We were rolling by sunup. I was in the lead car, the same beat-up Toyota that had brought us from Taunggyi. This time, though, I was dressed in fatigues, as were the driver and the two men in the backseat.
Two jeeps rolled out behind us, and a pair of canvas-topped troop carriers followed in their wake.
We rode past the Shan checkpoint and pulled up a mile or so from the government roadblock. Half a dozen men dismounted from one of the troop carriers and disappeared into the brush on either side of the road. The commander – his name, I’d finally learned, was Ne Win – passed out cheroots, and checked his watch as the men lit up and smoked.
Waiting, Ne Win asked me how I felt. I was much better, I told him. I’d been in a bad way the night before, I added, and I hadn’t even recognized the symptoms as malaria.
“Ah,” he said. “You have never had it before?”
“No.”
“Well,” he said, “you will have it again.”
He checked his watch from time to time, and after twenty minutes or so he gave an order and our Toyota headed on down the road, with the other vehicles staying put for the time being. It took us only a couple of minutes to reach the government checkpoint. As before, young men in uniforms trained guns on us, and the same officious martinet strutted over and demanded to see the driver’s papers.
I had a blanket over my lap, and under it I held the machine pistol Ne Win had issued me. It was Czech-made, and I wondered what hands it had passed through before it got all the way to an outpost of Shan insurgents. What kind of tale would it tell if it could talk?
I wondered if our advance party was in position and ready. I wondered how long we’d last if they’d been delayed.
And then I lifted the Skoda a little, aiming across the body of the driver and through the open window at his side. And then, just as the little captain was making some sort of bureaucratic fuss over the driver’s papers, I triggered a burst into his chest.
And all hell broke loose.
Our sharpshooters had managed to get themselves into position, and my gunfire was their signal to open up on the troops who had their guns trained on the Toyota. We took them completely by surprise, and all the shooting was done by our side. Then our men were emerging from the brush at the side of the road, cheering, flushed with success. They piled up the bullet-ridden corpses of the government troop while Ne Win pointed his pistol in the air and fired three spaced shots, a signal to the rest of our forces. By the time they reached us, the jeeps and the troop carriers, the roadblock was dismantled and the weapons and ammunition of the dead enemy soldiers stowed in the trunk of the Toyota.
And we rolled on to attack their camp.
That took a little more doing. The government outpost had numerical superiority – around a hundred and fifty men to our forty – and enjoyed an advantage over us in weaponry. They were in a fortified compound, and had the edge of defending while we had to attack. All things being equal, they would have swamped us.
Fortunately, all things weren’t equal. We had the great advantage of surprise, and they had every reason to be surprised, having had not the slightest intimation of unrest among us. And how could they? There hadn’t been any unrest until my fevered speech – and fevered it was – had turned a quiet group of men into impassioned killers.
So they weren’t expecting us, and indeed a good many of them were still in their beds when we hit them. They responded quickly, I have to give them that, and they fought well, but they were outclassed. Along with everything else, we were better motivated. We were fighting to avenge an Australian durian-eater, and to bring glory to the Shan people, and to hasten the day when the Shan would take their place among the free and independent nations of the world.
They, on the other hand, were just fighting for their lives. They didn’t stand a chance.
We hit them fast and we hit them hard, and it was at once awful and wonderful, as warfare generally is. It catches you up and carries you away, as it has always done since the Israelites went up against the Midianites. I ran around just like all my comrades, firing my gun, dodging bullets that whined overhead, shooting men and seeing them die.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit what a thrill it was. But if combat weren’t exciting, if men didn’t love it, how could it have lasted for all these millennia? The pleasure’s diminished, of course, if you get wounded, and it stops altogether if you get killed. But if you emerge without a scratch, and if your team wins, I swear there’s nothing like it.
When it was over we piled our vehicles with their weapons, along with the sacks of rice and cases of canned goods and cartons of medical supplies we confiscated. Then, when the last of the prisoners had been shot, we placed our explosive charges, blew up the buildings, and headed back to camp.
I had just enough time to eat a meal and drink a pot of tea and tell Katya about the morning’s action. And then the malaria hit me.
