The Jungle

Jiang finally broke free from Than and got behind the wheel himself, his demure aide at his side in the passenger seat. They didn’t speak to each other as the engine was fired and the vehicle put into gear. A little wind puffed into the cargo area as they threaded through the prison grounds and headed toward the main gate. Juan couldn’t see anything but sky from his position on the floor, but he recalled that Insein Prison was a massive complex in northern Yangon built around a central hub like the spokes of a wheel. He also remembered that families were allowed to bring nonpolitical prisoners food at the perimeter wire and that, without it, many would simply starve to death.

Society is said to be measured by the condition of its prisons. Myanmar had to be at the bottom of the barrel.

The van slowed to a stop at the main gate. Guards checked the underside and opened the back doors. One pointed first at Juan, then at MacD, checked a clipboard, counted them a second time, and nodded. The doors were slammed closed.

They were a block from the prison, and Juan was about to try talking to the general when his aide opened the steel grille confining them in the back. She’d removed her glasses.

Juan gaped at her, unable to believe what he was seeing. She started crawling back into the cargo bed, carrying a small black case.

“How?” he rasped.

Her eyes’ shape changed with latex appliances and her hair dyed and lengthened with extensions, the Oregon’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julia Huxley, threw him the warmest smile he’d ever seen.

Then it dawned on him why he recognized the general. It was Eddie Seng, also heavily made up to appear older.

“Eddie and I were in the neighborhood.” She quickly cut Cabrillo’s Flex-Cuffs with a scalpel from her medical bag and started examining MacD Lawless.

“Don’t get cocky,” Seng warned from the driver’s seat. “We just passed a motorcade heading toward the prison and, if I don’t miss my guess, in the backseat of the second car was the real General Jiang. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“What?” Cabrillo cried. “The Chinese really want me? What the hell for?”

Seng glanced over his shoulder. “It was before I joined the Corporation, but didn’t you sink one of their navy’s Luhu-class destroyers?”

“The Chengo,” Juan recalled. “It was the first time we ever worked with NUMA’s current director, Dirk Pitt.”

He took Hux’s seat in the van’s cab. On the center console was a liter bottle of water. He drank a third before rescrewing the cap. He wanted more, but cramping was a real concern. Outside, Yangon was like any other modern megalopolis. The air was thick with smog and the stench of leaded gasoline being burned in untuned engines. This part of town was poorer than most. The road was a strip of crumbling asphalt. The curbs were open sewers. The single-story houses all seemed to lean on one another for support while half-naked children watched traffic with vacant eyes. Mangy dogs lurked in alleyways, looking for whatever scraps the kids hadn’t gotten to. Car horns blared at every intersection and usually for no apparent reason. In the far distance, Cabrillo could see some high-rises, but they had the institutional blandness of 1970s Soviet architecture. Occasionally there were signs of the city’s Oriental nature, a pagoda or Buddhist shrine, but other than that Yangon was indistinguishable from every other Third World city on the planet.

“Where’s the Oregon?” Of the dozens of questions swirling through Cabrillo’s mind, that was the most pressing.

“She’s about twenty miles southeast of us,” Eddie replied.

“Do you have a phone or a radio? I need to tell Max that the air force and navy are hunting for her.” Seng fished a two-way radio from his uniform pocket. Juan called the ship and told the duty officer—Hali Kasim, as it turned out—about the search under way and to place the Oregon on battle stations. The ship’s klaxon was wailing by the time the last words were out of the Chairman’s mouth.

Next, Cabrillo spun in his seat so he could look into the rear. “How is he, Hux?”

“Head injury for sure,” she replied in her clinical voice. “Can’t tell how severe until we get him back to the medical bay and I run an MRI.” Like everything else on the Oregon, her infirmary was state of the art, and would qualify as a Level One Trauma Center. “How about you? Any injuries?”

“Dehydration and a broken collarbone. I had a concussion, but it’s cleared up.”

“I’ll examine you in a little while.”

“Concentrate on MacD. I’m fine.” Cabrillo turned back around. “Okay, what’s been happening? Oh, first, Roland Croissard double-crossed us. I don’t know what he’s playing at, but his man Smith is why MacD and I were captured.”

“We figured something was up when yours and Linda’s tracking chips showed you both heading out of the jungle at over a hundred miles per hour. Figured it was a chopper.”

“An old Mi-8. Wait, Linda came with us? Where is she now?”

“A few hours after you landed in Yangon, she went to the airport and flew out to Brunei. The signal went dark when she was moved to a location just off the coast. I assume she was heloed out to a ship.”

“Brunei?” It made no sense. Unless Croissard had business dealings there, which was entirely possible.

“Murph and Stony are looking into it and digging deeper into Croissard’s background.”

Cabrillo asked, “How’d you set up the rescue from Insein?”

“We took the Oregon south as soon as your signals started to move and we couldn’t raise you on your phone, and when we were within range we started monitoring all military communications, especially stuff coming out of the prison. When Soe Than—he’s the warden, by the way—made his deal with General Jiang, we saw our opening. The trick was to time it so we arrived earlier than him, but not so early that we roused suspicion.”

“I have to congratulate Kevin and his magicians. The makeup is amazing.”

“Remember, he once barely missed out on an Academy Award. This was a piece of cake to him. He said a real challenge would have been to make Linc into Jiang.”

“How’d you two come to shore?”

“On the Liberty.” That was one of the Oregon’s two lifeboats. Like her mothership and her twin, the Or Death, the Liberty was a lot more than she seemed. “We came in during the night and docked her at an old boarded-up fish-packing plant across the river.”

Traffic was growing thicker and the sound of car horns louder. Big city buses and little three-wheeled tuk-tuks overloaded with passengers and their possessions vied for the same real estate with equal disdain for the other’s presence. It was bedlam. They saw no traffic cops, but plenty of soldiers patrolled the sidewalk, all armed with AK-47s and aviator shades. Pedestrians went around them like water around a boulder, parting and merging again, and making sure to never jostle them.

To Cabrillo, they didn’t look particularly alert. They were menacing, but they didn’t have the look of soldiers on the hunt for something in particular. That meant Than hadn’t sent out an alert. Yet.

“Where’d you get the van?” Juan asked as they sat behind an old truck carrying lengths of teak logs.

“Rented it from a delivery company first thing this morning.”

“No problems?”

“For the thousand euros cash I paid him, the clerk would have offered to kill his own mother,” Eddie replied. Like Juan, Seng had been a deep-cover operative for the CIA, so he had a way about him that made strangers trust him and had an ease in foreign countries as though he’d lived there his entire life.

As they drove and the neighborhoods improved, they saw stores selling just about everything under the sun and street vendors who sold anything else. There was a more commercial vibe, and a vibrancy, though nowhere near that of other Asian cities. It was the pall of the military dictatorship that sapped people of energy. Traffic was snarled not because there was so much of it but rather because the drivers were in no hurry to get to their destinations.