them in the back. She’d removed her glasses.

Juan gaped at her, unable to believe what he was seeing. She started crawling back into the cargo bed, carrying a small black case.

“How?” he rasped.

Her eyes’ shape changed with latex appliances and her hair dyed and lengthened with extensions, the Oregon’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julia Huxley, threw him the warmest smile he’d ever seen.

Then it dawned on him why he recognized the general. It was Eddie Seng, also heavily made up to appear older.

“Eddie and I were in the neighborhood.” She quickly cut Cabrillo’s Flex-Cuffs with a scalpel from her medical bag and started examining MacD Lawless.

“Don’t get cocky,” Seng warned from the driver’s seat. “We just passed a motorcade heading toward the prison and, if I don’t miss my guess, in the backseat of the second car was the real General Jiang. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“What?” Cabrillo cried. “The Chinese really want me? What the hell for?”

Seng glanced over his shoulder. “It was before I joined the Corporation, but didn’t you sink one of their navy’s Luhu-class destroyers?”

“The Chengo,” Juan recalled. “It was the first time we ever worked with NUMA’s current director, Dirk Pitt.”

He took Hux’s seat in the van’s cab. On the center console was a liter bottle of water. He drank a third before rescrewing the cap. He wanted more, but cramping was a real concern. Outside, Yangon was like any other modern megalopolis. The air was thick with smog and the stench of leaded gasoline being burned in untuned engines. This part of town was poorer than most. The road was a strip of crumbling asphalt. The curbs were open sewers. The single-story houses all seemed to lean on one another for support while half-naked children watched traffic with vacant eyes. Mangy dogs lurked in alleyways, looking for whatever scraps the kids hadn’t gotten to. Car horns blared at every intersection and usually for no apparent reason. In the far distance, Cabrillo could see some high-rises, but they had the institutional blandness of 1970s Soviet architecture. Occasionally there were signs of the city’s Oriental nature, a pagoda or Buddhist shrine, but other than that Yangon was indistinguishable from every other Third World city on the planet.

“Where’s the Oregon?” Of the dozens of questions swirling through Cabrillo’s mind, that was the most pressing.

“She’s about twenty miles southeast of us,” Eddie replied.

“Do you have a phone or a radio? I need to tell Max that the air force and navy are hunting for her.” Seng fished a two-way radio from his uniform pocket. Juan called the ship and told the duty officer—Hali Kasim, as it turned out—about the search under way and to place the Oregon on battle stations. The ship’s klaxon was wailing by the time the last words were out of the Chairman’s mouth.

Next, Cabrillo spun in his seat so he could look into the rear. “How is he, Hux?”

“Head injury for sure,” she replied in her clinical voice. “Can’t tell how severe until we get him back to the medical bay and I run an MRI.” Like everything else on the Oregon, her infirmary was state of the art, and would qualify as a Level One Trauma Center. “How about you? Any injuries?”

“Dehydration and a broken collarbone. I had a concussion, but it’s cleared up.”

“I’ll examine you in a little while.”

“Concentrate on MacD. I’m fine.” Cabrillo turned back around. “Okay, what’s been happening? Oh, first, Roland Croissard double-crossed us. I don’t know what he’s playing at, but his man Smith is why MacD and I were captured.”

“We figured something was up when yours and Linda’s tracking chips showed you both heading out of the jungle at over a hundred miles per hour. Figured it was a chopper.”

“An old Mi-8. Wait, Linda came with us? Where is she now?”

“A few hours after you landed in Yangon, she went to the airport and flew out to Brunei. The signal went dark when she was moved to a location just off the coast. I assume she was heloed out to a ship.”

“Brunei?” It made no sense. Unless Croissard had business dealings there, which was entirely possible.

“Murph and Stony are looking into it and digging deeper into Croissard’s background.”

Cabrillo asked, “How’d you set up the rescue from Insein?”

“We took the Oregon south as soon as your signals started to move and we couldn’t raise you on your phone, and when we were within range we started monitoring all military communications, especially stuff coming out of the prison. When Soe Than—he’s the warden, by the way—made his deal with General Jiang, we saw our opening. The trick was to time it so we arrived earlier than him, but not so early that we roused suspicion.”

“I have to congratulate Kevin and his magicians. The makeup is amazing.”

