Parked just outside the big room was a white van without rear windows. The back doors were opened to reveal a cargo bed separated from the cab by a metal grille. The two prisoners were tossed into the back. MacD’s head hit with a thump and he lay still. There was nothing Cabrillo could do.
More Flex-Cuffs were used to secure the two men to hooks built into the floor. This wasn’t a regular prison vehicle, just a commercial van, but without internal door handles it was just as effective as an armored car. The doors slammed shut with a finality Juan felt in his bones. This was not going to end well.
A few more minutes went by. He could imagine Than and the general comparing torture techniques the way housewives swap recipes. Even with the front windows open the rear of the van grew as hot as a Dutch oven.
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.
“On the left?” Eddie said.
Juan knew immediately who he was referring to. Midway down the block of stores selling knockoff clothing and bootleg CDs and DVDs was a soldier holding a walkie-talkie to his ear. He nodded, spoke a few words, and clipped it onto his belt. He had a partner who’d been standing at his side. The first one relayed information to the second, and the two started paying the traffic a lot more attention.
“What do you think?”
“I think,” Cabrillo replied, “that the jig is up. Do you have a weapon?”
“Glove box.”
Juan opened it and retrieved a Glock 21 chambered for .45 caliber. The big slugs would put down just about anything short of a charging elephant.
The two soldiers saw the big white van amid the sedans, taxis, and bicycles, and their carriage changed in an instant. Hands tightened on weapons, and their posture stiffened. They started walking with purpose.
“I don’t want to have to kill these guys,” Juan said.
“Hold on.”
Eddie crushed the gas pedal and turned the wheel so that the front of the van clipped the back of some Chinese-made subcompact neither had ever heard of. Its wheels burned off rubber as the van pushed the tiny little car out of the way.
The soldiers started running. Juan stood with his head out the window and fired across the sloping hood. He aimed for the smoking brazier of a street vendor selling some sort of meat skewers. The metal drum toppled off its stand and crashed to the ground at the same time the two soldiers dove flat for cover. Glowing embers peppered the sidewalk in smoking heaps, and enough landed on the soldiers that their immediate concern was immolation and not the van.
Seng finally bulldozed the car out of the way, which allowed him to steer the van onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street from the soldiers. He laid on the horn and kept going. People leapt aside, and wares displayed outside shops were blown through. He spun the wheel at the next cross street, which thankfully was clear, and got back onto the tarmac.
“We’ve bought seconds at most,” he said, checking his wing mirrors. “Any ideas?”
“Ditch the van.”
Hux must have heard him because she said, “I want to move MacD as little as possible.”
“I’m afraid we don’t have much of a choice. This city’s crawling with soldiers on the lookout for us. We need another vehicle.”
Eddie pulled off the road into the parking lot of a gilt-topped shrine. The building towered more than seventy feet and managed to shine despite the smog. Several monks in saffron robes were sweeping the entrance steps. Off to the side were a string of tuk-tuks for hire. He stopped the van next to them and jumped out. The motorized tricycles, powered by 50cc engines, could seat three, and were as anonymous as yellow cabs in Manhattan.
Seng pulled the keys from the ignition and approached the nearest driver. His negotiation consisted of dangling the keys, pointing to the van and then to the man’s three-wheeled scooter. This must have been the best day of his life because the driver couldn’t nod fast enough.
While this was going on, Juan tucked the pistol into his waistband and made sure his T-shirt covered the butt before stepping out of the truck. He could hear police sirens. He jumped to the back doors and opened them. With Hux’s help they got MacD out and over Cabrillo’s good shoulder. The broken one shot out spears of agony with every move. He walked on his knees, and placed MacD as gently as he could in the tuk-tuk’s rear bench seat, Julia cradling his head the whole time.
She got in on one side of Lawless, Juan on the other, and Eddie placed himself behind the handlebars. The engine belched a cloud of noxious blue smoke with the first kick of the starter and fired on the second.
A whistle shrilled behind them. A policeman was rushing up the road on a bicycle, waving a hand and blasting away with his whistle.
Eddie popped the clutch as the cop fumbled for his sidearm. The tuk-tuk had the acceleration of a boulder rolling uphill. Its woefully underpowered engine strained to get them moving. The cop was thirty yards away when the little jitney started going and was coming at a breakneck pace.
The other tuk-tuk drivers sensed trouble and vanished behind a hedge of blooming shrubs while the man who’d made the Faustian bargain yelled at Eddie to get off the bike. He ran alongside and pulled at the handlebars.
