by Jason Kasper
My pulse began to rise to a panicked state as my mind became gripped by sheer hysteria. Don’t lose control, I thought. Focus. I shifted backward, felt my shoulder hit a wall, and sank against it. Sliding to the floor, I took long, measured breaths, forcing oxygen into my system until the pulse slamming in my brain began to quiet.
Control. Control. What next? Two options—death or escape. No one would come for me. But even as I acknowledged the need to escape at all costs, I couldn’t begin to fathom how. There were no other prisoners, no distractions for my captors—my breath began to quicken again.
Don’t think so far ahead, I thought. Make it one more breath, then two. Five breaths, then ten. You’re David Rivers, I told myself, a whisper of mental strength returning. You’ve been through combat, bloodied but never broken. You’ll find a way—you have to. For Ian. The only thing that can stop you is yourself. Karma’s voice…You know the only thing that’s the end of the world, David? The end of the world. You can recover from everything else…
The sharp creak of the door being thrown open was my only warning before thundering boots entered, flashlights shone in my face, and I was punched in the side of the head. Multiple men surrounded me, holding me down as the blindfold was put back on.
Then a gun barrel was pressed squarely to the center of my forehead.
“Do it,” a man shouted. “Or die.”
“What? Do what?”
The pressure of the barrel lifted.
“Stand.”
I struggled to rise, bracing myself against the wall for support, but a sudden kick to my groin felled me in place with a scream of agony.
“I say STAND! You do fast!”
Grunting, I fought my way upward to a crouched position, the pain spreading from my testicles into my guts.
“Take clothes off.”
“What?”
A hard backhand across my jaw, hot blood filling my mouth.
“Take clothes off. You touch blindfold, I kill.”
I stripped off my shirt, dropping it to the floor beside me and facing the voice. A moment’s hesitation before a sharp uppercut impacted my stomach.
“Take clothes off!”
I sucked in a breath and unfastened my pants, shucking them off my legs and peeling off my socks and boxers before he had a chance to hit me again. The sound of laughing and Burmese taunts filled the room. From what I could tell, at least five men were sharing the humor at my expense.
“You cold, America? No man, here.”
More laughs. I said nothing.
Hands on my shoulders turned me in place, shoving me against the wall. They pulled my arms behind my back, slid the plastic loop of a new cable tie around both wrists, and cinched it so tight it cut off blood to my hands. Then they shoved me down onto a sitting position on the floor.
I heard a slosh of water just before a torrent of it splashed down over my head. Gasping, I heard the laughter roll backward out of the room, followed by the door slamming shut.
I began to shake almost immediately as the air temperature turned freezing with my abrupt soaking. Falling onto my side, I tried to force my butt over the cable tie to bring my hands to my front. My left arm surged with the same dazzling pain that had accompanied being shot months earlier, and I quickly realized that getting my restrained hands around my pelvis was impossible.
Struggling to my knees instead, I shuffled to a wall and smeared my face against the rough cinderblocks until my blindfold dislodged. Eventually I was able to get it off altogether, finding that the room was bathed in darkness but for a sliver of light at the entrance.
Pressing my back to the door, I probed its tinny surface with my fingertips but found no bolt or lock. Then I tested the handle, which held firm. I shivered with dampness, and briefly considered using my bare feet to locate my pants so I could contort my legs into them.
Instead I stepped sideways along the perimeter of my cell, feeling the wall with fingers beginning to tingle from lack of circulation. I had to find some sharp corner or edge to saw the cable tie against before my hands went completely numb.
But before I could, the door swung open.
Cetan entered with his lantern, pulling the door shut behind him. I turned to face my interrogator, naked but towering over him, knowing I could overpower and kill him before anyone could enter and stop me.
But enter they would, and I’d be executed in this fucking room.
My voice sounded low, angry as I spoke. “This is what you meant by water?”
“No, this not me.” He set the lamp down and procured his medical shears. I turned away from him as he clipped the cable tie open and a rush of blood returned to my fingertips. I spun to see Cetan looking over my naked body as I found my boxers and pants, pulling them over my legs as he spoke.
“I see you have many scars. Do not make more. Now talk. What you do here, Adam?”
I had to tell him something—if he left empty-handed, my next beating was going to escalate to the point of permanent injury.
I slipped into my shirt before responding through my teeth, “America sent me.”
“No. This lie.”
“It’s true. Contact my embassy. Tell them you found Adam.”
“You lie me, I no stop soldier. They hurt you, you no speak.”
Hell, I thought, if I was going to play an American agent I may as well act the part.
“No. Not anymore.”
“No?”
“I’m an American named Adam.” I made up a social security number, providing an old phone number minus the last two digits as Cetan struggled to document it on a notepad.
“Check with my embassy. They’ll confirm my identity. If I am hurt any more, my government will not be happy and neither will yours. My country knows I’m in Laukkai and they’ll be looking for me very soon. Contact my embassy and they will negotiate my return.”
“We see. You tell truth, you get help. You lie…things not go well.”