“Remember, he once barely missed out on an Academy Award. This was a piece of cake to him. He said a real challenge would have been to make Linc into Jiang.”

“How’d you two come to shore?”

“On the Liberty.” That was one of the Oregon’s two lifeboats. Like her mothership and her twin, the Or Death, the Liberty was a lot more than she seemed. “We came in during the night and docked her at an old boarded-up fish-packing plant across the river.”

Traffic was growing thicker and the sound of car horns louder. Big city buses and little three-wheeled tuk-tuks overloaded with passengers and their possessions vied for the same real estate with equal disdain for the other’s presence. It was bedlam. They saw no traffic cops, but plenty of soldiers patrolled the sidewalk, all armed with AK-47s and aviator shades. Pedestrians went around them like water around a boulder, parting and merging again, and making sure to never jostle them.

To Cabrillo, they didn’t look particularly alert. They were menacing, but they didn’t have the look of soldiers on the hunt for something in particular. That meant Than hadn’t sent out an alert. Yet.

“Where’d you get the van?” Juan asked as they sat behind an old truck carrying lengths of teak logs.

“Rented it from a delivery company first thing this morning.”

“No problems?”

“For the thousand euros cash I paid him, the clerk would have offered to kill his own mother,” Eddie replied. Like Juan, Seng had been a deep-cover operative for the CIA, so he had a way about him that made strangers trust him and had an ease in foreign countries as though he’d lived there his entire life.

As they drove and the neighborhoods improved, they saw stores selling just about everything under the sun and street vendors who sold anything else. There was a more commercial vibe, and a vibrancy, though nowhere near that of other Asian cities. It was the pall of the military dictatorship that sapped people of energy. Traffic was snarled not because there was so much of it but rather because the drivers were in no hurry to get to their destinations.

“On the left?” Eddie said.

Juan knew immediately who he was referring to. Midway down the block of stores selling knockoff clothing and bootleg CDs and DVDs was a soldier holding a walkie-talkie to his ear. He nodded, spoke a few words, and clipped it onto his belt. He had a partner who’d been standing at his side. The first one relayed information to the second, and the two started paying the traffic a lot more attention.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Cabrillo replied, “that the jig is up. Do you have a weapon?”

“Glove box.”

Juan opened it and retrieved a Glock 21 chambered for .45 caliber. The big slugs would put down just about anything short of a charging elephant.

The two soldiers saw the big white van amid the sedans, taxis, and bicycles, and their carriage changed in an instant. Hands tightened on weapons, and their posture stiffened. They started walking with purpose.

“I don’t want to have to kill these guys,” Juan said.

“Hold on.”

Eddie crushed the gas pedal and turned the wheel so that the front of the van clipped the back of some Chinese-made subcompact neither had ever heard of. Its wheels burned off rubber as the van pushed the tiny little car out of the way.

The soldiers started running. Juan stood with his head out the window and fired across the sloping hood. He aimed for the smoking brazier of a street vendor selling some sort of meat skewers. The metal drum toppled off its stand and crashed to the ground at the same time the two soldiers dove flat for cover. Glowing embers peppered the sidewalk in smoking heaps, and enough landed on the soldiers that their immediate concern was immolation and not the van.

Seng finally bulldozed the car out of the way, which allowed him to steer the van onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street from the soldiers. He laid on the horn and kept going. People leapt aside, and wares displayed outside shops were blown through. He spun the wheel at the next cross street, which thankfully was clear, and got back onto the tarmac.

“We’ve bought seconds at most,” he said, checking his wing mirrors. “Any ideas?”

“Ditch the van.”

Hux must have heard him because she said, “I want to move MacD as little as possible.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have much of a choice. This city’s crawling with soldiers on the lookout for us. We need another vehicle.”

Eddie pulled off the road into the parking lot of a gilt-topped shrine. The building towered more than seventy feet and managed to shine despite the smog. Several monks in saffron robes were sweeping the entrance steps. Off to the side were a string of tuk-tuks for hire. He stopped the van next to them and jumped out. The motorized tricycles, powered by 50cc engines, could seat three, and were as anonymous as yellow cabs in Manhattan.

Seng pulled the keys from the ignition and approached the nearest driver. His negotiation consisted of dangling the keys, pointing to the van and then to the man’s three-wheeled scooter. This must have been the best day of his life because the driver couldn’t nod fast enough.

