“They must have carried them overland from Bangladesh,” Smith said.
Cabrillo shook his head. “It’s more likely they entered the river where it meets the sea. They must have chartered a boat in Chittagong to carry them on the first part of the trip. Soleil definitely had a destination in mind. She knew right where she was heading. Check that out.”
They all followed his pointed finger to where the last rays of the sun shone on the head so that for a brief few seconds the gray stone visage appeared gilded.
Linda’s hand went to her mouth to stifle a cry of surprise. “It’s beautiful,” she said breathlessly.
“Ah guess we ain’t in Lafourche Parish after all,” Lawless remarked.
Smith made no comment. He looked at the temple for just a second before tucking his machine pistol under his arm and glancing at Cabrillo with an expression that said gawking at antiquities wasn’t on their agenda.
Juan didn’t doubt Smith’s loyalty to Roland Croissard, nor his desire to rescue his employer’s daughter, but he thought the former Legionnaire needed to lighten up a bit and enjoy the surprises life sometimes throws at you. There were probably less than a handful of outsiders who’d ever seen the temple complex. Knowing that sent a charge through his system, and he wanted nothing more than to explore its mysteries.
But he also knew Smith was correct. They were on a mission, and studying archaeological treasures wasn’t part of the deal. They could cover the remaining miles to their GPS target before the jungle became too dark to see. He did let Linda snap a few pictures and slide her cell phone camera back into its waterproof sleeve before giving the order to move out.
10
JUAN HAD THOUGHT THE EASIEST WAY TO TRAVEL WOULD BE to keep to the little stream, but it was a muddy morass that sucked at their boots with each step. When he lifted his foot from the muck, thick clots of it clung all the way to his ankle, and every step seemed to accumulate more. After just a dozen paces he could barely lift his legs free of the ooze.
This forced them out of the streambed and into the bush.
Juan knew immediately what soldiers fighting in the barbwire-entangled trenches of World War I had gone through. The sharp leaves pulled and ripped at his clothing and opened shallow yet painful cuts on his arms and face. There was no trail to speak of. He had to battle his way through snarls of vines and shrubs with the finesse of a bull in a china shop.
MacD, who marched directly behind Cabrillo, tapped him on the shoulder and made a gesture to say that he should take point. Cabrillo silently bowed to him. Lawless stepped ahead of the Chairman, studied the wall of bushes facing them, and moved a few feet to the left, closer to where tree trunks were just barely visible. He started forward, moving his body like a contortionist. It looked awkward, but he more than tripled their pace, with each team member mimicking the moves of the person ahead. And where Cabrillo had sounded like a rhinoceros crashing through the bush, Lawless moved as silently as a snake.
Still, the going was slow, and thirty minutes later so little sunlight was filtering through the canopy, it was as if they were fifty feet underwater.
“We should stop for the night,” MacD said in a whisper. “Ah can’t see nothin’.”
“All right,” Juan had to agree. Looking upward, it was next to impossible to see any daylight at all. “We’ll start out again at first light.”
Everyone’s first order of business was to get the flameless heating units from their MREs to start chemically warming their entrées. Next came laying out nylon sleeping pouches with built-in mosquito netting. Finding areas big enough to lie comfortably in the dense jungle was a chore unto itself, so the single machete MacD had been carrying was put to good use.
By the time their food was ready everyone had their pouches rolled out but still tightly sealed to keep the armada of insects, which had plagued them from the moment the RHIB had come to a stop, from joining them for the night. No one said a word the entire time. When the meal was over, Juan pointed at Smith, then himself, then at MacD, and finally at Linda. This was the order for guard duty. He checked his watch, calculating in how many hours the sun would rise again, and held up two fingers. They nodded their understanding.
Cabrillo deliberately gave Smith the first watch because he knew he himself could stay awake to make sure the Legionnaire did his job.
