The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

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

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

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

  “Yes,” the pair said in unison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  11

  THE THREE REACTED AS ONE. CABRILLO TOSSED SOLEIL’S bag to Smith, since he was as close to the rightful owner as he could get, and together they raced for the stairwell up and out of the temple complex.

  His supposition that Soleil and what’s his name had been attacked by rebels or drug smugglers was obviously false. The chopper had to belong to the military, which meant these were reinforcements for a patrol that had to be someplace close by. Soleil must have either stumbled onto it or run into a group that had betrayed them to the military. Either way, it was rotten luck for the two hikers, and was now just as bad for Cabrillo and his team. They raced through the main temple, flew past the dorm level, and ran up to the groundlevel entrance.

  “We’ve got company,” MacD said unnecessarily.

  The helicopter came in low enough for Cabrillo to recognize it through the canopy as an old Russian Mil Mi-8. They could pack more than two dozen combat soldiers in one.

  “Okay, we’ve got one shot at this,” he said. “We’ve got to get across the river and into the forest before the pilot can find a place to set down.”

  “Why not try to hide on this side and cross later?” Smith asked.

  Cabrillo didn’t waste the breath explaining that guards would doubtlessly be posted on the rope bridge, and he didn’t fancy hiking days or even weeks to find another way across. “Linda, you go first, then Smith, MacD, and me. Got it?”

  With the helicopter drumming the air, the four of them sprinted from the temple entrance, keeping as much cover as possible between them and the aircraft overhead. Given how dense the jungle was, it wasn’t too difficult. They only had a hundred yards to cover, but the problem would be once they reached the bridge. It was totally exposed.

  The beat of the rotors changed as the pilot transited into a hover. Juan knew that meant the men were coming down fast ropes and would be on the ground in seconds. This was going to be close.

  Linda reached the bridge and kept on going, not breaking stride. Her feet danced along the main cable, one hand bracing along the guideline, the other clutching her REC7. Smith let her get a few paces out before he committed himself to the rickety structure. His added weight gave the bridge a burgeoning sway. It creaked ominously, and several of the support ropes snapped free.

  Cabrillo and MacD ran side by side, knowing that less than a hundred yards back the Mi-8 had disgorged its passengers and begun lifting clear, its huge rotor beating at the hot, fetid air.

  A stream of tracer rounds ripped across their path, forcing both men to dive flat. Juan flipped around and opened fire, laying down a suppressive wall of lead to allow MacD to start across the bridge. Cabrillo wriggled behind a rock, and whenever he saw movement in the jungle behind them, he triggered off a three-round burst.

  A grenade came lobbing out of the bush. Juan made himself as small as possible behind his rock as the poorly thrown explosive went off with a concussive whoosh. Shrapnel chewed the dirt around him, but nothing struck home. Lawless was halfway across. On the far side, Linda made it to solid ground and immediately twisted around one of the support pylons and added her own cover fire. From Cabrillo’s position, the muzzle flash looked like twinkling stars.

  He changed out his half-depleted magazine for a fresh one, loosed a long burst of autofire, and exploded from his hidden position. He felt like he had a giant target pinned to his back and that his legs were encased in lead. It seemed harder to run than when they’d hit that ooze just off the boat. Cabrillo slung his rifle across his back when his boot hit the bridge. It jolted and jumped like it was carrying a live electrical current. Ahead of him, MacD was moving as fast as he could, while Smith made it to the other side. Like Linda, he found cover behind the support pillar and opened fire.

  Bullets cut the air all around Juan as he tried to both keep his balance and run. He didn’t recall the thick-braided rope being so narrow. A hundred feet below him the water was a white frothing nightmare. Expecting a bullet in his back at any second, he kept running, the cable swaying all the while like an old hammock.

  With his eyes on his feet, it was a miracle he looked up at the instant he did. A little ways ahead of MacD, bullets slammed into the cable, fired no doubt by the Burmese soldiers. It disintegrated in a furball of hemp fibers, and, as soon as the two ends parted, the guide ropes took the added strain.

  “Down!” Cabrillo shouted over the din of battle, and threw himself onto the quivering main cable. MacD dropped flat, clutching at the foot-thick rope with his arms and leg.

  Even when the structure was first built, the guidelines were never designed to carry the load of the main cable. They lasted the seconds it took Cabrillo to spin himself around so he was facing the temple. He had one instant to see that a pair of soldiers in jungle fatigues had also started across the bridge, their AKs slung low across their bellies.

