The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  “Okay, then,” Juan said, and stood. “You get some rest, and we’ll talk more later.”

  “There are some people I’d like to call. My father and some friends.”

  “I might as well tell you now. Your father is missing. We’ve been trying to reach him for several days but haven’t had any luck. Also, I’m afraid that until we have a better handle on the situation we need to keep up the pretense that you died back on that oil rig.”

  “My father? Missing?”

  “And the last time anyone saw him he was with the man that most likely kidnapped you in Zurich.”

  Guilt, fear, and anger played across her face in a kaleidoscope of emotions. She sat as still as a statue, a beautiful mannequin, her soul having just been torn out.

  “I am sorry,” Juan said softly. He wished she hadn’t asked about making calls. She wasn’t ready to hear this kind of news. Not now.

  Soleil finally looked up at him, a pleading look in her eyes that he wanted more than anything else to satiate. He’d never seen such naked vulnerability. Now he was in territory where he wasn’t all that comfortable because it brought up feelings of his own loss. He hadn’t been told about his wife’s death until he’d returned from a mission for the CIA and she’d been in the ground for weeks.

  With relief he saw her firm up, straighten her shoulders, and harden her eyes. “I think I would like to get dressed and walk the deck, if that is okay. I have not seen sunshine or felt fresh air in a long time.” She pointed to a suitcase just outside the bathroom that he recognized as coming from the wardrobe section of the Magic Shop. Linda and Kevin Nixon had already kitted her out.

  “Of course,” Juan quickly agreed. “If you need anything, feel free to ask any of the crew. Even though we didn’t find you where we expected to, they’re all relieved that you’re safe.”

  “Thank you for everything.”

  “Cocktails in the dining room at six. Dinner’s casual, but I’ll wear my cape for you.”

  She smiled wanly at his attempt at humor, and Cabrillo took his leave. He finally tracked down Linda. She was in the exercise room with Eddie Seng. Both were dressed in the traditional gi of martial arts training and were locked in a fight for dominance on the dojo floor.

  “Not enough action for one day?” Juan teased.

  Linda flared. “That dirtball Smith got the drop on me back in the jungle, and I want Eddie to show me what I did wrong.”

  Seng had degrees in several styles of fighting and was the Corporation’s instructor.

  “It can wait. We need to talk.”

  Linda bowed to Eddie and came across the padded mats in bare feet. “I’ll tell you right off the top that Smith didn’t give away much. As soon as he got me to Yangon he hit me with happy juice.”

  “And you woke up on the chopper, heading out to the rig.”

  “How did you know that?” she asked, one eyebrow arching.

  “I’m Superman. Actually, I just had a chat with Soleil.”

  “Chat, eh?”

  Juan didn’t take the bait. “Was Smith with you in the chopper?”

  “Yes. And he had the bag. And he made his only mistake. It was on the floor between him and the pilot, and, just before we landed, he opened it. Inside were ruby crystals, big ones. I’d say a foot long or longer, and they’d already been cut and polished. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”

  Cabrillo had a hard time believing this was all an elaborate smuggling scheme. There had to be something beyond that.

  Linda was still talking. “Once we landed I continued to play rag doll. They took me straight to the cell with Soleil, so I don’t know if Smith hung around for the final act or not.”

  “I suspect not. Bahar went through a lot of trouble to get that bag. He’d want the stones as soon as possible. Let me ask you something. I discovered that two entire floors of that rig were crammed with computers. I’m talking thousands of interlinked machines. Any ideas?”

  “Ask the brain trust. Mark and Eric are the computer nerds.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to call them ITs?”

  “So I’m not politically correct. Sue me. Seriously, you’d have to ask them. I was shoved into the black hole of Calcutta as soon as I was aboard.”

  Cabrillo found Mark and Eric in Stoney’s cabin. They were playing a video game on a giant flat-screen that was actually four edgeless panels mounted in a square. Juan understood that some games promoted actual skills, but he saw no redeeming features in the two of them racing a cartoon car with what looked like an aardvark behind the wheel through a shopping center.