It was worse the second day. I couldn’t lie still and it was torture to move. Everything hurt, and I was freezing and burning up all at once, and the fever had me out of my mind, hearing colors and seeing odors and tasting music. I had impassioned conversations with people I’d never met – Pyotr Kropotkin and Lajos Kossuth and Emilio Zapata, to name three who paid visits to my fever-wracked side. I had occasional moments of clarity, and I was just as glad when they were over, because my mind was such that I was better off out of it. Some of the time I was afraid I was going to die, and the rest of the time I was afraid I wasn’t.
I don’t know if the aspirin helped, or the quinine, but I took them when Katya gave them to me. I don’t know if the shwe le maw helped, either, but I drank deep when Katya held a cup to my lips. Sometimes it was boiled water and sometimes it was the orange brandy. Maybe it helped. It certainly didn’t hurt.
And sometime during the night the fever broke. Foul perspiration poured out of me in a flood, soaking the mattress under me and the covers piled on top of me. My pulse slowed and the pains in my limbs receded and I not only knew I was going to live, but I was even glad of it.
“Vanya?”
I looked up at her. “I think I saw angels,” I said, “and you were one of them.”
“You saw many people, Vanya. You had many conversations.”
“I remember the one with Kropotkin,” I said. “I was asking him about some points that always bothered me in his pamphlet, On Mutual Aid. And he answered my questions, but I can’t remember what he said.”
“He was not really here, Vanya.”
“Well, I know that,” I said. “Still, if his arguments were valid, it would be useful if I could remember them. Whether he was here or not.”
“You are here,” she said. “That is what is important.”
And damned if she didn’t slip under the covers with me, with predictable (but still surprising) results.
Afterward she curled up beside me and slept, her breath warm against my shoulder. I thought about the events of the day, and the horrible joys of war. The only part I hadn’t liked was when my Shan brothers had shot the handful of men who had tried to surrender. It was fairly standard – an insurgent army can’t be expected to care for prisoners, and the troops who’d thrown up their hands had done so with no real hope of survival. Ne Win’s men, never having signed the Geneva Convention, were not bound by it. They didn’t torture their prisoners, or mock them, or make cruel sport of them. They simply gunned them down.
I understood it, but I didn’t like it much. Aside from that, I had a distressingly good time. I shot some people before they could shoot me, I stood shoulder to shoulder with other like-minded men, and I had the good fortune to be on the winning side. When it was all over, we brought home six dead and four wounded, which had to rank as remarkably light casualties in a battle that had cost upward of a hundred and fifty government lives, plus the ten troops we’d gunned down at the roadblock checkpoint.
A famous victory, I thought. It wasn’t the Battle of Blenheim, and it didn’t have Robert Southey to write a poem about it, but when the Shan state achieved independence, it might rate a mention in the high school history books.
So I thought about it, and about the relationship of war and testosterone, and the previously unnoted aphrodisiacal effects of malaria. And about Stuart, in whose memory the day’s slaughter had been undertaken.
And other things, things to think about while I waited for the dawn.
While Katya and I breakfasted on duck eggs and sticky rice, the rest of the camp was a beehive of activity. It was only a question of time until army headquarters in Rangoon sent a brigade to avenge yesterday’s action, and Ne Win wanted to be prepared.
Katya wanted to know what would happen. I wondered myself. Would Ne Win try to defend the little compound? Or would his troops slip away into the hills, pausing now and then to ambush the SLORC regulars, then disappearing before the army could exact retribution?
There was something to be said for either approach, but we weren’t going to be around for it. Because, as soon as we’d finished our meal, he put us in a car, assigned us a driver, and sent us off to Thailand.
“Evan Turner,” he said, “you are a true Shan brother.” He placed a hand on my head, where, were I still a monk, I’d be well advised to shave. “You were a splendid monk,” he assured me, “but an even better soldier. A safe journey, my friend.”
By nightfall we were at the border. We had to cross a river via a rope bridge, a passage I found scarier than the firefight the previous day. The third night of malarial fever was on me by then, which didn’t make it easier. But we got across, and they found me a safe place to sweat out the fever, and I was better in the morning.
