11

Hidden Fortress

In the morning I reset my watch. Although Shan State was in revolt against Rangoon, the region still observed official Burmese time that, due to some unfathomable quirk, was one-half hour earlier than Thai time. But I could have spun my watch’s hands counterclockwise nearly forever; Ho Mong appeared out of a world several centuries earlier than Bangkok. We had awakened to a Dalí dreamscape, a feudal city-state nonetheless equipped with Toyota trucks and automatic weapons. Pickups droned by carrying armed, uniformed Mong Tai Army soldiers. In their dusty wake, Lisu hilltribe women walked toward the market bearing stacks of broad, ovate thanat leaves and bouquets of maroon-tinged eugenia gathered in the jungle and sold as cheroot wrappers and temple offerings. Shan girls strolled along in ruby-red sarongs, hummingbird-blue jackets, and indigo turbans, swinging tassled shoulder bags in which to carry the day’s shopping. We followed, our trail-sore muscles gradually loosening during the early morning walk. On our first full day in Burma, we would get a thorough tour of Ho Mong from Flynn and one of his closest Shan friends, Sengjoe.

Sengjoe’s dirt-floored house stood on the south side of the market, a profitable location for the noodle restaurant and small dry-goods store his wife ran out of the large, open front room. Still sleepy, presumably from carousing the previous night away with Flynn, Sengjoe extended a long, tattooed arm to shake hands, then bade us to sit. His wife brought clouded drinking glasses and a Chinese thermos brimming with weak, scalding-hot Shan tea to our table.

“How was your sleep, gentlemen?” he asked. His English was courtly and British accented, the product of a childhood spent in a Keng Tung missionary school run by Italian priests.

“Never better,” I replied. The jet lag, the pent-up anxiety, and the mule ride had knocked me into flat-line sleep for ten hours.

“It is the Shan mountain air.”

Sengjoe popped a fifth-generation bootleg cassette by country singer George Strait into a tape deck powered by dying batteries. The sound was pure Nashville on Quaaludes. Fifty years old, his India-ink hair combed straight back, and standing a rangy six feet tall, Sengjoe carried himself with a patrician grace and a wistful touch of the poet. He settled onto a bench and fumbled absently with a pack of Krong Thips. I made his morning with a fresh box of Marlboros.

“Some breakfast, sirs,” he said, lighting the first of what would be many cigarettes that day. “Then we begin.”

While his wife fed us sticky rice, Sengjoe regaled us with tales of his CIA mercenary past. As a young man he had enlisted as a rifleman in the force of Khun Myint, a rebel commander with the Keng Tung–based Shan National Army. To get arms and ammunition, he explained, Khun Myint contracted the company to a CIA subsidiary. His mission: fight Communist-backed guerrillas in northwestern Laos.

“We were hired as machineries,” he recalled, although he meant “mercenaries.”

“We fought on behalf of the CIA. The company was called Scope. The pay was very poor but we have a lot of things. Air drops full of ice cream, full of meat canned. We have lot of arms and ammunition from the Scope people.”

Deployed to Muang Meung, a Laotian town near an ancient caravan crossing of the Mekong River, Sengjoe’s unit had engaged in a classic bout of Asian shadowboxing. Again, rule number two: Nothing was what it seemed.

“We rarely fought each other,” Sengjoe confessed. “Actually, the Pathet Lao and our corps had a mutual understanding. In the night we’d both do shelling to get more ammunition for ourselves. The Pathet Lao, knowing we were not a Laotian force, did not attack. It was like a cheating game.”

“We were hired guns,” he added. “We didn’t get killed. Most of the soldiers suffered from syphilis. There were a lot of tribal girls, Lahu girls, all around.” He smiled at the memory. “We should say we were lucky.”

Despite the nocturnal artillery “duels,” Sengjoe continued, the Scope advisers had an inkling their Shan hirelings were not fighting and had a gentlemen’s agreement with the Pathet Lao. If there was heavy fighting, why weren’t there any body counts?

