The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  Gomez Adams held the 520 over the helipad, one skid touching the deck, the other hovering over a massive gap. He was level. It was the platform that was skewed. The tips of the rotor blades on one side of the chopper thrummed dangerously close to the deck.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Juan shouted.

  Below them, the rig screeched once again as gravity pulled it closer to the tipping point. The Hercules’s rail was buried in the sea, and a gap began to show under the uphill side of the platform as it started going over.

  In the Op Center Eric Stone redirected the drive-tube nozzles and put on a burst of speed, redlining the engines in a desperate bid to get the ship clear of the steel avalanche crashing toward them. Aboard the capsizing heavy-lifter, Eddie, Linc, and Mike had no choice but to hold on to any solid surface they could find, so they clung to the topside railing with everything they had.

  Cabrillo unceremoniously shoved both women into the chopper as Adams started lifting clear and leapt in after them as the rig slid the rest of the way off the deck. The stress was too much for the platform’s spindly drill tower and it broke free, twisting steel wrenched apart as though it were a balsa wood model. The rig moaned like amplified whale song.

  The helicopter’s tail boom cleared the helipad with inches to spare, its three passengers staring agog at the destruction they had just escaped. The platform crashed into the ocean scant feet from the fleeing Oregon’s jack staff and created a titanic wave that lifted the ship like a toy in a bathtub and nearly drove her bow into the swells. Eric deftly steered them across the wave front like a surfer peeling down the face of one of the big ones off Oahu’s North Shore.

  The top-heavy rig turned turtle as soon as all of it was in the water, upending so that the air-filled pontoons were pointed at the sky. It bobbed almost merrily. Unburdened of so much deadweight, the Hercules pendulumed back until she was almost straight, before the inertia of water sloshing in her tanks returned her to a deadly list. The three men holding fast to the rails were thrown violently but managed to maintain their grip.

  When they let go, each slid across the deck on his backside, maintaining a safe speed by pressing gloved hands and shoes against the plating. When they came up against the lower rail, all three simply stepped into the ocean and started swimming away. Adams maintained a hover over them to direct the rescue launch racing from the Oregon’s amidships boat garage.

  The RHIB reached them just moments before the Hercules succumbed to the inevitable and rolled ponderously onto her side, her barnacle-scaled bottom exposed to the sun for the first time in her long career. Air trapped in the hull burst out through portholes and vents, spewing and sputtering as though the old ship was fighting her fate.

  And then he remembered that this wasn’t the end of the affair but the very beginning, and all thoughts of humor vanished.

  “Gomez, get us back to the ship ASAP.”

  MacD Lawless had betrayed them from that very first night in Pakistan, and Cabrillo wanted answers.

  No sooner were they down and the RHIB back up the ramp in the boat garage than he ordered the Oregon to stand off the platform and rake its waterline with the ship’s 20mm Gatling gun. The depth here wasn’t optimal—the Hercules’s crew must have been rushed after all—but they were over the continental slope, and, with luck, the J-61 would tumble down the undersea cliff and end up in the crushing depths of the abyssal plane.

  Juan wanted no evidence that this act of sabotage hadn’t gone off as planned. The heavy-lifter wouldn’t last another ten minutes on the surface, and once they’d peppered the rig’s floats with a couple thousand holes it would join the ship on the bottom.

  Because he was covered in gooey oil from his search for Linda, Cabrillo went to his cabin first, while the two women were escorted to the infirmary for a checkup. As much as he longed for a shower, he simply stripped out of the clothes he’d been wearing, balling them up for the trash rather than tossing them into a hamper, and threw on a navy blue jumpsuit and clean boots.

  He was down in medical seven minutes after Adams got them safely home.

  Max was there waiting, a look of concern on his bulldog face. “First off, glad you’re okay. Second, what the hell is going on?”

  “We’re both about to find out,” Juan said, and led him through the door.

  “About time I get some answers,” Dr. Huxley said with mild irritation. “Why is my patient under guard?”

