Bamboo Dragon
By Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir
First edition July 1997
ISBN 0-373-63223-1
Special thanks and acknowledgment to
Mike Newton for his contribution to this work.
BAMBOO DRAGON
Copyright © 1997 by M. C. Murphy.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incident are pure invention.
® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
Printed in U.S.A.
For Eva Kovacs, one of the best.
And, as always, for the Glorious House of Sinanju.
Chapter One
The cursed jungle had invaded Hopper's dreams. It was bad enough that it had made his every waking hour Hell on Earth, but now he could find no respite even in his sleep. His private nightscape stank of rotting vegetation, hummed with biting insects, seethed with wriggling vipers. Always, in the murky background, he could hear the rumbling snarl of larger predators, unseen but waiting for the false step that would make him theirs.
Instead of waking up refreshed each morning, ready for another grueling workday, Hopper found himself exhausted, haggard from the nightmares that pursued him once he crept inside his sleeping bag and pulled the beige mosquito netting down around him like a giant spider web. The past few days, he had forsaken shaving, not because the simple operation sapped his energy, but rather to avoid the face that greeted him each morning in his mirror—gaunt and dark, with sunken, bloodshot eyes and hair like straw that stubbornly defied the comb. His cheeks were hollow, mottled with the pox of insect bites, and Hopper didn't like the blotchy tan that made him look like an escapee from a lab experiment. His gums had started bleeding Tuesday night—or was it Wednesday? Not a lot, but still enough to stain his teeth, and that had been the final straw. He left his mirror for the monkeys when they broke camp in the morning, and he wished them better luck. He wouldn't shave again until he had hot water and a proper bathroom, possibly a barber to perform the ritual, so he wouldn't have to face himself.
A lady barber. She could shave his whole damned body if she wanted to, and scrub him clean until he started feeling human once again.
It was peculiar, this reaction to the jungle and the job that had been paying Hopper's way for close to fifteen years. He didn't like to think it was the work, for that meant starting over, finding something new if he couldn't perform, and that was never easy for a man of his restricted educational achievements.
No, it couldn't be the job. That never changed. He used the same equipment each time out and knew the drill by heart. He could perform the simple operations in his sleep—had done exactly that, the past ten nights or so—and there were only two ways it could go. Success or failure. Either way, he still got paid for making the attempt.
It had to be the jungle, then, and that was strange. In his time, he had been sent to every stinking pest-hole from the Congo to the Amazon. He had communed with pygmies and the wild men of the Mato Grosso, sharing meals that would have gagged a maggot, pumping the locals for information that would help him do his job. He knew about the spiders, snakes and scorpions, and had learned to wear his jockey shorts while bathing, so loathsome parasites and tiny spike-finned fish wouldn't invade his genitals or rectum. On the flip side, he had trekked through deserts where the ground cracked like old leather and the temperature topped 120 in the shade—if you could find the shade at all—and even biting flies had sense enough to hide until the sun went down. At the other extreme, he was no stranger to the Arctic tundra, and had dined on frozen mammoth steaks with blubber on the side and watched his piss freeze in a golden arc before it hit the ground.
But he had always done his job.
So what was different now? What was it that repulsed him so about this place?
He didn't think it was the climate, which reminded him of Indonesia at the height of summer, hot and humid, sapping the vitality of anyone foolish enough to labor in the daylight hours. Still, a man could fortify himself with salt and special beverages, restoring lost electrolytes. He knew the tricks, all right. Indeed, he had invented some of them himself.
The teeming insects? Hopper didn't think so. Granted, the mosquitoes were particularly large and vicious, rivaling the worst that he had seen in Africa, and there were flies that felt like hypodermic needles when they hit you, always from behind. But Hopper had been vaccinated for a whole list of diseases, from malaria to filariasis, and he was armed with bug repellent tailored for the military. As it was, he suffered only twenty-five or thirty painful bites per day, and he could live with that.
What, then?
Eleven weeks of speculation and analysis led Hopper to conclude that it must be the place, some nasty combination of the climate and terrain, plant life and skulking fauna, that conspired to put his nerves on edge. It seemed ridiculous, but there it was. This place was evil, pulsing with malignant undercurrents that invaded blood and muscle tissue, wormed their way inside the human brain.
Or maybe he was simply going mad.
Eleven weeks.
They were supposed to finish off the job in half that time, but someone upstairs had clearly underestimated the jungle, basing their timetable on bland tourist guidebooks and maps that shrank the country down to postcard size, reducing mighty river networks to a web of slender threads, the all-devouring jungle to a green blotch you could cover with your hand. The "planners," as they liked to call themselves back in the States, were absolutely ignorant of what it took to ford a river when the crocodiles were waiting, scale a hundred feet of crumbling shale or wade through miles of reeking swamp with stagnant water up around your chest and leeches squirming underneath your sodden clothes.