  First one guideline split apart, rotating the entire bridge in a gut-wrenching jolt. The second let go an instant later, and Cabrillo was suddenly in free fall, clinging to the rope as it arced back toward the Buddhist sanctuary, accelerating with every second. Wind whistled past his ears while the world tilted and spun. The two Burmese soldiers hadn’t seen what was coming. Screaming, one hurtled off the span, his arms and le
gs pinwheeling until he smashed into the rocks below. The river washed away the crimson smear he’d left on the stone and carried the body away. The second soldier managed to grab at the guidelines as they sagged like deflated balloons.

  Juan redoubled his grip and braced for impact, knowing that if he lost his tenuous hold he also lost his life. He hit unyielding stone like he’d been struck by a bus. He felt his collarbone snap like a green twig and his entire left side go numb for an instant. And then his brain rebooted, and the agony struck his nervous system from his ankle to his head. Blood dripped from a gash on his temple, and it took everything he had not to just let go and be done with it all.

  The soldier who’d clutched at the rope at the last second gave a warning shriek as he lost his hold and came tumbling down the cliff face. There was nothing Juan could do. The guy struck him a glancing blow that caused him to slip a little farther down the cable, and then he was gone.

  Cabrillo looked down to see him sail past MacD, who had somehow stayed on even though he’d fallen farther and hit even harder. The soldier plummeted into the water headfirst and vanished. Juan never did see him surface.

  He was stuck. With his broken collarbone there was no way he could climb up the cable, and he knew there was no way he’d survive a plunge into the river. He thought that maybe he and MacD could swing the rope across the cliff and somehow land on the waterwheel platform, but that wouldn’t work either. It was just too far away.

  Cabrillo looked up, expecting to see the triumphant faces of soldiers aiming down at him. He could no longer hear any firing from Linda’s side of the chasm and assumed that when the rope parted, she and Smith had beaten a fast retreat. The soldiers could be choppered over in just a few minutes, so it made no sense for them to linger over a situation over which they had no control.

  The cable began to shake with a slow rhythm, and it took him just a moment to realize that the Burmese soldiers, rather than shooting the two of them off the rope like flies, were hauling him and MacD up to the canyon rim, to a fate that would probably make dropping into the river seem like the lesser of two evils. But as long as he was alive and had Max Hanley and the rest of the Corporation as backup, Juan Cabrillo would never give up.

  Twenty-four hours later, he wished he had.

  It took the soldiers nearly ten minutes to haul first Cabrillo and then MacD out of the gorge. By then Juan’s shoulder felt like it had been lanced with a hot poker, and his arms and legs burned with an unholy fire from clutching the cable. He was disarmed by a soldier wielding a combat knife who cut the REC7’s sling before he had been brought fully to the ground. Another soldier plucked his FN Five-seveN from its holster and yanked a throwing knife from its scabbard, hanging inverted from his harness strap.

  The same was done to MacD when they brought him up from the depths. He’d been so much farther out on the rope than Cabrillo that when it collapsed, he had actually been dragged into the river. His pants were wet from the knees down. That little bit of a cushion was what saved him from being crushed against the cliff.

  They were forced to stay on their knees, with two men covering them and a third removing the rest of their gear. It was during the pat down that they discovered Cabrillo’s broken collarbone, which the soldier made sure to knead with both hands until the bones ground together.

  The pain was intense, but only when the soldier let go did Juan let out a little whimper. He couldn’t help it. They also discovered the artificial leg. The soldier turned to an officer wearing aviator-style sunglasses for instructions. A few words were exchanged, and the soldier pulled Juan’s combat leg free of its stump and handed it to his superior. The man looked at it for a moment, gave Juan a rotten-toothed smile, and hurled the limb over the edge.

  He hadn’t known what a small arsenal the leg represented or how Juan had planned to hijack the chopper using the pistol secreted within it. He just wanted to show Cabrillo that he was totally powerless and that from this moment on the army of one of the most ruthless dictatorships in the world controlled his fate.

  Cabrillo had to fight to keep the disappointment from showing on his face. Instead of giving the bastard the satisfaction of knowing how much this really meant, he shrugged as best he could and just looked around at the scenery as if he didn’t have a care in the world. If his mouth hadn’t been so dry, he would have tried to whistle.

  The officer didn’t like that his demonstration of power hadn’t elicited the proper amount of fear, so he barked an order at one of the soldiers covering them. An instant later the butt of a Kalashnikov smashed into the back of Juan’s head, and his world went black.

  * * *

  CABRILLO CAME TO in fits and starts. He remembered the awful racket of a chopper flight and being manhandled a couple of times, but each of these memories felt as if it had happened to someone else, like a scene from a movie he’d watched long ago. He never came close enough to consciousness to feel any pain or have any idea where he was.