  “How are Soleil and Linda?”

  “They’re fine. Soleil is a little wrung out from her ordeal, but up until they moved the oil platform she was cared for. How about it, Juan?”

  “Croissard was duped the same way we were and by the same person.”

  “MacD?”

  “Nope. But let’s go have a chat with him.”

  Juan could see that the guard had taken the added precaution of securing MacD’s wrists to the frame of his hospital bed. Cabrillo dismissed him with a wave and spent several seconds eyeing their newest member turned prisoner.

  Cabrillo started, “I’m going to tell a story and I want you to correct me where I get it wrong. If I’m satisfied when we’re finished, I’ll untie you myself. Deal?”

  MacD nodded.

  “At some time during your most recent posting to Afghanistan when you worked for Fortran, you befriended a local, probably someone younger than yourself.”

  “His name was Atash.”

  “You told him all about your daughter back home in New Orleans, never considering the kid was part of a terrorist cell and that the information you gave him would be used against you.”

  Shame washed over Lawless’s face.

  “When they were ready, the cell sent a team to the United States to kidnap her. Proof of her abduction was somehow provided, and you were told that if you didn’t do exactly what they said, she would be killed. You had no choice. They set up a bogus ambush to get you across the border into Pakistan, where you were roughed up a little to make your capture appear legit. On a night they knew we were watching that village you were paraded around, setting us up to rescue you at the same time we nabbed the little boy, Setiawan.

  “I always figured our escape out of that town was too easy,” Cabrillo said. “Not the ambush on the road later. That was a separate group that had no idea what was going on. But the people in the village were under orders to let us go with minimum fuss.”

  “Hold on,” Max said. “I thought you said they opened fire on the bus.”

  “Oh, a couple of Johnny Jihadis shot at us, but they either missed entirely or fired up at the roof so as not to hit anyone. It was a show to convince us that we’d made the greatest escape in history. All hat and no cattle, as the old saying goes. Later, after we escaped the roadblock, we had a Predator launch a missile at us. I never even saw it, but MacD here did, and moved faster than an Olympic sprinter. He saved our lives. It was an impressive feat for someone supposedly beaten half to death by the Taliban and stuffed into the trunk of a car for a few days. No way would you have been able to move like that. Your injuries were mostly faked.”

  Lawless didn’t deny it.

  “I don’t get this,” Hanley persisted. “How did they know when we were going to rescue that kid?”

  “You don’t see it yet?” Juan asked. “That kid didn’t need rescuing because his father had sent him to Pakistan in order to lure us to that village.”

  “I must be dense or something. Why lure us there?”

  “The whole thing was set up so that we would take MacD into the fold. Gunawan Bahar is the mastermind of everything we’ve been through these past couple of weeks. He wanted to plant a spy on the Oregon, so he hired us to ‘rescue’ his son from the Taliban while he also planted a man whose daughter’s life he controls in place for us to rescue too.

  “It was a brilliant piece of misdirection. As soon as we were double-crossed by Smith in Myanmar, all suspicion automatically went to Croissard. No one ever considered there was another layer to this onion and that Croissard w
as no more in control of his actions than MacD.”

  That last statement wasn’t entirely true. Since his time at Insein, Cabrillo had harbored a nagging doubt about something. He did not know what, but he sensed that some piece of information he’d been given was off in some way. It was instinct, but that was a feeling he’d learned to trust over the years, so when he saw Soleil on the rig he knew what had eluded him for so long.

  “What gave it away,” he continued, “was the timing of the rig being sunk. Bahar knew from Lawless that we’d escaped Insein Prison and had Linda’s location because of the tracker chip. That pushed up his deadline to deep-six the J-61 platform by a few days or weeks. The clincher was when MacD came up to the bridge this morning. He’d been told we were steaming hard but had no idea the speeds the Oregon is capable of. As soon as he left me he called his handler, Smith, I assume, because of the way he seemed to get under your skin when we were back in the jungle. He told Smith that we were just hours away rather than days. The Hercules still wasn’t over the Palawan Trough, but they were out of time. They immediately opened the sea cocks and hit the lifeboats. To not only kill Linda and Soleil but also to hide the fact that the platform was home to perhaps one of the largest collections of interlinked computers outside a government lab. How’d I do?” He directed that last question to MacD.

