MEN DIED EVERY DAY IN BATTLE
But watching them die through the wonders of supertechnology was somewhat spooky, Brognola felt. Dead was dead, but this was something else entirelyâreal time, real flesh-and-blood dying as little more than a lit speck, an eerie video game.
There was still plenty of red-orange jumping all over the screens and lots of bad guys in play. Visual relay was shaky at best as the Phoenix Force warriors advanced, swung this way and that, ducked fire, blazed away in long raking bursts, left to right or vice versa.
Brognola watched as the tactical team relayed warnings and positions of bogeys. Encizo and Manning were monitored by Wethers, Kurtzman taking Hawkins and James, with Tokaido watching McCarter, the lone fighter out.
It was quite the grim and, yes, Brognola admitted to himself, ghoulish show.
Myanmar
Colonel Ho Phan Lingpau feared the jungle, was borderline terrified of the dense pre-Jurassic rain forest encompassing the compound like a vined and walled fortress. These days there was plenty to fear, he thought, as he pondered murmured rumors heâd overheard among the rank and file. There was menace out there in the jungle. And beyond, ragtag bands of armed rebel savages.
Heâd heard the terrible stories recently of man-eating crocodiles crawling up the banks of the Ayeyarwady River to chomp down on the leg of some unsuspecting villager, dragging him or her into the black waters, their bodies thrashing in the behemothâs death roll the final sighting of the victim. Then there were rumors of tigers on the prowl, the beasts leaping from nowhere out of the brush, claiming human meals in a frenzy of disemboweling claws that left little to the imagination. And there were reported elephant stampedes throughout the Kachin and Shan states. Three days prior, he recalled as he shuddered over the images left dangling in his mind by the report, a herd of the beasts had gone berserk, crushing half of his thirty-pony caravan, trampling four of his soldiers to bloody pulp as theyâd hauled refined product to the paddle wheeler on the river.
At first he had believed these wild tales to be mere fabricated excuses from the comrades of AWOL soldiers who held as much loathing and fear of the jungle as he didâonly they had dredged up the nerve to defect his unit at the risk of a firing squad if caught traipsing back for the comfort and safety of Yangon. However, only after witnessing a rhino charging then knocking one of his transport trucks onto its side before the animal was shot down in a hail of bullets had he begun to allow silent credence to an ominous notion.
The jungle was alive with an animal evil. Wildlife had seemingly gone berserk, the creatures of the forest having evidently evolved to some vicious counterattack mode on humans, nature tired from fear of being the hunted. Mother Nature, he believed, was in revolt against man. No nature lover, no tree huggerâsince he was the chief architect for the slash-and-burn of countless acres in the region to make room for more poppy fieldsâhe entertained a fleeting wonder. How would he feel if he was destined for slaughter, his hide providing a coat or rug for some rich manâs mistress, perhaps his penis used, much like the tigerâs, as an aphrodisiac, maybe his head mounted on the wall for the hunterâs admiration? As if the grinding fear of animal attack wasnât enough, there were the various and sundry rebel groups lurking the Kachin, all of them trigger-happy when it came to blowing away any uniform marched out there by Yangon. By day, the jungle frayed his nerves badly enough, rebel phantoms hidden in the lush vegetation, framing a uniform pasted to flesh drenched in sweat from steaming heat through the crosshairs of a high-powered scope. At night, with all the caws and chittering and howling in the dark, he found himself unable to sleep, unless his HQ was ringed by sentries and he drifted off with a brain floating on brandy.