The Jungle Read online

  “Ah’m a redneck at heart. Spent my summers hunting in the bayous. My dad used to boast that he had the dogs carrying the guns and me following the scent.”

  6

  IN THE END, THE DECISION OF WHETHER TO SEND AN ADVANCE team to Chittagong, Bangladesh’s principal port city, or wait and drive the Oregon hard around the Indian subcontinent was made easy by the simple fact that the ship had never been there and none of their contacts had a trustworthy man in the area. If they couldn’t guarantee getting the supplies and equipment they needed, there was no sense sending a group ahead to even try.

  They would lose five days getting the ship into position, five days in which the trail would grow colder. While this rankled Cabrillo and the rest of the crew, the demand for a face-to-face meeting with Roland Croissard annoyed even more.

  When Juan had sent his acceptance email to L’Enfant, the reply had been swift, as it always was. The financial terms had already been agreed upon, but Croissard had added the stipulation that he get to meet with Cabrillo. Juan had only agreed to meet Gunawan Bahar because the man had flown to Mumbai, where the Oregon had just off-loaded two containers of South African millet that had been lashed to the forward deck. Croissard was currently in Singapore and wanted Cabrillo to come to him.

  It meant Juan had to chopper back to Karachi, get on the G-V, fly to Singapore, hold the man’s hand for an hour or two, then head off to either Chennai, formerly Madras, or Vishakhapatnam, on India’s east coast. Which city would depend on the length of the meeting and the speed the Oregon could maintain. Once there, they would need to slow the ship so Gomez Adams could chopper in to pick him up.

  Any number of bureaucratic snafus could hold him up. He’d replied to L’Enfant, expressing his concerns, but was told the client was adamant.

  What bothered Cabrillo was the fact that until he could somehow get the Corporation back in the good graces of the United States government, he had no choice but to accept assignments like this. Like any business, they had overhead and expenses that translated to about two hundred thousand dollars a day.

  Taking out entire terrorist cells, thwarting some major attack before it happened—these were the things he’d created the Corporation for. That was why he’d joined the CIA in the first place.

  And knowing that, for the time being, he had been marginalized to a degree ate at the back of his mind.

  He decided to take Max with him for no other reason than to have his company during the long flights. That left Linda Ross in charge of the ship. After she’d gotten out of the Navy, Linda had captained a rig tender in the Gulf of Mexico. She could handle a ship as well as she could handle a gun.

  They landed at Changi Airport, to the north of the futuristic city-state of Singapore. Its skyline was punctuated by some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, including the new Marina Bay Sands Hotel, their destination. Hanley was nearly inconsolable when Juan told him they wouldn’t have the time to hit the hotel’s casino.

  As was usual when arriving on a private jet, customs was a mere formality. The uniformed agent met them at the stairs when they stepped from the plane, glanced at, then stamped, their passports, and didn’t ask to see the contents of Cabrillo’s sleek briefcase, not that they were hiding anything in it.

  Though they had flown casual, both had put on suits and ties just prior to landing. Juan wore an elegantly cut charcoal, with a faint pinstripe that was picked up in the colors of his two-hundred-dollar tie. His brogues were buffed to a glossy black. Keeping shoes spit-polished was a fetish he shared with the Oregon’s steward. Max wasn’t wearing off-the-rack exactly, but he looked uncomfortable. His collar dug into the spare flesh around his neck, and there was the tiniest trace of an old stain on his left sleeve.

  The air was decidedly warmer here than in Karachi, and while they couldn’t detect it over the smell of hot asphalt and jet fuel, it carried the tropical humidity associated with the sea. The Equator was only eighty-five miles to their south.

  Juan checked his watch, an all-black Movado that was barely thicker than a piece of paper. “We’ve got an hour. Perfect.”

  Though offered a super-stretch limousine, they took a less ostentatious town car into the city. Traffic was absolute murder and yet remarkably polite. There were no blaring horns, no aggressive driving techniques. It made Juan recall that for all its wealth and sophistication, Singapore was virtually a police state. Free speech was severely limited, and spitting on a sidewalk could get you caned. This tended to create a homogenous population with a keen respect for the law, and thus no one cut you off or flipped you the bird.

