The Jungle of-8 Read online

  “How is it that you came to be in my country, armed no less? We get so few visitors from the United States that we know exactly how many are within our borders at any given time. You, my friend, should not be here. So tell me, what brings you to Myanmar?”

  A line from Casablanca popped into Cabrillo’s head. “My health. I came here for the waters.”

  The officer chuckled. “Very good. One of my favorite movies. Claude Rains then says, ‘The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert,’ to which Bogey replies, ‘I was misinformed.’ Truly a classic.” His voice then cracked, “Muang!”

  The hose struck twice in rapid succession, both blows hitting the exact same spot on Juan’s broken collarbone. The pain traveled up from his shoulder and slammed into the top of his brain, where it felt like his head would come apart along the cranial sutures.

  “Mr. Smith,” the lead interrogator went on smoothly, “I mentioned that I believe you are American. I would like to know your feelings on torture. It is a sore subject in your country, I believe. Some feel that even sleep deprivation and exposure to loud music are cruel and inhumane. Where do you stand on this subject?”

  “I agree wholeheartedly,” Juan said quickly.

  “I would imagine a man in your position would,” the officer said, a smile plucking at the corners of his mouth. “I wonder if you felt that way yesterday, or last week. It doesn’t matter. This is your fervent belief now, of that I am certain.”

  He did something to a mechanism under the table so that it tipped back slightly, leaving Cabrillo’s feet about twelve inches higher than his head. While this was going on, the guard near the table ripped off the sheet to reveal several folded towels and a onegallon plastic jug.

  “What I really want to know,” the officer continued, “is if you believe waterboarding constitutes torture, hmm?”

  Juan knew he had a high threshold for pain. He had hoped to hold out for the couple of days he figured it would take Max to bust them out, but he’d never faced the waterboard before and had no idea how he’d react. As a kid he’d spent countless days swimming off the Southern California coast, and though he’d had water forced up his nose on more than one occasion, he’d never really been as close to drowning as he was about to come.

  A towel was laid across his face while two powerful hands grabbed his head to keep it from moving. Cabrillo’s heart went into overdrive. His hands tensed. He heard water splashing. Felt a couple of drops hit his neck. And then he felt moisture on his lips, a dampness at first, but soon his skin was wet. A drop slid down his nose and burned its way into his sinuses.

  More water was dumped onto the towel, soaking it through. Juan tried to exhale through his nose to stop the water from invading the delicate membranes. It worked for seconds, almost a minute, but his lungs could hold only so much air, and the towel was sodden, a great clammy weight pressing down on him. At last there was no more air to fight the inevitable, and water poured into his sinus cavities. Because of the angle of the table, it pooled there and went no farther along his respiratory tract.

  That was what waterboarding was all about. Make the victim feel he is drowning without actually drowning him.

  It wasn’t a matter of will. Over this there was no control. When the sinuses fill with water, the brain, having evolved since the first primitive fish walked out of the sea and breathed in its first lungful of air, knew the body was drowning. It was hardwired. Juan could no more control his body’s reaction than he could force his liver to produce more bile.

  His head felt like it was burning from the inside out while his lungs went into convulsions, sucking small amounts of water into them. The sensation was worse than anything he could imagine. It felt like he was being crushed, like an ocean’s worth of water had invaded his head, scalding and searing the fragile air sacs behind his nose and above his eyes.

  The pain now more intense than any he’d experienced. And this had only gone on for thirty seconds.

  The weight of it all grew worse still. His head was ready to explode. He wanted it to. His throat pumped in a gagging reflex, and he choked on more water pouring down his windpipe.

  He heard agitated voices speaking in a language he didn’t know and wondered if he was hearing angels calling to him.

  And then the towel was taken away and the table tilted so that his head was much higher than his feet. Water jetted from his nose and mouth, and he retched painfully, but he could breathe. And while his lungs still burned and the air tasted of death, it was the sweetest breath he’d ever taken.

  They gave him less than a minute before the table slammed back down and the soaking-wet towel was once again pressed over his face. The water came, gallons of it, tons of it, tsunami waves of it. This time, he could only exhale a few seconds before it again pooled inside his head. His sinuses filled up to the rim of his nostrils, and they could hold no more. With that came the agony, and the panic, and his brain screaming at him to do something—to fight, to struggle, to break free.

  Cabrillo ignored the pitiable cries of his own mind and took the abuse without moving a muscle, because the truth was that he knew he wasn’t drowning, that the men would let him breathe again, and that he had control over what his body did, not instinct, not his hindbrain. It was his intellect that ruled his actions. He lay as calm and still as a man taking a nap.

