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 and medical experts already on the scene. But the supreme hierarchy of the SLORC had seen through his flimsy sales pitch, sent him packing with veiled threats on his way out the door about failure to fulfill his duty. Since the Kachin refinery had been built at his insistence—despite reservations about growing rebel armies and the distance to both Laotian and Thai borders from his colleagues in the SLORC—the generals with more stars, fatter bank accounts and political muscle had singled him out to investigate the mysterious explosion over the Kachin.
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?