The night passed smoothly, if not exactly comfortably. A jungle at night contains an earsplitting symphony of bird and monkey cries, with a backup chorus of insects’ incessant chirping. Juan’s concerns about Smith were unfounded.
A clammy mist clung to the ground when they awoke, deadening the sounds of the forest and giving everything an eerie, otherworldly mien. They broke camp as silently as they made it, and within ten minutes of there being light enough to see they struck out again, MacD at point and Cabrillo in the drag position.
Mercifully, the jungle began to thin, and when MacD found a game path, they could move on at an almost-normal pace. Lawless paused every so often, to listen, for one, but also to check the trail for any signs that a human had used it recently. Given the amount of rain that fell on a daily basis, Cabrillo doubted he would find anything and was amazed when after a quick detour into the adjoining bush he came back holding a balled-up piece of silvered paper. A gum wrapper. He opened it and held it under Cabrillo’s nose. He could still smell the mint.
“Our Miss Croissard,” he whispered, “is no environmentalist, littering like this.”
Lawless pocketed the scrap while Juan checked the GPS. They had about a quarter mile to go.
Their pauses became longer and more frequent the closer they got, and everyone held their weapon at the ready, not knowing what to expect but prepared nonetheless. It was a good sign that birds and tree-dwelling animals cavorted in the canopy. It was usually a sure sign that there was no one else around.
The forest suddenly opened up into a small glade of kneehigh grass. They paused at the edge, like swimmers contemplating jumping into a pond, and surveyed the area. A gentle breeze made the stalks of grass sway and ripple, but otherwise nothing moved. Cabrillo judged that Soleil had made her final transmission from the right side of the open field near where the jungle started again.
Rather than cross the glade, they backtracked into the bush and approached the site from the side. When they were fifteen feet away from the GPS coordinates, Cabrillo spotted stuff on the ground at the very edge of the field. He realized immediately it was what remained of a camp. He spotted a dark green tent that had been slashed apart, its lightweight frame mangled beyond recognition. Stuffing from shredded sleeping bags looked like cotton balls. There were other items too—a small camping stove, plastic plates, articles of clothing, a hiker’s walking stick.
“Looks like we are much too late,” Smith said in a low voice. “Whoever attacked here is long gone.”
Cabrillo nodded.
He hadn’t known what to expect they would find, but this confirmed his worst fears. All that remained was to find what the animals had left of the bodies. It was a grisly but necessary step to prove to Croissard that his daughter was truly dead.
“You and MacD watch the perimeter,” Juan said. “Linda, you’re with me.”
With the two men keeping guard, Linda and Cabrillo moved closer to the little encampment. As they did, they saw that the tent had been riddled with small-arms fire. The nylon was peppered with tiny holes whose edges were singed black by the heat of the bullets.
Linda hunkered down to pull open the collapsed tent fly, her arm reaching out to the zipper like it was on automatic pilot. Her expression was one that said she wanted to be anywhere but here and doing anything but this. Juan stood bent behind her
The viper had been resting in the cool shadow of the tent, just out of view. The vibrations of two large animals’ hearts beating and their lungs breathing had woken it seconds earlier, so when it struck, it did so with the fury of the disturbed.
It moved so fast that high-speed cameras would be
necessary to capture its strike. As its hood opened, and its needlelike teeth hyperextended from its mouth, drops of clear venom had already formed on their tips. It was one of the most powerful neurotoxins on the planet and worked by paralyzing the diaphragm and stopping the lungs. Without antivenom, death occurs about thirty minutes after the bite.
The lightning-quick snake aimed straight for Linda’s forearm and was about three inches from clamping its jaws around her skin and sinking its teeth an inch into her flesh when Juan’s hand snapped around its neck and used the awesome power of its uncoiling body to redirect the strike and hurl the serpent into the jungle.
The entire episode took a single second.
“What just happened?” Linda said. She hadn’t seen a thing.
“Trust me,” Cabrillo said, a little breathlessly. “You don’t want to know.”