  “I guess you guys haven’t heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Croissard’s daughter was on that rig too. He was used to get to us. And MacD Lawless was a spy.”

  “What?” the two crowed in unison.

  “The real bad guy turns out to be Gunawan Bahar. He was the mastermind behind everything. So your priority is tearing into every part of his life. I want to know who he really is and what he’s after. When we first contacted Overholt about Bahar, he said that he wasn’t on the CIA’s radarscope, so you’re going to have to dig deep.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Mark said. “MacD’s a spy? For who?”

  Cabrillo laid out the whole convoluted story, summing up by saying that he and Max both agreed that Bahar felt the Corporation represented a direct threat to whatever he had planned. “Two final pieces,” he added as a further aside. “Linda saw a bunch of foot-long polished rubies in the bag we recovered in Myanmar, and I discovered that two decks of the oil platform had been converted into a massive server farm. Any thoughts?”

  The two young geniuses glanced at each other for a moment as if syncing their minds. Mark finally spoke up. “Whatever they were, they weren’t rubies. Corundum, the base material for both rubies and sapphires—the difference being the presence of trace minerals that give them color, chromium for ruby, iron or titanium for sapphire—has a hexagonal crystal structure, but it’s tabular rather than linear.”

  Cabrillo kept his face impassive while inside he was screaming, Speak English!

  “What he’s saying,” Stone translated, “is that rubies don’t grow lengthwise like emerald or quartz, so it is unlikely that Linda saw foot-long rubies. They were some other type of crystals.”

  That supported Juan’s theory that this wasn’t about gem smuggling, but this information got him no closer to the truth. “What about all the computers?”

  Mark said, “Obviously Bahar needed to crunch some major numbers, but without knowing more about him or his goals it’s impossible to say exactly what or why.”

  “Then you have your marching orders. I want answers.”

  “You got it, boss man,” Stoney replied.

  17

  JOHN SMITH STEPPED OFF THE BOARDING STAIRS OF THE private jet and into the arms of Gunawan Bahar. The two embraced like brothers.

  “You have done well,” Bahar said, holding Smith at arm’s length to look him in the eye.

  “It was easier than we anticipated, especially after you brokered the deal with the army.” They spoke in English, the only language they had in common.

  Smith really had taken the anonymous nom de guerre when he’d joined the Foreign Legion. He’d been born Abdul Mohammad in Algeria and, like many in his homeland, had a great deal of French blood in his veins after one hundred and thirty years of colonial occupation. Also, like many in his homeland, more than forty years of independence hadn’t eroded the hatred he felt for his nation’s former overlords. But rather than fight as an insurgent in his own country against a government he saw as corrupted by Western influences, he had decided to fight the beast from within and joined the Legion as a way of gaining military training and learning how to ingratiate himself with Europeans so that he could easily pass as one.

  After his initial five-year contract, he left to join the Mujahadin, fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The warfare he enjoyed, but the level of ignorance he encoun
tered among the people came as a shock. He found they were all superstitious peasants who spent as much time warring among themselves as they did fighting the Soviets. Even the Great Sheik Bin Laden was a paranoid fanatic who actually believed that once the Russians were expelled they should take the fight directly to the infidels in the West. Though he’d been a playboy in his youth and enjoyed himself in European cities, Osama never understood the true might of a Western army. Battling Russian conscripts on soil that was foreign to them was a far cry from taking on the United States.

  Bin Laden came to believe that martyrdom operations, as he liked to call suicide bombers, would bring about the destruction of the Western world. Abdul Mohammad wanted to see America brought to its knees, but he understood that blowing up a few buildings wasn’t going to change anything. In fact, it would harden the victims’ resolve and bring swift and deadly reprisals.