“They tried to detect this with a lie-detector machine,” he said. “But our officers were very smart. Whenever they were summoned, they took some balls of opium. The machine didn’t have any effect on them. They just passed the examination smoothly. There was no trace. No fluctuation in blood pressure, no sweating.”

He sucked in a lungful of Virginia tobacco, then exhaled fitfully. Hilltribe women stood near the talaat, gaping at us.

“The Scope contract was a year, but after eight months we had enough. We returned to Shan State, full of arms.”

His dislike for the Burmese became stone-cold hatred in the late 1970s, he said, when his wife and a daughter were killed in an air raid in eastern Shan State. The loss still cut through his military reserve. Now remarried with two young children—a handsome boy hobbled by a minor brain injury and a cute daughter with a thanaka-streaked face—he worked as a translator for Khun Sa and served as the mayor of Ho Mong.

“I want to retire,” he said with a sigh. “It’s a bloody hot job.” Five hundred baht a month couldn’t lessen the headache of arbitrating constituent complaints about garbage, noise, and wandering buffalo. Sengjoe stubbed his cigarette butt, adjusted his Australian bush hat to a rakish angle, then set out to show us the armed town that Khun Sa had carved out of the deep forest.

*   *   *

To arrive in this distant corner of Burma, Khun Sa had charted a life course resembling a harsh Akira Kurosawa epic. He was born Chang Chi-fu on February 17, 1934, the son of Khun Ai, an ethnic Chinese living in Hpa-perng, a village under the dominion of the saopha of Mong Yai in northern Shan State. After Chang’s father died in 1937, his Shan mother, Nang Saeng Zoom, remarried the hereditary chief, or myosa (a Burmese term literally meaning “town eater”), of nearby Mong Tawm. Young Chang was soon entrusted to the care of his paternal Chinese grandfather, who tutored him in tea cultivation and horse breeding. It was a lonely childhood.

Although he received little formal education beyond the instruction at a temple required of every Buddhist boy, Chang possessed a flair for leadership, a talent for reading the political winds, and enormous business acumen. By his mid twenties, he was authorized to form his own local, government-sanctioned militia, or Ka Kwe Ye (KKY) unit. Overwhelmed by a host of ethnic insurgents, KMT troops, and Burmese Communist Party rebels in Shan State, the Burmese military concocted a plan that allowed almost any armed group that pledged fealty to Rangoon to become a KKY outfit. Without funds to pay, clothe, or supply these soldiers, the government permitted KKY commanders a powerful perquisite: use of government-controlled towns and roads to transport contraband, including opium.

Chang set himself up in north-central Shan State, a major locus for poppy cultivation, and soon built his KKY unit into a heavily armed force of eight hundred men. Chang also adopted a new name: Khun Sa, The Prince of Prosperity. By 1964, the ambitious young Sino-Shan commander cut his ties with Rangoon and relocated to Vingngun in the far eastern reaches of Wa territory, just a few miles from Yunnan Province, to establish his own poppy-growing fiefdom. Within a few years, his force had grown to two thousand soldiers. The KMT generals settled along the Thai borderlands north of Chiang Mai, who then controlled 90 percent of the opium trade, began to take notice of the young Turk in the distant hills.

The inevitable showdown occurred in 1967. During the February opium harvest, Khun Sa issued a brash ultimatum: KMT caravans passing through the Wa states would have to pay the same tax that he had to pay whenever his mules transited KMT territory on their way to Thailand and Laos. The following June, Khun Sa’s opium convoy headed south from Vingngun for Ban Khwan, a Laotian village in the Golden Triangle where the buyer, General Ouane Rattikone of the Royal Lao Army, operated a heroin refinery. In the trackless mountains east of the Salween River, the armed column linked up with a secondary shipment from central Shan State to create an enormous opium caravan of three hundred mules that stretched single-file for more than a mile. For the KMT, the implications of this sixteen-ton drug shipment were enormous. If the opium got through, Khun Sa would have the revenue to place another one thousand men under arms. That would put his private force almost on equal footing with the KMT and threaten its stranglehold on the caravan routes. An expedition of one thousand KMT troops was assembled quickly and ordered into Shan State to intercept the pack-mule train.

