The Jungle

After an hour of hard going, covering ground they had just crossed that morning, Smith called for a five-minute break. His companion wasn’t even breathing hard. Smith plopped himself onto the ground, panting heavily. In the background was the omnipresent sound of birds and insects. Linda squatted next to Smith, her expression grim, her mind doubtlessly on the fate of her captured companions.

She wiped at her eyes and turned away from Smith. It was the opening he’d been waiting for. He silently drew his pistol and placed the barrel at the back of her head.

“Drop your rifle, carefully,” he ordered.

Linda had drawn air through her teeth and gone stiff. She had the REC7 across her knees. She slowly placed it on the ground in front of her. Smith kept up the pressure with his pistol as he reached out and dragged the rifle out of her range.

“Now pull out your pistol. Two fingers only.”

Like an automaton, Linda unsnapped her holster and, using just her thumb and index finger, drew the Glock 19 she favored. The instant her fingers opened, she ducked her head and spun, throwing up a blocking arm to push Smith’s pistol into the air. She’d known his attention would be on her weapon and used that as a distraction. She stabbed out with stiffened fingers and caught Smith in the throat just above where the collarbones met. Then she hit him in the side of the head with a left cross. The punch wasn’t her best because they were close together, but with his airways constricted from the jab it dazed the former Legio

Linda sprang to her feet and reared back to kick Smith in the head. Fast as an adder, he grabbed her foot out of the air and twisted it over so that Linda had no choice but to fall to the ground. He leapt onto her back with both knees, blowing the air from her lungs, and his weight made it difficult for her to refill them. He slammed the pistol into the nape of her neck.

“Try something like that again and you’re dead. Understand?” When Linda didn’t reply, he repeated the question and screwed the barrel deeper into her flesh.

“Yes,” she managed to croak.

Smith had a length of wire ready in his pocket. He grabbed Linda’s arms and placed them at the small of her back. One-handed, he looped the wire around her wrists and twisted the two ends closed. The wire was high enough up her forearms that she couldn’t reach it with her fingers. A second piece of wire bound her wrists to the reinforced belt loop of her camouflage fatigues. In just seconds Linda Ross was trussed up like a Christmas goose. Only then did he take his weight off of her. Linda coughed violently as her lungs began working again. Her face was bright red, and her eyes burned with rage.

“Why are you doing this?”

Smith ignored her. He retrieved his satellite phone from his pack and powered it up.

“Answer me, damnit!”

He stripped the baseball cap off her head and stuffed it into her mouth. With so much jungle overhead he couldn’t get a clear signal. He grabbed Linda and started walking toward a clearing about fifty yards away. He dumped her into the grass and sat opposite her. He noticed he had an e-mail that had come in first thing this morning:

Change of plans, my friend. As you know my intention all along was to use official cha

Smith scratched at the stubble on his jaw. This changed everything, and explained how the chopper happened to show up at the exact right time. This meant the first team sent into the jungle was probably attacked by smugglers rather than the army. Just bad luck on their part.

Smith wrote out his text:

Wish I’d read your e-mail sooner. I’ve spent the last hour ru

A minute passed before the reply lit up the screen:

I knew you could do it! And three Corporation members grabbed in the process. Interesting. It seems the Oracle gave them far more credit than they deserve. It appears they are no longer a threat. What of the other team I sent? Any ideas?

Smith replied:

Basil was shot, most likely by drug ru

The response came a moment later:

I will get word to them that you are coming back to their location. They will stand down. You can fly with them back to Yangon. A jet is waiting.

That beat having to hike out. In the cosmic scheme, it made up for being in a firefight where he was never a target. He thumbed in another message and hit SEND:

What do I do with the woman?

Is she attractive?

Smith looked over at Linda and assessed her the way a butcher looks at a cut of meat.

Yes.

Bring her along. In case the Oracle didn’t misjudge as badly as we think, she makes a good bargaining chip. If we don’t need her, we can sell her. See you soon, and well done, my friend.

Smith shut off the satellite phone and put it back in his pack. He again looked over at Linda. She glared at him with laser intensity. He smirked. Her anger had absolutely no effect on him.

“On your feet.”

Linda continued to stare defiantly.

“I was just told to keep you alive,” he said, “but that is an order I needn’t worry about obeying. Either get on your feet or I shoot you now and leave your corpse to the vultures.”

Her defiance lasted another heartbeat or two. He could tell when she finally accepted that she no longer had choices. The fire remained behind those eyes, but her shoulders sagged just a little as tension ran out of her body. Linda rose. With her in the lead, and Smith just behind her enough so that she couldn’t try anything, they retraced their path and headed back to the monastery.

JUAN MARKED TIME by the twin ravages of hunger and thirst. The hunger was a dull ache that he could handle. It was the thirst that was driving him mad. He had tried pounding on the door to get someone’s attention, but he knew that they hadn’t forgotten him. They were breaking him down bit by bit through deliberate deprivation.

His tongue felt like a seared piece of meat that had been rammed into his mouth, and his skin had stopped sweating so that it felt papery and brittle. No matter how he tried not to think about it, images of water flooded his mind—glasses of it, lakes of it, whole oceans of it. It was the worst form of torture. They were letting his mind betray him the way Croissard and Smith had. He realized that the waterboard treatment had only been a lark, a way for them to amuse themselves. If it had worked, fine. If not, they already had the second phase of his interrogation mapped out.

This was their tried-and-true method of breaking prisoners, and he was quite sure it had never failed.

Suddenly the bolt securing his door snapped back with a metallic echo, and the hinges squealed like nails on a chalkboard. Two guards were there. Neither had weapons other than the rubber truncheons slipped under their belts. They stomped into the room and lifted Cabrillo from the floor. The Burmese are not usually big people, and these two were no exception. In his exhausted state, and with only one leg, Cabrillo was deadweight, and the soldiers staggered under him.

Cabrillo was dragged down the corridor toward where he had been waterboarded. The dread he felt was like a load of stones had been packed around his heart.