passengers and begun lifting clear, its huge rotor beating at the hot, fetid air.
A stream of tracer rounds ripped across their path, forcing both men to dive flat. Juan flipped around and opened fire, laying down a suppressive wall of lead to allow MacD to start across the bridge. Cabrillo wriggled behind a rock, and whenever he saw movement in the jungle behind them, he triggered off a three-round burst.
A grenade came lobbing out of the bush. Juan made himself as small as possible behind his rock as the poorly thrown explosive went off with a concussive whoosh. Shrapnel chewed the dirt around him, but nothing struck home. Lawless was halfway across. On the far side, Linda made it to solid ground and immediately twisted around one of the support pylons and added her own cover fire. From Cabrillo’s position, the muzzle flash looked like twinkling stars.
He changed out his half-depleted magazine for a fresh one, loosed a long burst of autofire, and exploded from his hidden position. He felt like he had a giant target pinned to his back and that his legs were encased in lead. It seemed harder to run than when they’d hit that ooze just off the boat. Cabrillo slung his rifle across his back when his boot hit the bridge. It jolted and jumped like it was carrying a live electrical current. Ahead of him, MacD was moving as fast as he could, while Smith made it to the other side. Like Linda, he found cover behind the support pillar and opened fire.
Bullets cut the air all around Juan as he tried to both keep his balance and run. He didn’t recall the thick- braided rope being so narrow. A hundred feet below him the water was a white frothing nightmare. Expecting a bullet in his back at any second, he kept running, the cable swaying all the while like an old hammock.
With his eyes on his feet, it was a miracle he looked up at the instant he did. A little ways ahead of MacD, bullets slammed into the cable, fired no doubt by the Burmese soldiers. It disintegrated in a furball of hemp fibers, and, as soon as the two ends parted, the guide ropes took the added strain.
“Down!” Cabrillo shouted over the din of battle, and threw himself onto the quivering main cable. MacD dropped flat, clutching at the foot-thick rope with his arms and leg.
Even when the structure was first built, the guidelines were never designed to carry the load of the main cable. They lasted the seconds it took Cabrillo to spin himself around so he was facing the temple. He had one instant to see that a pair of soldiers in jungle fatigues had also started across the bridge, their AKs slung low across their bellies.
First one guideline split apart, rotating the entire bridge in a gut-wrenching jolt. The second let go an instant later, and Cabrillo was suddenly in free fall, clinging to the rope as it arced back toward the Buddhist sanctuary, accelerating with every second. Wind whistled past his ears while the world tilted and spun. The two Burmese soldiers hadn’t seen what was coming. Screaming, one hurtled off the span, his arms and legs pinwheeling until he smashed into the rocks below. The river washed away the crimson smear he’d left on the stone and carried the body away. The second soldier managed to grab at the guidelines as they sagged like deflated balloons.
Juan redoubled his grip and braced for impact, knowing that if he lost his tenuous hold he also lost his life. He hit unyielding stone like he’d been struck by a bus. He felt his collarbone snap like a green twig and his entire left side go numb for an instant. And then his brain rebooted, and the agony struck his nervous system from his ankle to his head. Blood dripped from a gash on his temple, and it took everything he had not to just let go and be done with it all.
The soldier who’d clutched at the rope at the last second gave a warning shriek as he lost his hold and came tumbling down the cliff face. There was nothing Juan could do. The guy struck him a glancing blow that caused him to slip a little farther down the cable, and then he was gone.
Cabrillo looked down to see him sail past MacD, who had somehow stayed on even though he’d fallen farther and hit even harder. The soldier plummeted into the water headfirst and vanished. Juan never did see him surface.
He was stuck. With his broken collarbone there was no way he could climb up the cable, and he knew there was no way he’d survive a plunge into the river. He thought that maybe he and MacD could swing the rope across the cliff and somehow land on the waterwheel platform, but that wouldn’t work either. It was just too far away.
