Silent Arsenal

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?

The more he thought about it, General Nuyaung suspected someone had launched germ warfare against his country. But who? Why? Relations with neighboring China, Laos, Thailand, India and Bangladesh were anything but strained. The surrounding countries, naturally, guarded their borders, and those in charge of any nation always frowned and attempted to turn back or eliminate refugee hordes. There were, he knew, the occasional border skirmishes, usually involving contraband, but nothing so volatile as to warrant their neighbors unleashing a plague that could wipe out the entire population of Myanmar. And if the attacker was a neighboring country, they risked cross-border contamination. Then who?

It was an hour of madness, he knew, either way, but extreme measures were being initiated to, hopefully, contain the outbreak. There was still hope—if the situation was at least under control in the quarantined sectors, or all potential human contaminants eliminated, infected corpses removed then burned in some inaccessible stretch of jungle—he could save the product and meet his self-imposed deadline. Peasant workers and soldiers alike were easy enough to replace. His greatest fear, beyond personal risk of infection, was that perhaps the vast acreage of poppy and the refinery itself were contaminated.

Nuyaung flipped the file on the seat beside him. He tried to will away the images of the contorted death masks of victims and their faces riddled with red sores and bumps oozing pus, but they were branded in his mind. Perhaps, he considered, it was a grave mistake, after all, to expand heroin production outside the Shan State. But worldwide demand was up, particularly now that various Islamic organizations were gobbling up massive quantities of product, using the funds to finance the future of jihad, no doubt in clamoring search for weapons of mass destruction.

Having lost himself racking his thoughts for solutions to a variety of problems, he suddenly found his chopper hovering over the courtyard. The latest arrivals, some five hundred soldiers, were divided as evenly as possible throughout the stricken zones. Nuyaung stared into the inferno below, then saw a squad of SLORC soldiers dragging two robed monks past the three statues of the warrior guardians set near the three lions and three-headed elephant in front of the temple. The monks were still alive, one of them attempting to break free of the latex-gloved hands clamped around his shoulders. Nuyaung knew the filter masks the troops wore would be no protection against the plague if it was an airborne contagion, assumed the stench of burning flesh down there would bring his men to their knees if their faces weren’t covered. HAZMAT suits—the few that could be scrounged from various military and medical facilities—were reserved for the team of doctors. Depending on what he heard, he would pull rank, claim a HAZMAT suit for himself.

Nuyaung turned away as the monks were tossed into the fire. He glimpsed the towering plumes of black smoke, north and east, decided he could wait on reports about the sanitizing of contaminated peasant villages. He punched the intercom button, told his pilot, “Take me to the refinery. I will tell you where to land when we arrive.”

“THIS IS NOT the right time, Khisa. They are too many.”

She felt the fire burn behind her eyes, willed herself to hold back the tears, holding on to rage and hatred.

Ashre Nwa was right, she knew, but wondered, just the same, how much longer she could bear to watch the slaughter of innocent people she had sworn to protect, or avenge, before raw emotion compelled her to strike. If an attack was potential suicide before, the odds against even a pyrrhic victory were now clearly insurmountable.

Whatever happened as a result of the explosion had seen the quick arrival of more Barking Dogs, more helicopter gunships than she could count. A shock attack, unless she was committed to suicide and the senseless massacre of her fighters, was beyond hope. Five tanks had been airlifted into the surrounding area just after dawn, followed by still more soldiers, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft batteries—an impregnable barrier.

Then there were men in space suits and the plastic tents hastily erected outside the perimeters of the villages, cylinders and steel tubes and vats, computers and other equipment she couldn’t possibly identify….

They were makeshift laboratories, she knew, the men in space suits drawing blood from both villagers and soldiers alike who had fallen ill. What had happened here? If this was some testing ground for a biological weapon engineered in Yangon, surely the SLORC wouldn’t use their own soldiers as guinea pigs. And if she and her fighters remained in the area, would they, too, become stricken by whatever sickness appeared to claim the lives of victims within a matter of hours?

For more than two days now she had remained with her fighters, high up in the hills, hidden in the forest, an umbrella of mist of suspended clouds shielding them from the flock of helicopter gunships patrolling the skies. With mounting rage, she had watched the Barking Dogs gun down every man, woman and child of the three largest villages in the vicinity of where, she assumed, the blast had detonated. They dragged them out of their bamboo huts. They dumped bodies—some of which, she observed, were still moving—into pits dug out by heavy machinery flown in by still more giant transport helicopters. They poured gasoline over both the living and the dead, ignited mass graves with flamethrowers before soldiers moved on, torching every last hut, every living thing. The screams of victims burning alive still echoed in her head. The call of the murdered, she told herself, crying out for justice from the grave.

Demanding vengeance.

She looked away from the burning pit, the meandering space suits, the soldiers with flamethrowers burning down what few huts still stood, and searched the faces of her fighters. Beyond anger, she saw they were frightened, wondering, most likely, what horror had been unleashed on the Kachin.

“We will return to camp. We are going to need outside help,” she told them. “I know what has to be done.”