  Before Lawless could reply, a searing blast of sound made conversation impossible. It was the buzz-saw clamor of the Gatling raking the sides of the oil rig’s ponderous floats. It went on in staccato bursts for a full minute so that by the time the weapon was withdrawn back into the ship and its redoubt cover slid back into position, three thousand fist-sized holes had been blown through the floats, above and below the water. It would slip beneath the waves within the hour.

  “How about it?” Juan prompted when it was clear Mark Murphy had finished the job.

  “Nailed it. Everything.”

  “I get it now,” Max exclaimed. “Croissard was controlled because Bahar had kidnapped his daughter too. All that crap on her website about going to Burma was bogus. They must have tried to get to that temple themselves, failed, and so he used Croissard to hire us, somehow knowing we’d get the job done.”

  Cabrillo nodded. “And with both Smith and his spy on the team, Bahar had regular updates of our progress.”

  “It all seems so elaborate. Why bother forcing MacD into this? Why the ruse? Bahar could have simply hired us to go into Myanmar.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” Juan said. “No motivation. We would never take on some job to go tomb raiding. He needed the type of mission he knew we wouldn’t refuse. He’d already proven our soft spot for wayward kids, with the whole deal to save his son, so he just pulled the same trick again, only this time using Roland Croissard’s daughter as bait. Then, once he had whatever was in that bag, he called in his friends in the government to take us out.”

  “Why not work with the government all along?” Max wondered aloud.

  “No idea, but there was some reason. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered with us at all. My guess is that bringing in the military was a last-minute deal. MacD, any thoughts?”

  “No, sir. They never gave me any information. Just took it.”

  “So you have no idea what was in that bag we recovered from the body in the river?”

  “None at all. And before you ask, Ah never even knew the name of the guy above Smith. I knew Smith wasn’t calling all the shots, but Ah didn’t know who was behind him.”

  “Another mystery solved,” Max said, turning back to Cabrillo, “is the bombing at the hotel.”

  “What? It wasn’t random?”

  “It’s obvious that Bahar considers us such a threat that he felt the need to infiltrate our team, but he also took a shot at blowing us up in Singapore to end that threat early.”

  Juan considered this for a moment and shook his head. “I don’t think so. As I said before, why not just have Smith blow our brains out as soon as we entered the room?”

  Hanley’s face split into a wicked grin. “Because he would know the rest of the Corporation would search the ends of the earth for the shooter. But if we’d died in a suicide bombing, who would they hunt down?”

  Cabrillo thought that his old friend might be onto something, but a lingering doubt remained. For the time being the past was unimportant. “For now, we need to concentrate on Bahar. We need to find out what he has planned. It’s something he sees us threatening, and it’s linked to whatever they pulled from the temple.”

  “That’s specific,” Max said sardonically

  “What about my little girl?” MacD asked, mustering as much dignity as he could. “Now that Smith, or this Bahar guy, knows Ah’ve been found out, they’re goin’ to kill her. They’ve let me talk to her over a webcam. The guys with her are strapped with explosive belts. They’re going to blow up my baby.”

  “Who said anything about Smith and Bahar knowing we’ve discovered why you’re here?”

  “Ah don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple, really. You contact Smith like you’re supposed to and report that the rig was gone by the time we got to it.”

  “Okaaay,” Lawless said, drawing out the word as if to draw out more information.

