The Burma Effect

by Michael E. Rose

  Delaney’s girl was called Meg, after Meg Ryan, the Hollywood star, she told him. “You are a quiet man,” she said.

  “Yes,” Delaney said.

  “You are not happy with me?” she said.

  “You’re a nice girl,” Delaney said. “No problem.”

  “You want to make nice now, maybe? Whole body massage for you, maybe?”

  “No thanks.”

  “General Thein says to make nice with everybody tonight.” “That’s kind of him.”

  “You have a special sweetheart girl somewhere?” she said.

  The liquor and the heavy food and the stale air had started the room spinning slowly on an axis Delaney could not see. “Somewhere,” he said.

  No matter how many times Delaney rolled the problem around in his mind, he could not imagine why the Burmese military, or Thein’s faction anyway, would allow a group of mercenaries to move at will throughout the country with AK-47s and other deadly gear in tow. No matter how persuasive Kellner might have been, no matter how much money Thein and others thought they were going to be paid in some other scheme, the whole thing just did not add up. And if anybody at all in the Burmese military knew anything about the wild plan to take Suu Kyi, Delaney was sure they would not have allowed the mercenary team, or Thein himself, to get even this far.

  Delaney thought things through one more time as he stood late the next day on the steaming tarmac of Kengtung’s small military airport, watching the mercenary gear being loaded onto a wide Spanish built turbo-prop for the flight to Rangoon. His travelling companions, even the normally level-headed Dima, all looked very much the worse for wear after their night of R&R at the officer’s club.

  Delaney, too, had had far too much to drink. He vaguely remembered being helped down from the little bus that ferried them back to the hotel; he could not remember who had given him a helping hand. He vaguely remembered the two British mercenaries slapping him on the back throughout the evening and saying what a fine chap he was after all, that he mustn’t mind Bobby and Abbey, that they were all proud and delighted to have a journalist of his excellent, no, extraordinary, stature along with them on this adventure. Et cetera.

  The night of drinking and male bonding seemed to have defused the tension somewhat, for all except Bobby. Even Abbey seemed more relaxed around Delaney, at the hotel and later at the airport as they waited to board their plane. Only Bobby still scowled at Delaney, displayed menace. The beating Delaney and Ben had given him back at Mae Sot would never be forgotten, it seemed.

  The flight to Rangoon took them over the rugged hills of Shan country, where the army was doing its best to wipe out a longstanding rebellion and, if other accounts were to be believed, the entire ethnic Shan population as well. Most good reporters in Bangkok had written about the massive relocation of Shan civilians, the forced labour, the packed refugee camps on the Thai side of the border. Kellner would have filed his share of such stories too.

  They landed at dusk at a military airport on the southern outskirts of Rangoon. Yet another Toyota bus took them through the city, heading north. A small truck followed with their crates. The hot claustrophobic streets of the Burmese capital were teeming; corner teashops everywhere were crammed, the streets were crammed with aging Chevrolet buses, motorcycles, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws. The crumbling pavements were crowded with stalls, each selling only one or two items; perhaps soap, matches and lighter fluid in one, packets of rice and noodles in another. No one seemed to be buying.

  At every intersection stood teenage soldiers with AK-47s and fixed bayonets, clearly under instruction to crash down on the slightest hint of trouble. Since the riots and the arrests and killings after the 1990 elections, and since Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest, the Burmese capital was tense, with only a chipped varnish of normality.

  They left the buzzing city centre and moved through quieter colonial era-suburbs of dark dilapidated mansions showing no signs of life within. Aung San Suu Kyi was closeted in just such a mansion, near the University of Rangoon, on a lake that dominates that part of the city. Their driver did not take them anywhere near Suu Kyi’s household, which had become the focus of the pro-democracy movement and where squads of soldiers were always at the ready in nearby troop carriers in case one of the rallies outside Suu Kyi’s fence ever got out of hand.

