“That!” The lieutenant pointed farther up the road. “Those men went missing from the convoy when we were ambushed on the first day.”
Three Thai soldiers had been tied to a banyan tree with wire. Even from this distance you saw that their throats had been slit and signs—like the ones we had seen before entering the jungle—dangled from their waists; I zoomed in so Kristen could see the writing.
“The signs all say the same thing,” Kristen told me. “Spies. And Lieutenant?”
“Call me Bug, Kristen.”
“Yes, Bug. The Thai officer is radioing to the rest of his men to reverse down the road. He is taking the convoy back to Bangkok.”
I pushed Jihoon out of the way and swung my arm, slapping the side of the Thai lieutenant’s helmet so he fell, sprawling facedown across the road and dropping his carbine. I knelt on his back. The man’s backpack unit was simple, and his radio light blinked as it sent bursts upward through the canopy, invisible pigeons that by now could have given away our position to either Burmese infiltrators or the Gra Jaai themselves, but then the satos already knew where we were, and the bodies had been a message: the mayor and his wife had been innocent. It took less than a second to deactivate his radio while the lieutenant struggled.
I yanked him to his feet and slapped him again. “You don’t turn this convoy around unless we tell you to.” Kristen sounded like she had put just the right amount of anger in the words, but it was hard to tell.
“The Gra Jaai are crazy,” he said. I heard him sobbing now and wondered how old the guy was. “They’ll kill us all. This isn’t my first time on a supply run; I know what I’m talking about.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Explain it to me.”
The lieutenant removed his helmet and vision hood, then wiped sweat and tears from his face. “Up there, the Gra Jaai are in charge, not the Army. We supply them—on orders from the King himself—but once we enter the mountains, it’s like entering another country, a nightmare. They fear nothing. Can do anything they want.”
“Were those men,” I asked, pointing at the bodies, “spies? Could they have given away the convoy information?”
He looked down. “They were new to my unit. I didn’t know them well. None of us did; they didn’t really try to make friends with the other men and disappeared last night.”
“Then they got exactly what they deserved. Gear up, Lieutenant. Get this convoy moving forward; we can’t waste any time unless you like the thought of sleeping out here tonight.”
“I am not moving another centimeter forward.”
I sympathized with the guy. He hated satos more than I did, and now that I saw his face, I knew he was younger than Jihoon—maybe hadn’t been exposed to the horrors of a bush war until recently—and from behind me I sensed that the bodies had an effect on Ji too because he shifted nervously, the sound of his carbine clicking every time it changed hands. But there wasn’t time for any of this.
I pointed my carbine at the lieutenant’s forehead and clicked onto the general frequency so everyone could hear Kristen’s translation. “We’re on a priority mission and have to make it to the line today; you know it and I know it and nobody in Bangkok will mind if I shoot you here. So get this thing going, Lieutenant. Forward. Now.”
By now, all the vehicle engines were off, and I realized just how weird it had gotten. Silent. When it got that quiet, bad things happened, and the jungle secreted anticipation, holding its breath until the shit started flying, the infinite shades of green surrounding us with a sickening sensation of being in a place that was part fun house, part nightmare. You just knew that the Gra Jaai loved the jungle and bathed in its heat, wiped their asses with the morning fog that settled in low spots. They breathed the bush. Out here there were worse things than the Burmese Army, things that nobody wanted to see, and while I waited for the lieutenant to tell his men to load up and push on, it occurred to me that the Gra Jaai had taken root in the deep green the same way the banyans had; if I were a Burmese infiltrator, I would never go here alone, never with anything less than a platoon or maybe a battalion. Finally the lieutenant nodded and pulled his helmet on.
“Let’s get our gear,” I said to Ji. “From here on out, we ride on the lieutenant’s APC so we can keep an eye on things.”
“Even the Thai troops are scared of them,” he said. “Of the satos.”
I nodded, and we jogged back to grab our gear and then made our way to the column’s front. Jihoon helped me onto the lead vehicle.
“Are you scared of them?” I asked. “The Gra Jaai?”
“I don’t know what I am. It makes sense that three men from the convoy would have been responsible for the ambush, though. On the other hand, who’s going to pay for the fact that the Thais screwed up and killed the mayor?”
The lieutenant’s APC jerked forward, and I risked taking my helmet off for a cigarette, breathing the smoke as deeply as I could and then holding it there, willing it to calm my nerves. “Why should anyone pay, Chong? It’s just war.”
The trucks behind us kicked up red dust and slid from side to side until their wheels found traction, taking all of us farther into the bush. Closer to Margaret. The convoy slowed to a crawl a few miles later, and one by one the vehicles turned onto a rocky track, even more narrow and rutted than the road we left, and we headed up the side of a steep mountain so that at times my legs—which hung off the APC’s side—dangled over near-vertical drop-offs. Other times you couldn’t see the cliffs because the jungle was too thick, but they were there, and I knew it the same way I knew that we were being watched; the girls were in the bush, and I didn’t need sniffers to tell me because it made sense that they’d want to observe, to gauge our reaction to finding the Thai soldiers. Satos and the bush were synonymous.
The deeper we went, the hotter it got.