While this was going on, Juan tucked the pistol into his waistband and made sure his T-shirt covered the butt before stepping out of the truck. He could hear police sirens. He jumped to the back doors and opened them. With Hux’s help they got MacD out and over Cabrillo’s good shoulder. The broken one shot out spears of agony with every move. He walked on his knees, and placed MacD as gently as he could in the tuk-tuk’s rear bench seat, Julia cradling his head the whole time.

She got in on one side of Lawless, Juan on the other, and Eddie placed himself behind the handlebars. The engine belched a cloud of noxious blue smoke with the first kick of the starter and fired on the second.

A whistle shrilled behind them. A policeman was rushing up the road on a bicycle, waving a hand and blasting away with his whistle.

Eddie popped the clutch as the cop fumbled for his sidearm. The tuk-tuk had the acceleration of a boulder rolling uphill. Its woefully underpowered engine strained to get them moving. The cop was thirty yards away when the little jitney started going and was coming at a breakneck pace.

The other tuk-tuk drivers sensed trouble and vanished behind a hedge of blooming shrubs while the man who’d made the Faustian bargain yelled at Eddie to get off the bike. He ran alongside and pulled at the handlebars.

Seng reached over, grabbed the guy’s face, and shoved. He tumbled to the ground in a heap of flying arms and legs. The cop was still gaining but was having a hard time pulling out his weapon. His whistle blasts were becoming shriller as his breathing became more ragged.

He was almost beside them when they hit the street in front of the glittering temple. His uniform was soaked with sweat, but his face showed nothing but resolution. Juan could have simply shot the man, but he was just doing his job. Instead, Cabrillo found a ratty umbrella on the floor at his feet, a convenience for the tuk-tuk’s passengers during the rainy season.

He grabbed it up and thrust its point into the spokes of the bike’s front wheels at the same time the cop finally got an ancient Makarov pistol out of his holster. The umbrella whipped around and jammed against the front forks, stopping the two-wheeler instantly and launching the cop over the handlebars. He flew a good eight feet before crashing into the road. He rolled a few times and lay still, dazed but alive. The tuk-tuk roared on.

“I think we’re clear,” Eddie said after a few moments.

“Let’s hope so,” Juan told him.

“Kind of feel bad for the owner of this thing. He’ll never get to keep the van, and now he’s lost his scooter.”

“Just goes to show that it’s as true here as anywhere.”

“What’s that?”

“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Cabrillo turned serious. “You know that cop’s going to tell the military that we’re in a tuk-tuk now. Three Westerners riding around with a Chinese driver can’t be an everyday occurrence.”

“I know, but there are a hell of a lot more tuk-tuks than white panel vans. Here.”

There had been a straw coolie hat dangling from a handlebar. Eddie passed it back to Juan, who settled it atop his head.

Despite the detours, Eddie seemed to know his way, and soon they were driving on a road parallel to the river. Eventually they found the on-ramp to the Hlaing River Road and its suspension bridge across.

A third of the way up the arching span, the tuk-tuk had slowed to a crawl. A line of traffic behind them honked as if one voice. Julia jumped over the rear seat, and with her weight gone and her pushing with everything she had they managed to crest the bridge and putter down the far side. As soon as there was room drivers zipped past them, glaring.

“Only about another two miles,” Eddie told him.

They all felt a measure of relief being outside of the city proper. This side of the river had nowhere near the congestion, and there were even some open fields. They headed south, passing swampland on their right and industrial facilities abutting the river on their left. Some of the warehouses appeared abandoned, the metal siding coming off their skeletal frames. Squatter families clustered near them, using them as makeshift homes.

“Oh hell,” Eddie said. Up ahead, in a copse of mangrove, was a short canal dug into the riverbank so that fishing boats could tie up to a pier without being struck by the main current. There was a cluster of large buildings around it that had once been a cannery. Now it was a rust-streaked ruin with a collapsed roof, and the pier built along the three-hundred-foot canal was more rot than wood. The Liberty was tucked partially under the quay, her normally safety-orange upper deck sporting matte-black paint.

What had upset Seng was the navy patrol boat hovering about thirty feet from the Liberty with a crewman standing in the bow training a .30 caliber at their craft. Also, a police cruiser was parked in the cannery’s lot, and two officers were walking toward the lifeboat with their weapons drawn.

