The Jungle (Oregon Files 8)

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 for

ks, 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.