by Jason Kasper
“Not invaluable: approximately 640,000 US. Subject to exchange rates, of course. That is the amount I am refunding the woman who sent you, with my deepest regrets. But I cannot alter the political course of my homeland, nor the military one, as my family has explained to you. On a personal note”—he leaned in toward me—“in over thirty years, I have never failed to deliver an order. It pains me to do so now. So please do not make me explain it again before you go.”
I cleared my throat. “I didn’t come here for you to explain it—I came for you to authorize a mission.”
His low silver eyebrows began to rise with the hint of a smile. “My apologies, David. This meeting is done.”
He turned to leave. Acting instinctively, before I had time to think better of it, I grabbed his arm to stop him.
The shuffle of footsteps exploded in the cavern as the black shapes of bodyguards moved toward me, then went silent as Kun raised his gnarled hand to wave them off.
I released him and he faced me once more, this time stepping closer, dark eyes boring into mine. “You have made a grave error coming here, David—”
“Hear me out,” I said quickly, “please. I have an offer that serves us both.”
“One minute. Then I leave.”
“The woman who sent me will not take kindly to a refund. If she doesn’t have the resources to rectify this breach of contract now, she soon will.”
“I did not take you as the type to threaten, David.”
“You are correct. What I’m offering isn’t a threat, but a way to absolve yourself and your family of responsibility. She sent me as a full representative, yes?”
“Her ability to communicate is quite sporadic. So yes, she gave you authority to speak on her behalf. But that does not put you in a position to dictate orders.”
“Of course not. What I’m recommending, with your permission and with all respect, is that you let me recover the component of my item that is currently being held in the depot.”
“Quite impossible. The Kokang leader hides in the mountains. I cannot even reach him right now. The status of his counterattack is uncertain at present.”
“You do not have to commit forces, merely authorize me to embark on a mission, on my own. If you can describe the item’s exact location in the depot and provide me minimum armament—”
“My family has surely described the extent of junta defenses.”
“And the fact that the Myanmar Army will burn the depot to the ground before they depart, yes.” I nodded my concession to his point, then countered, “But with all respect, I believe your family underestimates what one man can accomplish against defenses that cannot conceive of such an audacious attempt.”
Kun’s brow furrowed, then relaxed. He seemed surprised at my proposal, but a tight smile preceded his next words. “So you act of your own accord, and the woman who sent you will have no further basis on which to refuse a refund.”
“Or cite a breach of contract. The Myanmar government took sudden actions beyond your control while I was on my way here, and I demanded to recover the item myself. She delegated authority to me, so any perceived blame no longer falls on you or your business. I will either succeed and recover the item and you keep your payment—”
“Or you will be killed, and the junta sets fire to our depot.”
“In which case you send her a refund, as there is no item remaining to provide. She chose to send me, and she bears the consequences, good or bad.”
He shook his head slowly. “What you propose is a bold move for one man when even the Kokang Army fears to attack the junta. My fear is that you are captured, then tortured and forced to reveal details of my network.”
I swallowed and opened my mouth to speak, then hesitated. I would either convince Kun now or condemn Ian forever.
“What knowledge can I reveal?” I asked. “They must already know who you are, or you’d be traveling freely.” I glanced toward the giant Buddha he’d emerged from behind. “A person of your stature wouldn’t be meeting at a dead end. You’ve got the closest thing to becoming invisible: a hidden tunnel. But you’ve probably got a dozen other meeting sites that I don’t know about. The safe house in Lashio is easily replaceable, and I know nothing of the men who brought me here besides a few first names and the fact that Peng and Tiao will probably celebrate if I get killed. This is worth the risk in order to preserve your reputation as a man who has accommodated client requests for thirty years. I won’t let the junta break that record.”
He remained silent at this, leaving us to the patter of water droplets from the cave ceiling. Then he replied, “Your chances are most doubtful.”
“I will succeed.”
“If you succeed, I believe it will be in a way neither of us expects. But”—he took a long breath—“I will allow you to try.”