  At some point one of the guards was sent to fetch another gallon jug of water, and for a total of fifteen times Juan was drowned and then allowed to breathe, drowned and then allowed to breathe. Every time, the soldiers expected Juan to break and beg for mercy. And, every time, he lay back down after catching his breath and goaded them by nodding to them to do it again. The last session, they let it go so long that he passed out and they had to unshackle him quickly and force the water from his body and revive him with a couple of slaps to the cheek.

  “Apparently,” the interrogator said while Juan panted and snorted water out of his sinuses, “you do not want to tell me what I want to know.”

  Cabrillo shot him a look. “Like I told you earlier. I came here for the waters.”

  He was heaved off the table and dragged to a cell down a short, stark corridor. The room was unbelievably hot, with absolutely no air movement. Juan was dumped on the bare concrete floor, the metal door was slammed, and the lock shot home. There was a single caged light high up on a wall, a slop bucket, and a few handfuls of dirty straw on the cement floor. His cell mate was about the most emaciated cockroach he’d ever seen.

  “So, what are you in for, buddy?” he asked the insect. It waved its antennae at him in response.

  He finally was able to examine the back of his head and was amazed that the bone wasn’t broken. The gash had doubtlessly bled, but the waterboarding had cleaned out the wound. His concussion was still with him, yet he could think clearly, and his memory was unaffected. It was a medical myth, unless showing symptoms of brain injury, that a concussed person should stay awake following the injury, but with his lungs afire and his body aching all over, he knew that sleep would not come. He found that the only comfortable position was flat on his back with his injured arm bent across his chest.

  He thought back to the firefight in the jungle, examining every instant like he had with the terrorist attack in Singapore. He saw Linda on one knee behind the stone pillar, her petite body shaking every time her rifle discharged. He saw MacD’s back as he ran ahead of him, recalling that Lawless’s foot almost slipped from the rope once. There was Smith, reaching the far cliff and whirling around the second anchor pillar. Juan recalled looking at his own feet again and trying not to stare into the maddened river almost a hundred feet below him.

  He then looked up and saw Smith open fire, and then the rope disintegrated ahead of MacD. Cabrillo ran the scene through his mind again and again, like a cop reviewing surveillance footage. He concentrated on Smith’s rifle as it roared on full auto. He was aiming across the river at the soldiers chasing them. He was sure of it.

  So who had fi
red the rounds that hit the rope bridge? It couldn’t have been anyone on the cliff behind him. They were all under cover far enough from the edge that they couldn’t get an angle to shoot at the dropping rope. The two soldiers who’d fallen down the gorge when the rope came apart wouldn’t have done it.

  He clearly saw Linda blasting away, but Smith’s outline was blurred in his memory.

  Juan blamed his headache. Usually he could recall every detail and nuance, but not now. Besides which, cold was leaching up through the concrete and settling into his bones. He stood, feeling dizzy enough to need to place a hand on the wall. Without his artificial leg, there really wasn’t anything he could do. He waited until the dizziness passed, but didn’t trust his balance enough to hop around the cell. On a lark, he measured it out using his exact six-foot height. It was twelve by twelve. He did the math in his head. The diagonal would be a touch under seventeen feet. He tested his calculation, knowing that his boot was thirteen inches long. His arithmetic was spot-on.

  “The brain’s still working,” he said to the cockroach, which was moving about in the scattered stalks of hay. “Okay, think! What the hell is bothering me?”

  There was something about the destroyed camp. He recalled a feeling of confusion, that there was an item out of place. No! Not out of place. Missing. There were certain things a woman out camping for more than a month would have brought with her, and they were things that men had absolutely no reason to steal. Soleil Croissard’s pack had been in the tent, and emptied. There hadn’t been any face cream, or lip balm, or feminine products of any kind.

  Had the body he’d almost recovered been a woman’s? He hadn’t seen her face, but the build and hair color had been Soleil’s. It had to be her. And whatever female luxuries she’d packed into Myanmar must be in the ditty bag he’d recovered and handed off to Smith. It had been waterlogged, so there was no way to judge its true weight and thus no way to guess at its contents, but that had to be it. She and her companion, ah, Paul Bissonette—hey, the memory ain’t so bad after all—must have heard or seen the army patrol approaching. She grabbed up her most personal items, and together they lit out into the jungle and eventually to the ruined Buddhist temple.

