The Lost Power: VanOps, Book 1

by Avanti Centrae

  The climate in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was hot and humid, and July was the rainy season. Bear liked the sticky climate, saying it reminded him of his youth in North Carolina before he moved to Lake Tahoe, but she and Will complained it was too hot. For one, it made Maddy’s hair look as if birds had set up camp there and fashioned a thousand nests. For another, the heat made her feel as if she were always walking in sand. She hated the humidity and pined for the dry air of California.

  However, Maddy was intrigued by the culture. Their ox-cart driver wore a cloth that looked like a skirt called a longyi, and both women and men chewed a red concoction made of betel leaves, slaked lime paste, and sometimes tobacco. Apparently, the mixture had a somewhat euphoric effect but caused a prevalence of oral cancer. She’d read it was also the cause of the population’s ubiquitous missing teeth and red-stained mouths.

  They wanted to scout the old town of Bagan before they ate dinner, so had caught the cart ride from New Bagan to Old Bagan. It wasn’t far, but in the heat, she was grateful for every step she didn’t have to walk, even though her thigh was feeling much better. She would focus on feeling grateful and worry about the bruises from the bumpy ride later.

  The driver dropped them off at Tharabar Gate, a sturdy-looking stone structure from days long past. In front of the gate, on each side of it, were two shrines, one male and one female image, both in red hats with painted gold faces. They reminded Maddy of dolls she had played with as a child.

  Bear read from his guidebook. “‘Tharabar, the main gate of the eastern wall, is the only one left of the twelve gates of the walled city that King Pyinbya established in 849.’”

  “So at least we know this town was around in Ramiro’s day,” Maddy said.

  “Yep. Bagan became a central powerbase in the mid-ninth century under King Anawratha, who unified Burma under Theravada Buddhism. It’s estimated that as many as thirteen thousand temples and stupas once stood here.”

  Will walked over to the stone gate and studied it. “That’s a lot.”

  Maddy stood still and looked around. “I feel like we’re on the right track, but how many of those temples are still standing?”

  “There are twenty-two hundred, in various states of disrepair, but since they’re all still considered sacred, we need to take off our shoes and socks before entering. And it’s good we’re wearin’ long shorts as we’re not supposed to show any knee.”

  “Okay, good to know. How long did people live here?”

  It looked like a religious ghost town now, with only tourists milling about. Maddy hadn’t expected it to be quite so wind-whipped and deserted. It reminded her of Bodie, a California town frozen in time that she visited once.

  “Most historians think the Mongols invaded and sacked it in 1287,” Bear replied.

  Will joined Bear and Maddy. “So, for four hundred and thirty-eight years, it was alive and well. And the timing works from the Ramiro perspective. Shall we go in?” Will pointed through the gates and started moving through them.

  Maddy was impressed by Will’s calculator-like mind and surprised at how thick the gates were as they walked through. They’d been seeing temples dot the landscape for some time now, but the view inside the gate was amazing. “Wow.”

  Bear closed the guidebook down, using his finger to bookmark the page. “Look at that.”

  “Let’s just be tourists for an hour,” Maddy said.

  “I could gaze at these abandoned temples and pagodas for days,” Bear said.

  Will swiveled his head from side to side. “We probably will, searching for a sign.”

  Maddy looked around, taking it all in. “I know, it would just be fun to be here without an agenda and appreciate the architecture.”

  “What’s that tall temple over there to the left?” Will asked, “The one that looks like a white mausoleum with a golden tip at the top?”

  Bear looked in the guide book again. “That’s Thatbyinnyu Temple--the tallest pagoda here. It measures just over two hundred feet tall. It was built in the twelfth century. The name translates to ‘omniscience.’”

  All of the temples needed to be searched. Awe and dismay filled Maddy. Her jaw dropped open and her right eye began to twitch.

