babble rife with fear and confusion.
“Stop yammering!” Lingpau shouted at the trio, searching the grounds for armed invaders but finding only his soldiers scurrying about the poppy fields with the night workforce, other gaggles of troops frozen near the transport trucks parked in front of the massive tent refinery.
“Rebels? Are we under attack?” Lingpau saw them shake their heads, mouths open, his sentries clearly left speechless over whatever they’d seen. “Then what? Answer me!”
“The sky, Colonel, it is falling!”
“The heavens are on fire!”
“It is going to crash right on top of us!”
Teeth gnashed, cursing the fool bleating something about a craft plunging in flames from outer space, Lingpau hit the ground, whirling, shouting orders, calling out the names of his captain and lieutenant. His voice sounding shrill in his ears, eyes darting everywhere, he ordered the perimeter sealed, the workforce detained in their tents, full alert and double the guard around the refinery. He was forced to repeat the orders, uncertain of his own voice, limbs hardening like drying concrete as he realized he was looking skyward.
“What…”
Lingpau’s first conclusion was that the descending fireball was the result of a rocket attack. Only the massive size of the unidentified object, the white sheen that seemed to spew tentacles of luminous blue fire for miles in all directions and, finally, the trajectory of its fall, told him it was something other than a missile. But what? he wondered, squinting against the harsh glare illuminating the heavens, hurtling night into day, the mushroom-capped jungle canopy rippling against the blinding light as if the inanimate threatened to come alive.
Yes, he had seen meteor showers, shooting stars, and what little he knew about comets no giant rock from outer space could slow its own descent, appear to hover, change directions. There were other stories he had heard, though, fantastic tales from the jungle he had dismissed without a second thought, told around campfires, no doubt, by bored peasants with too much time to waste and too much imagination perhaps inflamed by opium. Tales told of alien spacecraft that flew at impossible speeds over the countryside, blinding lights that fell over a man and saw him vanish into the sky. Was it possible? Could it be?
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.