In mid July, the KMT sprang an ineffective ambush south of Keng Tung, then pursued the opium caravan to Ban Khwan. As a showdown loomed, General Ouane ordered both parties out of Laos. Neither side budged. The KMT attacked the entrenched Shan on July 29 and an intense firefight raged into the next day before General Ouane, in full face-saving fettle, called in his air force for two days of bombing and strafing runs. The Shan retreated by boat across the Mekong to Burma; the KMT fled north and were soon captured by Lao soldiers. The wily General Ouane retained his honor and the spoils of war: sixteen tons of unpaid-for opium, courtesy of Khun Sa, and a seventy-five hundred-dollar repatriation fee for his KMT prisoners.

While a humiliating episode for the KMT, the 1967 Opium War was an even heavier blow to Khun Sa. He had lost dozens of men, weapons, and mules, and half a million dollars’ worth of opium. Troops began to drift away from his command. To recoup power and prestige, he met secretly in September 1969 with Shan rebels to discuss the formation of an anti-Communist resistance. Tipped off by the KMT, the Burmese Military Intelligence Service arrested Khun Sa the following month and imprisoned him for high treason.

As Khun Sa languished inside Mandalay Palace, a moated, century-old fort on the broiling Irrawaddy riverplain, the power vacuum in northern Shan State created by his incarceration was filled by Lo Hsing-han, another KKY commander who had used his government-approved smuggler status to swell his fortune and his firepower. By 1972, American narcotics officials labeled Lo the “kingpin of the heroin traffic in Southeast Asia.” But it all fell apart for the Lashio-based druglord the following year. In the face of international outrage over the heroin boom in Burma, Rangoon abolished the disreputable KKY program. Lo then defected to the Shan rebels and was arrested in Mae Hong Son Province.

As Lo’s luck ran out, Khun Sa’s fortune improved. In April 1973, his loyalists entered Taunggyi, kidnapped two Russian doctors who had come to the Shan capital to inspect a Soviet-built hospital, and then demanded Khun Sa’s freedom. After an unlikely go-between, Thai General Kriangsak Chomanan, negotiated the release of the Russians, Khun Sa was discharged from prison. In short order, he resurfaced in northern Thailand in command of a new force, the Shan United Army. His headquarters in the village of Ban Hin Taek was just a short stroll away from a Thai Border Patrol Police camp, but his close relationship to General Kriangsak, who became prime minister in 1977 following a military coup, allowed him to operate undisturbed.

Khun Sa’s five-year incarceration in Mandalay had provided him time for reflection and strategic planning. Laying claim to his maternal lineage, he began positioning himself in the media as a Shan nationalist, a leader who reluctantly trafficked in opium to earn his people’s freedom. In a savvy move to garner credibility, he convinced a prominent Shan poet and intellectual, Long Khun Maha, to relocate to Ban Hin Taek, going so far as to buy him a printing press. The self-styled “King of the Golden Triangle,” began floating a bold drug-eradication plan in return for international help in negotiating Shan State’s independence from Burma. All the while his army consolidated control of the Golden Triangle and its illicit riches.

Khun Sa’s illegal operations and indiscreet pronouncements so infuriated Kriangsak’s straight-arrow successor, Prem Tinsulanan, that the prime minister ordered an assault on his headquarters by Thai Rangers in January 1982. After a furious battle, Khun Sa relocated several hundred miles to the west, to the mountainous Shan forests just north of Mae Hong Son Province. He displaced a rival rebel force, the Shan State Army, from the old caravansary and tax station of Mong Mai and began rebuilding his opium empire in the nearby hamlet of Ho Mong. The upland-valley settlement was an ideal site for an insurgent’s citadel. Its strategic border location allowed Khun Sa to control the major Shan caravan routes to northwestern Thailand. The Salween River, just twelve miles away, formed a daunting natural barrier to any attacks on his northern and western flanks. To the east, the jagged, rebel-infested Doi Larng Range posed a similar physical obstacle. And a web of jungle trails led south to Thailand, his major trading partner and, if things got too dicey in Ho Mong, his rear supply base in the Shan village of Ban Mae Suya.