  Into that scene, the mercenaries now riding with Delaney on a small bus intended soon to thrust themselves, to extricate Suu Kyi and ascend out of danger in a blast of testosterone-fuelled glory.

  Their driver pulled up outside a six-story apartment building in a grim cluster of concrete blocks north of the capital. The government had relocated thousands of people, potential troublemakers they argued, from the city centre to the northern suburbs where they would have a far less easy time fomenting revolution. Rangoon was a city of passbooks and curfews and police checks; even visits to family were tightly controlled. In these forlorn modern apartment blocks lived many of the opponents, and victims, of the military regime.

  It was an odd place for a band of mercenaries to be left off as night fell. After unloading their crates, they manhandled them up to a sprawling first-floor flat, with four bedrooms and a couple of dark enclosed balconies and little in the way of furniture except mattresses, a fifties-era kitchen table and a few rattan sofas. Their driver, and two other soldiers who had materialized when they arrived, did not offer to help them.They saw no one else in the silent neighbourhood.

  The entire building, dying of concrete cancer, and the surrounding streets were virtually deserted. Eventually, a lone ancient lady in a broad straw hat made her way unsteadily along the hot pavement in front of their building. She took no notice of the activity there, too frightened or perhaps too wise to do anything except to make her way past them as quickly as she could.

  Tom stood at the filthy kitchen sink and turned on a tap. The faucet coughed and wheezed and spat out a dab of copper-coloured paste.

  “Guess it’s room service tonight, boys,” he said. He opened a sorry-looking Kelvinator refrigerator and felt one of the racks. “Cool, not cold,” he said.

  “Empty anyway,” Clive said.

  “We’re out of luck for beer,” Sam said.

  Their driver and the two soldiers had come up the dank concrete stairway to the first floor. The driver spoke reasonable English.

  “General Thein says you must wait here,” he said. “He will send you supplies tonight, they are on their way. He says there will be meetings as soon as possible.”

  “How long?” Stefan said, looking at Dima.

  “He did not say, sir,” the driver said.

  “We are waiting for one more man on our team,” Dima said. “Kellner. When will he come?” “Sorry sir,” the driver said.

  As he spoke, two impossibly young-looking soldiers in wraparound sunglasses and olive green Tshirts, but unarmed, came inside with cardboard boxes of food and drink. They went back downstairs several times for more. Sam and Clive unpacked, stowing tins and small sacks in kitchen cupboards, water and beer in the fridge. For a moment, it was a disconcertingly domestic scene.

  “That beer will barely last us the night,” Tom said.

  “Shit, man,” Abbey said. “How long we got here anyway?”

  Stefan and Dima both motioned to him at the same time to be quiet.

  After the Burmese soldiers left, Bobby and Abbey smoked some marijuana they got from one of the bar girls the night before. No one else smoked. The humid Asian night closed in and they could hear, finally, the sounds of life and meal preparation from apartment windows nearby. But the neighbourhood was still far from busy.

  “We’ve got to find Kellner,” Bobby said. “We can’t do this thing without him. Where the fuck is he?”

  Delaney sat off to one side, watching and saying nothing.

  “We all know the plan,” Dima said.

  “Yeah, but
it’s Kellner’s plan. We can’t go ahead without him.” “We can,” Dima said.

  “What is the point, man? It is his plan, his lady he wants to take,” Abbey said. “I don’t give a shit for no Suu Kyi.”

  “That’s the job we’re here to do. That’s what we’re getting paid to do,” Stefan said.

  “Without the man himself,” Bobby said.

  “We’ll get General Thein to track him down for us. Relax. Just relax,” Stefan said.

  Clive and Sam, the Brits, tough but never talking about it, drank beer quietly, taking everything in.

  “Maybe someone took him out,” Bobby said, exhaling smoke and passing the joint to Abbey.

  “Then we’d be toast too,” Tom said.

  “Toast,” Abbey said dreamily.

