Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (best free e book reader .TXT) 📗

CHAPTER

TWENTY-

ONE

BAN DOI HENGA REFUGEE CAMP

THAI/BURMA BORDER

MAE HONG SON PROVINCE, THAILAND

EWAN FERGUSONARRIVED on scene to find refugees tearing charred bamboo huts apart, salvaging what they could. A sea of cots lay outside an Order of Malta clinic tent. Doctors and nurses in masks and street clothes moved among them, treating burns and smoke injuries. Spellbound by the calm and care of the medical workers, Ewan bumped into one of four men dragging fresh bamboo out of the jungle. He reached out. “Sorry. So sorry.”

The men never looked back.

Controlled chaos. The Thai way.

The child of a Scottish missionary and a Thai schoolteacher, Ewan understood both the Eastern and Western philosophies of time and order, and where the two clashed. That merger of language and culture had given him the advantage when he applied to become Compassion International’s Director of Thailand Operations four years earlier. His mother had gone so far as to say God had purposed him for the position. While Ewan knew better than to argue with a Thai schoolteacher, let alone his own mother, inside he wondered whether the Lord created people for lifelong careers or for specific moments like this one.

“Excuse me.” He caught the attention of a woman hurrying past. “Where is the church?” In his memory, the church building and the school pavilion rested at the top of the highest hill in the camp. All he saw now were ash and charred trees.

The woman pointed to the same spot.

His heart sank. “And Pastor Nakor? Where is he?”

Sadness joined the misery in her eyes.

“Teacher Rocha?”

She bowed her head and walked on toward the medical tent.

Dear Lord, help me discover what happened here.

God was with him. Ewan knew by the miracle which had brought him there so quickly—a perfect storm of circumstance. Travel and communications were difficult in Thailand, especially where the mountain borderlands were concerned. There were no phone lines, no cell towers. The dirt roads were muddy death traps from June to October.

By God’s grace, this fire had hit the camp in December, when the roads were passable and the Order of Malta was on site for the season. The Order had a sat phone, and their Thai coordinator was a member of Ewan’s Bangkok church. What should have taken a week or more between notification and safe travel had taken a day and a half.

“Pastor Nakor? Teacher Rocha?”

Each passerby continued on in post-disaster shock or sadly shook their heads. A few looked up to the charred hilltop. Ewan feared what he might find there. The Order of Malta always collected remains as quickly as possible, but the living took priority over the dead.

Remains. He didn’t want to think about it. Ewan clutched the satchel at his side, feeling the binder full of profiles within. If Pastor Nakor and Teacher Rocha were gone, what had happened to the children? He had expressed his concern on that score to Jenni Lewis, his State Department contact.

There were thirty-four profiles in that binder—thirty-four children in this camp center, out of the more than forty-eight thousand spread across Compassion’s Thailand facilities. Ewan’s heart broke to think of even one of them in pain.

The fineness, the utter softness, of the ashes where the church had stood struck him as peaceful. Blackened cinder blocks showed him the four corners of the vanished structure. Across the yard, one charred and stubborn rosewood pylon spoke of the pavilion. These sights hurt his heart, but the scent of the place gave him hope. The hilltop smelled of campfires, not death. Ewan had experienced the scent of deadly fires before. There were no bodies hidden in these soft ashes. The children were alive.

Someone touched his shoulder.

“Master Fer . . . Ferg-u-son.” The woman, about his own age, struggled with his name, which had never fit well with the Thai tongue. “You are here.”

They had been acquainted before. Obviously. For the woman had known him by the back of his head. But a name did not readily come to mind. “Forgive me, Mrs. . . .”

“I am Eh Taw. You were here when Pastor Nakor welcomed my daughter into the center program.”

“Yes.” Ewan took her hand. “I remember now. Your daughter is Hla Meh.”

The remembered fact earned him a fleeting smile.

He clung to one last hope. “Can you take me to Hla Meh now?”

The woman’s fingers tightened on his. She spoke with a voice broken and hard at the same time. “Come. The other parents have gathered in the yard at the center of the camp.”

The parents mobbed Ewan at the edge of the yard.

Again, controlled chaos. The Thai way.

He could not blame them. Ewan had a daughter of his own. Eleven going on twenty. How devastated and desperate he would feel if she disappeared in a fire.

Mothers cried. Fathers yelled. After a great deal of shouting for calm and listening to rapid accounts, Ewan gathered that the fire had taken place at the end of the school day. The flames had separated parents from children and spread into the huts. Eh Taw introduced him to Hsar, the woman who’d organized a bucket brigade from the river.

Hsar held her place at the front of the crowd with outstretched arms. “I was present at the last fire at Ban Doi Henga. My son, Thet Ye, was born that night.”

“Thet Ye. I remember. Smart boy.” He had been among the first from the camp to join the program. A sponsor family in the States had fallen in love with his profile, then him, and now sent him monthly letters to encourage his faith and studies. Hla Meh did not have sponsors yet, but there was still time. Perhaps.

Hsar told him how the refugees had worked the whole night to stop the fire, and Eh Taw made certain he understood Hsar herself had led the efforts. Hsar quieted her friend with a calming hand. “My husband only returned this morning from the rice fields in the next valley, hours after the