  Though he did not know how, he knew there was a better way. It wasn’t until years later, long after Bin Laden took down the Twin Towers and ignited a powder keg that had hurt the Muslim world far more than the West, that Mohammad met Setiawan Bahar, Gunawan’s brother and namesake to his son. (The boy used in the Afghan operation had been a street urchin they had carefully coached not to talk to the infidels.) By the time they met, Mohammad was working for a private security company in Saudi Arabia, the flames of jihad having cooled in his belly. The Bahar brothers were in the country at a time when Wahabi fundamentalists were targeting Western interests. The pair was touring oil production facilities that were interested in buying electronic controls from one of their companies back in Jakarta.

  Mohammad was their bodyguard for two weeks, and their full-time employee ever since.

  They used him for their own corporate security as well as what they dubbed “special projects.” These ranged from corporate espionage to kidnapping rivals’ family members in order to win contracts at lower bids. The Bahar brothers, and then only Gunawan after Setiawan died of lung cancer, were very careful to shield themselves from any consequences of their more aggressive business dealings. The fact that the Corporation couldn’t trace their ownership of the J-61 oil platform was a testament to their care and caution.

  What had bonded the three men originally was their belief that Bin Laden’s tactics were doomed to fail. They agreed that they wanted the West to end its persistent meddling in the Middle East, but terrorism would never bring that about. In fact, it caused more interference. What the Muslim world needed was leverage over the United States. Since both sides needed oil, the one to run its factories and cars, the other for the tremendous revenue, something else had to be found.

  It was four years earlier when Gunawan had read an article in a science magazine—in his dentist’s office, of all places—that he found a way to get that leverage. He had placed Abdul in charge of the venture and gave him near-limitless resources. The very best and brightest in Bahar’s vast empire were put to the task, and outside contractors were brought in as needed. The project was so cutting-edge that secrecy was a given and needn’t be explained to the employees, while only a select few knew the ultimate use of the device they worked feverishly to build.

  They had been ready for nearly a year except for one critical component and that’s what Abdul had finally found, thanks to an obscure British researcher who’d put together the pieces of an eight-hundred-year-old legend and led Mohammad to a remote temple lost in one of the most impenetrable jungles in the world.

  Muhammad unslung the bag from his shoulder and carefully opened the top. The bright sunshine beating down on the airport tarmac made the crystals gleam like solid fire.

  “Congratulations, my friend,” Bahar said warmly. They started toward a waiting limousine. “This has become your obsession as well as mine. Tell me, was the temple as Marco Polo described it to Rustichello?”

  “No. The monks expanded it greatly over the years. The original cave where the crystals were first mined was still there, but they had constructed buildings going down to it from the cliffs above and had started carving more idolatrous images on the opposite side of the chasm. Judging by the level of decay, I would say it was abandoned at about the time the current junta took control.”

  “Interesting that they left the last of the stones behind,” Bahar mused as a chauffeur held open the door for him.

  “They took their foolish statue but abandoned the gems. Perhaps over the centuries they lost the knowledge of their existence. Polo said that only the head priest knew about them, and that he was told only because he carried the Khan’s seal.”

  “Perhaps,” Bahar muttered, already uninterested in the conversation. “It’s enough that you were able to track them down at all.”

  Abdul had had teams of researchers and archivists searching the globe for these particular crystals after finding a tiny sample in the shop of a Hong Kong antiquities dealer and learning they possessed the special internal structure needed to make their device work. And his superior was correct in saying this had become an obsession. He had amassed and retained so much information about crystals that he could probably get his gemology certification. He’d personally visited stores and mines from Scotland to Japan, but his break came after one of the hired researchers, a bit of a Marco Polo fanatic himself, had sat in on William Cantor’s moneygrubbing lecture in Coventry, England. When Mohammad heard the tale about crystal-powered weapons, he had flown to England that night with an assistant and met with Cantor when he gave his next lecture. He had to give Cantor credit—he’d actually tried to hold off telling Abdul who the actual owner of the Rustichello Folio was and where he lived. Once they’d disposed of Cantor’s body, they’d broken into the drafty mansion in the southern part of England, killed the old man, taken the Folio, and staged the scene to look like a robbery gone bad.