To hasten his comeback, Khun Sa may even have cut a pragmatic deal with the Burmese military, with whom he had maintained a relationship—somewhat strained by his five-year prison term—since his KKY days. Several sources indicate that in March 1984 the Tatmadaw offered Khun Sa and his Shan United Army free rein in the opium trade in return for attacking other narco-insurgents and ethnic rebels. Shortly after the alleged accord, a SUA truck bomb blew up the Chiang Mai mansion of a KMT general. The power play continued. The headquarters of several other factions were overrun by SUA troops. Other rival leaders died violently. Khun Sa also pursued a longstanding vendetta. In March 1985, he allied with Khorn Jern, leader of the Shan United Revolutionary Army and a staunch nationalist, opium trafficker, and former KMT ally. To emphasize its ethnic connection with neighboring Thailand, the new Shan force was renamed the Tai-land Revolutionary Army. Following rebel custom, the name was short-lived and soon changed to the Mong Tai—or Shan State—Army. Khun Sa had severed the KMT’s opium and jade routes, had appropriated its proxy army in Burma, and had finally exacted his revenge for the 1967 Opium War. Just three short years after being chased from Thailand, the King of the Golden Triangle had returned, stronger than ever.

*   *   *

Ho Mong, the General’s redoubt, had a population of more than ten thousand people, according to Sengjoe, made up of nearly six thousand civilians and almost five thousand MTA recruits training at two camps. Despite its size and its amenities, which dwarfed those of nearly every town in southern Shan State, Ho Mong did not appear on any national maps of Burma. The outlaw city-state we cruised through in a rented Toyota pickup did not officially exist.

Sengjoe directed our Shan driver toward the northwestern base of the valley. About one mile from the talaat, we stopped at a complex of cinderblock buildings. This was Ho Mong Hospital, complete with operating rooms and wards. The General had built the facility to treat MTA casualties who could not be evacuated to hospitals in northern Thailand and to minister to the local civilian population, who received free medical care. New wards were being erected, boosting capacity from ninety to two hundred fifty beds. It looked like the General was bracing for either an epidemic of disease or a major military engagement.

Inside the main hospital building, a young MTA soldier lay on a canvas stretcher on the floor. His delirious moans echoed off the cool gray walls. Flynn gave him wide berth.

“Has he been shot?” I asked.

“Blackwater fever,” said Flynn. “Don’t let him spit on you.”

“Ho Mong is a place highly infested with malaria,” said Sengjoe. “And in the past eight months we have a lot of trouble with dysentery. Eighteen people died. It comes from the blackwater fever. In this season we have more influenza and cholera and dysentery, because the water system is contaminated. We have to educate our people to boil water before drinking. It helps, but still we have a lot of disease around.”

I had been warned about the biological environment I would face. Somehow, mountains always seemed salubrious. H. N. C. Stevenson, a colonial-era administrator of Shan State, had tried to disabuse lowland farang of the same notion in his 1944 pamphlet, The Hill Peoples of Burma:

It was fashionable for people living in the hot plains of Burma to describe the hills as a healthy paradise in which diseases of the plains had no place. The great evacuation of 1942 has changed all that and the hill areas are known for what they really are—the home of malarial mosquitoes more deadly than most, the haunt of leeches so fantastically innumerable as to have become legend, the stamping ground of typhus ticks and the place of sneaking winds which strike down the unwary with pneumonia.

I hoped I didn’t end up face down on the floor of this jungle clinic, pissing blood, heaving bile, and wondering, should I survive, how Blue Cross would handle my claim. To guard against malaria, I was taking daily Doxycycline pills, and, on Flynn’s advice, Fansidar. In the morning, I had doused myself with FlyPel; the previous night I had fumigated the room with noxious mosquito coils. And all day long, I intended to pray.