  They drifted toward the tall pagoda. It looked complex and there were so many similar temples and pagodas in the area. The tall one had seven terraces, all on one side. She counted over twenty spires, without even being able to see the back of the structure. As they walked around, they saw, on three sides of the ground floor, tall statues of Buddha made of brick and cement.

  They took their shoes off and walked inside. On the ceiling and walls of the vaulted corridors, they found original mural paintings of people pursuing a variety of daily activities, painted in hues of tan, gray, and red. The lifelike action illustrated their lives with a delicacy, grace, and beauty that took Maddy’s breath away.

  While they put their shoes back on outside, they were accosted by an assortment of women and children selling wares. Several of the children and one of the women had golden colored leaves applied to their cheeks. Maddy figured they weren’t stickers and wondered how they got them to stay on their faces in the heat. Even though some of the goods looked interesting, shopping was not top of mind at the moment, so they passed and walked on.

  Everywhere she looked around the spire-fringed skyline, the gilded past contrasted sharply against the tumbledown present. Occasional groups of bald Buddhist monks moved in unison like schools of fish up and down the street. Stupas crowned with glitter-studded, miter-like spires, and ascending tiers of roofs lined by lacy fascia woodcarvings, towered over copious amounts of overgrown weeds, stray dogs, relentless garbage, and clusters of overheated tourists.

  She hoped this place still held the clue they were looking for among the ancient bricks and bushy bougainvillea. That missing signum regis was the key to keeping the Power of the obelisks from the hands of the Russians. She hoped it was here.

  For a moment, one of the tourists looked like the burned Russian. Her breath caught. She stopped, touched Bear’s arm, and said softly. “Hey.”

  Bear glanced her way. “What?”

  Silently, she pointed toward the stupa where she had seen the slight, blond-haired man.

  Will also stopped walking and glanced in the direction she pointed.

  There was no one there.

  Maddy shrugged one shoulder and took a deep breath. “False alarm.”

  “No worries,” Bear said. “But would you like to walk in a different direction?”

  “I would.”

  They turned right ninety degrees and continued walking down a new path.

  Five minutes later, Maddy stopped to watch a pair of squirrels scamper from one temple to the walls and pediments of another. “Should we follow the same low, medium, high methodology we used before?”

  Bear also halted and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “What if we look at the oldest structures first?”

  Maddy liked Bear’s solid, common sense approach. “Works for me. Does the guidebook have ages for the structures?”

  “It does.”

  Will was playing with a medium-size stray dog: young, mostly white, male. If it had a breed, Maddy didn’t recognize it. Will had thrown a stick for it twice, making a new friend.

  “Will, work for you?” Maddy asked.

  “Sure, we can start there first and check the later structures if the earlier ones don’t pan out. Anything built before Ramiro’s time is fair game. What drew him here, do you think?”

  “I know it looks ruined now, but in Ramiro’s life, it was a thriving, well-known center of commerce and spirituality. It was out of the way, yes, but maybe he liked that,” Bear replied.

  “If I were trying to hide something and lived when he did, this would have seemed like a good spot,” Maddy agreed.

  Will threw the stick one last time. “Or maybe we’re wasting our time here, too.”

  Sometimes Will’s
skepticism irritated Maddy and this was one of those times. “We’ll never know until we look.”

  The dog followed Will as they moved. “Should I call him Buddy or Buddha?”

  “Buddha might be insulting. But he’ll forget you by tomorrow. Let’s just go.”

  “C’mon, Buddy. Show me your town,” Will said, and Buddy wagged his tail.

  They searched for an hour before the beautiful, filtered light failed, and they could no longer see well enough to find any clue that might be hidden in the antique bricks. They headed back to New Bagan for dinner, tired and daunted.

  The dog followed them for about half a mile. Then it turned away, leaving them to walk the dark road back alone.

  CHAPTER 59

  July 20, 7:30 a.m.:

  For two full days in Bagan, they looked at Buddhist temples, inside, outside, around each side, all to no avail. Not even the ghost of a clue presented itself and Bear could feel the twins’ frustration. Will, in particular, was getting wound up, and Bear didn’t blame him. The lone bright spot was that the dog, Buddy, and his wagging tail, had joined them each day.

