“And where are you from?” she persisted.
“That is a question you never ask a Legionnaire. In fact, you never ask about his past at all.” He sipped from his glass of ice water.
Max asked, “You’re sure that Soleil hasn’t tried to contact her father since that last communication just before we met?”
“Correct. He’s tried her phone numerous times, but there is no answer.”
“So our starting point,” Juan said, “will be the GPS coordinates we got off that last call.”
“I noticed there is something next to the helicopter, covered with a tarp. A boat, I assume?”
“Yes,” Cabrillo replied to Smith’s question. “Even stripped as she is, our chopper doesn’t have the range to reach Soleil’s last known location. We’ll use it to airlift a boat into the country and track her from the water.”
“A good plan, I think,” Smith admitted. “By boat is about the only way one can travel in the jungle. I recall my training days in French Guiana. The Legion guards the European Space Agency’s launching facility there. They would drop us into the jungle with a canteen and a machete and then time how long it took us to get back to base. It was so thick, the best of us averaged a mile a day.”
“We’ve all been there,” MacD Lawless said. “I’d match the Georgia swamps to any jungle in South America.”
“Ranger?” Smith asked, recognizing that the Ranger training school was at Fort Benning, Georgia.
“Yup.”
“And you, Miss Ross, what is your background?”
Linda threw him a cocky grin that told him she could give as well as take. “You never ask a lady about her past.”
Smith actually smiled. “Touché.”
Juan unrolled a map he’d brought to the mess and anchored the corners with a coffee cup and a plate laden with what remained of a blueberry cobbler that he was relieved Smith hadn’t tried because it was about the best he’d ever tasted.
“Okay, we’re going to bring the Tyson Hondo in here.” He pointed to a spot just off Bangladesh’s southern coast. Tyson Hondo was the name currently painted across the Oregon’s fantail, and it was what they’d been calling her since Smith came aboard. “There’s nothing much out there. Just a few fishing villages and nomadic clans who live aboard their boats. I wish we could fly at night, but lowering the boat onto this river here”—he pointed to a spot about a hundred miles inland, well across the border with Myanmar—“is just too dangerous in the dark. There are no military bases that far north, so we don’t really need to worry about being spotted, but we’ll fly nap-of-the-earth the whole way in.”
“Is your pilot qualified?”
“We grabbed him away from the 160th SOAR,” Juan replied, referring to the U.S. Army’s elite special operations aviation regiment.
“So he’s qualified.”
“More than. From there, we’ll motor upstream. These maps are terrible, but as near as we can tell the river will take us to within a couple of miles from where Soleil and her companion were last heard from. Now, as you can see from these two plotted positions, she hadn’t wandered too far from when she’d made her last scheduled check-in with her father.”
“Is that significant?” Smith asked.
“Don’t know,” Cabrillo replied. “Maybe. It all depends on what’s in that particular patch of jungle. In her last call, she said she was close to something but that someone else was even closer.”
“If I may venture a guess,” Linda said, and continued when the men were looking at her. “From what I’ve read about her, Soleil Croissard is a daredevil, but she really doesn’t publicize her adventures. She’s not into seeing her name splashed across the tabloids. She just sets herself insane goals and then checks them off her list when she’s done. Car racing, check. World’s tallest mountains, check. Scuba dive with great whites, check. My guess is that whatever she’s looking for isn’t something she’s going to tell the world about. She’s after something for herself.”
“It would be a hell of a feat to cross Burma on foot,” Max said. “It’s not just the terrain, but you’ve got opium smugglers, and one of the most repressive governments in the world that would like nothing more than to capture her for a show trial.”
“Could it be that simple?” Juan asked Smith.
“I do not know. She never told Monsieur Croissard why she was doing this.”
“If that were the case,” MacD said, “why hasn’t she moved more than ten miles in almost two weeks?” To that, there was
no answer. “What if she sees herself as a real-life Lara Croft? Are there any ancient temples or anything in that jungle?”
“Possibly,” Juan said. “The Khmer empire stretched pretty far. There might have been other significant civilizations before or since. I really don’t know this history as well as I should.”
“I do not see what it matters why she is there,” Smith interjected. “Getting her out should be our only interest.”