  Then why wasn’t he satisfied? Had he seen her face, there would be no doubt, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t make a positive identification, and that left a loose end, something he professionally and personally hated. Of course, he had bigger things to worry about than the past.

  Cabrillo hoped against hope that their Burmese captors would leave MacD alone. It was obvious from his and Lawless’s ages that Juan was the senior man here, so they should concentrate all of their attention on him. He just didn’t think that was going to happen. He had an idea of what Lawless was made of. He was tough and resourceful, but did he have the kind of mettle it took to go through what Juan had just experienced and not break? Cabrillo hadn’t known that about himself, so he had no idea if the kid could take it.

  In the end, Juan thought, what did it really matter if MacD broke? What did he know, really? The client’s name and the mission to go find his daughter wandering the Burmese jungle. The Oregon? He knew her name but had no idea of her real capabilities. Juan’s identity? Who the hell would care? He’d been out of the CIA long enough that he couldn’t be considered an intelligence asset.

  No, he thought, MacD could spill his guts out and it wouldn’t really change a thing. He now hoped that Lawless was bright enough to see this and spare himself any pain.

  Somehow, as exhaustion began to dull his own aches and he felt himself drifting toward sleep, he suspected that MacD would keep quiet if only to prove himself worthy of joining the Corporation.

  Cabrillo had no idea how much time had passed—he’d come to on the waterboard without his watch—when he woke with a start. He was bathed in sweat and panting.

  “Son of a bitch,” he shouted aloud.

  It had come to him during his sleep—a clear vision of John Smith firing at the cable. He had intentionally shot the thing to pieces. Rage boiled in Juan’s veins.

  Smith had set them up. No. Roland Croissard had set them up. That hadn’t been a woman’s body in the river; it had been a slender man. And the bag didn’t contain feminine toiletries. In it was something they had plundered from the temple, something hidden beneath the dais where the Buddha statue had once sat, and Juan had handed it to Smith pretty as you please.

  This had never been about rescuing any daughter. Croissard had sent his own team into the jungle and they’d failed to recover some item, so he’d hired the Corporation to finish their mission.

  “God, what an idiot I am.” Then through the fog of anger came the realization that Linda Ross was with Smith and had no idea he had a completely different agenda than she knew.

  Would he just kill her now that he had what he wanted? The question burned in Juan’s mind. Logic said that he wouldn’t. It would be easier for him if she were to explain to Max and the rest what had happened to MacD and Cabrillo. And once he was aboard the Oregon, he simply needed to wait until transport back to civilization could be arranged.

  He felt a measure of relief. Linda would be okay. But the idea of Smith and Croissard’s betrayal sent his blood pressure through the roof. How could he not have seen it? He thought back, looking for signs or clues. That audio message Croissard supposedly had received from his daughter was obviously faked. It had just the right note of mystery and desperation to whet Cabrillo’s interest. He had wanted this mission because there was a frightened young woman, a damsel in distress—he thought bitterly of his own stupid sense of chivalry—who needed saving.

  Croissard had played him for a chump. Cabrillo looked at the suicide bombing at the hotel under a new light, but he couldn’t see an angle that benefited the Swiss financier’s master plan. That wasn’t staged. Those men were looking to kill as many people as they could. It was just luck that he and Max had survived. There was no way Croissard was behind it. Of that, he was certain.

  He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been duped. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had even bluffed him at poker. He’d always prided himself on knowing all the angles, thinking three steps ahead, and having an edge over everyone he dealt with.

  How could he not have seen it?

  The question played though his mind on a never-ending loop. There was no answer. Mark and Eric had vetted Croissard. The guy was just a businessman. What the hell was he playing at? Why the subterfuge? And then came another question he couldn’t possibly answer: What had been in the bag that made it worth sending the first pair of explorers and then shelling out millions to the Corporation when they fell off the radar?

  Cabrillo lay with his back propped up against the cement wall of his cell while a sea of unknowns filled his brain.

  12

  TO SMITH’S SURPRISE AND HER CREDIT, THE WOMAN DIDN’T argue when he said they should head into the jungle after the rope bridge parted. They stayed just long enough to see that the Burmese soldiers were hauling up their two new prisoners before they ran for cover in the forest. With the bridge out, the soldiers wouldn’t be able to follow until they could find a place to land their chopper. Smith and Linda would have more than enough of a head start to elude capture. But just in case the Burmese had a tracker as accomplished as Lawless, they made certain to sweep the trail behind them.

  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 Legionnaire.

  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.