The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  Marion Lawless II came around a corner, wearing chinos and a denim shirt. His son was his spitting image, especially the jade-colored eyes and slightly cleft chin.

  “Mare, these men are here with MacD.”

  Juan thrust out a hand. “My name is Juan Cabrillo. This is Franklin Lincoln. And we’ve been working with your son to rescue Pauline.” As soon as introductions were over, the Chairman called Lawless on a disposable cell and told him it was clear but to come through backyards anyway.

  “The last we knew, MacD had quit working for that security company after something bad happened to him in Afghanistan,” the senior Lawless said.

  “It’s a rather long, complicated story. I’ll let your son tell it when he gets here. We just wanted to let you know that we’ve located Pauline and we’re going to get her back.”

  “And the animals that took her?” Kay asked. From her tone it was clear what fate she preferred for them. She might be a genteel Southern woman, but there was steel in her spine.

  “Will never bother you again,” Juan assured her, and she understood his meaning.

  “Good.”

  “However, once we have her back I’m going to need you folks to disappear for a while until we can roll up the people behind Pauline’s abduction. If you don’t have someplace, we can get you a hotel.”

  Mare Lawless put up an arresting hand. “No need. An old friend of mine has a cottage down on the Gulf Coast that he lets us use anytime we want.”

  Juan considered this option and decided it was safe enough. He nodded. “That sounds perfect. This might take us a couple of weeks.”

  “Take as long as you need,” Kay said quickly, and with the resolve of a woman protecting her own. She turned when there was a knock on the sliding-glass door that led to the backyard patio. She shrieked with joy when she saw her son, standing next to the wicker table and chairs.

  She unlatched the door and hugged MacD intensely, tears running unabashedly down her cheeks. Marion Senior joined them and threw his arms over his family. He too was crying with joy, and also the guilt of not being able to protect MacD’s only child.

  If he was honest with himself, the scene made Juan choke up some as well.

  They stayed for only an hour. Cabrillo wanted enough daylight to locate and study the house the kidnappers were using. MacD explained everything to his parents, only leaving out his treatment at the hands of the Insein Prison jailors, the fact that he’d had a rope bridge shot out from under him, and a few other details he felt it best they not know. It was still a harrowing story that left Kay Lawless a little pale under her tan.

  They left amid smiles and more tears. MacD promised he’d come home as soon as they nailed the person behind Pauline’s abduction.

  The neighborhood where the videoconference originated hadn’t been adopted by a celebrity or been the recipient of a generous grant. Many of the houses were still boarded up, though, at the very least, most of the trash had been removed. This was the section of New Orleans that was hardest hit when the levees failed and had been a virtual lake in the days following Katrina. Nearby were vacant lots with only crumbling concrete pads to mark the grave sites of families’ homes.

  Linc dropped MacD and Cabrillo at a coffee shop not too far from their intended target. In this area, two white men and a black man in the same car would look suspiciously like cops no matter who was behind the wheel. He returned thirty minutes later, and helped himself to the chicory coffee from the pot Juan had ordered.

  “Well?” Cabrillo asked after Linc had stopped making a sour face at the bitter taste of the coffee.

  “Nasty,” he pronounced. “Okay, the satellite pics we have are a little out of date. The two houses behind the one we’re interested in have been demolished, and the lots are practically jungles. The ones on either side are still there and completely shuttered. There are families living across the street. I saw kids’ bikes chained in their yards, and toys and stuff on the lawn, so we need to be careful there.”

  “What about the kidnappers?” MacD asked, his anxiety level spiking.

  “Never showed themselves. The shades are drawn in all the windows, but I believe there are tiny gaps at the edges that they can see out of and only a professional Peeping Tom could see in. And Juan, you were right about the lawn. It looks like a goat’s buffet. Those guys are holed up tight and probably go out only at night, to get food from a store miles from here.”

  “So was that an attached garage we saw on the pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get a chance to run a thermal scan?”

  “No. It would look too suspicious, and it’s still too warm outside. Not enough of a temperature difference to register properly.”

  Cabrillo had suspected as much but felt he should ask anyway. “Okay. We lay low and then go in at one and assault at three.” Three a.m. is when the human body is at its lowest ebb. Even a guard on night duty succumbs to the body’s natural circadian rhythms and would be far from alert. “MacD, you cool?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Ah won’t let my emotions interfere with the op.”

  Even in such a tumbledown neighborhood, the men couldn’t go skulking around in full combat gear and armed to the teeth. As one o’clock approached, Linc parked the car several streets over from the target house and popped open the hood. Any passing police patrol would see that it was a disabled vehicle and that the driver had left it for the night. A curious cop might run the plates, see that it was a rental, and assume it was a relative displaced by Katrina to Houston, as so many were, back home for a visit.

  They all wore dark jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts, and their equipment was stuffed in duffel bags. The air was markedly cooler, though the humidity remained high. They walked normally along the cracked sidewalk as if they didn’t have a care in the world. There was no traffic, and the only sound came from a barking dog several blocks over.