Linda shrugged and bent back over her task. There were more items inside the tent—food wrappers, a mess kit, more clothes—but there was no body, or even blood. Juan reached over Linda’s shoulder, moving stuff around with his hands, concentrating on what he wasn’t seeing more than what he was. He cast around in the grass, eventually finding Soleil’s satellite phone, or what was left of it. A bullet had passed clean through the sleek high-tech device. He also found a bunch of spent shell casings. 7.62mm. They were doubtlessly fired from AK-47s, the old Soviet Union’s legacy to the world of violence.
He called softly for Lawless and Smith.
“They’re not here,” he informed them. “I think they were ambushed but managed to slip into the jungle. The attackers swept through the camp, took what they wanted—food, apparently, since we didn’t find any—and then went off in pursuit.”
Smith’s expression didn’t change except for a little tightening at the corners of his eyes.
The guy really was made of stone, Juan thought.
“MacD, think you can track them?”
“Give me a sec.” He ambled over to the edge of the jungle closest to the ruined camp. He dropped to a knee, studying the ground, and then examined the branches of the nearest shrubs. He took almost five full minutes before waving the others to him. Cabrillo had used that time to call the Oregon and give Max Hanley an update. In return, Max had told him that everything was quiet on their end.
“See here?” MacD pointed to a broken branch. The pulpy wound had turned ashen. “This here looks like sumac to me. This level of discoloration means the branch was snapped a week ago, maybe ten days.”
“So, you can track them?” Smith prodded.
“Ah sure will try, but no guarantees.” He looked at Juan. “Did y’all find any shoes or boots?”
“No.”
Lawless put himself into the minds of two terrified people running for their lives. They would go in as straight a path as possible. They hadn’t found shoes, which meant they weren’t asleep when the attackers struck, meaning it had probably still been daylight, or dusk. Yes, they would run in a straight line since the pursuers would be able to see if they veered left or right.
He entered the jungle, confident that the rest of his team would keep him covered so he could concentrate on the hunt. Twenty yards in he found a red fiber that had been snagged by a thornbush and knew he was on the right path.
And so it went. At times, there were plenty of signs that a group of people had passed through the forest. At others, they’d go a quarter mile before spotting some vague clue, usually a broken twig or a smeared and barely discernible footprint. The morning wore into a steamy afternoon. They didn’t pause to eat but rather wolfed down protein bars and drank from their camelbacks.
Cabrillo thought they’d come at least ten miles when the jungle ended in a gorge that cut through the landscape like an ax stroke. At the bottom, nearly a hundred feet down by his estimation, raged a churning river that twisted and curled around rocks and fought against the stony banks.
“Left or right?” he asked MacD.
He scanned the ground in both directions, casting ahead nearly a hundred yards. “Oh my,” he called.
The others jogged to where Lawless stood, and they all saw what had given him pause. It was another temple complex like the one they’d seen when they left the main river only this one was built on the opposite cliff, clinging to the rock almost organically. It reminded Cabrillo of the Anasazi cave city at Mesa Verde, Colorado, only this had typical Oriental architectural flairs, with gracefully arching roofs and round, tiered pagodas. Some of the structure must have collapsed over time because under the buildings, down in the river channel, were mounds of dressed stonework, some with decorative carvings still visible. Amid the rubble was the remains of a waterwheel that must have powered a mill inside the temple. Most of it had rotted away, but there were enough of its metal struts and supports left to show it had been enormous.
Very little of the complex rose above the far rim of the chasm, and what little bit did was covered in vegetation, like the vines and creepers that snaked their way down the façade. The original builders had constructed the temple so that it was next to impossible to find.
“I’m definitely getting that Lara Croft vibe,” Linda said as she gazed awestruck at the remarkable feat of engineering.
They moved farther along the edge of the canyon and came across two additional surprises. One was that a village had once stood on this side of the river. Though the jungle was reclaiming it bit by bit, the land had been cleared and diked to form rice paddies, and there were remains of several dozen stilted huts. Most were piles of rotted wood, but some still stood on shaky legs, like tottering old women too proud to rest. The people who’d lived here must have tended to the monks who resided in the temple.