All this he had been willing to endure, as on his other expeditions, for the payoff. Half up front, the rest when he was finished, with a handsome bonus if he scored. Around Los Angeles—where he made his home of sorts—and in the industry at large, there was a saying that what Hopper didn't find could not be found. Hyperbole, perhaps, but no one ever lost his shirt by cultivating an impressive reputation.
It could get you killed, though, if you didn't watch your step.
The job had sounded perfect when they laid it out for Hopper at the briefing back in March. Not easy—that would be too much to hope for—but at least it didn't sound impossible.
The planners had a fix on what they wanted him to find, spun off from a potpourri of native legend, secret military documents, some wishful thinking based on satellite photography and laser tracings from the past two shuttle missions. What it added up to was a fortune… maybe. All they needed was a pro to carry out the groundwork under "primitive conditions."
In the field.
He had to smile at that, the way they made it sound as if he were being sent to walk around a meadow, someone's open pasture land. "The field" was in fact something else entirely: jungle, desert, maybe rugged mountains where you knew damned well a mining operation would be difficult, if not impossible, to organize. It wasn't Hopper's job to rain on anyone's parade until he had a look around and scouted out the territory, looking high and low for the elusive pay dirt that would fatten up his bank account along with everybody else's.
That was one good thing about his job: instead of working free-lance, for himself, he went out on retainer for the companies with deep, deep pockets, and they had to pay him, win or lose. It pissed them off whenever Hopper came up empty, but that didn't happen often. By the time a sponsor needed him, the ground had been examined from a distance, probabilities determined by the kind of high-falutin math he never even tried to understand. From that point on, the job came down to Hopper in the field, pursuing fame and fortune on behalf of men who didn't have the skill or courage to go out and grab it for themselves.
And he had done all right… until this time.
He told himself that he was being foolish; there was nothing in the jungle hereabouts that he hadn't previously encountered somewhere. Same snakes, or close enough. Same frigging spiders, ants, flies, gnats, mosquitoes, body lice. Same natives, more or less, with their innate suspicion of outsiders who had screwed them in the past and might again if they let down their guard.
It wasn't anything, in fact, that he could put his finger on. But beneath the sweat, sunburn and jungle rot that came with any mission to the tropics, there was… something else.
A nagging sense of dread.
And he wasn't the only one who felt it, either. Starting with the local tribesmen who had balked at sharing information, much less renting guides out to the expedition, forcing Hopper to pay well beyond the going rate for native help. He didn't mind—it wasn't his cash, after all—but their reluctance, verging on a state of superstitious terror, set the tone for everything that followed.
Eakins, the geologist from Houston, had been first to show the signs among the three of them who counted. You could see him getting edgy, checking out the shadows While they marched and staring past the firelight into darkness when they camped. Before the second week was over, he had started dropping hints and questions, getting curious about the natives, predators, whatever. Still, it was his first time in the heavy bush, and there were bound to be some nerves involved.
The fear crept up on Hopper next, and took him by surprise. So far, he thought that he had done a fair job of concealing it, though the lack of decent sleep was wearing on him in the stretch and threatening to breed mistakes. He wrote it off to age at first—the big four-oh was coming up in August—but there had to be some other reason for the nightmares and the grim, oppressive sense of doom that dogged his waking hours.
Now, unless he was mistaken, even Sparks was feeling it. Sparks was their troubleshooter, muscle with a military background who had drifted into mercenary work and on from there into the nebulous preserve of what they liked to call "executive security." For fifty grand a year, plus traveling expenses, Sparks might be dispatched to twist an arm in Washington, tap phones in Birmingham… or baby-sit an expedition slogging through the shit a thousand miles from anywhere.
Sparks knew his job and calculated the attendant risks before he made a move. When there was danger brewing, he could kick ass with the best of them. There was a hazy but persistent rumor, stateside, that his killings weren't confined to Third World civil wars.
But he was getting nervous now, no doubt about it. You could see it in his eyes, the way he kept his rifle close beside him, with the safety off.
It had to be imagination, Hopper told himself, since nothing much beyond the ordinary had occurred so far. There was continued reticence among the guides and porters, but you got that sometimes, where taboos and superstition were involved. The trek itself, while beating any Hopper could recall for sheer exertion and fatigue, wasn't otherwise especially dangerous. The nearest he had come to outright peril was a close encounter with a cobra on the fourth day out, when he had left the trail to take a bladder break.
Shit happened in the field, but he couldn't escape the nightmares, even so.
They always started out the same way, Hopper tramping through the jungle, lost, with darkness coming on. He knew the camp should be ahead of him, another hundred yards or so, but when he called to Sparks and Eakins, no one answered. Haunting bird calls echoed through the forest, unseen rodents scuttling in the undergrowth, but nothing human seemed to share his space.