  They were safely out of the country before either crime was discovered.

  A hired translator then spent several weeks on the document, eliciting details of Polo’s observations of the battle and his later journey to find the mine where the crystals that had blinded the village’s watchkeepers had originated. Abdul knew that the mine held the same stones as the tiny sliver he’d found in Hong Kong.

  Of course they would need to be tested, but the optical properties Polo described were the same as they needed for their project. It couldn’t be coincidence.

  “And the sinking?” Bahar inquired. “Did it go as planned?”

  “We had to hurry but were only a few miles from our target area, and no one spotted us heading back to Brunei in the Hercules’s lifeboats. Our American mole had reported that the ship they used is much faster than we were led to believe. He should call me soon to tell me how it went, but I think we destroyed all traces of the Oracle before they reached it.”

  “That is good. As it turns out, the Oracle was right about the Corporation posing a potential threat. They did manage to escape Insein Prison, a feat I don’t believe has been accomplished by many.”

  Abdul recalled his meeting with Cabrillo in Singapore. He’d had a feeling then that the man was dangerous. That reminded him of another loose end that needed seeing to. “What of Pramana?”

  “We’re going to see him now. That is the reason for our delay here in Jakarta. I knew after his failure in Singapore that you would wish to speak with him. It was only your quick thinking that prevented it from becoming a fatal mistake. Once your chat is over we’ll head to Europe with the crystals. Oh, what about Croissard?”

  “Weighted down and tossed into the Malacca Strait.”

  Thirty minutes later the sleek Mercedes limousine pulled into the parking lot of a run-down warehouse on the outskirts of the teeming city of ten million. The lot was cracked and weed choked, and the building looked as though it hadn’t seen paint since the Dutch granted Indonesia its independence.

  “I can’t believe that fool Pramana didn’t have tighter control of his people,” Mohammad said, his temper beginning to grow.

  Some of the enforcers he
employed came from the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah. In fact, Pramana had accompanied him to England and had carried out the torture of William Cantor. What Abdul hadn’t known is that when Pramana sent two of his men to the Singapore meeting as lobby backup in case something went wrong, they brought suicide vests on the private jet with the intention of killing the very men Abdul was there to meet. Abdul didn’t know the reason or particularly care. He supposed it was to avenge the fellow Muslims the Corporation had killed in Pakistan. Abdul himself had warned them all about how good these operators were, so perhaps they’d decided to martyr themselves by taking out such a formidable foe.

  It mattered little. What mattered was that Pramana had betrayed them either deliberately or by not being able to control his men, and they’d nearly ruined everything. Had Mohammad not realized the situation and quickly improvised another explosive device with gunpowder from his pistol and chemicals he found on a maid’s cart, he felt certain that Cabrillo would have realized the meeting had been a trap and not taken the contract. The third blast he’d set off in the casino had been just enough to convince the two Americans that they had been in an unfortunate place at an unfortunate time.

  “If you don’t mind,” Bahar said when Abdul swung open the car’s door, “I’ll remain behind.”

  “Of course.” Mohammad stepped out into the humid air and unsheathed the knife he kept strapped to his forearm.

  18

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  THE PRESIDENT’S SECRETARY HAD BEEN WITH HIM FROM the very beginning when he decided to parlay his up-by-thebootstraps story and gift for oratory into a political career. He put his law practice on hiatus and ran for mayor of Detroit and won in a landslide when his opponent had withdrawn from the race to “spend more time with his family.” The truth was, his opponent’s wife had found out her husband had been cheating and was preparing divorce proceedings. From there he did two terms in the House and another in the Senate before launching his presidential run. Eunice Wosniak had dutifully followed him from his one-man practice to the mayor’s office and on to Washington, and now to the most powerful post in the world.