The hospital had seven surgical wards, two operating theaters, and a pair of X-ray machines, although one was broken. In the jungle, said Sengjoe, it was hard to get parts and medicine. There were five doctors on staff: two Shan and three Chinese.

“One of the Chinese doctors is wanted in Hong Kong on charges,” Flynn related. “He didn’t tell me the charges, but they must be serious. He told me, ‘Best I stay here for a long time.’”

We pushed through swinging doors and walked down a hallway lined with glass windows looking onto the operating theaters. A medical team prepared for major surgery in one of the rooms.

“One of the Shan doctors comes from the front lines last year,” said Sengjoe. “We have a lot of patients, a lot of casualties from Doi Larng, when we have a pitched battle with the Wa. We save a lot of money treating patients here. Usually it costs between fifty to one hundred thousand baht for each patient being treated in Thailand. We prefer to do our own operations. It saves a lot of lives.”

An electric fan blew dusty air through the surgical theater. The frosted-glass louvers were open to admit light; no screens covered the windows. A young boy lay face down, ether-oblivious, on the operating table. Two nurses struggled to place a soiled cotton sheet beneath his unconscious frame. The boy’s diagnosis: a meningococcal infection. My prognosis: not good, in an unsterile environment with few antibiotic medications, no matter how skilled the physicians.

Just north of the hospital stood Pang Seua—Tiger Camp—Khun Sa’s original Ho Mong headquarters. Here the General trained and educated the Noom Suk Harn, the Young Brave Warriors. The name was a clever choice: the Shan resistance movement formally began in 1958 when a group of university students founded an identically named cadre. Hundreds of boys, some as young as eight, most not yet in their teens, had come from all corners of Shan State to Tiger Camp. When they reached sixteen, they became combat soldiers. Inculcated from an early age with MTA dogma, they were the true believers in the cause, and in Khun Sa. It was from the Noom Suk Harn that the warlord plucked his retinue of loyal bodyguards.

During their years at Pang Seua, the Noom Suk Harn lived, fifty to a dormitory, in one dozen long, low barracks of split, woven bamboo arranged around a large, dirt parade ground. Inside each dormitory, a raised wooden platform kept the boys’ thin reed mats and rough woolen blankets off the ground; a single wooden shelf held their meager personal belongings. It was a hard life, but a peasant’s life had always been spartan in Shan State. The recruits ate rice and vegetables, studied mathematics, English, and Shan history, and dreamed of the moment they would be issued a rifle. It was a momentous rite of passage for any boy of the hills, the day of the gun.

Twenty percent of the boys had been sent by parents too poor to feed them, said Sengjoe, while an equal number had been “recruited” by the MTA. “If you have three children in a family,” he explained, “we take one and leave the two.” However, Sengjoe added, the majority of the child soldiers were orphans whose parents had been killed by the Burmese Army, which had achieved international condemnation for its brutal treatment of ethnic civilians.

“Their parents are used to serve as porters, used to serve as minesweepers,” said Sengjoe. “They are made to walk into the minefields. They are just killed at random. They are not given adequate rations like the Burmese people. At times, even ladies are being recruited as porters. In the day they have a big burden, they have to carry a lot of weight. At night, they suffer mass raping. After that they are just killed. Many have died in the process.”

Behind the barracks complex, the hillside was dotted with what appeared, but for the timbered lintels, to be the mouths of dozens of small caves. Air-raid shelters, Sengjoe explained. He pointed to the top of the ridgeline, several hundred feet above the valley floor, where an antiaircraft battery equipped with .50-caliber machine guns guarded the western flank of Tiger Camp. Similar posts occupied high ground around the valley of Ho Mong and provided the withering, interlocking firepower that dissuaded Burmese air attacks. Sullivan eyed the shelters with the same disdainful look he gave to cheap vodka.