It didn’t matter that we were aboveground; out there, the canopy formed a different kind of subterrene. At one point the road narrowed and vegetation formed a tunnel through which we pushed at five kilometers an hour, branches cracking as the APCs squeezed through the shadows and into a dim kind of green light that made everything look sickly. We heard firing in the distance. Not plasma weapons, but a deep rumbling that I hadn’t forgotten since the last time I was there, when ancient artillery—of a caliber that sounded immense—drove everyone into holes. As we neared the line, vibrations shook the branches around us and every once in a while a limb would crash and the convoy would stop to clear the road, making the last part of the journey a crawl. It was just before sundown. But even though the sun must have still been visible from other parts of the country, where we were the road had gone dark so that my thermal imaging kicked in, changing the scene from green to varying shades of gray and white; I felt better when the green faded into memory.
On thermal, the banyans looked even more alien, things that had landed from above to spread gray limbs over rocks, cracking boulders at the roadside to send fragments into the path of our wheels. Nothing resisted their roots. Even if it took a lifetime, the trees had the patience to wait infinitely, however long they needed to destroy rock and earth. Our motors whined and spat, echoing against the distant mountains while we tried our best to stay on the trail, bouncing over the rocks until the path emptied into a clearing and dumped us in front of a structure where everyone dismounted. The sight of it made me shiver—an ancient Buddhist temple that had been partially destroyed by engineers who’d mined a circular, ten-meter hole through its side.
A sign over a main tunnel entrance said Supply in English, but Kristen translated the Thai anyway, and I watched as the soldiers began stringing hoses into the tunnel’s mouth, disappearing as they went to hook up with underground storage tanks. It would be some time before the tankers drained their loads. Other Thais began ferrying cases and crates from the trucks, and at first there was no sign of anyone manning the place, but as the men moved their materiel, a single sato emerged to lounge against the temple wall so she
could watch and light a cigarette.
“She’s staring at you,” said Jihoon, and his voice crackled on helmet speakers.
It was true. The girl looked at me as she inhaled, a white spark from her cigarette obscuring everything except the eyes and a bizarre insouciance, out of place in our current surroundings and with artillery still impacting a klick up the mountainside. “Maybe she likes my helmet.”
“You ever think that maybe those chicks are psychic?”
“Are you nuts?”
Ji chuckled, and in the distance we heard the impacts stop, a sudden silence that made things even creepier.
“I’m serious. Like she knows who you are and what you do for a living.”
“She knows what we are because we’re wearing modern US armor and stick out like a sore thumb. So sure. If that’s your definition of psychic.”
He motioned with his carbine at the entrance. “We’ll have to go in there, Bug. Once they’ve finished shifting supplies.”
“I know.”
“I’m just sayin’. Don’t freak out or anything.”
The tunnel was like none I’d ever seen, and it struck me as blasphemous that they’d bored through such an ancient structure, a tremendous monument consisting of eight-foot rock slabs that interlocked seamlessly; much of the temple had become so overgrown with vines that it seemed to have sprung from the earth as half tree and half stone, belonging there, and even the patches that weren’t shrouded in stranglers had gone black with mold. Then again, tunneling through it made perfect sense. To the satos, the temple would have been blasphemous, a monument to their God’s competitor, and so taking a fusion borer and watching it melt its way through the stone would have brought smiles to their faces, and for all I knew it was why the one watching me was so happy right now.
When the trucks finished unloading, the troops loaded back into their vehicles, which managed to turn around and head back onto the road that had brought us.
“I thought they’d stay here for the night,” said Jihoon.
“Guess the lieutenant would rather risk going over a cliff or getting ambushed than spend a night with these chicks.”
“Or in this place.”
“And I can’t say I blame them.” I slung my carbine and headed toward the tunnel entrance, just as the barrage started again, bringing shells closer this time. The girl stopped us before we could enter.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“American advisers. We’re supposed to report to Major Remorro.”
She didn’t say anything at first and just stared some more. Then the chick ground her cigarette on her armored forearm and motioned with her carbine that we should walk ahead. “We’ll see.”
Jihoon cleared his throat, and I tried sending him a psychic message to just shut up but knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“What’s your name?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he tried again, but the chick wasn’t about to talk with us, and it pissed me off.
“I think I recognize her, Chong.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. She looks just like a hundred other engineered betties I’ve wasted.”
But she was cool. The girl never even breathed faster as far as I could tell and just kept walking behind us, staring beyond and in front, her eyes not needing infrared or light amplification to see in what must have been near total darkness. Our feet splashed in a shallow stream of water that grew deeper as we advanced, the tunnel floor sloping downward so that with each step it was as though the pressure increased, rock overhead getting thicker and heavier. Finally, the main tunnel opened into a large chamber—a hangar—and overhead lighting forced our vision kits back to normal.
Before I knew what had happened, the sato behind me pushed us to the ground while six others jumped out on either side, stripping us of our weapons and pressing their carbines against the back of my helmet so that I couldn’t move my head.
“What is this?” I said, getting even more pissed off. “We’re here on orders to meet with a Major Remorro.”
I couldn’t see the girl who answered. “You’re Special Forces. American.”
