Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

He geared down, resisting the urge to squeeze the brakes. At seventy miles per hour, that was a good way to lose control, and he had no desire to end up smeared across a stretch of Burmese blacktop. Instead, he waited until he was only doing about forty, and then leaned forward and squeezed the front brake.

The front tire left a streak of rubber, but the back end of the Rebel lifted off the ground, the drive wheel spinning free. With a little wiggle of his hips, Shin swung the bike halfway around, pivoting on the front wheel, and as the rear tire touched down, he twisted the handlebars the opposite way and goosed the throttle again, accelerating out of the turnaround.

He felt a surge of excitement that was partly due to the realization that he hadn’t lost the Toyota after all, but mostly because of having pulled off a near perfect “stoppie.”

Too bad there’d been no one around to see it.

He raced back down the highway, and this time he had no difficulty spotting the dirt track. He also saw that the road was blocked by a metal gate. An old Bamar man wearing what looked like military fatigues, stood at the gate and watched Shin approach with unveiled distrust.

Shin weighed his options as he turned toward the gated road and brought the motorcycle to a stop a few feet away from the old man. He was a park ranger, Shin decided, or at least he was meant to look like one.

Putting on his most sincere smile, he addressed the man in Mandarin Chinese. “Is this the entrance to the botanical gardens?”

The old man blinked at him and then tried his best to reply in the same language. “No Chinese speak. Go away.”

Though conversationally fluent in the Burmese language, Shin was trying to pass himself off as a misguided traveler. Chinese visitors were about the only tourists who came to Burma, and some parts of the country had as many Chinese inhabitants as Burmese. Shin was Korean, but he doubted the Bamar man would be able to make the distinction.

“English?” Burma had been a British colony until 1947; the old guy might even remember the Colonial era.

The man nodded, but remained wary.

“I looking for gardens,” Shin continued in his best attempt at broken English.

The man pointed back down the highway. His own command of English was passably good. “The gardens are that way, five kilometers.”

Shin knew he was reaching his limit of questions, but he thought he could get away with one more. “What this place?”

“It is a wildlife refuge. No one is allowed inside.”

“Wildlife? What kind? Good for pictures?”

“Buru,” the man answered.

“Buru?”

The man nodded as if the question somehow signified Shin’s comprehension. “Nagas. Very dangerous. No pictures.”

Well that clears it right up. First buru and now nagas?

Shin knew of an ethnic group called the Naga that lived in the northwestern region of the country, but he didn’t think the old man was talking about them. Naga was also the name of a serpentine demon in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. The term was also sometimes translated as ‘dragon,’ which didn’t make much sense either. Maybe it was a spooky story concocted by the government or someone else with a desire to keep people off this road. Regardless, it was time to be moving on.

He thanked the old man and pulled back onto the highway. This time, he kept his speed to a nice safe forty mph, and as soon as he was out of the gatekeeper’s line of sight, he let go of the throttle altogether. He coasted the bike off the road and parked it in a stand of trees.

He shrugged out of his backpack and dug inside to retrieve his Garmin GPS unit and a paper map of the country. Neither showed the dirt road, much less indicated a wildlife refuge, but the map did show both the curves of the highway and the course of several rivers and streams that meandered through the valleys between the plateaus. He quickly plotted a course into the GPS that would eventually cross the dirt road—well away from the old man standing guard at the gate—and entered the waypoints into the device.

In addition to the navigations aids, his backpack contained what he had come to think of as essential equipment for any mission. There was enough gear to set up a hooch—a rainproof poncho and a quilted poncho liner, and some elastic bungee cords. There was food—a couple of granola bars, two MREs, a liter bottle of water and some iodine tablets for field-expedient purification if the need should arise, and it was looking like it might. What he didn’t have was a weapon, at least not in the backpack.