Eddie motored past the cannery’s entrance gate and pulled into the next driveway, which happened to be for another abandoned warehouse. An old woman in a dingy dress was cooking over an open fire pit and didn’t bother looking up from her chore.

“What do you think?” Eddie asked.

Cabrillo considered the situation. The police would soon figure out there was no one aboard and, since the engine was tamper-proof, would eventually tow it away behind the fifteen-meter patrol boat. They had to act fast. Juan unlaced his remaining boot and pulled off his sock.

“Whew,” Julia exclaimed at the odor.

“Be grateful you’re upwind of this thing,” he quipped. “Eddie, you’re going to have to carry MacD. With my shoulder broken I can’t do it and run.” Though Eddie wasn’t particularly big, a lifetime of martial arts training had given him phenomenal strength. “Julia, you’re with Eddie. Get the boat fired up as fast as you can and meet me on the point at the end of the canal. Oh, I need a lighter.”

Eddie flipped him a Zippo. “What are you going to do?”

“Create a diversion.” Juan had gotten out of the tuk-tuk and come around to unscrew the gas cap. It was three-quarters full. He pressed the sock into the tank, and soon gasoline wicked up through the cotton fibers.

This time, with Juan on the driver’s seat, they drove slowly past the cannery again, and just when they lost sight of the police cruiser because of the mangroves he stopped to let out the other three. Eddie’s expression remained the same as he deadlifted MacD Lawless onto his shoulder.

“I’ll give you ten minutes to get as close as you can. By then the cops will have holstered their pistols, and the guy on the machine gun should be relaxed.”

It was bad luck among the Corporation team to wish someone good luck, so they parted without another word. Julia and Eddie stepped into the mangrove forest, sloshing through kneehigh water, and soon vanished from sight.

Juan had no watch, but his internal clock worked with quartz-powered precision. He gave them exactly five minutes before kicking down on the starter. It refused to fire. He jumped on it twice more with the same result.

“Come on, you stupid thing.” He kicked again. Each thrust with his leg caused the broken ends of his collarbone to grate together.

He feared he’d flood the motor, so he gave it a few seconds before trying again. He got the same result. In his mind’s eye the marine patrol was securing tow ropes to the Liberty’s bow and the cops were headed back to their car.

“Okay, you sweet little jewel of a tuk-tuk, cooperate with ole Uncle Juan and I promise I’ll treat you nice and gentle.” It was as if the vehicle knew its fate and wanted no part of it.

Then finally on the tenth kick the motor sputtered to life. Juan rubbed the fuel tank fondly. “Good girl.”

Without a foot to shift the pedal into gear, he had to bend over and move it manually at the same time he let out the clutch. The tuk-tuk came within a hairsbreadth of stalling, but he managed to keep the engine fired. As soon as he could, he popped the transmission into second, and then was in third by the time he cut through the cannery gate. The cops stood on the quay while the patrol boat was backing toward the Liberty.

So intent on their prize, none of them paid attention to the buzz-saw whine of the tuk-tuk barreling into the complex. Juan made it to the parked cruiser, its single dome light still pulsing, before one of the officers started back to see what was happening.

Cabrillo slid off, lit the gas-soaked wick sticking out of its tank, and started to commando-crawl as fast as he could.

The sock burned in an instant and detonated the gasoline seconds later. Juan felt the searing heat on his back when the mushroom of flame and smoke erupted like a miniature volcano. Had he been running, the concussion would have blown him off his feet, but he was slithering like a snake and never slowed his pace.

The tuk-tuk blew apart like a grenade, with shrapnel piercing the side of the cruiser on the rear quarter. The car started leaking fuel, and it too went up in a conflagration many times larger than what had just gone off. The rear half of the vehicle lifted five feet into the air before smashing back onto the concrete apron hard enough to snap its frame. The cop who’d left the dock to investigate the three-wheeler’s arrival was blown back ten feet.

Through all the carnage Juan continued to crawl, unseen amid the debris littering the open parking lot and the forest of grasses and shrubs that grew up through the cracked pavement. He whimpered each time he moved his bad arm but fought through the pain.