  When they reached the jungled lot behind the target house, the men faded into it as if they’d never existed. From here on out, they were invisible. Bags whispered open, and equipment was triple-checked. They oozed their way through the foliage. If any of them noticed that most of the plants were studded with wicked sharp thorns, no one gave any indication. After five minutes of silently crawling through the underbrush, they came into the clear. A wooden fence, missing slats like a mouth missing teeth, encircled the backyard and blocked most of the view. Unperturbed, Cabrillo hefted the thermal imager from a bag strapped to his side and climbed atop a chunk of concrete left over from when this parcel had been a home.

  The scanner worked by comparing heat signatures, and had uncanny sensitivity. It basically allowed him to see through walls as though he had X-ray vision. They were so effective that many civil liberties groups were fighting their use by law enforcement agencies because of right-to-privacy issues. The military had high hopes for the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, but oftentimes the mud huts’ walls were too thick to get accurate readings. But here, with a house so old it lacked even basic insulation, the scanner was in its element.

  Cabrillo could see four distinct heat signatures, which glowed white in his vision, and a squat rectangle of absolute black, which would be the cold water stored in the only bathroom’s toilet cistern. There were three other spots showing heat. One was cylindrical and would be the hot-water tank. Another was much smaller and was the warm compressor motor for the refrigerator. There was no glowing pilot light, so the stove was electric. In this way not only did Juan see the occupants, he could decipher the house’s layout. Three of the people were in repose, their bodies seeming to float a few feet above the floor because the scanner couldn’t see the beds they were lying on. The fourth figure was sitting upright as if in a chair, a lightbulb glowing cheerily over him.

  He concentrated on the seated person for fifteen minutes, and in all that time the figure didn’t move once. If Juan had to venture a guess, he’d say the guy was sound asleep.

  Next he moved off to th
e right about twenty yards, through the grass, until he came up against the trunk of a tree. He was close enough now to peer over the fence. He scoped the house a second time. Because he’d shifted position he saw the same objects from a different angle and could confirm that his mental picture of its layout was accurate.

  He rejoined his team, and they retreated back into the woods.

  Cabrillo’s voice was barely above a whisper. “There are three Tangos, one at the front of the house asleep in a chair. A second one is alone in a back bedroom. The third is in the bedroom next to it with MacD’s daughter.” He felt Lawless stiffen next to him. “Before you ask, they’re in separate beds.” He’d been able to distinguish her from the others because of her small stature.

  They’d earlier determined that the house, though small by American standards, was too big to use the knockout-gas trick they’d employed to “rescue” Setiawan Bahar. They would have to go in silently and without a hint of hesitation. The heat signatures were too clear for any of the kidnappers to be wearing a bulky suicide vest, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them close by.

  For the next two hours they took turns watching the house through the thermal imager. At one point, the guard in the front room roused himself to use the bathroom and when he returned the scanner showed him lying down—on a couch, presumably—and most likely going to sleep again.

  As the minute hand of Juan’s watch swept to three a.m., they moved out, advancing in a crouch and then vaulting over the fence like ghosts. They were so silent that the few nearby crickets didn’t stop chirping. There was a single door that led to the backyard from the kitchen. Juan and MacD donned night vision goggles and turned them on. Working only by touch, Linc picked the lock in under fifty seconds. Despite the massive size of his hands, he had the dexterity of a surgeon but had taken longer than normal in order to stay as quiet as possible.

  While Linc was working, Cabrillo drizzled oil from a small can over the hinges and worked it into the gaps with his fingers. The door unlatched, but Linc kept it closed, as a slight breeze had come up from behind them and would have blown into the house had he opened it.

  The men’s weapons were mere .22 calibers, and the silencers attached to their barrels were the size of soda cans, making them unbalanced and unwieldy. Such pistols had only one purpose. These were the tools of assassins. The ammo was mercury tipped but carried less powder than normal. It was a trade-off of power versus stealth. But when the silencer was placed against a target’s head, the extra gunpowder would have been superfluous anyway.

  The breeze died down, and Cabrillo nodded. Like a black panther, Linc inched open the door and slid his big body through, followed immediately by Cabrillo and Lawless.

  There was enough light spilling from the front living room to make it seem like noon in the filthy and reeking kitchen. A barrel-sized trash can was overflowing with rotting food and used paper plates. Skillets and pans were mounded in the sink, covered in congealed grease and doubtlessly home to a sizable roach colony. An unadorned archway led to the living room while another exit gave way to a hallway where the bedrooms and bathroom were located.

  Moving so that his feet barely left the unmopped linoleum floor, Cabrillo glided through this second doorway with MacD on his heels. The bedroom doors were both closed. From one there was silence. From the other came deep, sonorous snoring. The snorer was with Pauline Lawless, yet one more torture for the poor girl.

  As agreed, they struck thirty seconds after parting in the kitchen to give each other enough time to get into position. Juan counted down those last few seconds in his head as accurately as a Swiss chronograph. At the precise last second, he heard two muted coughs from the front of the house. Linc’s man was dead. Juan opened the cheap pressboard door and saw his target sprawled on a plain metal bed. Next to him was a stand with a pistol and a book on top. On the floor was a pile of clothing and another garment that had nothing to do with protecting the wearer from the elements. Juan could see the bulges of plastic explosives and wiring looping all across the vest.