“I’m hoping we won’t have a chance to experience this.”

Rows of open-air classrooms were situated east of the barracks. Inside, the Noom Suk Harn sat ramrod straight upon wooden benches at long, rough tables, their arms crossed and their eyes fixed on the blackboard and the day’s English lesson:

He is jumping. She is clapping. Is she opening the window? Is he closing the door?

The students used Burmese textbooks for their English classes, although I doubted the language credits from Tiger Camp would ever transfer to a Burmese school system. I surveyed the room. Two dozen boys, ten to thirteen years of age, some with hair shaved to prevent lice, all carrying the hard, untrusting stares of childhoods stolen by war. It was difficult to imagine these future soldiers ever having occasion to say, in English, “She is clapping.”

Sai Ching was a typical Tiger Camp student. He was thirteen and had not been home to his village in Loi Kaw township, a five-day walk to the west, since his parents sent him to Khun Sa more than two years ago.

“I came here to fight the Burmese,” he said. Sai Ching spoke Tai Yai and Sengjoe translated; the boy’s fierce ambition could not be articulated from the English-language phrases of his Burmese textbooks.

“They came to my village,” said Sai Ching. “They beat the villagers and looted the chickens and pigs. I want to become an MTA officer.” The Shan conflict with the Burmese had endured for decades. Sai Ching, I felt, would probably get his wish.

The contradictions surrounding Khun Sa were seeping to the surface. A global pariah, the warlord lived a high-profile life by the standards of international fugitives. Narcotics were the lifeblood of the MTA, yet Khun Sa had tendered a plan to abandon the heroin business in return for Shan independence. Cast in the Western press as a cruel, petty tyrant, he provided free medical care, however primitive, and free education, albeit with a rebel bent. He controlled the lion’s share of the world opium market and yet drug use was forbidden among members of his organization.

Doubling back toward the center of town, we paused to view the special-forces parade ground. The camp was under the command of Khun Sa’s eldest son, Cham Herng, whom everyone called “Number One” or “The Principal.” According to Flynn and Mook, Number One had received military training in Taiwan and, under an assumed name, had also attended Arizona State University. Now the son had been brought into the family firm and groomed for a leadership position. Number One lived adjacent to the parade ground in his father’s old house, a tidy red-brick bungalow set behind a picket fence bordered with a low, clipped hedge, a trellised gateway, and grounds planted with banana trees, aloe, and bougainvillea.

Number One oversaw a training regimen that lasted one full year. Officers and soldiers received leadership training, studied infantry and guerrilla tactics, and learned to handle the General’s entire arsenal, from M-16 and AK-47 rifles to M-79 and RPG-7 grenade launchers. Several company-sized groupings of uniformed soldiers stood at attention on the sun-burned field as a bullhorn-wielding officer addressed them from a reviewing stand. The Tiger Camp flag—a blue banner emblazoned with a red M-16 rifle, a fountain pen, and an open book—flapped weakly in the slight breeze.

“The flag means that wisdom and the pen are sharper than the sword,” Sengjoe said.

“No,” corrected Flynn. “It means read, write, and shoot.”

There would be soldiers, many more soldiers, to see. We left the special-forces troops and rode north for a mile, beyond the outskirts of Ho Mong, and turned onto a secondary road blocked by a turnpike topped with a red stop sign. Sengjoe spoke with the armed guard at the checkpoint, the pole was raised, and we drove through the gate of the limited-access Shan State Drug Rehabilitation Center.

“This was created by the General himself three years ago,” Sengjoe said. “A lot of people get cured in this encampment. We try to get rid of the opium addicts. Most of the guys under treatment are opium addicts. They cannot afford money to buy heroin. Heroin is so costly. But it’s easy to get addicted to opium. At first, they want to take about three balls. But soon, if they want the same feeling, they have to multiply the balls. They have to smoke six, ten balls. In a day you can take about fifty to sixty balls. Then you are really in the groove of addiction.”

Thirty men, soldiers as well as civilians, were currently being treated. The center could accommodate one hundred patients.