Seng reached over, grabbed the guy’s face, and shoved. He tumbled to the ground in a heap of flying arms and legs. The cop was still gaining but was having a hard time pulling out his weapon. His whistle blasts were becoming shriller as his breathing became more ragged.
He was almost beside them when they hit the street in front of the glittering temple. His uniform was soaked with sweat, but his face showed nothing but resolution. Juan could have simply shot the man, but he was just doing his job. Instead, Cabrillo found a ratty umbrella on the floor at his feet, a convenience for the tuk-tuk’s passengers during the rainy season.
He grabbed it up and thrust its point into the spokes of the bike’s front wheels at the same time the cop finally got an ancient Makarov pistol out of his holster. The umbrella whipped around and jammed against the front forks, stopping the two-wheeler instantly and launching the cop over the handlebars. He flew a good eight feet before crashing into the road. He rolled a few times and lay still, dazed but alive. The tuk-tuk roared on.
“I think we’re clear,” Eddie said after a few moments.
“Let’s hope so,” Juan told him.
“Kind of feel bad for the owner of this thing. He’ll never get to keep the van, and now he’s lost his scooter.”
“Just goes to show that it’s as true here as anywhere.”
“What’s that?”
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Cabrillo turned serious. “You know that cop’s going to tell the military that we’re in a tuk-tuk now. Three Westerners riding around with a Chinese driver can’t be an everyday occurrence.”
“I know, but there are a hell of a lot more tuk-tuks than white panel vans. Here.”
There had been a straw coolie hat dangling from a handlebar. Eddie passed it back to Juan, who settled it atop his head.
Despite the detours, Eddie seemed to know his way, and soon they were driving on a road parallel to the river. Eventually they found the on-ramp to the Hlaing River Road and its suspension bridge across.
A third of the way up the arching span, the tuk-tuk had slowed to a crawl. A line of traffic behind them honked as if one voice. Julia jumped over the rear seat, and with her weight gone and her pushing with everything she had they managed to crest the bridge and putter down the far side. As soon as there was room drivers zipped past them, glaring.
“Only about another two miles,” Eddie told him.
They all felt a measure of relief being outside of the city proper. This side of the river had nowhere near the congestion, and there were even some open fields. They headed south, passing swampland on their right and industrial facilities abutting the river on their left. Some of the warehouses appeared abandoned, the metal siding coming off their skeletal frames. Squatter families clustered near them, using them as makeshift homes.
“Oh hell,” Eddie said. Up ahead, in a copse of mangrove, was a short canal dug into the
riverbank so that fishing boats could tie up to a pier without being struck by the main current. There was a cluster of large buildings around it that had once been a cannery. Now it was a rust-streaked ruin with a collapsed roof, and the pier built along the three-hundred-foot canal was more rot than wood. The Liberty was tucked partially under the quay, her normally safety-orange upper deck sporting matte-black paint.
What had upset Seng was the navy patrol boat hovering about thirty feet from the Liberty with a crewman standing in the bow training a .30 caliber at their craft. Also, a police cruiser was parked in the cannery’s lot, and two officers were walking toward the lifeboat with their weapons drawn.
Eddie motored past the cannery’s entrance gate and pulled into the next driveway, which happened to be for another abandoned warehouse. An old woman in a dingy dress was cooking over an open fire pit and didn’t bother looking up from her chore.
“What do you think?” Eddie asked.
Cabrillo considered the situation. The police would soon figure out there was no one aboard and, since the engine was tamper-proof, would eventually tow it away behind the fifteen-meter patrol boat. They had to act fast. Juan unlaced his remaining boot and pulled off his sock.
“Whew,” Julia exclaimed at the odor.
“Be grateful you’re upwind of this thing,” he quipped. “Eddie, you’re going to have to carry MacD. With my shoulder broken I can’t do it and run.” Though Eddie wasn’t particularly big, a lifetime of martial arts training had given him phenomenal strength. “Julia, you’re with Eddie. Get the boat fired up as fast as you can and meet me on the point at the end of the canal. Oh, I need a lighter.”
Eddie flipped him a Zippo. “What are you going to do?”
“Create a diversion.” Juan had gotten out of the tuk-tuk and come around to unscrew the gas cap. It was three-quarters full. He pressed the sock into the tank, and soon gasoline wicked up through the cotton fibers.
This time, with Juan on the driver’s seat, they drove slowly past the cannery again, and just when they lost sight of the police cruiser because of the mangroves he stopped to let out the other three. Eddie’s expression remained the same as he deadlifted MacD Lawless onto his shoulder.