Cetan snatched his lamp, then pounded three times on the door. It opened a moment later, his lamp illuminating the far wall and projecting the shadows of other men before I was once again locked in.
The back of my neck burned with a mix of shame, guilt, and murderous rage. It would take them time to contact and receive a response from the US Embassy, time that I desperately needed to plan an escape.
Suddenly the door flung open, and a group of men flooded the room as one shouted, “Turn around!”
I did so immediately, facing the wall before I was roughly blindfolded. They spun me around, using a cable tie to bind my hands to my front this time—that much was an improvement. The tie was pulled snug but not constrictively tight. Someone tilted my chin upward, then placed a plastic cup to my lips.
I greedily drank as much water as I could, reveling in the refreshment to my parched throat. They finished pouring, and the final drops ran down my chin as they left the room, slamming the door behind them. A few sips of water, my reward for beginning to provide information.
I quickly rubbed my fingertips across the cell walls, feeling for anything sharp enough to saw my cable tie against. My mind boiled with the embarrassment of what everyone who’d ever doubted me would say if they ever found out about this jaunt—particularly Sage, who already thought I was just a trigger-puller surviving at the mercy of her strategic vision. I imagined her rage if she discovered I’d undertaken a disastrously impossible solo incursion.
And every member of my previous paramilitary team—Boss, Ophie, and especially Matz—would be rolling in their graves if they knew what I’d just done.
My stomach churned when Cetan came back much sooner than expected, the door locking behind him as he set his propane lamp down on the floor, his face lit from below.
He took out the medical shears, and I extended my wrists toward him. But he paused instead, placing the scissors back into his pocket. “No. You not cooperate. Your embassy say they never hear of you.”
Had he called, or was he bluffing? Ne
ither would have surprised me.
“That’s impossible,” I rasped. “Any duty officer there will be able to tell you.”
Cetan shook his head gravely. “AK-47, a Makarov, night eye. Mercenary beard. You are no lost tourist. Maybe you think you helping freedom fighter? No freedom fighter here. The border states are corrupt. Kokang worst of all. Illegal casinos. Trafficking weapons, trafficking drugs. Fifty heroin refineries, Kokang alone. Trafficking human beings.”
“I’m not trying to help anyone but my country.”
“These soldier outside, they want kill you. Not me. You tell me one thing, I cut you deal. No prison. Home arrest in state facility. I only want know one thing: why you come here to depot? You tell whole truth now, I not ask again—”
The booming thunderclap of an explosion rattled the floor beneath me, and the light from his propane lamp flickered before resuming full strength.
Cetan jumped at the noise, his face assuming an expression of sudden terror—no dogged veteran of ground combat, this one. I heard the escalating reverberation of machineguns firing in bursts outside.
The rebel counterattack had begun.
Men began shouting in the hallway, followed by the receding thumps of their boots as they raced out of the building.
Cetan turned to pound on the door, but I slipped my arms over his head before he had time to finish raising his fist.
Pulling my wrists against his neck, I pinched his throat shut with the cable tie. Cetan’s choking noises were lost in the gunfire as I maintained pressure until his entire body went limp.
I lowered him to the ground beside the lamp and released his throat before he suffocated to death—killing him wasn’t worth the repercussions if I couldn’t escape. I retrieved the medical shears from his pocket, hastily sliding the blunted tip of the blade between my wrist and the cable tie.
My fumbling hands lost control of the scissors, dropping them in the dim light. I mumbled a curse, frantically sweeping my fingertips across the floor until I found them. Then I forced myself to take a breath and focus intently. Placing my wrists beside the lamp, I maneuvered the scissor blades around the cable tie, then slipped my thumbs through the handles and squeezed to cut my restraint with a satisfying clip.
I dropped the scissors, desperately wanting to strip Cetan’s uniform and don it in an effort to buy even a second’s hesitation from any troops standing between me and safety. But his clothes were far too small for me, and the time required to make the switch too long—I had to exploit the confusion of the moment or I’d lose my sole fleeting advantage.
I ripped off Cetan’s boots instead, stuffing my feet in—the boots were far too small, but cramped and uncomfortable footwear was better than being barefoot for what I was about to attempt. Quickly patting down his pockets, I found he’d brought nothing with him but the shears. I pounded on the door three times, exactly as Cetan had done when trying to exit. Unlike before, there was no immediate response—all or most of the junta soldiers had just run off to fight.
I checked the handle, finding it locked tight, and then knocked again as loudly as I could. A sudden earsplitting blast shook my room, followed by a second, then a third, the entire depot now reverberating—the S-60 anti-aircraft gun had opened fire outside. I pounded more frantically on the door.
As I was about to test my luck in kicking it, someone unlocked the door from the outside. I threw my full weight against it just as it started to crack open, bursting into the hallway expecting multiple guards—instead, there was only one left after the others ran off to fight. Not much taller than Cetan, he was scrambling to raise his rifle with a shout of alarm drowned out by cannon booms.
