And all hell broke loose.

Our sharpshooters had managed to get themselves into position, and my gunfire was their signal to open up on the troops who had their guns trained on the Toyota. We took them completely by surprise, and all the shooting was done by our side. Then our men were emerging from the brush at the side of the road, cheering, flushed with success. They piled up the bullet-ridden corpses of the government troop while Ne Win pointed his pistol in the air and fired three spaced shots, a signal to the rest of our forces. By the time they reached us, the jeeps and the troop carriers, the roadblock was dismantled and the weapons and ammunition of the dead enemy soldiers stowed in the trunk of the Toyota.

And we rolled on to attack their camp.

That took a little more doing. The government outpost had numerical superiority – around a hundred and fifty men to our forty – and enjoyed an advantage over us in weaponry. They were in a fortified compound, and had the edge of defending while we had to attack. All things being equal, they would have swamped us.

Fortunately, all things weren’t equal. We had the great advantage of surprise, and they had every reason to be surprised, having had not the slightest intimation of unrest among us. And how could they? There hadn’t been any unrest until my fevered speech – and fevered it was – had turned a quiet group of men into impassioned killers.

So they weren’t expecting us, and indeed a good many of them were still in their beds when we hit them. They responded quickly, I have to give them that, and they fought well, but they were outclassed. Along with everything else, we were better motivated. We were fighting to avenge an Australian durian-eater, and to bring glory to the Shan people, and to hasten the day when the Shan would take their place among the free and independent nations of the world.

They, on the other hand, were just fighting for their lives. They didn’t stand a chance.

We hit them fast and we hit them hard, and it was at once awful and wonderful, as warfare generally is. It catches you up and carries you away, as it has always done since the Israelites went up against the Midianites. I ran around just like all my comrades, firing my gun, dodging bullets that whined overhead, shooting men and seeing them die.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit what a thrill it was. But if combat weren’t exciting, if men didn’t love it, how could it have lasted for all these millennia? The pleasure’s diminished, of course, if you get wounded, and it stops altogether if you get killed. But if you emerge without a scratch, and if your team wins, I swear there’s nothing like it.

When it was over we piled our vehicles with their weapons, along with the sacks of rice and cases of canned goods and cartons of medical supplies we confiscated. Then, when the last of the prisoners had been shot, we placed our explosive charges, blew up the buildings, and headed back to camp.

I had just enough time to eat a meal and drink a pot of tea and tell Katya about the morning’s action. And then the malaria hit me.

It was worse the second day. I couldn’t lie still and it was torture to move. Everything hurt, and I was freezing and burning up all at once, and the fever had me out of my mind, hearing colors and seeing odors and tasting music. I had impassioned conversations with people I’d never met – Pyotr Kropotkin and Lajos Kossuth and Emilio Zapata, to name three who paid visits to my fever-wracked side. I had occasional moments of clarity, and I was just as glad when they were over, because my mind was such that I was better off out of it. Some of the time I was afraid I was going to die, and the rest of the time I was afraid I wasn’t.

I don’t know if the aspirin helped, or the quinine, but I took them when Katya gave them to me. I don’t know if the shwe le maw helped, either, but I drank deep when Katya held a cup to my lips. Sometimes it was boiled water and sometimes it was the orange brandy. Maybe it helped. It certainly didn’t hurt.

And sometime during the night the fever broke. Foul perspiration poured out of me in a flood, soaking the mattress under me and the covers piled on top of me. My pulse slowed and the pains in my limbs receded and I not only knew I was going to live, but I was even glad of it.

“Vanya?”

I looked up at her. “I think I saw angels,” I said, “and you were one of them.”

“You saw many people, Vanya. You had many conversations.”

“I remember the one with Kropotkin,” I said. “I was asking him about some points that always bothered me in his pamphlet, On Mutual Aid. And he answered my questions, but I can’t remember what he said.”

“He was not really here, Vanya.”

“Well, I know that,” I said. “Still, if his arguments were valid, it would be useful if I could remember them. Whether he was here or not.”

“You are here,” she said. “That is what is important.”

And damned if she didn’t slip under the covers with me, with predictable (but still surprising) results.

Afterward she curled up beside me and slept, her breath warm against my shoulder. I thought about the events of the day, and the horrible joys of war. The only part I hadn’t liked was when my Shan brothers had shot the handful of men who had tried to surrender. It was fairly standard – an insurgent army can’t be expected to care for prisoners, and the troops who’d thrown up their hands had done so with no real hope of survival. Ne Win’s men, never having signed the Geneva Convention, were not bound by it. They didn’t torture their prisoners, or mock them, or make cruel sport of them. They simply gunned them down.

I understood it, but I didn’t like it much. Aside from that, I had a distressingly good time. I shot some people before they could shoot me, I stood shoulder to shoulder with other like-minded men, and I had the good fortune to be on the winning side. When it was all over, we brought home six dead and four wounded, which had to rank as remarkably light casualties in a battle that had cost upward of a hundred and fifty government lives, plus the ten troops we’d gunned down at the roadblock checkpoint.

A famous victory, I thought. It wasn’t the Battle of Blenheim, and it didn’t have Robert Southey to write a poem about it, but when the Shan state achieved independence, it might rate a mention in the high school history books.

So I thought about it, and about the relationship of war and testosterone, and the previously unnoted aphrodisiacal effects of malaria. And about Stuart, in whose memory the day’s slaughter had been undertaken.

And other things, things to think about while I waited for the dawn.

While Katya and I breakfasted on duck eggs and sticky rice, the rest of the camp was a beehive of activity. It was only a question of time until army headquarters in Rangoon sent a brigade to avenge yesterday’s action, and Ne Win wanted to be prepared.

Katya wanted to know what would happen. I wondered myself. Would Ne Win try to defend the little compound? Or would his troops slip away into the hills, pausing now and then to ambush the SLORC regulars, then disappearing before the army could exact retribution?

There was something to be said for either approach, but we weren’t going to be around for it. Because, as soon as we’d finished our meal, he put us in a car, assigned us a driver, and sent us off to Thailand.

“Evan Turner,” he said, “you are a true Shan brother.” He placed a hand on my head, where, were I still a monk, I’d be well advised to shave. “You were a splendid monk,” he assured me, “but an even better soldier. A safe journey, my friend.”

By nightfall we were at the border. We had to cross a river via a rope bridge, a passage I found scarier than the firefight the previous day. The third night of malarial fever was on me by then, which didn’t make it easier. But we got across, and they found me a safe place to sweat out the fever, and I was better in the morning.