Back in the canal, Julia and Eddie, towing the unconscious MacD, had used the cover of the pier to reach the Liberty after making it through the mangrove swamp. The lifeboat was big enough to accommodate forty passengers in its fully enclosed cabin. She had two conns. One was a fully enclosed cockpit at the bow, and the other was an open helm at the very stern, with a door leading down into the hull. A band of narrow windows ringed the cabin, and there was a second hatch to gain entry just behind the cockpit. It was low enough that Julia could tread water and still manage to open it. She popped the lock as soon as the jitney cab detonated.

Kicking her legs and pulling with her arms, she managed to wriggle through. Forty feet away, and in plain view, the four men on the sleek patrol boat were watching the fireworks and paying no heed to the lifeboat. Juan’s distraction was working flawlessly.

By the time the police cruiser exploded, Eddie had passed up MacD and was halfway into the Liberty himself. The interior was low-ceilinged but bright. The bench seats all had three-point harnesses for the passengers almost like the safety gear on a roller coaster, because in heavy seas the Liberty could flip completely over and still manage to right herself.

Julia went straight for the cockpit while Eddie bent over the bilge cover to recover a long plastic tube clipped down in the dank recess of the craft. The twin engines rumbled to life, and Julia gave it no time to warm up before advancing the throttles to their stops.

Eddie staggered back under the brutal acceleration but kept on his feet. As soon as he got a better stance he unscrewed one end of the tube and slid out an FN FAL, a venerable Belgian assault rifle, and two magazines. No one really knew why Max had cached a weapon like this on a lifeboat, but Eddie was grateful for it now because once they had the Chairman, he knew the fight was far from over. He rammed home one of the mags and joined Julia in the cockpit. She intentionally brushed against the slightly smaller patrol boat as they shot past. The hit scraped paint off both vessels but, more important, dumped the guy manning the machine gun into the canal.

They left him bobbing in their wake even as another crewman scrambled to get behind the weapon.

In just a few seconds they were adjacent to the small promontory at the end of the man-made canal, but there was no sign of Cabrillo. And the patrol boat was halfway turned around for a pursuit. Juan suddenly emerged from where he’d been lying behind an overturned barrel. His face was a mask of determination even if his body looked utterly ridiculous as he hopped one-legged for the boat. Each leap carried him almost four feet, and his balance was such that he barely paused before flinging himself forward again.

Eddie ran aft to open the upper hatch, and as soon as he popped out into the sunshine he loosed a short burst from the FN at the patrol boat. Angry fountains of water erupted all around the black-hulled craft, and the men ducked for cover beneath the gunwales.

Julia throttled back but didn’t kill power entirely as she came abreast of Cabrillo. He gathered himself for one more leap and hurtled across the open space between the shore and the boat and crashed onto the upper deck in an ungainly belly flop. She buried the throttles as soon as she heard him hit. The speed with which the Liberty got on plane was such that, had Eddie not grabbed him, Juan would have tumbled over the stern.

“Thanks,” Cabrillo panted. He pressed himself into the molded jockey seat that was little more than a padded shelf for your butt and rubbed at his thigh. The muscle burned with built-up lactic acid.

They had at least a hundred yards on their pursuers, but now that the patrol boat wasn’t under fire it was quickly accelerating. The gap narrowed deceptively fast. The sailor behind the machine gun bent to take aim. Juan and Eddie ducked a second before he opened fire. He raked the seas to their port side and then swept the barrel across the transom, high-powered rounds chewing at the fiberglass.

Julia juked the Liberty to throw off his aim, but the maneuver cost her speed, and the gap tightened further. Eddie rose from behind cover and opened up. This time he was aiming to hit something, but even on a smooth river a boat is not the best firing platform, and his shots went wide.

Traffic on the water was heavy, with barges under tow and all manner of shipping, from small one-man skiffs to five-hundred-foot freighters. The two boats raced each other like competitors. The Burmese skipper knew he had superior speed to the bluntly ugly lifeboat, but he couldn’t get too close to the gunfire. It was a standoff that lasted for a mile as both craft tried to get an advantage by using other ships as moving obstacles.

“Enough of this,” Juan said when he felt he was sufficiently rested. He ducked his head into the cabin and shouted over the engine’s roar, “Julia, I’m taking the conn.”

“Okay. Good. I need to check on MacD. This can’t be doing him any good.”