  Without pause, Cabrillo strode across the room, held the barrel an inch from the kidnapper’s head, and put two muffled rounds into his skull. The body jerked at the first impact but was still for the second.

  He felt nothing at that moment. Not remorse at killing another human being, not elation at taking out a terrorist. On his moral balance sheet, tonight’s action was a wash. He would derive neither pleasure nor guilt from it, but he would bury this memory as far down as humanly possible. Killing a sleeping man, no matter what he’d done to deserve it, simply wasn’t the Chairman’s style.

  When he came out into the hallway, MacD stood there with a little blond girl, still asleep, in his arms. Cabrillo held the deactivated suicide vest in his.

  “Clear,” Juan called, and pulled off his and Lawless’s NVGs.

  “Clear,” Linc echoed. He entered the hallway also carrying a suicide vest. “What do you want to do with this?”

  “We’ll take them with us and deep-six them in Lake Pontchartrain.”

  The next part of the plan was a little bit of misdirection for the police. Cabrillo didn’t want them to suspect that this incident had anything to do with terrorism. Linc had been carrying a camelback canteen over his shoulders, but rather than water it contained gasoline. While he started dousing every combustible item in the house, especially the bodies, Cabrillo sprinkled about empty vials commonly used by crack dealers and candles and spoons for cooking heroin as well as medical syringes. He knew the cops would test the drug paraphernalia and that it would come up clean, but he hoped they’d shrug off the anomaly and just be grateful three more dealers were dead. Cabrillo also left a small mechanical scale, and a few hundred-dollar bills inside a cigar box-sized metal case under one of the beds. The scale and lockbox had come from Walmart, the cash from their safe house’s uncirculated cache. The scene was set. Drug deal gone bad. End of story.

  MacD waited outside, his sleeping daughter still unaware that her ordeal was over.

  Juan was the last one out, and he closed the back door after he tossed a match into a pool of gasoline. By the time they made it through the back-lot jungle, the house was a pyre, with flames arcing through the roof rafters. Wide-eyed children and their families staked out positions on their lawns while overworked firefighters battled a blaze they could not defeat. The house was a complete loss, and by the time it was finally out, a duffel bag laden with the now-traceable weapons and two vests packed with explosives was at the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, Lawless, his parents, and his little girl were headed to the coast, and a nondescript rental car was halfway to Houston. MacD would join the Oregon after spending a couple of days with his family.

  20

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS HAD PASSED SINCE THE FAX FIRST came through to the White House. More than eight thousand men and women were put to work trying to figure out who was behind it and how it had been accomplished. Agents from every department in the country were mobilized, even if some were kept in the dark as to the exact nature of their search because the incident had been classified above top secret.

  Indecision gripped the Oval Office. The demonstration of the adversary’s power had been convincing, but his demands went too far. The president couldn’t meet any of them if he hoped to maintain national security and perhaps even keep his job. To his credit, the latter was a much lesser consideration.

  He’d been given advice and speculation from across the spectrum. It was al-Qaeda. It was the Iranians. We should give in to the demands. We should ignore them. Ultimately it was his call, and no matter which way he looked at the ultimatum, he saw no viable exit strategy. He’d tried calling the Israeli prime minister to float a balloon about simply announcing the U.S. was suspending financial aid in the short term, but the call was mysteriously cut off as soon as it became clear that America would clandestinely still continue supporting the Jewish state. Somehow the most secure telephone in the world could be listened in on and disconne
cted at will.

  A technician from the NSA had explained to him that it was impossible, but the evidence lay dead on his desk. He tried having the call come from another phone not connected to the White House switchboard and it too ended before anything substantive was said. His only option, however cumbersome and slow, was to send a diplomatic courier to Jerusalem to tell the prime minister what the United States intended to do.

  He was behind his desk, staring off into middle space, when Lester Jackson knocked and entered without permission. The doors to the Oval Office were too thick for much sound to spill through, so the president hadn’t heard the fax behind Eunice Wosniak’s desk ring.

  “Mr. President, this just came from them.” He carried a fax like it was a decomposing muskrat.

  “What does it say?” he asked wearily. If they made it through this crisis, he’d already decided that this would be his one and only term. He felt like he’d aged a hundred years since yesterday morning.

  “All it says is, ‘We meant immediately. Their blood is on your hands.’ ”

  “Whose blood?”

  “I don’t know. There’s nothing much happening in the country, according to the major news outlets. Sir, this could still be an elaborate bluff. They could have inside people in Troy, New York, that killed the power, and there’s some powerful software that could hack our phone system.”

  “Don’t you think I don’t know that?” he snapped. “But what if it isn’t? What if they carry out another attack? A lethal one? I’ve wasted enough time already.”

  Stung, Jackson’s voice went formal. “What are your intentions, sir?”

  The president knew he was taking out his frustration on one of his oldest friends. “I’m sorry, Les. It’s just ... I don’t know. Who could have ever foreseen something like this? It’s hard enough ordering men and women in uniform into harm’s way. Now our entire civilian population’s at risk.”

  “That’s been our position for a number of years,” Jackson pointed out.