  Their destination rose along the water in three gracefully sloped white towers, each more than fifty stories tall. Atop them was a platform that stretched for nearly a fifth of a mile, one part of it cantilevering off the third tower a good two hundred feet. This was known as the SkyPark, and even from a distance they could see the profusion of trees and shrubbery that adorned it. The SkyPark side facing the marina was composed of three infinity edge swimming pools holding almost four hundred thousand gallons of water.

  At the base of the hotel towers were three enormous domed buildings housing the casino, exclusive shops, and convention spaces. Rumor had it, the casino resort was the second most expensive on the planet.

  The car pulled up to the hotel entrance, and a liveried doorman was there even before the tires had stopped turning.

  “Welcome to the Marina Bay Sands,” he said in cultured English. Cabrillo suspected that had he looked Scandinavian he would have been greeted in flawless Swedish. “Do you have any baggage?”

  Juan jerked a finger at where Max was heaving himself out of the car. “Just him.”

  They stepped through into the hotel’s soaring lobby. It was crowded with vacationers. A group of them were assembled for some sort of tour and were receiving instructions in singsong Chinese from a female guide who couldn’t have been four and a half feet tall. The line waiting to check in snaked through a velvet-rope maze. With twenty-five hundred rooms, this was more like a small city than a single enterprise.

  Juan found the concierge desk and told the attractive Malay girl that she had an envelope for him. He gave his name, and she asked for identification. Inside the envelope was a credit-card-style room key and one of Roland Croissard’s business cards. Scrawled on the back was the financier’s room number.

  They needed to show the armed guard near the elevators that they had a proper room key. Juan flashed it, and they gained entry. They took the car up to the fortieth floor with a Korean couple who were arguing the entire way. Cabrillo imagined that the man had gambled away the family kimchi money.

  The hallways were muted and somewhat dimly lit. Unlike the layout of some of the megacasinos they had been in, the three-tower design meant they weren’t left walking forever to find the right room. Cabrillo knocked on Croissard’s door.

  “Moment,” a voice said, dropping the t like a French speaker.

  The door opened. The man standing there nearly blocking the door from jamb to jamb was not Roland Croissard. They’d seen photographs of him while researching his background.

  In that first half second Juan noted that the man’s jacket was off, his hands empty, and his expression wasn’t overtly aggressive. This wasn’t an ambush, and so he relaxed his right arm, which was about to deliver a karate strike to the man’s nose that more than likely would have killed him. The man grunted. He’d seen how quickly the Chairman had perceived and then discounted a potential threat.

  “Monsieur Cabrillo?” the voice called from farther in the suite.

  The gorilla who’d opened the door stepped aside. He was nearly as big as Franklin Lincoln, but where Linc’s face was normally open and easygoing, this one maintained a permanent scowl. His hair was dark, cut unfashionably, and looked like something from a 1970s adult movie. He had hooded, watchful eyes that tracked Juan as he stepped into the opulent two-room suite. He had shaved that morning but already needed another.
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  Hired muscle, was Cabrillo’s assumption, and too obvious about it. The good bodyguards were the ones you never suspected. They looked like accountants or entry-level CSRs at a bank, not hulking wrestler types who thought their size alone was intimidating enough. Juan resisted the impulse to put the guy down for the fun of it. The guard indicated that Juan and Max should fan open their coats so he could see if they were carrying concealed weapons. To get things moving along, the two men from the Corporation indulged him. He didn’t bother to check their ankles.

  Cabrillo wondered if this guy was really that bad or if he’d been told these were expected guests and should be treated accordingly. He decided the latter, which meant the man had overstepped his authority by asking them to open their coats. His abilities went up a notch in Juan’s mind. He took protecting his boss more seriously than his orders to let them enter unmolested.

  “Could you button your shirtsleeves, please?” Juan asked him.

  “What?”