The control panel at the rear helm station was simple and straightforward except for one switch hidden under the dash. Cabrillo eyed the speedometer for a second and saw they had more than enough speed. He hit the button. Activated by hydraulics, it extended a series of wings and foils under the hull that knifed through the water with almost no resistance. The hull was lifted until only the foils and her prop were in contact with the river.

The acceleration was twice anything they’d experienced before, and the lifeboat/hydrofoil was soon doing sixty knots. Juan glanced back in time to see a look of awe on the patrol boat skipper’s face before the distance grew too much and he became just a dot on a rapidly receding horizon.

They cut across the water with the beauty of a porpoise, swinging around slower ships like a Formula One car chasing the checkered flag. Juan knew there wasn’t a boat in the Myanmar navy that could touch them, and he seriously doubted they’d get a chopper into the air in time.

Two minutes later Julia popped up through the hatch. She handed Juan a bottled water and helped him ease his arm into a sling. She also taped a chemical ice pack to his shoulder and shook some painkillers into his hand.

“And that, fearless leader, is the best medical science has come up with for a broken collarbone,” she said, giving him a couple of protein bars from an emergency rations kit. She then grew a little sheepish. “Sorry, I forgot this tub has turbo boost. I would have kicked it into high gear sooner.”

“No worries. Get on the horn and tell Max we’re heading home. Wait. How’s Lawless?”

Her expression darkened. “Don’t know. He’s still nonresponsive.”

They continued to thunder down the river, flashing under two more bridges. To their left the city scrolled by—container ports, cement works, lading piers—and finally they were past the downtown business district, with its clutch of high-rise office towers and apartment blocks.

A police boat had been launched to intercept them. Juan could see blue lights flashing on its radar arch as it skimmed across the waves on an intercept course. If this was the best the city had to offer, it was sadly short. Cabrillo calculated the vectors as the speedboat came at them and realized that it would pass at least a hundred yards astern of the Liberty.

He gave the captain kudos for effort, because even when it became clear they had no chance of catching the hydrofoil, he kept his two outboards pegged until he swung into the lifeboat’s wake at the exact distance Juan had figured. He chased them for almost a half mile, the distance lengthening with each second, until he finally admitted defeat and broke off. Juan threw him a wave as if to acknowledge the game attempt.

The river widened the closer they came to the sea until the banks were distant blurs of jungle. It grew muddier too as tidal action and ocean waves stirred up sediment from the bottom. Traffic thinned to just the occasional containership or fishing smack. Juan knew the smart thing to do now was to throttle back and act just like any other vessel out here, but he hadn’t forgotten that the navy had assets in the air and along the coast hunting for the Oregon, so the quicker they made their rendezvous, the quicker he could get them all safely over the horizon.

Julia came back with a spare radio, since Eddie’s had been in the drink. Juan called his ship on a preset frequency. “Breaker, Breaker, this is the Rubber Duck, come back.”

“Rubber Duck, you’ve got the Pig Pen, ten-four.”

“Max, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re almost to the mouth of the Yangon River. What’s your twenty?”

Hanley read off some GPS coordinates, which Eddie jotted down and then entered inversely into the Liberty’s navigation computer. It was a simple ploy on the off chance someone who understood idiomatic American CB lingo was paying them any interest.

“We’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” Juan said when the readout flashed their ETA.

“That’s good, because the Burmese navy will have one of their Chinese-built Hainan-class missile destroyers on our doorstep in about twenty-five. She’s got a mess of cannons and packs antiship rockets up the wazoo. We’ve been swatting at helicopters for the past hour. Haven’t splashed any of them yet since no one’s fired at us, but things are going to get real hairy real soon.”

“Copy that, good buddy. Smokey’s a-comin’. Best if we transfer to the boat garage and deep-six the Liberty.”

“Sounds like a plan, just so long as we don’t have a problem and sink being one lifeboat short.”

“Never a fear,” Juan said with typical bravado. “Oh, and alert medical that we have a head-trauma case. Have a gurney standing by. The secret police did a number on MacD in prison.”

Cabrillo pressed the throttle levers to see if he could coax another knot or two out of the Liberty’s engine, but it was giving everything it had. The air lost a lot of its humidity and freshened as they made the transition from the river to the ocean. The seas remained calm, so Juan could keep the hydrofoil up on her wings and skipping across the water.