  The first sensation when he finally returned from the abyss was an intense ache at the back of his head. More than anything, he wanted to explore the area with his hand and make sure his skull hadn’t been crushed in, like he was sure it had been. But he resisted the urge. An instructor at Camp Peary, the CIA training facility known as The Farm, had once told him that if he were ever captured and was uncertain of his surroundings, he should lie as quietly as possible for as long as possible. This allowed him to rest, but, more important, he could gather intelligence on where he had been taken.

  So with the back of his head screaming for attention and other parts of his body sore, he lay dormant, straining to glean anything from his surroundings. He could tell he was still clothed, and knew, by the ease with which he could breathe, that his head wasn’t in a bag. As best he could tell, he was lying on a table. He strained his ears but could hear nothing. It was difficult to concentrate. His head pounded in time with his beating heart.

  Ten minutes grew into fifteen. He was pretty sure he was alone, so he risked opening an eye a fraction of a millimeter. He could make out no shapes, but he saw light. Not the brightness of a noonday sun but the murky glow of an incandescent bulb. He opened his eye a bit more. He could see a bare cement-block wall where it joined a concrete ceiling. Both were stained with Jackson Pollock- esque swirls and splashes of a rusty red substance Cabrillo knew to be blood.

  He remembered that MacD Lawless had also been taken prisoner, so he could only pray that Linda and Smith had gotten out. If they escaped the ambush, he was confident that they would rendezvous with the Oregon. Once they were far enough downriver in the RHIB, Gomez Adams could extract them with the helicopter.

  The steady beat of pain lancing though his head continued unabated. It was making him a little nauseated, which meant he probably had a concussion. Though he was almost positive he was alone in a cell of some kind, he dared not move his head. There could be hidden cameras or a two-way observation mirror behind him. He did shift a little, like an unconscious person thrashing out. His feet and wrists were bound to the table with steel cuffs. He lay still once again.

  He was in no shape to stand up to an interrogation, and if they’d brought him to the capital, Yangon, he was most likely in Insein Prison. Pronounced “Insane,” it was perhaps the most brutal penitentiary on the planet, the deepest of black holes, where escape was impossible and survival had even longer odds.

  It housed around ten thousand prisoners, though its capacity was less than half that. Many were political activists and monks who’d spoken out against the regime. The rest were criminals of every kind. Diseases like malaria and dysentery were endemic. Rats outnumbered both the prisoners and the guards. And the tales of torture were the stuff of nightmares. Cabrillo knew they loved to employ rubber hoses filled with sand to beat people and used attack dogs to force prisoners to race each other across a gravel path on their elbows and knees.

  His only hope lay in the fact that there was an electronic tracking chip embedded in his thigh a
nd at this very moment Max and the rest of the crew were working on getting them out.

  Out of nowhere, a fist slammed into his jaw, nearly dislocating it.

  He could have sworn there was nobody else in the room with him. The guy had the patience of a cat. There was no use pretending any longer. He opened his eyes. The man who’d struck him wore a green military uniform. Juan couldn’t identify his rank but managed to take a little satisfaction in the fact that he was massaging his right fist. His head felt like a struck bell.

  “Name?” the soldier barked.

  Juan saw two additional guards had come through a metal door. One stayed close to it while the other took up a position next to a table with a sheet draped over it. He couldn’t tell from its outline what lay underneath.

  When he didn’t give his name fast enough, the lead interrogator pulled a length of ordinary garden hose from his belt. By the way it sagged Juan knew it was a weighted sap. It cracked across his stomach, and no matter how tightly Cabrillo had flexed his abs the blow felt like it had sunk all the way through to his spine.

  “Name!”

  “John Smith,” Cabrillo said, sucking air through his teeth.

  “Who you work for?” Again the cudgel whipped across Juan’s stomach when he didn’t answer instantly. “Who you work for? CIA? UN?”

  “No one. I work for myself.”

  The hose came down again, this time across Juan’s groin. It was too much. He turned his head and retched from the pain.

  A cultured voice with a tinge of a British accent said, “I can tell from your accent that you’re American.”

  The unseen speaker was up near the head of the table, where Cabrillo was strapped. Juan heard him light a cigarette, and a moment later a plume of smoke wafted over his face. The man moved so Cabrillo could see him. He was Burmese, like the others. Juan put his age as in his mid-forties. His face was nut brown, with lines around the eyes and mouth. He wore a visored cap, but Juan could see his hair was still jet-black. There wasn’t anything necessarily malevolent about the officer, but Cabrillo got a cold chill down his spine.