  They spied tourist balloons lazily circling the old city, and Bear secretly thought an aerial trip around the town might be romantic. Not so secretly, it might be a good way to search the taller spires of the city. As it had in Vilnius, the GoPro could help with their tourist disguise and the video would be amusing to look back on someday, if they made it through the rest of their adventure alive.

  The town had two balloon tour companies. One had all red balloons, the other’s fleet was entirely green. Over lunch one day, they overheard a tale that the green balloon company had experienced an accidental gas explosion several months ago. Despite the risks, Bear had talked the twins into a ride to increase their odds of finding a clue.

  They arranged a tour with the red balloon tour vendor and were preparing for launch. In a staging area, next to their basket, several other balloons were spread out on a soccer field, which was about twenty minutes from town by bus.

  The old English buses from WWII that they’d ridden to the launch site lined the outskirts of the field and tethered the balloons to the ground. Bear looked at the antique buses and imagined their long journey from England. He briefly recalled the bloody Burma Campaign. There was much history here, and he loved it.

  “I’m not so sure about this.” Will looked a little pale, not liking heights. Interesting that he hadn’t voiced a concern at dinner last night when they’d planned the trip. “But the equipment looks cool, check it out.” Will pointed to the noisy contraption that was burning gas above their heads and shooting flames up into the open belly of the balloon. “I wonder how that green balloon exploded.”

  “Maybe it’s a not-so-urban myth,” Bear suggested.

  Will turned to their tour guide. “Did one of the green balloons explode?”

  “Not have much English. It not explode. It catch on fire and have to come down very fast. That is all.”

  Their guide was of Burmese descent, wore long shorts, no shoes, a light-colored T-shirt and had short, spiked, coal-black hair. His teeth were stained from chewing betel leaves. At least he still had all his teeth.

  “Oh, thanks. That’s reassuring,” Will said with a smile.

  The guide returned Will’s smile. Based on the popularity of the tours, Bear guessed the locals could afford to make fun with the tourists and still do plenty of business.

  Perhaps because it was the rainy season and fewer tourists than normal infested the area, they managed to get the balloon to themselves, along with the dog and the tour operator. Buddy had again tagged along and Will had done nothing to discourage his canine companion. The operator just smiled, nodded, and spat a red stream when Will asked if the dog could join them. They were all ensconced in a generous bathroom-size bamboo basket with sides four-feet high.

  The spike-haired young man handed bags of sand from the bottom of the balloon over the basket’s side to a cohort. “Hold on to the sides now,” he said with one hand on a guy line.

  Then he pulled a quick release and the balloon rose smoothly into the air. The ground fell away at what Bear considered a tad slower rate than most helicopters, but within seconds they were above the tree line. Will watched the ground and swayed from side to side like a tree in a windstorm.

  Bear pointed toward the skyline. “Argones. Don’t look down. Look at the trees, or out at the horizon.”

  Will pulled his eyes up, took hold of the railing, unobtrusively checked his knife scabbard under his sleeve, and stopped swaying. “Thanks, Bear.”

  Over the last few days, Bear had shown Will how to spin a piece of flat wood in the air to use as a knife target, and Will had become fascinated with the process, mumbling about trajectories, velocity, calculus equations, and such. Bear was just pleased that slowly, but surely, Will appeared to be getting more accurate and comfortable with his knives.

  Maddy wore a baseball cap and twirled her ponytail in her fingers with a hypnotic rhythm. “This was a great idea, Bear, we’ll be able to see a lot from up here.”

  Riding the air currents, they followed several other maroon balloons that had taken off before them. Crimson in its morning display, the sun had come up over the tree line only a few minutes earlier. In the spellbinding dawn glow, the golden Irrawaddy River sparkled and snaked in the distance and they began to travel downstream, toward Old Bagan and its famous pagodas. The still-almost-cool air smelled fresh and Bear’s spirits lifted along with the balloon.