“Some are volunteers for treatment,” Sengjoe said. “Some have been caught by the authorities. The village headmen have to send all the addicts to the center to be treated. Also the commanders in the front lines have to send the soldiers here. Most of the military people in the front line have no medicines. They smoke opium for relaxation or for illness. At first, it’s a miracle cure. But then they repeat very often and they get hooked. So many of the officers and soldiers from the front lines come here for treatment.”

Elderly addicts, however, were exempted from the drug-treatment program.

“People over sixty are allowed to have the addiction,” Sengjoe said. “As long as he doesn’t extend his opium pipe to the youngsters, it’s all right. He can keep. He’s happy. If you cut off the old man, it’s like killing him.”

We parked at the foot of a small knoll. A young man, his head shaved clean, greeted Flynn. He was an errand boy at the Shan State Restoration Council’s office in Mae Hong Son. But for more than a month, he had been confined to rehab, locked in the throes of opium withdrawal.

“He’s a good boy,” Flynn said quietly. “I didn’t know he had a problem.”

We climbed to the hillock’s summit, which was ringed with trenches. On the southern slope, just below a small MTA garrison guarding the inmates, stood four simple lean-tos. Beneath their sheet-metal roofs, wooden crosshatches lay inexplicably on the ground. Sengjoe walked to the nearest shelter, stooped, then lifted the heavy, hinged hatch. Beneath the lid was the dark, gaping maw of an oubliette, the centerpiece of the General’s simple, brutally efficient detoxification program.

“It’s about sixteen feet deep,” Sengjoe said. “Underneath the gate it’s like a ball. The mouth is small, but inside it’s a big space. It’s a black pit. The opium addicts are put in the pit for treatment. We leave them there for seven days and nights. We give them only water and rice. These poor guys wriggle, they shit a lot, they sweat a lot, they cough a lot. When they are hauled from the mouth of the pit, really, it’s a gruesome sight. They have a bath and after that, they have to stay in a cell for a month.”

He pointed downhill to a cluster of windowless wooden buildings. Nearby, a half-dozen men, with heads shaved like monk novitiates, struggled to drag away a giant log.

“Then they are allowed to move freely in the compound. They have to work all day to harden their muscles. We encourage them to have a lot of baths every day. Some have to go under treatment for six months to a year. It depends on how long they are addicted to opium.”

While at hard labor, patients were permitted weekly visits by relatives. The MTA guards searched all visitors and packages for illicit drug fixes.

“In the past two years we caught some persons trying to smuggle in opium,” Sengjoe explained.

“Do they get the pit, too?” I asked.

“They get killed,” he replied. “Death penalty. Serious.”

The center claimed a success rate of 80 percent. To deter recidivism, the General had enacted a draconian three-strikes policy. For a second offense, patients received fifty lashes, then got the black pit, isolation, and hard labor. For a third transgression, they were put to death. Decapitation, with the stroke of a dah sword.

“The drug treatment works wonders,” Flynn chuckled. “We always say, ‘Don’t lose your head over it.’”

We had been invited to a memorial feast hosted by the field commander of the MTA, Sao Kan Zet, to honor his recently deceased brother, and so we left the involuntary ascetics and drove south, passing the Ho Mong talaat, now quiet in the midday heat. A brown patch of a soccer field spread to the west, alongside a concrete basketball court. Flynn had introduced the game in the late 1980s to Tiger Camp. The General, who was intrigued by Western culture, had wanted recreation for his soldiers. Basketball, which required only rudimentary equipment, seemed a good way to build troop morale.

“There can’t be too much dunking,” I said. “The only Shan taller than me is Sengjoe.”

“Sure, they can dunk,” Flynn cracked. “They load the ball in an RPG-7 and shoot from half-court.”