The next fifteen minutes passed without incident, but then Juan spotted something in the distance, a speck floating just above the horizon. It soon resolved itself into another Mil helicopter that was thundering toward them at full military power. The big helo was flying at less than five hundred feet when it roared overhead, the whop of its rotors sounded like crashing thunder.

The pilot must have satisfied himself with a positive identification, because when he came around again the side door had been rolled open and a pair of soldiers stood ready with AKs. Points of light winked at the muzzle tips, and lead rained from the sky. Their aim was thrown off by the speed of the chase, but the amount of ammunition they were pouring down on the hydrofoil was staggering. Holes erupted on the Liberty’s unarmored roof while bits of chewed-up fiberglass whipped by Eddie and Cabrillo at the helm. Eddie fired a controlled burst back at the chopper and managed to score a hit. A spray of blood pattered the inside of the copilot’s window.

Juan weaved the hydrofoil back and forth, trading a little speed to keep them out of another deadly assault.

“My kingdom for a Stinger missile,” Eddie said.

Cabrillo nodded glumly.

“Rubber Duck, we have a chopper on radar at about your position,” Max called over the radio.

“He’s right above us. Anything you can do?”

“Wait two minutes.”

“Roger.”

The chopper dove in for another run once the soldiers had reloaded. Juan cut the hydrofoil hard to starboard, skipping it across the waves like a stone and nearly tearing away her underwater wings. His quick maneuver put the boat directly under the Mil and robbed the gunman of their open shots, and Cabrillo matched the pilot’s every turn as he attempted to shake them out of his blind spot. Eddie put the FN to his shoulder and fired straight up, peppering the underside of the chopper with a dozen perfectly aimed rounds.

This time it was the helicopter that was forced to retreat. It took up a station at around two hundred feet in altitude and more than a thousand yards off the Liberty’s starboard rail. The pilot maintained their speed but showed no interest in coming closer. That last attack had cost him.

Then from over the horizon came a streaking blur that cut the air like lightning. It was a burst from the Oregon’s 20mm Gatling gun dialed up to its maximum of four thousand rounds per minute. At that setting it wasn’t individual bullets she threw into the sky but a solid wall of tungsten hitting hypersonic speeds. Such was the ship’s targeting system that the rounds came within three feet of the chopper’s spinning rotor without hitting it. Had they wanted, they could have blown the helicopter into a falling meteor of scrap aluminum, but the demonstration of such awesome firepower was more than enough.

The Mil banked away violently and soon vanished.

A moment later Juan spotted the Oregon as she waited patiently for her wayward children. Under her patchwork coats of naval paint and artfully applied rust streaks she was the most beautiful sight in the world to him. The garage-style door of her boat garage was opened at the waterline amidships on her starboard side. While Eddie made ready to open the sea cocks and send the Liberty to a watery grave she did not deserve, Juan guided her in to a perfect stop. Max stood on the sloping ramp with two orderlies from medical and a gurney for MacD. Behind them loomed a second RHIB assault craft like the one they had abandoned in the jungle. It sat on a launching cradle that could shoot it out of the ship using hydraulic rams.

Juan tossed Hanley a line, which he tied off to a cleat.

“Good to see you.”

“Good to be back,” Juan said with a weariness he felt all the way to his bones. “I tell you, my friend, this has been a nightmare from the word go.”

“Amen to that,” Hanley agreed.

The orderlies boarded the lifeboat, carrying a backboard to stabilize Lawless and prevent any more injuries. They moved quickly, knowing that they were minutes away from engaging in a battle with Myanmar’s finest gunboat.

Once MacD was lifted clear and was on his way to the infirmary with Julia huddled over the speeding gurney, Eddie opened the seacocks and leapt from the lifeboat.

“Sorry,” Juan said, and patted the Liberty’s coaming before making the jump himself.

Max mashed an intercom button that linked to the high-tech Op Center. “Punch it, Eric. We’re out of time.”

Then came an echoing boom from across the sea followed by the high-pitched shriek of an artillery shell in flight and then an explosion of water thirty yards beyond the wallowing Liberty. Hanley was right. They were out of time. Almost immediately they were bracketed by a second shell. The Oregon was pinned.