I tackled him with a visceral intensity, my body’s entire adrenal supply coursing through my blood at once. Straddling his slight frame, I drove a fist across his face hard enough to scatter teeth with a spray of blood. Then I grabbed his head with both hands and smashed it against the floor until he went unconscious.
Looking about like a startled animal, I saw a hallway that was empty in both directions. I stripped the guard’s weapon—no wonder he couldn’t shoot me in time. It was a hideous bullpup assault rifle, the selector awkwardly located on the left side of a buttstock from which a curved magazine extended. I slung it over my shoulder and dragged its owner’s body into the room with Cetan.
The hallway was still empty, but that was a very temporary situation—clearly they’d left the most inept of their ranks to guard the locked cell door, but that would be remedied as soon as the surprise of the rebel counterattack wore off.
The S-60 fire dwarfed the sound of every machinegun, and for a brief moment I considered searching the depot for Sage’s item.
But I realized that would be the worst decision I’d made since embarking on my solo mission. I was no longer a crusading warrior flinging myself into danger—my psyche was a fragile eggshell of its former self, I was starving, about to be hunted, driven to madness by lack of sleep and abject fear.
Unsure of my location in the building, and likely seconds from being discovered, I fled in the opposite direction of the gunfire, hoping to move away from enemy contact and therefore guard presence. I turned a corner and saw sunlight streaming in through a door left partially ajar. Beyond it I could hear the chatter of machineguns and deep booms of rockets impacting between blasts from the S-60 cannon, and it occurred to me that the last time I’d been so close to an anti-aircraft piece in action was as an invader of Iraq.
Now I was in Myanmar, this time as an evader.
I burst outside into the morning sunlight amid the clashing thunder of war, the sounds a legitimate cause for terror for most, but in that moment they were a sweet, blissful symphony reverberating in my ears, the very sound of freedom.
I looked downhill, seeing two guard bunkers trading shots with rebel fighters in the city. None of the junta soldiers were watching the depot to their rear. I charged between them and into the mass of buildings beyond, adrenaline fueling my pumping legs into the fastest sprint I’d ever managed. A few potshots impacted the wall beside me, but I paid them no mind—I was moving dangerously, recklessly fast now, past one building, then across a street toward another, down an alley, vaulting abandoned bicycles and piles of brick like an Olympic steeplechase champion, moving ninety degrees from the audible shooting.
The entire city was abandoned save military units clashing with the rebels, and this left me a wide berth to make good on my escape. My confidence surged back in full force. I was certain that I wouldn’t trip or make the slightest misstep, certain I could run the two miles back to the cave and have plenty of fuel in the tank to continue beyond that if needed.
And I was right.
Gradually I located the jagged mountaintop I’d departed from the night before, and threaded my way toward it as explosions and gunfire rocked the once quiet town of Laukkai.
11
I was escorted from a panel van into a building—quickly, so I wouldn’t see my surroundings in detail. I’d been kept in the back of the van during the ride from the shrine to our present location, so I truly had no idea where we were.
And I didn’t care.
The floor of the room I entered was lined with pillows, and Tiao directed me to sit as he and Peng joined me in a circle. Kun entered with the same elderly shuffle I’d first seen when he emerged from the shadows of the temple, and he slowly took a seat across from me with assistance from his grandson Cong.
Tiao began, “Car ready to take America back—”
Kun silenced him with a hand and then spoke in Chinese to Cong, who bowed and left the room.
Turning his face to Tiao, Peng, and me in succession, Kun spoke at last. “David, please explain what happened.”
I looked up at the late morning sunlight spilling through the window, casting glowing beams filled with sparkling dust particles.
“I was a guest of the junta overnight. Fairly gracious hosts, as military interrogators go.”
Peng huffed a si
gh of indignation.
Kun raised a gnarled finger toward me. “What did you say of my network?”
“Not a word. I gave them a false name, false identification number, told them to contact the US Embassy for an explanation. I was able to escape during the confusion of the rebel counterattack.”
He lowered his hand to his lap, closing his eyes. “I hope for your sake that you are not lying. As we speak, my sources are obtaining the junta’s report of your interrogation.”
I could only nod, letting the words—and the threat they thinly veiled—pass before responding. “I’m certain of your ability to learn what occurred during my interrogation. Trust that if I betrayed you, Kun, I would not have returned to your protection. My presence here speaks to the fact that I’m telling you the truth—and that I wish to discuss another option.”
“I fear that all options, David, are quite exhausted.”
“Most options, yes. But not all—I’m still a surviving agent.”
“Of a woman who cannot yet be contacted.”
“Therefore I still have full authority to negotiate on her behalf.”
Tiao interjected, “Had full authority. Proper English. Past tense. You fail. Now you go.”
Peng nodded his agreement. “Kokang counterattack failed. They have many casualties. Asked Wa Army to bring two thousand men, but they not arrive until tomorrow.”
I seized on this new information. “If the Kokang and Wa armies make a combined attack on the junta tomorrow, that’s the perfect time to recover the item. I was in that building and saw the confusion that ensued during the counterattack this morning. With two thousand more troops, the junta won’t be able to hold the depot.”