She turned away, shaking with fury, leading her fighters down the hill toward the river. Whatever was happening, they all knew there was far more to fear now than just the Barking Dogs.

“REPORT. AND DO NOT tell me you have no answers.”

General Nuyaung was still waving back Dr. Angkhu, working nervous surveillance around the space suit, taking in the commotion of soldiers hard at it, disposing of corpses. The filter mask staved off the fumes of burning flesh, but now that he was on the ground, smack in the middle of a contaminated zone, Nuyaung felt the fear rising. Bodies were still being hauled by soldiers from tents, dumped into a mass grave, men in space suits wandering in and out of the plastic tents, heavy machinery unearthing more mass graves. He spotted the bloody carcass of a tiger, a figure with leaking guts stretched out near the large bamboo hut. He saw Angkhu follow his stare, the doctor’s voice muffled by his helmet.

“Colonel Lingpau.”

“Speak up!”

“He was attacked,” Angkhu said, “this morning. It is most unusual, distressing to inform you this, but I would urge caution, especially at night. Three other tigers have been seen—”

“I do not care about that. A tiger can be shot! And why hasn’t Colonel Lingpau’s body been burned?”

“Major Kyin. He was uncertain whether you would desire…such a disposal of a fellow officer.”

Nuyaung bellowed at the closest group of soldiers to throw the colonel’s body and the tiger carcass into the fire.

“What are we faced with?” he shouted at Angkhu.

“I…we… Initial tests are inconclusive.”

“Inconclusive!”

“It is a filo or a thread virus. But it is unlike any virus we have ever seen. Its DNA appears a combination of smallpox, malaria, perhaps another genetically mutated virus—we are not certain. But whatever it is, it multiplies at an extreme rapid rate in a host. First symptoms of outbreak occur within two hours.”

“Is it airborne? Can you become infected by mere contact with a carrier?”

“For our purposes, I believe we would be better served if we could study this back in Yangon—”

“No one leaves here until I have answers. What about the refinery?”

“If you are asking if the refinery is contaminated, the answer is no. Viruses do not simply go away, they merely hide. A virus needs a live host.”

“Watch your tongue! I am not completely ignorant of the situation, Doctor. I sense you are holding something back. What is your expert opinion? How bad is it?”

“The virus, in my expert opinion, is a hybrid cross, created in a laboratory. It—”

Nuyaung gritted his teeth, waiting, the look in Angku’s eyes warning him he would not like the answer. “Speak!”

“I am afraid this particular virus, General, is one hundred percent fatal.”

NAHIRA MUHDU no longer prayed for deliverance from evil. God, she believed, knew the horror she was leaving behind, aware, too, of her needs. If she—and her only surviving family—were to survive the journey, reach safety inside the border of Kenya, then it was God’s will. She was too tired, so parched from thirst the tears had ceased flowing, too weak from hunger, even, to pray.

It had been…what? she wondered, feeling the blood squish in sandals worn down to ragged strands of leather, each yard earned over rock-stubbled broken ground shooting pain through every nerve ending. Three weeks? A month since she had set out on foot with the other villagers from Bhion and the vast surrounding southern plain?

They had been driven out by marauding rebel troops at war with the government of Addis Ababa, and the entire country appeared under assault by rebels and soldiers alike, men who were more like wild beasts than anything human. Killing. Burning. Looting. Raping. The horrors of a new war with Eritrea had spread from the north where Eritrean soldiers were invading the Tigray region. She had heard her country was losing the latest war with Eritrea, mauled Ethiopian troops falling back to the plains of the south, renegade soldiers taking what they wanted from defenseless villages so they could live to fight—or murder—another day.

Famine, drought and civil war were nothing new to Ethiopia, she knew, but the past six months had become a living hell, her country gone mad with violence and brutality, villages in flames from the Tigray to the Darod, reports of mass graves littering the countryside. Drought, then starvation and, finally, the invasion by Eritrea had unleashed anarchy, an evil, it seemed to her, that was much like an avalanche gathering momentum the longer it kept rolling.

And the evil of other men had found her. Remaining in her homeland was certain death. Small comfort, but she wasn’t alone in misery.

Her anger and grief had withered some the first week out of the village, exhaustion and hunger dampening raw emotion, but the memory of her husband, shot dead by the killers of the Free Ethiopian Order of Islam, was still fresh, as if it happened only minutes ago. What they hadn’t burned, they plundered, seizing every last grain of wheat, every handful of sorghum they could find. The horror of the past, the dreaded uncertainty of tomorrow, and she wondered if peace would simply come with her own death.

And they had been falling dead in greater numbers the past week.

Only yesterday had she buried in a shallow grave, dug by rock with the help of fellow refugees, two of her three sons, ages four and six. The weeping was over, only the ghosts from a life taken haunting her every step. So weary now, her fingers aching, the flesh raw and crusted with dried blood where she had clawed out the hard earth, there was nothing to do anymore but to keep moving, to keep hoping. There was a life to consider beyond her own, the tiny, emaciated frame of Izwhal, swathed in filthy rags, she determined, her final reason to live. She couldn’t recall the last time either of them had eaten.