The following day we reached Chiang Mai, where we caught an overnight train to Bangkok. And by nightfall I was back where I’d started, in the little teahouse across the street from the Swan Hotel.
Mr. Sukhumvit wasn’t there. I ordered a Kloster and a basket of prawn chips. I was on my third beer and my second basket of chips when he came in. He walked toward his usual table, then spotted me out of the corner of his eye. I looked different – my hair gone, my skin darkened by the sun and yellowed by malaria – but something clicked and he recognized me. He looked my way, and I nodded, and he came to the table.
“So,” he said. “I heard you were dead.”
“You can’t believe everything you hear.”
“You are quite right. I also heard you planted a bomb at Shwe Dagon Pagoda.”
“That is not true either. Soon you will no doubt hear that I was involved in a massacre of a Burmese army post by an insurgent Shan force.”
“The Shan are at peace with the government.”
I smiled.
“Ah,” he said. “I think you bring me valuable information. Tell me more, and then we will go eat some dog.”
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m sick of dog.”
“You must have eaten your fill of it in Burma.”
“Day and night,” I said. “It’s hard for me to pass a fire hydrant.”
“I do not understand.”
“Never mind,” I said. “There was some difficulty in Rangoon, as you may imagine. I find myself in need of a passport.”
“Ah,” he said.
“I thought you might be able to help.”
“You need a passport.”
“Two passports, actually.” I took an envelope from my breast pocket, removed two pairs of inch-square photographs, one showing a man with his head shaved, the other a woman with long black hair. We’d had them taken at a drugstore in Chiang Mai, right next door to the shop where Katya bought the wig.
“And here is the data for the passports,” I said, and handed him a slip of paper.
“Evan Michael Tanner. And Katerina Romanoff. A Russian woman?”
“In part.”
“The problem with American passports-”
“Is the scanner. I know. I thought perhaps passports of another country.”
He nodded thoughtfully and named several countries. Some of them, like Vanuatu, had not even existed before I took my little trip to Union City. Then he mentioned Ireland, and I stopped him.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I think I’m entitled to an Irish passport. They let you claim dual citizenship if you have an Irish grandparent.”
“And one of your grandparents came from Ireland?”
“My great-grandmother,” I said. “That’s not the same as a grandparent, but it ought to be close enough to qualify me for a forged passport.”
“And your friend? She does not look Irish.”
I squinted at the photo. “She could be Irish,” I said. “In dim light.”
“Romanoff is not an Irish name, is it?”
I reached for a pencil.
“Katherine O’Shea?” Katya said. “What kind of a name is Katherine O’Shea?”
“Well, it’s Irish,” I said.
“But-”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “it’s a name with a lot of resonance to it. Kitty O’Shea was Parnell’s girlfriend, and her jerk of a husband caused a scandal that ruined the man’s career. It’s a name with a real history to it.”
“So is Romanoff, Evan.”
“You can be Katya Romanoff as soon as we clear Immigration,” I assured her. “You can be Katya Romanoff or Katya Singh or Katya Kovalshevsky, whatever you want. But first we have to get you into the country.”
“When will we have the passports?”
“The day after tomorrow. And the day after that we fly from Bangkok to New York via Los Angeles.”
“They gave you tickets?”
“They didn’t really want to,” I said. “But I had a return ticket in business class, and it was in my name even if I had lost it. I’ll have to show them a passport to prove I’m really me, so I won’t have the tickets in hand until I do, but once Sukhumvit comes through with the passports it won’t be a problem. One ticket in business class more than covers two tickets in economy.”
“Poor Evan. If you didn’t have me along you could sit in the front of the plane.”
“That’s all right. Even the luggage compartment would feel luxurious to me after the past couple of weeks.”
“What’s the matter, Vanya?”
“Well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
“What?”
“A way to pay for our passports. I showed Sukhumvit the ivory statues, and he all but laughed in my face. They may be worth something, they may even be museum quality, but this is no place to sell them. He’s giving me a pretty good deal on the passports, but I don’t know where I’m going to find the money.”
“My poor little Vanya,” she said. “Maybe it is not so bad after all that you have me with you.”
And she twisted the ruby ring from her finger and dropped it in my palm.