The Jungle (Oregon Files 8)

“That’s how my daddy taught me.”

“Oh, the leech will drop off, but it will also regurgitate everything it ate. Which, a, is disgusting, and, b, might carry disease. Use your fingernail and scrape its mouth off of you.”

Following her advice, and making faces that a little girl might make, MacD got four of the bloodsuckers off his arms, and one off the back of his neck with Linda’s help. Smith hadn’t been attacked by the loathsome parasites.

“You must have sour blood, John,” Lawless teased, putting his shirt back on. With a tightened belt and drawstrings closed around his ankles, he wasn’t worried about anything getting into his pants.

Smith didn’t reply. He took up his station at the bows and prepared to act as lookout once again. MacD exchanged a look and a shrug with Linda and Cabrillo, and went to join Smith at the bow.

Because of the waterfall covering their rear, there was no need for Linda to keep watch for anyone overtaking them. And with riverine transportation the only way to negotiate the jungle, Cabrillo drove with the confidence that there wouldn’t be any villages up ahead either. The people wouldn’t have been able to get back upstream once they floated past the falls, and he had seen no indication of portage paths on either side of the cataract.

He kept up a good twenty-five-mile-an-hour pace and slowed only at the truly blind corners as the river meandered deeper into the jungle. Their speed finally dried everyone’s clothes.

As the sun arced its way across the sky, the river remained as tranquil and easy to negotiate as a meandering canal. The rain forest was the other constant. It lined the waterway as dense as a garden hedgerow. Only occasionally would there be a gap, usually when a small stream fed into the main channel, or where the banks were especially gentle and animals coming down to drink had worn away game trails. One of the trails was particularly large. Juan suspected it might have been cleared by some of the country’s estimated ten thousand wild elephants.

Lurking in that impenetrable wall of broad-leaved plants were Asian rhinos, tigers, leopards, and all manner of snakes including the biggest pythons in the world and the most deadly species of cobra, the king cobra. All in all, he thought, not exactly a good place to be lost.

It was nearing early evening when Juan cut the power so that the boat

was barely making headway against the gentle current. The dramatic reduction in engine noise left their ears ringing for a moment.

“We’re about ten miles from Soleil’s last-known GPS coordinates. We’ll stay with the motor for maybe another five and then we break out the oars. Everyone, keep sharp. We have no idea what we’re going to find, but Soleil was convinced there was someone else in the jungle with her.”

Cabrillo’s eyes never lingered on any one spot for more than a moment. He scanned the forest ahead and off to the sides, knowing that someone could be watching them with total impunity. If there were rebels, or drug dealers, or an army patrol out here, they wouldn’t know until they had walked into the ambush. He had to resist the urge to glance over his shoulder. He knew Linda was watching their back, but he couldn’t shake the sense that someone was watching him.

A bird screech high in a nearby tree squirted a healthy dose of adrenaline into his bloodstream. Linda gave a little gasp, and he saw MacD jump. Only Smith hadn’t been startled. Juan was beginning to suspect the man had ice water running through his veins.

When they’d covered the allotted five miles, Juan cut the engine and lifted the outboard from the water so it wouldn’t act as drag. With two rowers on each side of the RHIB, they started paddling. Smith had pumped most of the water out of the bilge, but it was still a big boat, and, no matter how mild the current, it was tough going.

In times like these they usually deployed a small electric motor that could power them along silently, but like so much other equipment it had been left back on the Oregon in order to save on weight.

People who have never rowed a boat together before usually go through several awkward minutes as they adjust to one another’s timing. Not so here. Despite the fact that Smith and MacD were virtual strangers, all four set a tempo instinctively and worked the carbon fiber oars with the symmetry of the Harvard crew.

Every few minutes Juan would check his handheld GPS, and when he spotted a rare clearing ahead on the right bank, he knew they had reached the end of their time on the river. It was a natural trail into the jungle, and he suspected this was where Soleil and her companion—Cabrillo couldn’t recall his name—had exited the water.

He steered them toward the small open glade, noting that a thin trickle of water was running through it. Beyond towered a riotous wall of vegetation. Soleil had last been heard from three miles from this spot.

They edged the boat into some reeds lining the tributary, pushing it as far into cover as possible. No sooner had they stopped than Smith had his machine pistol up high on his shoulder, scanning the area through its scope. There was nothing but the background din of insects and birds and the sound of the water burbling past the RHIB’s transom.

It took just a few minutes to gather up their gear. All of them wore camelbacks for water and lightweight nylon rucks, weighing from twenty-five pounds for Linda to nearly forty for Cabrillo and the other two men.

With luck, they wouldn’t need anything other than the water.

Cabrillo looked back at the RHIB to make sure it was well concealed. He walked a few paces from the others to check from a different angle and that’s when he saw the face. It was watching him through hooded, unblinking eyes. It took him a breathless moment for his brain to comprehend what he was seeing. It was the head of a statue of Buddha that had toppled to the jungle floor just up from the river. Behind it, cloaked in creepers and vines, was a stone building much like the step pyramids at Angkor Wat in neighboring Cambodia, though nowhere near that massive scale.

The structure was maybe thirty feet tall, with the Buddha head once resting on the roof of the tallest tier. It all looked ageless, as if the complex had been here since time immemorial and the jungle grew up around it.

“I think we’re at the right place,” he muttered.

“No kidding,” Linda said. “Look.”

Juan tore his eyes away from the pyramid and glanced over to see that Linda had pulled aside a leafy branch to reveal two one-person plastic kayaks. The sleek craft were commercially available at outfitters all over the world. The pair were dark green in color, and were a logical choice for getting upstream because they could be carried around obstacles by the paddler.

“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.