“So?”
“So we can’t use you here.”
I closed my eyes. It was funny, but at that moment when I thought it was over, there wasn’t any fear but there wasn’t any peace either, just a sense of amazement because it had all happened in a few seconds and left me wondering: Would it hurt? What did dying feel like? I sensed that the girls had all tensed in preparation to squeeze off bursts into our heads, but then someone ran up to us shouting.
“They’re here to see me,” the guy pleaded, but I couldn’t see him. “Jesus, do we have to go through this every time one of my guys shows up? They’re number one, not here for genetics; number one, I swear to God.”
“Don’t say God ever again,” the one behind me said.
“OK, but I swear these guys are number one; they’re not here for you or your sisters.”
Silence. I lifted my head, pushing against their carbines so I could get a better look, but one of them kicked me, jamming my faceplate into wet rock, after which they let us up. I watched as the group sauntered away in silence with carbines perched on their shoulders. The man who’d saved us helped me to my feet, then waited for Jihoon and me to collect our gear before shaking hands.
“Major Remorro, Special Forces adviser to the Thai Army.”
I pulled my headgear off and grinned. “We always get such a warm reception up here?”
“This?” The major glanced at the girls and whistled. “That was nothing. You should see them when they capture a Mimi.”
“Mimi?” Jihoon asked.
“Myanmar troops,” Remorro explained. “The Burmese Army, the Tatmadaw.”
Major Remorro was tall and so thin that with his helmet off it looked as though he could wriggle out of his armor through the neck ring, and you almost heard his arms and legs thumping against the insides of his carapace. He looked like he was in pain. A thin beard grew from his face, and his head was bald, shaved, so that my focus shifted to the eyes, a pair of glassy ones that saw everything and around which dark circles had formed to make the guy look half–beaten up. It was a vacant look I recognized at once—either he was sick, exhausted, or mentally gone, and maybe all three.
“Follow me,” the major said. “And hurry up before they change their mind.”
He led us through the hangar, where we wove our way through countless APCs covered with dust from never having been used, and stacks of crates and supplies took up every spare inch so that we had to wriggle our way between them before the major led us to a wide exit tunnel leading deeper under the mountain. Deeper into rock. On our way we passed more of the Gra Jaai. The dim blue of combat lights made their faces look pale, but most of them were men with a few Asian women, and all had dark stains on their chins. They spat on the tunnel floors. Their eyes were half-glazed and watched us with a passing interest that showed no understanding of who or what we were.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
The major glanced at one. “A lot of the Gra Jaai take drugs in addition to chewing betel nut. To get closer.”
“Closer to what?” asked Jihoon.
“To her. To perfect. Who the hell knows for sure, but welcome to the world’s deepest crap hole because you’ve stepped into it now.”
I glanced at another one, a Japanese-looking woman who smiled up at me as she sprawled along the tunnel floor, half submerged in the stream of water and waste that ran down its center. “Closer to Margaret?”
The major shook his head. “To Catherine the Eternal, the maker of the one path. You assholes have a lot to learn. Now shut the hell up before you get us all killed.”
The deeper we went, the tighter I wound, and soon water dripped from above, pattering on our helmets so that it sounded like rain; at the same time it made our footing slippery and the walls glistened in the dim lighting. This was like no tunnel I’d seen. While on the one hand ever
ything looked disorganized and filthy, on the other you could tell that this was the look of war, of a place and people who had lived with it for years, and so while filth accumulated, it was a sign of having decided to spend time on more important things instead of cleaning up. I warned myself not to underestimate the inhabitants. We were rubes here, and my face was hot with shame—of having thought that I had known the bush. I did know it. But since then the bush had married with subterrene, and this was their deformed child, a kind of mutant and decrepit earthworm that had swallowed me whole, and this was its guts.
Eventually the major led us into a bunker, through a one-meter tunnel that forced us to crawl for at least five minutes, and by the time we exited, my knees ached to the point where I had trouble standing. With the exception of us and the major, the bunker held one occupant—just as skinny and pale as Remorro.
He grinned at us from around a long clay pipe, its thick smoke filling the tiny area. “Welcome to our little corner of hell, Lieutenants. I’m Captain Orcola. You two can have the top racks.”
The major collapsed on one of four bunks without removing his armor. Other than racks the room held a pair of chairs and a desk, on top of which lay computer after computer, and multiple video screens that showed views of the jungle somewhere far above. Jihoon peeled his helmet and hood off and glanced at me. We stood there for a moment, the artillery above shaking tiny clouds of rock dust from ten feet overhead.
“There’s no exit tunnel,” I said. “Nothing except the one we came in.”
Remorro nodded, his eyes already shut. “Yeah.”
“So what if it collapses behind us?”
“Then it collapses. Now if you don’t mind, Lieutenant, I’d like to get some shut-eye. There’s plenty of time to get acquainted in the morning.”
“If there is a morning,” Orcola added.
Jihoon and I stowed our gear in a corner, and when he began peeling off his armor, I stopped him.
“Why?” he whispered.
“Because we’re on the line now. Jack into the waste port every few hours and you never take it off from here on out, except your helmet.”
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 16
