“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.