The Jungle (Oregon Files 8)

Eddie ran aft to open the upper hatch, and as soon as he popped out into the sunshine he loosed a short burst from the FN at the patrol boat. Angry fountains of water erupted all around the black-hulled craft, and the men ducked for cover beneath the gunwales.

Julia throttled back but didn’t kill power entirely as she came abreast of Cabrillo. He gathered himself for one more leap and hurtled across the open space between the shore and the boat and crashed onto the upper deck in an ungainly belly flop. She buried the throttles as soon as she heard him hit. The speed with which the Liberty got on plane was such that, had Eddie not grabbed him, Juan would have tumbled over the stern.

“Thanks,” Cabrillo panted. He pressed himself into the molded jockey seat that was little more than a padded shelf for your butt and rubbed at his thigh. The muscle burned with built-up lactic acid.

They had at least a hundred yards on their pursuers, but now that the patrol boat wasn’t under fire it was quickly accelerating. The gap narrowed deceptively fast. The sailor behind the machine gun bent to take aim. Juan and Eddie ducked a second before he opened fire. He raked the seas to their port side and then swept the barrel across the transom, high-powered rounds chewing at the fiberglass.

Julia juked the Liberty to throw off his aim, but the maneuver cost her speed, and the gap tightened further. Eddie rose from behind cover and opened up. This time he was aiming to hit something, but even on a smooth river a boat is not the best firing platform, and his shots went wide.

Traffic on the water was heavy, with barges under tow and all manner of shipping, from small one-man skiffs to five-hundred-foot freighters. The two boats raced each other like competitors. The Burmese skipper knew he had superior speed to the bluntly ugly lifeboat, but he couldn’t get too close to the gunfire. It was a standoff that lasted for a mile as both craft tried to get an advantage by using other ships as moving obstacles.

“Enough of this,” Juan said when he felt he was sufficiently rested. He ducked his head into the cabin and shouted over the engine’s roar, “Julia, I’m taking the conn.”

“Okay. Good. I need to check on MacD. This can’t be doing him any good.”

The control panel at the rear helm station was simple and straightforward except for one switch hidden under the dash. Cabrillo eyed the speedometer for a second and saw they had more than enough speed. He hit the button. Activated by hydraulics, it extended a series of wings and foils under the hull that knifed through the water with almost no resistance. The hull was lifted until only the foils and her prop were in contact with the river.

The acceleration was twice anything they’d experienced before, and the lifeboat/hydrofoil was soon doing sixty knots. Juan glanced back in time to see a look of awe on the patrol boat skipper’s face before the distance grew too much and he became just a dot on a rapidly receding horizon.

They cut across the water with the beauty of a porpoise, swinging around slower ships like a Formula One car chasing the checkered flag. Juan knew there wasn’t a boat in the Myanmar navy that could touch them, and he seriously doubted they’d get a chopper into the air in time.

Two minutes later Julia popped up through the hatch. She handed Juan a bottled water and helped him ease his arm into a sling. She also taped a chemical ice pack to his shoulder and shook some painkillers into his hand.

“And that, fearless leader, is the best medical science has come up with for a broken collarbone,” she said, giving him a couple of protein bars from an emergency rations kit. She then grew a little sheepish. “Sorry, I forgot this tub has turbo boost. I would have kicked it into high gear sooner.”

“No worries. Get on the horn and tell Max we’re heading home. Wait. How’s Lawless?”

Her expression darkened. “Don’t know. He’s still nonresponsive.”

They continued to thunder down the river, flashing under two more bridges. To their left the city scrolled by—container ports, cement works, lading piers—and finally they were past the downtown business district, with its clutch of high-rise office towers and apartment blocks.

A police boat had been launched to intercept them. Juan could see blue lights flashing on its radar arch as it skimmed across the waves on an intercept course. If this was the best the city had to offer, it was sadly short. Cabrillo calculated the vectors as the speedboat came at them and realized that it would pass at least a hundred yards astern of the Liberty.

He gave the captain kudos for effort, because even when it became clear they had no chance of catching the hydrofoil, he kept his two outboards pegged until he swung into the lifeboat’s wake at the exact distance Juan had figured. He chased them for almost a half mile, the distance lengthening with each second, until he finally admitted defeat and broke off. Juan threw him a wave as if to acknowledge the game attempt.

The river widened the closer they came to the sea until the banks were distant blurs of jungle. It grew muddier too as tidal action and ocean waves stirred up sediment from the bottom. Traffic thinned to just the occasional containership or fishing smack. Juan knew the smart thing to do now was to throttle back and act just like any other vessel out here, but he hadn’t forgotten that the navy had assets in the air and along the coast hunting for the Oregon, so the quicker they made their rendezvous, the quicker he could get them all safely over the horizon.

Julia came back with a spare radio, since Eddie’s had been in the drink. Juan called his ship on a preset frequency. “Breaker, Breaker, this is the Rubber Duck, come back.”

“Rubber Duck, you’ve got the Pig Pen, ten-four.”

“Max, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re almost to the mouth of the Yangon River. What’s your twenty?”

Hanley read off some GPS coordinates, which Eddie jotted down and then entered inversely into the Liberty’s navigation computer. It was a simple ploy on the off chance someone who understood idiomatic American CB lingo was paying them any interest.

“We’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” Juan said when the readout flashed their ETA.

“That’s good, because the Burmese navy will have one of their Chinese-built Hainan-class missile destroyers on our doorstep in about twenty-five. She’s got a mess of cannons and packs antiship rockets up the wazoo. We’ve been swatting at helicopters for the past hour. Haven’t splashed any of them yet since no one’s fired at us, but things are going to get real hairy real soon.”

“Copy that, good buddy. Smokey’s a-comin’. Best if we transfer to the boat garage and deep-six the Liberty.”

“Sounds like a plan, just so long as we don’t have a problem and sink being one lifeboat short.”

“Never a fear,” Juan said with typical bravado. “Oh, and alert medical that we have a head-trauma case. Have a gurney standing by. The secret police did a number on MacD in prison.”

Cabrillo pressed the throttle levers to see if he could coax another knot or two out of the Liberty’s engine, but it was giving everything it had. The air lost a lot of its humidity and freshened as they made the transition from the river to the ocean. The seas remained calm, so Juan could keep the hydrofoil up on her wings and skipping across the water.

The next fifteen minutes passed without incident, but then Juan spotted something in the distance, a speck floating just above the horizon. It soon resolved itself into another Mil helicopter that was thundering toward them at full military power. The big helo was flying at less than five hundred feet when it roared overhead, the whop of its rotors sounded like crashing thunder.