Cabrillo looked up, expecting to see the triumphant faces of soldiers aiming down at him. He could no longer hear any firing from Linda’s side of the chasm and assumed that when the rope parted, she and Smith had beaten a fast retreat. The soldiers could be choppered over in just a few minutes, so it made no sense for them to linger over a situation over which they had no control.
The cable began to shake with a slow rhythm, and it took him just a moment to realize that the Burmese soldiers, rather than shooting the two of them off the rope like flies, were hauling him and MacD up to the canyon rim, to a fate that would probably make dropping into the river seem like the lesser of two evils. But as long as he was alive and had Max Hanley and the rest of the Corporation as backup, Juan Cabrillo would never give up.
Twenty-four hours later, he wished he had.
It took the soldiers nearly ten minutes to haul first Cabrillo and then MacD out of the gorge. By then Juan’s shoulder felt like it had been lanced with a hot poker, and his arms and legs burned with an unholy fire from clutching the cable. He was disarmed by a soldier wielding a combat knife who cut the REC7’s sling before he had been brought fully to the ground. Another soldier plucked his FN Five-seveN from its holster and yanked a throwing knife from its scabbard, hanging inverted from his harness strap.
The same was done to MacD when they brought him up from the depths. He’d been so much farther out on the rope than Cabrillo that when it collapsed, he had actually been dragged into the river. His pants were wet from the knees down. That little bit of a cushion was what saved him from being crushed against the cliff.
They were forced to stay on their knees, with two men covering them and a third removing the rest of their gear. It was during the pat down that they discovered Cabrillo’s broken collarbone, which the soldier made sure to knead with both hands until the bones ground together.
The pain was intense, but only when the soldier let go did Juan let out a little whimper. He couldn’t help it. They also discovered the artificial leg. The soldier turned to an officer wearing aviator-style sunglasses for instructions. A few words were exchanged, and the soldier pulled Juan’s combat leg free of its stump and handed it to his superior. The man looked at it for a moment, gave Juan a rotten-toothed smile, and hurled the limb over the edge.
He hadn’t known what a small arsenal the leg represented or how Juan had planned to hijack the chopper using the pistol secreted within it. He just wanted to show Cabrillo that he was totally powerless and that from this moment on the army of one of the most ruthless dictatorships in the world controlled his fate.
Cabrillo had to fight to keep the disappointment from showing on his face. Instead of giving the bastard the satisfaction of knowing how much this really meant, he shrugged as best he could and just looked around at the scenery as if he didn’t have a care in the world. If his mouth hadn’t been so dry, he would have tried to whistle.
The officer didn’t like that his demonstration of power hadn’t elicited the proper amount of fear, so he barked an order at one of the soldiers covering them. An instant later the butt of a Kalashnikov smashed into the back of Juan’s head, and his world went black.
CABRILLO CAME TO in fits and starts. He remembered the awful racket of a chopper flight and being manhandled a couple of times, but each of these memories felt as if it had happened to someone else, like a scene from a movie he’d watched long ago. He never came close enough to consciousness to feel any pain or have any idea where he was.
The first sensation when he finally returned from the abyss was an intense ache at the back of his head. More than anything, he wanted to explore the area with his hand and make sure his skull hadn’t been crushed in, like he was sure it had been. But he resisted the urge. An instructor at Camp Peary, the CIA training facility known as The Farm, had once told him that if he were ever captured and was uncertain of his surroundings, he should lie as quietly as possible for as long as possible. This allowed him to rest, but, more important, he could gather intelligence on where he had been taken.
So with the back of his head screaming for attention and other parts of his body sore, he lay dormant, straining to glean anything from his surroundings. He could tell he was still clothed, and knew, by the ease with which he could breathe, that his head wasn’t in a bag. As best he could tell, he was lying on a table. He strained his ears but could hear nothing. It was difficult to concentrate. His head pounded in time with his beating heart.