  “Your sleeves are down but unbuttoned, which means you have a knife strapped to your forearm. I’ve already noticed you aren’t wearing an ankle holster, and yet somehow I don’t think you’re unarmed. Hence the unbuttoned sleeves.”

  Roland Croissard rose from a sofa on the far end of the room. A briefcase and papers were strewn across the coffee table. A glass with ice and a clear liquid sat in a puddle of condensation. He wore suit pants and a tie. His jacket was draped across an overstuffed chair that was part of the same furniture cluster.

  “It’s okay, John,” he said. “These men are here to help find Soleil.”

  The guard, John, scowled a little deeper as he buttoned his cuffs. When he bent his elbow, the cotton of his shirt bulged against a low-profile knife sheath.

  “Monsieur Cabrillo,” Croissard said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  The Swiss man was of medium height and starting to show a paunch, but he had a handsome face and penetrating blue eyes. His hair, an indeterminate shade, was thinning and combed straight back. Cabrillo’s estimation was that he looked younger than sixty-two but not remarkably so. Croissard plucked a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses off his straight nose as he came across the room with his hand extended. His grasp was cool and professional, the shake of a hand that did it for a living.

  “This is Max Hanley,” Juan introduced. “My second-in-command.”

  “And this is my personal security adviser, John Smith.”

  Cabrillo held out his hand, which Smith begrudgingly shook. “You must get around a lot,” Juan said. “I’ve seen your name on a lot of hotel registrations.”

  The man gave no indication he got the joke.

  “Why don’t we sit down. May I get you gentlemen a drink?”

  “Bottled water,” Juan said. He set his briefcase down on an end table and popped the lid. Smith had positioned himself close enough so that he could see inside.

  Cabrillo pulled two electronic devices from the case and shut the lid again. He flicked one on and studied the small screen. Gone were the days when he had to sweep a room with a bug detector. This handheld could check a hundred-foot radius instantly. Croissard’s suite was clean. In case there was a voice-activated listening device someplace within earshot, he would leave it on. He then went to the window. In the distance were the silver spires of the skyline, made somewhat indistinct by the heat haze that was forming as morning burned into afternoon.

  He peeled an adhesive backing off the cigarette pack-sized device and stuck it to the thick glass. He hit a button to turn it on. Inside the black plastic casing were two weights powered by a battery and controlled by a micro random generator. It set the weights in motion, which in turn vibrated the glass. The electronic generator would guarantee that no pattern would emerge that could be decoded and nullified by a computer.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  French wasn’t one of the languages Cabrillo spoke, but the question was easy enough to understand. “This shakes the windowpane and prevents anyone from using a laser voice detector.” He took one last look at the beautiful view, then closed the sheers so that no one could see into the suite. “Okay. Now we can talk.”

  “I have heard from my daughter,” Croissard announced.

  Cabrillo felt a ripple of anger. “You could have told me that before we flew halfway around the world.”

  “No, no. You do not understand. I think she is in more grave danger than I first thought.”

  “Go on.”

  “The call came through about three hours ago. Here.” He pulled a sleek PDA from his pant pocket and fumbled through a couple of applications until a woman’s voice, sounding very tired and very scared, came through the speaker. She said no more than a few words in French before the call abruptly ended.

  “She says that she is close. To what, I do not know, but then says that they are closer. She then says that she will never make it. And I do not know who the ‘they’ she references might be.”

  “May I see that?” Juan asked and held out his hand.

  He fiddled with the PDA for a moment and hit play to repeat the recording. Croissard talked him through it, and once again they heard Soleil’s breathless voice. There was a noise in the background, maybe wind through leaves, maybe anything at all. Juan played it a third time. Then a fourth. The background became no clearer.

  “Can you send this to my phone? I want to have the recording analyzed.”

  “Of course.” Juan gave him the number on the phone he was currently carrying, one that would have its SIM card pulled when the mission was over. “Were you able to get her GPS coordinates?”