I felt like I’d been freed and sentenced to death in the same instant. “Thank you, Kun. I will see that—”
“Do not thank me yet, David. My people will give you what you need to embark. But now I must go. Nothing good results from remaining too long outside one’s safe territory.”
I smiled. “Story of my life.”
With a rueful nod, Kun turned and disappeared behind the giant Buddha statue once more. The dark shapes of guards surrounding us converged into one amorphous shadow that slipped after him, leaving me alone.
9
Laukkai truly was a ghost town.
The only semblance of human presence I encountered on my journey toward the depot building was Myanmar soldiers. These were easy enough to spot—they were clustered in groups, their checkpoint locations chosen to shield warming fires from the steady pattering of rain, laughing and joking loudly as they passed the time. This much confirmed what I had hoped—the junta troops were expecting either a massive rebel counterattack or nothing at all. So long as the night was free of machinegun fire or rocket blasts, they probably felt as safe as if they were back on base.
I moved swiftly through the darkness, using a handheld night vision monocular to periodically scan my route. A silenced Makarov pistol was stuffed in my belt—holsters were apparently a luxury in this part of the world—and an AK-47 was slung tightly across my back. A single round from the unsuppressed assault rifle would announce my location to every soldier in the city, and its weight on my back represented little more than a last-ditch means to shoot my way out if cornered.
But it wouldn’t come to that. The rain worked to my advantage as the defending troops tried to stay dry and warm, the sound of my movement concealed, the precipitation obscuring the view even if someone was looking for a single intruder. I was feeling light, stealthy, eager for the split-second judgment calls required in my immediate future. I’d throw myself into the situation and react on instinct, just as I had with my first assassination against Saamir. In his Chicago high rise, I’d been in a fight for my life against an armed guard force who knew I was in the building, with nothing but a silenced pistol and fewer magazines than I had now. And while I didn’t have a getaway car waiting for me this time, I did have the added experience of dozens of firefights spanning the globe, most recently in Rio, where a gun and my instincts had prevailed, just as they always had. Just as they would tonight.
I weaved my way through the city with ease, circumnavigating the fires at Myanmar guard checkpoints, some so close that I could smell burning scrap wood and cigarette smoke even through the rain. Seemingly every civilian inhabitant had fled either deeper into Myanmar or into China through the border gate shortly beyond the hilltop I approached.
I stopped on a sloping dirt road and looked behind me at the jagged mountain marking the entrance to the Buddhist temple I’d flee to after getting what I came for. A massive, easily locatable terrain feature to help me navigate back. Turning to continue my infiltration route, I slipped down an alley and stopped at the corner to scan with my night vision, using the tip of my index finger to wipe the fog constantly accumulating on the lens.
The depot wasn’t hard to find.
It was seated prominently on the high ground, providing ample reason for the emplacement of the S-60 anti-aircraft gun. Scanning the hill with my night vision monocular, I could clearly make out the twin vertical armored plates protecting the gunner’s seat, from which a fourteen-foot-long barrel pointed downhill.
Apart from the cannon, however, the Myanmar Army defended the depot by relying on manpower. Perhaps too much of it. The guard presence was spread among pre-established bunkers now fortified by piles of sandbags, and while this may have been sufficient given a properly motivated force equipped with night vision, it was almost counterproductive when staffed with low-ranking, ill-equipped junta troops.
I was reminded of invading Iraq with the Rangers. After parachuting in, we’d secured a desert landing site and landed transport aircraft with our mobility vehicles. Soon we were traveling by night, maneuvering our convoy to avoid fortified troop positions and Iraqi tank columns, any number of which could have destroyed us had they not failed to suspect the presence of an American raid force so far behind the front lines. I vividly recalled driving past an Iraqi anti-aircraft cannon firing skyward, its gunner completely unaware that less than three hundred meters away a convoy of Rangers was en route to a target. Hell, for all I knew he could have been shooting an S-60 just like the one guarding the hilltop I approached.
