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The Ghost Road (Cont.) I WAIT FOR SEVEN HOURS, tearing engorged brown leeches off my legs and watching the blood run down into my boots. Late in the afternoon, the soldier with the black sidearm comes down the embankment, grabs me by the hair, and jerks me to my feet. I knock his hand away. He wants to hit me so badly the muscles in his cheeks quiver. I am pushed up the mud steps. Seated against the building, I could see only the laborers and the rolling jungle. When I reach the top of the mud steps, I truly confront the world I have entered. It is medieval, something from the Dark Ages. Before me is a 400-foot-high hill, stripped naked. Cut into the base of the slope, circling the mountain, is a trench, 20 feet wide and ten feet deep. Two-foot bamboo spears, sharpened pungee sticks, stab upward from the bottom of the trench. Just beyond the pungee pit is an eight-foot-high bamboo wall. The top and outer face of the wall are bristling with bamboo spikes. Past this is a strip of barren dirt too smooth and manicured to be anything but a mine field. Beyond that is another lethal bamboo wall. There are five walls and four strips of mined no-man's-land ascending the hill in concentric circles. The only break in the stockade is a narrow passageway that zigzags up the middle. I am dragged over the first pungee pit on a bamboo drawbridge and through the first wall via a small, heavy door with bamboo spikes. We enter a tunnel, the walls and stairs dug out of the wet mud, the ceiling roofed with logs. Passing through the tunnel, I try to imagine some purpose for this surreal jungle fortress. It lies on a forgotten, forbidden border and would be a ridiculous target for any combatant. It can only be protecting the Burmese soldiers from the local people they have enslaved. After passing through four doors, the mud steps rise back up to daylight. We are on top of the hill. I am taken to a table set in the red dirt beneath a canopy of leaves, behind which is seated a fat man with a pockmarked face. Underneath his sweat-stained fatigues, which have no insignia, I can see red pajamas. He is wearing green flip-flops. There are four armed soldiers standing behind the man. He says something to them and my pack is torn from my back and a bamboo chair forced against the back of my knees. I sit down. One of the soldiers dumps the contents of my pack onto the dirt and starts rummaging through my stuff. I stare at the fat man, wondering who will interpret, when he speaks for himself. "Passport. Give." I take my passport out of my money belt and hand it to him. His eyes don't leave my face. Without ever looking down, he flips through the pages, then throws the passport back, hitting me in the face. "Visa. Show visa." I open the passport to the correct page and hand it back. He studies the stamp. I make every effort to appear bored. I have an official visa for Myanmar. It is a large stamp that fills one page of the passport. At the bottom of the page, in blue ink that matches the stamp, I've blotted out the words ALL LAND ENTRY PROHIBITED. He shakes his head and shuts the passport. "Not possible. No one come here. Border closed." I expected this. I am already unfolding two other documents from my money belt. I hand them to him. One is a personal letter from Ambassador U Tin Winn, written and signed on embassy stationery, inviting me to Myanmar and urging all officials to help me travel along the Stilwell Road. The other is an official Myanmar Immigration Department Report of Arrival. My photo is affixed to this document, and it, too, has an official stamp from the Myanmar government. Along with my name, passport number, and visa number, there is a list spelling out my itinerary and the towns in Burma I have permission to travel through: Pangsau Pass, Shingbwiyang, Mogaung, Myitkyina, Bhamo. These are all forgeries, but I have confidence in them. He has no way of checking their authenticity. The documents make him angry. "Where you get?" he demands. "From the embassy of Myanmar. I had lunch with Ambassador U Tin Winn. He invited me to your country." I surprise myself with the calmness of my voice. I tell him I have brought gifts. I gesture for one of the soldiers to bring over a sack from the pile of my belongings. Inside he finds a five-kilogram bag of salt, a package of 20 ball-point pens, and three lined notebooks. Each notebook has a $100 bill paper-clipped to the cover. He looks back down at the documents. All of his fingernails are short and dirty, except for the nail on his right pinkie, which is clean and long. I can only assume that he is the warlord of this lost jungle fiefdom—beyond civilization and beyond the fragile wing of morality—and that there is no law here, no God. He is God. But I have these troublesome documents. I can see his mind working. Someone must know I am here. Why wasn't he informed? If these documents are real, he would've been notified of my arrival. I would've had a military escort. He raises his small black eyes, stares at me, and says something in Burmese. Two soldiers leave. A few minutes later, a boy is dragged up to the commander. He is clearly a prisoner. Skeletal, wearing nothing but torn trousers, he has an angular head, protruding ribs, legs so thin his knees are larger than his thighs. The commander barks at him and the boy cringes, then speaks to me. "Why are you here?" His English is catechism-perfect. "I told him already," I reply, feigning weariness. "I have been invited by the Myanmar government to travel the Stilwell Road." The boy translates this. The commander stands up and slowly walks toward me. He stops with his face in front of mine. Then he walks over and stands like a bear next to the emaciated boy and says something. "He doesn't believe you," the boy tells me. "Why have you come here?" When I give the same answer, the commander turns sideways and slams his heavy fist into the boy's rib cage. The boy screams and crumples to the ground. The fat commander looks at me and laughs. The message seems to be: I may be someone it would not be prudent to harm. But this boy, this boy is perfectly expendable. This boy could easily disappear without a trace. I am sickened by my naiveté. I've been willing to imperil my own life to travel this road, but not the life of someone else—that's why I chose to go alone. I should have known better. I've read shelves' worth of books about Burma. When I refuse to answer any more questions, my audience with the warlord is abruptly terminated. I'm hustled back down through the mud tunnels and out of the compound. At dusk, my pack and my passport are returned to me, but my forged documents have disappeared. The film has been ripped from my camera, and all pages with writing have been torn from my journal. I am marched back up to Pangsau Pass. Commander Rama and his platoon are waiting for me at the border. Rama stares at me with his old, oily eyes but doesn't say a word.
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