The other surprise was the rope bridge that spanned the eighty-foot-wide chasm. It sagged in the middle and looked ready to collapse with the next puff of wind. The main cable was at least a foot around, with two guide ropes that were at shoulder height secured to it with strands of line like the cables of a suspension bridge. Because they were thinner and more susceptible to rot, many of these supports had parted and hung dejectedly from the main hawser.
“You don’t think?”
“It’s possible,” Juan answered Linda’s almost-asked question.
“There is no way I’m crossing that,” she said.
“Do you fancy climbing down, crossing what looks to be class five rapids, and then free-climbing up the other side?” He didn’t wait for her response. “MacD, see if you can tell if Soleil or her partner came this way.”
Lawless was standing next to the stone pillars that anchored the bridge. They’d been set into holes carved into the rock and then reburied so that about four feet of each of them rose above ground level. Bronze caps with dragon heads had been placed over both pillars. One of them had snagged a small patch of red cloth in a dragon’s open mouth, the same shade as the fiber he’d found earlier.
“They came this way, all right,” he said, and showed off his discovery.
“Juan,” Smith called. He held a dull brass shell casing like the ones they’d found at the campsite.
Cabrillo eyed the rickety bridge with little enthusiasm, but he figured that if others had crossed it in recent days, it should support them. He slung his assault rifle over his shoulder as he approached the span. “Keep an eye out,” he said, and grasped the shoulder-high guide ropes.
The main cable was made of woven fiber and felt as hard as iron, though the guidelines had the slimy feel of rotting vegetation. He made the mistake of looking down. Below him the river looked like it was boiling, stones as sharp as knives littering the roaring waterway. Everything seemed jagged and deadly. If he hit the river, he’d be drowned for sure, and an impact with the rocks would split him open like a ripe melon.
Carefully placing one boot in front of the other, and testing each spot before putting his weight on it, Cabrillo inched his way out over the gorge, the sound of water cascading below him like a screaming jet engine. When he hit the halfway point, he glanced back an
d saw his companions watching him. The cable had sagged enough that he could only see their faces. Linda looked anxious, MacD intrigued, and Smith bored.
Climbing up the catenary-arced rope was trickier than going down, and once Juan’s foot slipped off completely. He clutched at the guideline, which shivered with tension. He slowly rebalanced himself and glanced back with a rueful shrug. He made it the rest of the way without incident and exhaled a long relieved sigh when his feet hit solid ground.
Linda came next, moving with the agility of a monkey, her pixie face set with determination. MacD followed, grinning like this was all a game to him. When he got to their side, Cabrillo looked up to see that Smith had disappeared.
“He said he needed to take a leak,” Lawless said, and went immediately to the vine-shrouded temple entrance. It looked like a perfectly square cave, and the air that whispered from it carried the cold chill of the earth.
Smith emerged from the jungle on the far side and quickly crossed the gorge, with Juan covering him with his REC7 should anyone step out of the forest behind him.
“All set?” Cabrillo asked him.
“Oui.”
“Here!” Lawless’s hushed voice came from inside the temple.
The three quickly stepped inside the stone building, which was just one story and unadorned. Lawless was halfway to a set of stairs carved into the rock that descended down to the lower reaches of the complex. He was hunkered down, holding a flashlight steady on the body of a young man.
He was blond, with a few weeks’ worth of beard, and dressed in sturdy cargo pants, a red long-sleeved T-shirt, and boots. There didn’t appear to be a mark on him. If not for his deathly pallor, it would be easy to imagine he was simply resting. MacD gently pulled him forward. There were four bullet holes stitched across his back. They hadn’t been immediately fatal or he wouldn’t have been able to prop himself against the wall. Or perhaps Soleil had done it as a final act of kindness.