  “We’ll find out what’s what with Kellner tomorrow,” Stefan said. He looked over at Delaney. “Where do you think he is?”

  “What the fuck would Delaney know?” Bobby said.

  “I think it’s obvious someone’s got to him,” Delaney said. “Kellner’s been missing for well over a month now. Almost two months. No one has seen him. His girlfriend hasn’t seen him, Cohen, no one. His editor hasn’t heard a word from him. This is Burma. If they had so much as a hint he was going to try something crazy with Suu Kyi, they would kill him.”

  “He has the military onside,” Stefan said.

  “All of it?” Delaney said.“And what do they think he’s going to do? I don’t care what faction he thought he had onside, there is no way he could mess with Suu Kyi. She is off limits, absolutely off limits, to everybody. They simply won’t care who it is or who thought they were onside, or not.” “Back off, Delaney,” Bobby said.

  “We’ll locate him tomorrow,” Dima said.

  “And we have to contact our chopper pilot in Mae Sot,” Stefan said. “That’s the priority.”

  Dima went to his pack and pulled out an ordinance map. He spread it out on the kitchen table and everyone except Bobby, Abbey and Delaney crowded around to look. Delaney just shook his head. Bobby saw him and flicked the last glowing stub of marijuana across the room at him.

  “I told you to back off, Delaney,” he said.

  “Don’t you be shaking your head in this house tonight,” Abbey said.

  “The chopper can put down right there, beside the lake,” Dima said to the soldiers at the table.

  “Tricky,” Clive said. “I’d say the backyard is the way to go.”

  Dimitri Prokupchuk, mercenary, sat on the balcony of a decaying concrete apartment block in the northern suburbs of Rangoon smoking a late-night cigarette. The soldier’s life had brought him here. From the sadism of Russian boot camps, through dirty wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya and two marriages and a variety of children to here, Rangoon, Burma, Myanmar, in the middle of the world.

  His colleagues snored and stirred in alcoholand drug-induced sleep. It might have been tents near Kabul or bombed-out factories near Grozny or any number of uncomfortable, dangerous places. This time the bivouac was mattresses on concrete floors in a bad apartment in Rangoon.

  He only felt true feelings, soldier’s feelings, when he was in a situation such as this. Calm, smoking a cigarette, men under his command, dangers to be faced, rewards on the horizon. He knew that night, like many other nights, that there was no life for him but the soldier’s, the mercenary’s life.

  He flicked his cigarette off the balcony. It trailed tiny embers through the night, like a tracer bullet seen from a kilometre away. He heard the butt hit and hiss briefly in the parking lot not far below. He would have preferred it if it was distant mortar fire, or distant flares, or distant aircraft overhead that made him feel uneasy that night. Unease was normal. The soldier’s life was full of fear and uncertainty and unease.

  This time, it was different. With all his experience, all his hard-won experience in battles large and small, he could not shake the feeling that this time something was fundamentally wrong.

  Was it because Kellner had gone missing? Not really. Things often went wrong in the days and hours before an operation. There was nothing terribly unusual about that, and a good tactician such as he would know how to allow for such events in the field. No, this time the situation felt fundamentally, irretrievably wrong, as if some basic piece of planning had been forgotten, or not done at all.

  He could not think what that might be. He trusted Kellner, had known him for years, valued him as a good contact for freelance work like this.

  No, it was not Kellner. And Dimitri Prokupchuk, mercenary, was at ease with ruthless men like General Thein, had had much experience with men like that, whose true motives were never clear, for whom money was one important thing but never, ever, everything, for whom an extra victim here and there was the cost of doing a soldier’s business.

  No, it was something different this time. Perhaps, Dima thought, as he felt the velvet caress of an Asian night on his skin, it was just a matter of age. He was lucky to have made it to 51, lucky indeed. Maybe this should be his last adventure. Maybe that was what his superstitious Russian soul was telling him that night. Maybe this would be his last adventure.

