He watched for what felt like an hour, waiting, dreading the moment when the giant flaming orb would squash the entire compound, nothing but a smoking crater choked with pulped corpses, crushed poppy and strewed product testament to the calamity here. Then it seemed to float away, or suspend itself in midair, or retreat—he wasn’t sure. The halo above its slow-motion free fall appeared to spread mist next, rolling it out like a carpet. He saw it was destined to crash far to the north, figured five or seven miles away, and felt a moment’s relief. The shouting of men was muted by the rolling thunder of the distant explosion as the white fireball plunged from sight. There were numerous Karen and Kachin villages in that direction. Whatever had plummeted to the jungle, whatever it was, he knew it required an investigation, a follow-up report to his superiors in Yangon. If this was some new weapon being tested by the rebels, perhaps some high-tech rocket the American CIA or DEA supporters had given the insurgents, and he failed to inform Yangon of its existence…
He shuddered at the thought of the grim consequences he could suffer for any dereliction of duty.
Lingpau was barking out the next round of orders, rounding up his lieutenant and ordering three full squads to board the Russian HIP-E helicopters and the Aérospatiale when he spotted a pair of eyes shining back at him from the edge of the jungle. Lifting his assault rifle, barrel sweeping up before his eyes, he was prepared to empty the entire clip into the brush. But the big cat was gone.
Lingpau scoured the impenetrable blackness, willing his legs to carry him to his helicopter. It was a fleeting albeit dangerous thought, yearning to return to Yangon, even if that meant abandoning his duty. Whatever had just dropped from the sky, he was certain yet one more evil was about to claim the jungle.
KHISA AN-KHASUNG neither wanted nor felt she deserved the Nobel peace prize. It was true, though, she had become something of a legend throughout Burma—Myanmar—if not most of Southeast Asia, viewed as heroine by the poor and the oppressed, denounced by SLORC and Laotian and Thai warlords and narcotics traffickers as a radical and criminal to be shot on sight. She took honor that she was seen by friend and foe alike as something of a stalking lioness, prowling the jungle, even hunting down the hyenas in human skin who would devour her pride. Defending the weak and the innocent had called on her to do more than just remain a rabble-rousing activist in Yangon or Mandalay, or to chase whatever accolades bestowed her as a lauded poet and writer of short stories, all of which, naturally, were published in the West. Had she chosen this path in life, she wondered, or had the path chosen her?
Whichever, there was the blood of many slain enemies on her hands, and a trip to Stockholm to be honored for a virtue she had never contributed to was hypocrisy in her eyes. It was pretty much the grandiose chatter of foreign journalists, anyway, Europeans, even Americans, all of them as transparent as glass to her. They came to her country—often specifically seeking her out in search of a story or a hero—men of questionable principles and motives, leaving with no more understanding of the horrors and the cruelty of life under military rule than when they’d arrived. The only honor she sought was for her land to be free of terror and tyranny.
And these days there was more avenging than defending.
Ever since the Barking Dogs of the SLORC had expanded their heroin operation north from the Shan State, she had seen the rain forest nearly burned and chopped down to perhaps a few thousand remaining acres of hardwood and mangrove. But there was no comparison, she knew, between their slash-and-burn of the jungle to the toll in human suffering the Barking Dogs had inflicted on the peoples of the Kachin. Where they weren’t brutalized or outright murdered by the Barking Dogs, they were seized by soldiers for slave labor in the poppy fields.
When villages were raided, where they were not razed by fire and the inhabitants weren’t all executed on the spot, she knew young daughters were taken from their families to be used as sex slaves by the Barking Dogs. When deemed soiled goods, they were then sold by the SLORC to rich cronies in neighboring countries, their families—murdered, worked to death in the poppy fields or dispersed to die in the jungle—never to see them again.
It was another form of genocide, she supposed, killing the men, abducting young women, extinguishing all hope the bloodline of the minority groups would continue. She knew all about the indignities, the humiliation the SLORC could inflict on a captive female. And she bore the scars of torture and rape on her own soul, her thoughts right then threatening to wander back to the four years she’d languished in a Yangon prison…
No. Her enemies were in the present, and perhaps the salvation of the Kachin State rested square on her shoulders.
Swathed in thick vines and brush, her fighting force of sixty-two spread evenly to either side along the jungle edge, she scanned the compound through infrared field glasses. With the help and support of both DEA and CIA contract agents in the Kachin, the Karen National Liberation Army of the Karen National Union was better armed and equipped than their predecessors—including her father and three brothers—who had been captured and executed during a SLORC raid when she was—about eight years old. So long ago—another lifetime, it seemed—it often took strenuous thinking to even recall her own age of twenty-four.
Too young, she thought, to feel so old.
There was, she knew, no turning back.
Even though they wielded rocket launchers, the hard truth, she knew, was that they were still outnumbered and outgunned by the Barking Dogs. They could attack this compound, her strategy already laid out to her freedom fighters. They could encircle the refinery, toss around a few white-phosphorous grenades, burn up the poison, cut down a few dozen or so Barking Dogs with their assault rifles and machine guns, but there was another hard truth beyond what would amount to little more than a suicide strike. No matter how many SLORC thugs they killed, Yangon would swarm the jungle with two, even three times the numbers she found before her. The painful thought that perhaps death was just another word for freedom and peace flickered through her mind, but she quickly cast aside any pessimistic notions that would render her less than a leader.
She knew they needed outside help if they were to drive the Barking Dogs from the Kachin. With her contacts to the CIA and DEA, a plan as to how she could achieve such a victory had nearly solidified the next path.
She was lowering the night glasses, wondering how or if they should launch an attack on the soldiers and the refinery, when the sky flashed above the jungle. She winced at the brightness, her fighters edging closer to open ground where the jungle gave way to the closest poppy field to gain a better view of the sky. They were muttering, pointing, searching for the source of light in the heavens. She ordered silence, told them to fall back. She believed another rebel group in the area had preempted her own strike, then she saw the utter stillness of soldiers and workers alike as they gazed at whatever the source of light in the sky.
Assault rifle in hand, she waited for an attack that never came, then surveyed the entire compound for the next few minutes, taking in the commotion, the air of panic mounting among the workers and soldiers. Arms were flapping now, soldiers darting around the compound, shoving the field hands into tents, doubling the sentries around the refinery. She couldn’t see the source of light, but the soldiers were aiming fingers and weapons to the north. She heard the rumble of a distant explosion, then found a contingent of thirty or so soldiers boarding the gunships. Despite her order, she caught the whispering among her fighters, sensed the mounting fear around her in the dark. Gauging the impact point of the blast, the vector of the gunships, she knew the explosion had erupted to the north. That, she also knew, was where a large population of her own people had yet to be molested by the Barking Dogs.
Khisa An-Khasung rose, AKS sweeping, her thoughts locked on to the mystery of the light and the explosion. She melted into the dark and told her fighters to follow.
GENERAL MAW NUYAUNG had stalled the task as long as he dared. He had his own superiors to contend with, and they had become impatient over the past two and a half days for answers, even while he debated with his comrades how the catastrophe should be most efficiently handled. He had handed off a number of excuses why he shouldn’t personally undertake such a grisly chore best relegated to lower-ranking officers