  “And then we rescue your daughter, figure out what these sons of bitches are really up to, and nail them to the nearest outhouse door.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE LONGEST, hottest shower he’d had in a long time, Cabrillo went to find Linda Ross. She’d write up a full report of her ordeal, but he wanted to get the highlights quickly to help establish their next course of action. He went first to her cabin to discover that Soleil was there and just out of the shower herself. She had one towel wrapped around her and tucked under her arms and another wrapped in a turban, covering her hair.

  “Again, you catch me when I am not at my best,” she said with a coy smile.

  “Story of my life,” Juan replied. “Good timing with everything but the ladies. Linda didn’t show you to one of the guest cabins?”

  “She did, but your selection of feminine toiletries is a little lacking. She was kind enough to let me use hers.”

  “I’ll get on the steward,” he promised, and then asked with genuine concern, “How are you?”

  A shadow passed behind her Gallic eyes. And, just as quickly, it faded. “I have endured worse.”

  “I read up on some of your accomplishments,” Cabrillo said. “And I was very impressed. However, there is nothing quite like being held against your will. That lack of freedom and control can get to anyone. Powerlessness is perhaps the worst feeling in the world.”

  She opened her mouth as if to reply, then suddenly plopped herself on Linda’s bed and buried her face in her hands. She sobbed quietly at first, but soon it grew, until her whole body was shaking. Juan wasn’t the type to be put off by a woman crying, at least when she had a reason. Pointless histrionics just irked him, but something like this naked expression of fear was something he understood all too well.

  He sat on the bed next to her but kept his hands to himself. If she wanted human contact, it would be up to her to initiate it. His instincts at times like this were spot-on. In seconds, Soleil had pressed her face into his shoulder. He put an arm around her and simply waited for her to get it out of her system. Less than a minute later she straightened and sniffled. Juan plucked a couple of tissues from the box on the nightstand and handed them to her. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Pardonnez-moi. That was not very ladylike.”

  “You’ll be all right now,” he predicted. “I can tell you are a strong woman, but you’ve bottled up your emotions for a long time. I suspect you never showed weakness to your jailers.”

  “Non. Not once.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any. So they come out in a rush in the end. Nothing to it.”

  “Thank you,” she said softly. Her voice strengthened, and a little smile played at the corners of her mouth. “And
thank you for saving my life. Linda has such faith in you that she never doubted our rescue. I was not so sure. But now?” The smile turned into a grin. “Now I think you can do anything.”

  “Just as soon as I get my red cape back from the cleaners.”

  The reference confused her for a moment. “Oh, your comicbook Superman.”

  “That’s me, but I don’t do tights.” Juan turned serious. “I need to ask you some questions. If it’s too difficult, we can do it another time.”

  “Non. I will do my best.”

  “Or I can come back when you’re dressed.”

  “I have a towel. It is enough,” she said with European pragmatism.

  “Did you overhear anything during your captivity? Anything that would give us a clue what this is all about?”

  “No. Nothing. They took me from my home in Zurich. Two men broke into my house and attacked me while I was asleep. While one held me down the other gave me a shot. It knocked me out. When I came awake again, I was in that cell where you found me. I did not even know that it was an oil platform until Linda told me. You see, they had drugged her too. But she says she woke in a helicopter on its way out to sea.”

  Juan knew that, like himself, Linda would have remained motionless after coming to in order to get a sense of her surroundings. It was a trick he’d taught her.

  “Do you have any idea why you were targeted?”

  “I assume it has to do with my father,” Soleil replied. “He is a wealthy and powerful man.”

  “I met him in Singapore when he hired us to go into Burma to look for you.”

  “It is true that I was planning on going to Bangladesh with a friend of mine on an extreme backpacking trip.”

  “We know. The man behind your abduction went so far as to update your website to make it look like you’d left for that trip. They covered themselves well. Anything specific about your father? Any recent business deals?”

  “We are not so close anymore,” she admitted sadly.

  Cabrillo knew that pretty soon she’d have to be told that in all likelihood her father was dead. Bahar had what he wanted, so Roland Croissard had become a loose end. They would keep searching, of course, but the odds were long that the Swiss financier had been left alive.