  “Yes.” Croissard unfolded a map that had been lying in his briefcase. It was a topographical map of Myanmar done before the country changed its name from Burma. Faint X’s had been marked with a fine-tipped mechanical pencil, and the longitude and latitude numbers added next to them. Cabrillo was familiar with them, having seen a copy of Croissard’s map already. But there was a new notation about twenty miles northeast of Soleil’s last-known location.

  “You’ve tried to call her back?” Juan asked, knowing the answer.

  “Yes, every fifteen minutes. There is no reply.”

  “Well, this is good news,” Cabrillo said. “It’s proof of life, even if it sounds like she’s in trouble. As you must understand, we need some more time to get everything into position. An operation of this nature must be carefully thought out so it can be precisely executed.”

  “That has already been explained to me,” Croissard replied, obviously not liking that simple truth.

  “We’ll be ready in three days’ time. Your daughter has already passed effective helicopter range, which will make our jobs a little tougher, but, mark my words, we will find her.”

  “Merci, monsieur. You have a reputation for success. There is one final piece to this affair,” he added.

  Juan cocked an eyebrow, not liking the tone in the financier’s voice. “Yes?”

  “I want John to accompany you.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Monsieur, this is not a negotiable request. I believe the expression is ‘my charter, my rules,’ yes?”

  “Mr. Croissard, this isn’t a fishing trip. We could be facing armed guerrillas, and I simply can’t allow an unknown man to come with us.” Cabrillo planned on bringing MacD Lawless, who was a bit of an unknown himself, but the financier didn’t need to know that.

  Wordlessly, John Smith unbuttoned the cuff where he didn’t carry the knife. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a faded blue tattoo. It showed a flaming circle above the words Marche ou Crève. Cabrillo recognized it as the emblem for the French Foreign Legion and its unofficial motto, “March or Die.”

  Juan looked at him levelly. “Sorry, Mr. Smith, all that tells me is that you’ve visited a tattoo parlor.” It would explain Smith’s generic name, though—Legionnaires often adopted noms de guerre.

  “About fifteen years ago, by the looks of it,” Max added.

 
; Smith didn’t say anything, but Cabrillo could see the anger building behind the man’s dark eyes. Juan also recognized that he was between a rock and a hard place because ultimately he would have to cave if he wanted the contract.

  “Tell you what,” Cabrillo said, and lifted up his trouser leg. Croissard and Smith were startled at the sight of his prosthetic leg. Cabrillo had several that had been tricked out by the wizards in the Oregon’s Magic Shop. This particular one was called the Combat Leg Version 2.0. He opened a concealed area behind the flesh-colored calf and pulled out a small automatic pistol. He popped the seven-shot magazine and cleared a round from the chamber.

  He showed it to Smith for just a second, and said, “Eyes on me.”

  Then he handed it over.

  Smith knew what the test entailed, and, without moving his gaze from Juan’s eyes, he quickly disassembled the small pistol down to its basic parts and then just as quickly put it back together again. He gave it back butt first. It took him about forty seconds.

  “Kel-Tec P-3AT,” he said. “Based on their P22 but chambered for .380. Nice gun to fit in a lady’s purse.”

  Juan laughed, breaking the tension. “I tried fitting a Desert Eagle .50 cal in this leg, but it was just a tad obvious.” He slipped the gun and magazine plus the loose bullet into his coat pocket. “Where have you served?”

  “Chad, Haiti, Iraq of course, Somalia, a few other Third World hot spots.”

  Cabrillo shifted his attention back to Croissard. “You’ve got your deal. He passes.”

  “Good, then it is settled. John will accompany you now back to your aircraft and then you will find my Soleil.”

  “No. He’s going to meet up with us in Chittagong. In case you aren’t aware, that’s a port city in Bangladesh.” Smith wasn’t going to be aboard the Oregon a second longer than necessary. “And that, I’m sorry, is nonnegotiable.”

  “D’accord. But if you do not pick him up as promised, do not think you will get my money.”

  “Mr. Croissard,” Juan said solemnly, “I am many things, but a man who backs out on his word isn’t one of them.”