The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  “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 for
ks, 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.