Dominik looked at Ashley and Jean, offering a tired but encouraging smile. "You two should grab some rations from the cooler. We have a long drive ahead."
"Thank you," Jean said quietly, taking a packet of crackers before retreating back into the corner of the cab.
As for Ashley, she offered a more practiced, polite smile. "Thanks."
"Mhm," Dominik simply hummed in response. Ashley, feeling the conversation was over, turned her attention to the window.
Watching her look away, Dominik shook his head slightly. He didn't intend to expose her identity as the President's daughter. In a lawless region rapidly descending into warlord-controlled anarchy, a high-value hostage like her was a massive liability. The fewer people who knew, the safer she—and by extension, the rest of them—would be.
After resting on the roadside for ten minutes, everyone piled back into the Hilux. This time, Simon took the wheel, and Dominik sat in the passenger seat.
As the truck rumbled south down the cracked asphalt of AH1, Dominik found that his crippling drowsiness had momentarily vanished. The adrenaline of the escape had settled into a sharp, hyper-vigilant wakefulness. He idly watched the dense, green blur of the jungle passing outside his window.
Simon, who clearly preferred the company of his rifle over civilian small talk, focused entirely on navigating the debris on the road. In the back, Laura, Ashley, and Jean had bonded through shared trauma, conversing in hushed, nervous whispers.
Professor Quaid, however, was silent. He kept staring at his ruggedized tablet, his brows furrowed deeply, seemingly engrossed in offline data.
Bored and needing to keep his mind occupied, Dominik turned in his seat to look at Quaid. "Hey, Professor. What are you looking at? You haven't blinked in five miles."
"Hm?" Quaid blinked, looking up from the glowing screen. He tilted the tablet toward Dominik. "Before the telecom grids went down in Mandalay, I downloaded all the local news reports, geological surveys, and encrypted university emails regarding this... epidemic."
Dominik hadn't expected the professor to actually share his work. He couldn't decipher the complex topographical maps on the screen, so he just asked, "And? What's wrong?"
"I can't shake the feeling that this outbreak..." Quaid's face twisted into a bitter, hesitant expression. He shook his head, almost doubting his own hypothesis. "It seems far too calculated to be a natural zoonotic spillover."
"Oh?" Dominik's interest was instantly piqued. The last remnants of his fatigue vanished. He straightened up, fully turning to face the back seat. "What did you find, Professor?"
"Do you remember when I told you that an undocumented temple complex was discovered deep in the Shan State jungle, and I was bringing my students to investigate it?" Quaid asked.
"Yes, I remember," Dominik nodded.
"The epicenter of this viral outbreak... the very first reported cases of violence and cannibalism... originated from the mining town adjacent to that exact dig site," Quaid said, his voice dropping to a whisper.
Dominik frowned. "I'm missing the connection, Professor. What does an old temple have to do with a bio-weapon?"
"To understand that, you need to understand what we found," Quaid said, adjusting his glasses. "Are you familiar with the KH-9 Hexagon spy satellites used by the US during the Cold War?"
Dominik raised an eyebrow. The pivot was unexpected. "I know they were used to photograph Soviet missile silos and track the opium routes in this region back in the 70s. Why?"
"Precisely." Quaid waved a hand dismissively. "In 1974, a KH-9 satellite snapped a high-altitude photo of an uncharted sector of the Shan Plateau. The photo revealed a massive, kilometer-long geological anomaly that looked exactly like a sleeping human face staring up from the jungle canopy. It became an urban legend in intelligence circles—The Stone Face of Shan."
"A giant face in the jungle?" Dominik asked skeptically.
"Yes. For decades, geologists dismissed it. They claimed it was a trick of the light and shadow playing over natural karst limestone formations, which are heavily heavily eroded by the monsoon rains here."
"Let me guess," Dominik deadpanned. "It wasn't just weathering."
"Hehe." Quaid smiled faintly, a spark of academic excitement breaking through his gloom. "In the 2010s, archaeology experienced a technological revolution. We stopped relying solely on machetes and started using LiDAR."
"LiDAR?"
Seeing Dominik's slightly bewildered expression, Quaid adopted his best lecturing tone. "Light Detection and Ranging. You know how radar uses radio waves to map objects?"
"Mhm," Dominik nodded.
"LiDAR uses pulsed lasers. We attach a LiDAR scanner to a drone or a low-flying Cessna. It fires hundreds of thousands of laser pulses per second at the ground. While the canopy reflects most of the light, a fraction of the pulses slip through the leaves and hit the forest floor."
Quaid swiped on his tablet, bringing up an image of a dense jungle transforming into a detailed 3D topographic map.
"By measuring the time it takes for those specific lasers to bounce back, a computer strips away the trees digitally, revealing the naked ground underneath. It allows us to see ancient cities, roads, and pyramids that the jungle swallowed centuries ago. It's how we found the hidden mega-cities of the Maya in Guatemala."
"I see where this is going," Dominik said, his eyes narrowing.
"When the university finally secured funding to fly a LiDAR drone over the Stone Face of Shan coordinates last year," Quaid said, his voice trembling slightly, "we discovered the geologists were wrong. It wasn't natural."
Dominik leaned over the center console, fully engrossed like an eager student. "What was it?"
"The 'Face' was actually the collapsed roof of a massive, subterranean structure. An artificial ruin of unprecedented scale, predating the Pagan Kingdom by millennia," Quaid said in a hushed tone. "It didn't look like a temple. It looked like a bunker."
"A bunker..." Dominik repeated, exchanging a brief, sharp glance with Simon, who had visibly tensed at the word.
"Over the last six months, private military contractors and shadow-funded researchers from all over the world flocked to the site under the guise of a rare-earth mining operation," Quaid continued grimly. "My students and I were brought in simply to catalog the surface-level antiquities to keep up appearances."
Quaid looked out the window at the devastated landscape. "Whatever they unsealed down there in the dark... it wasn't treasure. It was a plague."