  Delaney couldn’t sleep and went out to the kitchen, lit now only by yellow street lights from outside. He saw the glow of someone’s cigarette on the balcony, smelled tobacco smoke, but said nothing. He took a beer from the fridge, hoping that this might help him relax enough to doze off until morning.

  He saw a red cigarette butt rocket briefly off the balcony and then Dima came in, startled to see anyone else awake.

  “Delaney, what is your problem?” he said.

  “What is yours, Dima?” Delaney said. They were the two oldest in the group, and stood looking at each other from the vantage of men with no illusions.

  “I miss my dacha tonight, Delaney,” Dima said.

  “I’m getting old. Maybe that is all.”

  “You know that this is all going to go bad, don’t you Dima,” Delaney said.

  “Possibly,” Dima said. “Yes.”

  “Then why bother?”

  Dima waited a long time before he answered. Perhaps too long.

  “Ask me that again tomorrow,” he said.

  Chapter 13

  No one except Dima was in the main room when the knock came the next morning. Delaney was awake, but still lying down in the small back room where they had put him. It was just past seven. He heard Dima call out “Yes, wait” and move to the front door.

  Delaney heard the door being opened and the sound of men moving into the living room. A number of men, in heavy boots.

  “General Thein,” he heard Dima say. “Welcome to our humble abode.”

  Delaney got up, dressed quickly, listened from his open doorway. Down the dim hallway, he could see Dima and the general, with at least three or four uniformed soldiers behind them carrying AKs. The other mercenaries had not stirred yet, or were perhaps listening from their rooms, as Delaney was. There was no apparent reason to think that this morning visit was trouble. They had all been expecting Thein to come that day. But Delaney knew this was trouble.

  “You will ask your men to come out,” Thein said. “We will go to the city now. There is a vehicle waiting outside.”

  “To the city? Today?” Dima said.

  “Yes, now please,” Thein said.

  “We haven’t discussed our next arrangements with you yet,” Dima said. “We must talk of many things first. And we have not seen Kellner, we have not briefed him on the Mongla outcome.”

  “That will not be necessary now,” Thein said.

  “Why not?” Dima said.

  “Prokupchuk, you take me for a fool,” Thein said. “I have played fool for you for several days and I am tired of it now.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Dima said.

  “I am a soldier. You are a soldier, but I think now not
a very good one. Please do not insult me.”

  Dima now apparently decided to say as little as possible. He was silent and waited for the general to speak again.

  “Did you really think we would let you interfere with Suu Kyi and put this revolution at risk?” Thein said.

  Dima still said nothing.

  “Did you?” Thein asked again. “And did you really think you could persuade a general in the SPDC to take part in any of your other little business plans? Did you think we would let you interfere in our business in the north, or anywhere else? That you could buy me like that? Do you think we would put an important investment arrangement like the one in Mongla at risk and anger some international partners for a few dollars from a band of mercenary soldiers like yourselves? You Westerners think we are fools. We are not fools. All of these little schemes of yours, and Kellner’s. You are the fools to think that Myanmar is just a target for people like you.The SPDC watches and learns and we wait and then we strike back at all our opponents. Like today.”

  “Where is Kellner?” Dima said.

  “Kellner is dead,” Thein said.

  “Dead,” Dima said.

  “He was uncooperative and then he cooperated and now he is dead,” Thein said. “He was a rash man, and inside he was weak. Two things dangerous in combination.” Dima was silent.

  “Wake your men,” Thein said, drawing his side arm. “We will go now.”

  Bobby burst from a bedroom between Delaney and the scene in the living room. He was shirtless, but carrying an AK-47.

  “Down Dima,” Bobby shouted. Dima hit the floor rolling to the right. Bobby opened fire, two brief bursts. The noise was deafening in the enclosed space. General Thein was not even able to raise his pistol. He and the four Burmese soldiers were flung back against the wall and the entrance door, smearing blood as they slid to the floor.