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The Myanmar night is muggy and warm, rich with green growing things and undercut by smoke and oiled metal. The only breeze comes from the cloying insects, so thick that if I didn’t have the mask I’d suck them into my lungs with every breath. They batter my eyes, making me blink. I close the security center’s reinforced steel door behind us, shutting away the light, and wait for my eyes to accept the darkness.
It’s not as black out here as I thought at first. Each of the guard towers has a floodlight beneath the platform, and there’s pole lamps every thirty feet or so around the perimeter. I can see the closest fence as an illuminated haze in the darkness, a couple hundred feet away up the side of the mountain, but in front of us, the fence at the bottom and sides is invisible with dis