Limited guard forces made sentries more alert, compensating for their vulnerabilities; but a surplus of soldiers and deficit of fortified positions bred overconfidence, the unwarranted sense of assurance that someone would detect anything out of the ordinary. At the depot, that meant guards in positions I could spot under my night vision a hundred meters away, whose banter I could make out at half that distance.
Moving in a semicircle cloverleaf pattern around the depot, I probed for a gap in the defenses sufficient for a single man with night vision to slip through unnoticed. It took me less than two hours of close reconnaissance to confirm that my best route was along a divot of low ground between guard posts, cloaked in shadow.
The S-60 anti-aircraft gun watched the gap, making a daytime approach flat-out impossible; at night, however, I felt surreally confident. The cannon crew trusted the guard posts to spot minor threats in the night, while the guards trusted the men at the adjacent post to do the same. I lowered myself flat atop the slick, overgrown grass between buildings, the water oozing beneath my clothes amid the smell of wet, tropical earth. Pulling myself by my elbows, I writhed forward in a slithering high crawl that carried me through a channel of low ground between guard posts.
A chill began running through my core as I made steady progress forward. The journey would be infinitely more interesting on the way out, provided I wasn’t running for my life with the missing component of Sage’s item. It took me forty-five minutes to proceed less than a hundred meters uphill toward the depot, slipping between guard bunkers with the S-60 in full view ahead.
When I reached the depot, I stretched a hand to my side and touched the corner of the building—the cool, damp cinderblock wall felt welcoming, as if it had been waiting for me to arrive all along. Rising to a crouch, I followed the exterior wall toward a side entrance.
A sudden white light blinded me, followed by a half dozen more to my front and rear. Men screamed in Burmese as I instinctively went for my pistol. A rifle fired ten feet away—into the air, not into me—and I halted my pistol draw in place.
Armed men descended upon me, striking my body with rifle stocks and booted kicks. I went down and they grabbed me, stripping my weapons away in a few grunting, confused seconds while the rain pelted into me along with their strikes. I curled into the fetal position, unable to defend myself and overwhelmed by a sense of shame so profound that I almost didn’t want to.
The violent assault was well deserved, an almost superficial abstraction weighed against my mental anguish in the moments of my capture. I was furious with myself more than with my attackers. I’d proceeded with an arrogant overconfidence that had served me before but had no place in Laukkai. By grossly underestimating the enemy, I’d just saved the Handler’s life and quite likely ended my own.
And now, minutes before infiltrating my target building on a solo raid, I’d just become a prisoner of war in Myanmar.
DAMNED
Victoria aut mors
-Victory or death
10
The melee ceased long enough for someone to blindfold me and bind my wrists behind my back with a plastic cable tie. My equipment was ripped away, boots stripped off, and they executed a hasty pat-down search of my pockets. Now blind to my surroundings, I felt them drag me into the depot. I was overwhelmed with a sense of vertigo and panic as someone threw me backward, my shoulder blades striking a wall.
A sudden slap across my cheekbone dislodged my blindfold from one eye, revealing the blinding glare of flashlight beams directed at my face, ambient glimpses of men screaming, and rifles being pointed at my head. The smells of sweat and mildew, damp fatigues, and boot leather choked me as I squinted into the lights, looking away only to have them grab my jaw and force my face forward again. The screaming got louder, reaching some crescendo of fury that culminated in a rifle butt being thrust into my abdomen at maximum force. I fell to the floor, the wind gone from my lungs.
A man crouched beside me. “Where you from?”
I groaned, writhing in agony.
A gunshot exploded next to my face, so close that everything else vanished into the gonging sound erupting in my head. These men were crazy, reckless—they’d just discharged a weapon indoors, oblivious to or uncaring of the possibility of it ricocheting at themselves. A gun barrel was placed to my head, scalding metal burning my scalp.
The next scream from the man sounded distorted, warped, and muted even though he was next to me.
