Subterrene War 03: Chimera (21 page)

“What are those?” Jihoon asked.

I looked where he pointed and saw a series of poles arranged in random fashion on either side of the road but couldn’t bring them into focus until I’d pulled my vision hood on. The goggles zoomed in. Each pole held a corpse in varying stages of decomposition, some new and some already bare skeletons that had started to fall apart at their joints, and at the top of each, a sign in Thai had been painted on a wooden plank.

Jihoon had also pulled his hood on. “The signs say that ‘no man or woman can come further unless their souls are prepared.’ ”

I shook my head and took another drink. “Satos.”

“What’s it supposed to mean?”

“That we’re getting close. But not close enough to button up. I’m not sure if we’ll get there by tonight or not, but I’d hate to have to spend a night in the open, in the jungle, and I’d bet these guys feel the same way. I just hope they don’t drive off the road in a hurry to get us to Nu Poe before sunset.”

Jihoon lifted his carbine and checked its power level. “I’m beginning to see what you meant, Bug. About the jungle.”

“What about it?”

“It’s spooky.”

“That it is, Chong,” I said, taking another swig. “That it
is.
”

The road snaked toward the bush through the rows of bodies until at last it hit the first trees and took us inside, and I glanced once over my shoulder, back into Thailand,
to see the hole we had entered disappear around a bend at the same time the light dimmed, huge trees blocking every part of the sky. The bush made you feel abandoned, cut off, like someone had just slammed and locked the door behind you. It was dead quiet. Leaves absorbed the engine sounds and made it feel as though everything was muffled, and the air became heavier now that the trees blocked any breeze, so that climate control could barely keep the heat out, and I began to feel as though there wasn’t any air, that we had just entered an underwater nightmare. I lifted my carbine and shook it, making sure the fléchettes ran free in their flexi. Then I adjusted my hood to make sure it was snug and buckled my helmet on. Jihoon noticed and did the same. The troop truck in front of us had been packed with Thai soldiers, and without having seen us, the Thais also helmeted up or sealed their battle suits’ hoods tight around their shoulders before they all rested their weapons on the truck sides, pointing them outward.

“Is anything wrong?” Jihoon asked, his voice sounding loud in my helmet speakers.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“We’re in the jungle.”

“So what?” he asked.

“So now everything’s wrong. Shut up. We’re not that far from the Burmese border, and I need to concentrate.”

T
he convoy had stopped, and now people were shouting. Thai soldiers jumped from their vehicles and scattered as far into the jungle as they dared, which wasn’t far at all, and most of them kept checking to make sure they could see the road after dropping into the foliage. It was noon, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell. Banyan trees crowded us on either side, their roots snaking far enough onto the road that for the last four hours the APC had bounced so hard that I’d had to hold on for fear of being thrown off. Branches crowded overhead. The limbs scraped the highest of the convoy’s vehicles and sent clusters of roots into the clay so that they looked like tentacles reaching for something that rested far belowground and lent an alien feeling to an already growing sensation that we had landed on another planet. I jumped from the vehicle and motioned for Jihoon to follow.

By the time we reached the front of the column, the convoy commander, a lieutenant, had already asked for the two of us, and as soon as Ji rounded the front APC, the guy started jabbering—so quickly that I couldn’t activate
Kristen in time for a translation. He sounded terrified. Kristen translated Jihoon’s response in my ear, her voice a perfect imitation of his.

“We can’t stay
here,
” he said.

“My men will not move forward. Not under these conditions.”

“What do you mean? I can’t understand half of what you’re saying, and the other half doesn’t make any sense.”

“
These are madmen,
” the lieutenant shouted. “The
Gra Jaai
will kill us just as soon as they would kill a Burmese. I’m radioing this in.”

“How will you even turn around?
And what the hell got you so spooked? Radio what in?
”

“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.