  The guide moved to the other side of the basket, ignored them, and spat over the side. It was already a long way down. Bear wondered if the spit disintegrated in the air or if there was an unlucky sod below whose head would be the recipient of a large red droplet.

  Will pointed. “Look at that temple. It looks like a golden ice-cream cone.”

  They were almost level with it. It was just a couple of hundred feet away.

  “Golden spires everywhere.” Maddy looked around as the operator’s radio crackled. She pointed to another bell-shaped structure to the north, from where they’d come. “There’s some even way back there.”

  It was true, although Old Bagan had a higher density of temples, the surrounding countryside had its fair share as well. Near where she had pointed, a batch of green balloons blossomed. One of the air ferries flared its gas and against the bright light, Bear saw what could be a blond-haired man. Hard to tell, it was several hundred yards behind them, at least.

  The possible sighting made him wish again that they had been able to obtain weapons in Mandalay. He had been keeping his eyes open for sketchy types in New Bagan who might know how they could acquire some firepower. Unfortunately, the place was full of monks, not mischief.

  Bear pointed to the specs around the guide’s neck. “Can I borrow the binoculars?”

  The guide handed them to Bear. They were beat up, not great quality to begin with, but they would have to do. He pointed them toward the cluster of green balloons and focused.

  Maddy stepped closer to him. “What do you see, Bear?”

  She smells good.

  “I’m not sure yet.” Definitely not military-grade binocs.

  A blond man wore a blue polo shirt, and the other, a taller dark-haired man, sported a solid black T-shirt.

  Bear handed the binoculars over to Maddy. “Take a look at that second green balloon. Tell me what you see.”

  She took the binoculars, focused them to her eyes. After a long ten seconds, she tore them off her face, turned her back to the green balloon, and swore vehemently under her breath.

  CHAPTER 60

  8:00 a.m.:

  Maddy turned her back away from the green balloon and the Russian assassin. “I thought I saw him the other day, that first night we were here. It’s the sniper.” She swore and hit her thigh.

  At the recognition of the threat, her stomach, which up to now had been doing fine with the heights, decided to do flip-flops.

  “Seriously? Let me s
ee.” Will reached for the binoculars and Maddy handed them to him.

  “He’s with a taller, dark-haired guy. No AJ that I can see. Can you tell if they’re looking this way?”

  “I don’t know. Hard to tell with these lame binoculars.”

  Maddy’s voice cracked. “What do we do? We need a plan.”

  “How did they find us? That false clue should have sent them to the middle of nowhere.” Will jerked the binoculars from his eyes and turned to face Maddy and Bear.

  The guide continued to ignore them. The dog whined, sensing the fear.

  Bear patted the dog’s head absently. “They’re looking for two men and a woman. They’re a ways back there. At this distance, they’re not going to be able to see much either, although they might have better equipment.”

  Maddy’s hands were sweaty and she rubbed her palms together. “Could they hit us? If they shoot at us?”

  Bear shook his head. “Too far back. But if the winds change and they get closer...” Trailing off, he looked at Will. “It would be best if they don’t know it’s us. Argones, you sit down here on the floor next to the dog. You’ll be out of sight. Keep the binoculars. Continue scannin’ the Russians for any information and Old Bagan for the clue.”

  Will sat down next to the dog, cross-legged. “Sure, I can do that. What will you two do?” He put the binoculars back to his eyes and began to scan through holes in the basket’s weave.

  Bear turned his back on the green balloon so that he was looking the same direction as Maddy. “We can’t push the wind. We need a disguise. Are you up for being a couple?” He put his arm around her.

  She almost rolled her eyes. “A couple? You mean you and me?” This was the oldest trick in the book. Men...

  “Yes, they know we’re not together, so they’re not expectin’ to see a couple. People see what they expect to see.”