“WHERE YOU FROM?”
“America!” I shouted back. The heat of the barrel against my head disappeared as I panted for breath. A chorus of jeers from the men in the room, rollicking taunts in Burmese, another boot to my ribs.
This was a living nightmare—restrained, surrounded, encapsulated in a cell by men who wanted to torture or kill me, or both. No Outfit training scenario with a carefully scripted intervention, no one coming to rescue me. No one, in fact, who knew where I was beyond Kun and his men, who were now relocating any vestige of their network that had been witnessed by the foreigner who didn’t return.
“I kill you now, America.”
“No,” I gasped, “please.”
“Feed your body to dogs—”
A sudden barking shout silenced the entire room at once. I squinted upward, past the edge of my blindfold, and saw flashlights pointed at the ground, the men spreading to make room for a single man who entered through a lit doorway.
He began angrily screaming in Burmese, which sent the other men scurrying out the door.
“What have they done?” he asked, kneeling to set down a propane lantern. I rolled onto my side and he gently removed my blindfold, tossing it aside as I looked at his face.
He was too old to be a foot soldier—an officer, perhaps, though his mottled camouflage uniform bore no patches. He had a recessed hairline, his broad forehead catching a glimmer of the lantern beside him.
“I help you,” he said, fumbling in his pocket and producing a small set of medical shears.
He leaned over me, sliding the rounded edge of a scissor blade against my wrist and slicing the cable tie. I brought my hands to my front, rubbing my wrists as my eyes adjusted to the light. The walls around me formed a windowless square, the single door now closed.
I took mental stock of my condition—I was bruised and beaten for sure, but didn’t feel anything broken. Slowly I pushed myself upward to sit against the cinderblock wall as he stood. He was a slight man, just over five feet, and he pocketed the shears with an embarrassed shrug. “These men, they can be vigorous. Like all soldier. You good? Okay?”
I said nothing, looking at the ground, trying to remain non-confrontational. F
or all I knew, this guy was about to kick me in the face.
Then he declared, “I have other duty. You no talk to me, I leave. Soldier come back, ask you instead.”
He picked up his lantern and turned toward the door.
“No.” I shook my head. “Stay.”
He set the lantern back down, watching me from his meager standing height. “Good. Cooperate, things well for you. Food. Water. Doctor.”
I nodded slightly.
“My name Cetan. What your name?”
I responded instinctively, with the first name that came to mind. “Adam.”
“Where you from, Adam? Tell, or I go now.”
At some level I felt a deep, unbidden instinct to cooperate, to do anything that would improve my situation. The men outside were violent, and I was one misstep from broken bones at best and being shot at worst.
“America.” I felt humiliated using the name of my country now that I was facing imprisonment or death as the result of my own hubris.
“Good. What you do here, Adam?”
A lump rose in my throat—what could I say? Cetan would catch me in a lie almost immediately.
“Adam. I ask you. What you do here?”
Before I could reply, he said, “You want water before speak?”
I nodded.
“Okay. Okay, Adam. I get you water.”
Cetan picked up his lantern, then pounded three times on the door. After a pause it opened, and I caught a glimpse of the wall shortly beyond it as Cetan departed and it slammed shut again. There looked to be a hallway outside my cell—where in the depot did that put me? I pictured the diagram of the depot’s layout that Kun’s men had briefed me on, quickly realizing that I could have been in any one of half a dozen side rooms, all on the wrong side of the structure from my item.
I had a brief moment to observe the sickening irony of my situation—I’d ended up in the building I intended to infiltrate, but so hopelessly stranded from my goal that I may as well have never embarked to Myanmar at all. The room was warm with stale, tropical air, humid and unmoving in the space, and amid it my mind became a turbulent storm of converging emotions. One moment I felt deeply ashamed at being captured, deserving of any punishment that ensued, the next intensely vulnerable and fearful for my physical safety. A frantic desire to escape, mixed with the sheer helplessness at being unable to do so.