Beyond the playing fields lay brown, fallow paddy. The General was thinking of leveling the rice fields, remarked Flynn, building an airstrip, then purchasing a C-130 cargo plane. But he would never consider felling the gargantuan tree that caused the two-lane dirt road we now traveled to split around its thick trunk. Khun Sa might have absolute power over Shan life and limb, but the sacred Bo tree was not within his bailiwick. It was under a Ficus religiosa that Prince Siddhartha had renounced all earthly passions and become the Buddha. To fell the Bo was a sacrilegious act that also invited the wrath of the tree’s nat spirits, and so we lurched along an undulating detour around the tree.

The memorial banquet was laid out inside a breezy pavilion, just beneath a Buddhist temple at the foot of the valley’s eastern slope. The commander had gotten leave from the field to host the event and at least seven hundred people, some from as far away as Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son, had traveled to Ho Mong out of respect. The career soldier, a short, barrel-chested man with Brezhnev-thick eyebrows, bade us to sit at his table as honored guests.

“We always have a great expectation that the Western world will take a stand and give us some moral support or help,” said Sao Kan Zet, as Sengjoe translated. I offered an innocuous, optimistic reply while his aides descended upon the table with brimming porcelain bowls of curried chicken and potatoes, pad thai and pumpkin, bean-curd soup, boiled rice, fried river fish, and two-liter bottles of Sprite. Flynn and Sengjoe helped themselves to the food like starving men; Sullivan and I doled a few spoonfuls of rice and morsels of chicken onto our plates.

“Mister Jay and I do not have jungle stomachs,” I explained.

Sao Kan Zet nodded. I hoped we had not committed a grievous offense that would land us in a rat pit or on the front lines. Then Khernsai materialized, hoping our new accommodations were adequate, still apologetic for any past misunderstandings, quickly taking his leave. For the duration of our stay, he was to remain invisible.

Sullivan and I ate farang-style, with spoons. Some banquet-goers ate with chopsticks, in the Yunnanese manner, while most dined in traditional Shan fashion, with their fingers. As the feast concluded, MTA soldiers and civilians formed a human “bucket brigade” nearly one hundred yards long to pass dirty dishes and cutlery back to the kitchen for cleaning. Sengjoe remarked offhandedly that General Khun Sa was just uphill, visiting the monks inside the temple. The dragon had surfaced, surreptitious, unannounced.

We scrambled up the bouganvillea-shaded slope. A matched pair of late-model white Toyota four-wheel-drive trucks were parked outside the temple, outfitted with complete war-wagon packages: tinted windows, knobby tires, fog lamps, and raised chassis. Song thaews with attitude. Dozens of local Shan milled around outside while a trio of armed soldiers stood near a side doorway, smoking Krong Thips, regarding all observers with lidded, shoot-first eyes. The red strips of cloth dangling from their rifle slings like fishing lures identified them as Khun Sa’s personal bodyguards.

Through an open temple window I could see a golden Buddha image seated upon a raised altar, the glow of candles, the familiar hue of Purple Kings stuffed in glass offering jars. An MTA soldier armed with a Panasonic videocamera was recording the General’s audience with the monks. The sweet, lazy smell of joss sticks drifted from the room.

“Don’t make any sudden movements,” Flynn whispered. “The guards are very nervous.”

A near-electric ripple of anticipation swept the crowd hoping for a glimpse of their leader. MTA soldiers trotted from the temple and swung into the Toyota truck beds. They bristled with hair-trigger firepower: .45-caliber pistols, M-16 rifles, M-79 grenade launchers.

And then General Khun Sa ambled from the temple. The warlord’s loose, cream-colored dress shirt nearly hid the slight paunch pushing over his brown slacks. I don’t know why, but I thought of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, the old Mafia don playing in the garden with his grandchildren. From a distance, Khun Sa seemed benign, nearly bemused by the commotion. Maybe the comfort of ready automatic weapons did that to a man. The General spotted Sullivan videotaping his exit and stopped. That’s it, I thought, black-pit time. But the warlord raised his right arm, waved in our direction, and smiled.

“Bye-bye,” said the Prince of Death, in English. Then he stepped into the Toyota’s cab and was gone.