It was directive number two that found his bowels rumbling, heart racing, the sweat beads popping up on his bald dome and trickling down his craggy face from under the cap.
Determined but anxious to get this ghastly business over, he stared out the cabin window as the paddies swept several hundred feet below the custom-built VIP helicopter. The flight plan had already been mapped out before leaving Yangon, his pilots sticking to the arranged course, sailing east for the sluggish brown waters of the Ayeyarwady. They had just cut a wide berth around the quarantined area surrounding the refinery, en route now to the Buddhist temple, then a quick flyby of the Kachin and Karen villages being sanitized by arriving fresh battalions. A final search of the paddies and he felt relief stir at the sight of farmers and water buffalo still standing, man and animal toiling under the sun. Perhaps, he thought, the horror had been contained. If not he—all of the SLORC—was threatened with a crisis of proportions not even known in the worst of nightmares.
In fact, the calamity was already threatening to reach nationwide critical mass.
According to the weather report, a modest breeze of six to eight miles per hour had been blowing northeast since the explosion. But whatever the biological agent—presumably released before and during the blast—the wind had shifted due south, toward Yangon, and was gathering strength. If common citizens began dropping in the streets in a city teeming with four million…
General Nuyaung decided he was in no rush to hit the ground.
Exactly what had happened almost three nights ago remained a puzzle, but a mystery rife with horrifying implications for the entire country, he knew. Beyond the outbreak of plague, there was the matter of internal security, now threatened by foreign intelligence agents looking to capitalize on the supposed good will of a concerned global community.
Already there had been leaks about the disaster to the western media, CIA or DEA in-country operatives, most likely, pushing panic buttons around the globe, seeking only to infiltrate agents into what they branded a closed society, wishing to subvert and overthrow the ruling powers, disrupt or eradicate the production and flow of eighty percent of the world’s heroin. The hue and cry from the shadows was working.
Already the United Nations, Red Cross and even the American Centers for Disease Control were offering aid and assistance. He wasn’t fooled by the charade of proposed charity. Nuyaung—as did the other members of the SLORC—feared their troubles had only just begun.
Nuyaung wondered what nightmare he would find when he landed at the refinery, even though the intelligence report, complete with photos of victims and initial medical analysis, was perched on his lap. The unidentified object had been painted on their radar screens in Yangon, he remembered, as he had been called in to the Supreme Command and Control Center as soon as it had been picked up, forty-something thousand feet directly above the Kachin State. It had dropped like a streaking comet out of the sky, plunging to earth at more than seven hundred miles per hour before any fighter jets could be scrambled to destroy it. Then, incredibly, the object had slowed its own descent and cut to a mere impossible hover before sailing north.
At first they’d believed they were under attack, frantic speculation even that perhaps the DEA was striking the poppy fields with some supertech thermite bomb meant to incinerate the countryside of what had become the lifeblood of the SLORC. Their technical experts had measured the object at two hundred feet across, sixty feet top to bottom. Beyond the dimensions of the object there was little more than roundtable guessing over what it was. Initial reports stated a white cloud had been observed erupting from the unidentified object, spreading over one square mile before dispersing. That much, he knew, had been verified, the first dead and afflicted struck down in the immediate area of what Yangon tagged Ground Zero. It was the living, dying in other quarantined areas, contaminated by a plague yet to be identified, that concerned Nuyaung the most.
He glimpsed the rolling green hills, their peaks swaddled in white mist, then perused the report once again as the chopper began to vector over the jungle canopy. Including villagers, his workforce and soldiers, the body count, as of six hours ago, now exceeded three hundred. Within several hours of the explosion the first symptoms marked the onslaught of the mystery illness. He recalled the dying words from his last radio contact with Colonel Lingpau.
“General…help us. We are all dying…fever. I am burning up…it feels…as if even my eyes…are on fire. Even my sweat…it is like blood. I am told it is blood…”
Fever. Convulsions. Black urine. Sweat filled with blood infected by plague. Was it an airborne contagion? he wondered. Could he be infected if some blundering fool accidentally brushed up against him? Could it spread through water, food? Was his merchandise contaminated?
The more he thought about it, General Nuyaung suspected someone had launched germ warfare against his country. But who? Why? Relations with neighboring China, Laos, Thailand, India and Bangladesh were anything but strained. The surrounding countries, naturally, guarded their borders, and those in charge of any nation always frowned and attempted to turn back or eliminate refugee hordes. There were, he knew, the occasional border skirmishes, usually involving contraband, but nothing so volatile as to warrant their neighbors unleashing a plague that could wipe out the entire population of Myanmar. And if the attacker was a neighboring country, they risked cross-border contamination. Then who?
It was an hour of madness, he knew, either way, but extreme measures were being initiated to, hopefully, contain the outbreak. There was still hope—if the situation was at least under control in the quarantined sectors, or all potential human contaminants eliminated, infected corpses removed then burned in some inaccessible stretch of jungle—he could save the product and meet his self-imposed deadline. Peasant workers and soldiers alike were easy enough to replace. His greatest fear, beyond personal risk of infection, was that perhaps the vast acreage of poppy and the refinery itself were contaminated.
Nuyaung flipped the file on the seat beside him. He tried to will away the images of the contorted death masks of victims and their faces riddled with red sores and bumps oozing pus, but they were branded in his mind. Perhaps, he considered, it was a grave mistake, after all, to expand heroin production outside the Shan State. But worldwide demand was up, particularly now that various Islamic organizations were gobbling up massive quantities of product, using the funds to finance the future of jihad, no doubt in clamoring search for weapons of mass destruction.
Having lost himself racking his thoughts for solutions to a variety of problems, he suddenly found his chopper hovering over the courtyard. The latest arrivals, some five hundred soldiers, were divided as evenly as possible throughout the stricken zones. Nuyaung stared into the inferno below, then saw a squad of SLORC soldiers dragging two robed monks past the three statues of the warrior guardians set near the three lions and three-headed elephant in front of the temple. The monks were still alive, one of them attempting to break free of the latex-gloved hands clamped around his shoulders. Nuyaung knew the filter masks the troops wore would be no protection against the plague if it was an airborne contagion, assumed the stench of burning flesh down there would bring his men to their knees if their faces weren’t covered. HAZMAT suits—the few that could be scrounged from various military and medical facilities—were reserved for the team of doctors. Depending on what he heard, he would pull rank, claim a HAZMAT suit for himself.
Nuyaung turned away as the monks were tossed into the fire. He glimpsed the towering plumes of black smoke, north and east, decided he could wait on reports about the sanitizing of contaminated peasant villages. He punched the intercom button, told his pilot, “Take me to the refinery. I will tell you where to land when we arrive.”
“THIS IS NOT the right time, Khisa. They are too many.”
She felt the fire burn behind her eyes, willed herself