The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  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.

  13

  DEEP INSIDE THE SHIP’S HULL, HER REVOLUTIONARY engines came online with a command from Eric Stone. The supercooled magnets sitting encased in liquid nitrogen began stripping free electrons from the seawater being sucked through her drive tubes, creating an incredible amount of electricity that was transformed into horsepower by the pump jets. Like a thoroughbred that breaks from a standstill to a full gallop, the Oregon took off, a bone in her teeth and a creaming wake at her stern. The cryopumps’ whine soon went ultrasonic and disappeared above the normal range of hearing. A third blast concussed the air, and an explosive shell hit the ocean in the exact spot the ship had occupied moments earlier. It blew up a towering fountain of water that stayed suspended for what seemed like an impossible amount of time before collapsing with a guttural splash.

  Cabrillo’s first order, as he was hobbling to the Op Center with Max supporting one arm, was to send a crewman to his cabin to get him another prosthetic leg.

  The high-tech room buzzed with coiled energy that gave the air an electric tang. Eric and Mark Murphy were in their customary seats. Hali Kasim was to the right, monitoring communications, and Linc had taken over the radar station generally manned by Linda Ross when the ship was facing danger. Gomez Adams was at a spare workstation, flying an aerial drone over the area. The drone—really, just a large commercial RC plane—was fitted with a high-def Minicam that relayed incredible real-time pictures.

  “Sit rep,” Juan commanded when he threw himself into the Kirk Chair.

  “Single Hainan-class missile destroyer about twelve thousand yards off the port beam and coming in at about fourteen knots,” Eric reported.

  “Wepps, how are we looking?” That was Cabrillo’s nickname for whoever commanded the Oregon’s array of weaponry, usually Murph.

  “I’ve got target lock with an Exocet missile, and I’ve run out the 120mm cannon. I’ve also got two Gatlings deployed for antimissile defense.”

  The Exocets were launched from tubes mounted in the deck with hatches designed to look like typical inspection ports. The Gatling guns were placed in the hull and protected by metal plates that could swing out of the way. The big cannon, which used the same fire-control system as an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank, was housed in the bow. Clamshell doors opened outward, and the gun was run out on a hydraulic carriage that gave it almost one hundred and eighty degrees of traverse. This system’s only drawback was that the gun had to be decoupled from its autoloader at the extremes of its swing.

  On the main view screen was an aerial image of the Myanmarian ship cutting through the waves. Every few seconds what appeared to be a cotton ball would burst from one of the twin muzzles of her turret-mounted main guns as they continued to fire at the Oregon. The ship was about one hundred and seventy-five feet in length, with a knife-edged prow and boxy superstructure. The resolution was crisp enough to see she was a tired-looking boat.

  Cabrillo called up the specifications of the Chinese-built gunboat and grunted aloud when he saw it had a top speed of over thirty knots. The Oregon could still outrun her, but they would be in range of her 57mm deck gun for an uncomfortable interval.

  “Wait, how fast did you say she was approaching?” he asked.

  “Fourteen knots, steady.”

  “Gotta love the Third World,” Juan said. “They don’t have the money for proper maintenance. I bet that’s all the speed she’s got.”

  A warning alarm went off at the radar station. “He’s got a lock on us,” Linc warned.

  “Jam it!”

  “Missile launch detected.”

  “Murph?”

  “Got it.”

  The portside Gatling gun, with its own radar, scanned the sky and spotted the big missile as it came at them at wave-top height. With its three-hundred-pound shaped explosive warhead, the rocket would blow a hole into the Oregon big enough to rival the damage done to the USS Cole. The Gatling’s computer processor designated the threat, adjusted its aim slightly, and let rip with a four-second burst. It didn’t sound like a gun as it fired but rather some sort of mechanical saw. It was the sound of tearing on an industrial scale.

  At the same time, chaff launchers threw up a curtain of thin aluminum strips that obscured the Oregon from enemy detection on the off chance the missile got past the Gatling. And luminescent flares to confuse its heat-seeking capabilities were launched with the gusto of a Fourth of July fireworks show.

  T
he missile tracked in dead level and ran into the hail of 20mm Gatling rounds when it had traveled less than three miles. Two hundred and seventy-six rounds completely missed the rocket and plummeted harmlessly into the sea. One round did connect, and the missile exploded, smearing the sky with an elongated trail of fire as its charge went off and the remaining solid rocket fuel detonated catastrophically.

  But that wasn’t the end of the battle. The destroyer’s deck guns continued to fire at nearly eight rounds a minute. With both ships on the move, and the Oregon’s cross section half of what it should be because of some radar-absorbing material applied to her superstructure, the shots were falling pretty wild.

  Juan checked their speed and guesstimated that they would remain in range for the better part of fourteen minutes. That left the potential for more than a hundred rounds coming at them. A few were bound to be magic bullets and hit. His ship was armored against the types of weapons pirates employed—heavy machine guns and RPGs fired at the hull. An explosive round arcing in on a high parabola would slice through the deck plates, and the charge would detonate inside the ship with deadly results. If it managed to hit the liquid nitrogen storage tanks, the resulting explosion would unleash a deadly cloud of superchilled gas that would freeze the entire crew solid and so distort the hull’s steel that the ship would crush herself under her own weight.

  It was a risk he couldn’t take. He noted too that a Hainan-class destroyer carried a crew of seventy. An Exocet launch would sink them. And there was no close-by shipping to rescue survivors.

  He made his decision quickly.

  “Helm, bring us hard about one hundred and twenty degrees. Wepps, when you have a bearing on that ship, engage with the one-twenty. Let’s see if we can convince him that this is a fight he can’t win.”

  The Oregon dug her shoulder into the sea as her directional jets, with the help of an athwartship thruster, threw her into the tightest turn she could make. Loose items flew off shelves, and everyone had to lean into the turn to keep balanced. As the bow came about, Mark Murphy waited until he had a lock and then opened fire. Typically, they could fire twice as fast as the Burmese ship, but the gun was at its most oblique angle so the autoloader had to reengage after every round.