Chapter One
He must have been a raffishly handsome young man, with his bushy eyebrows, large
coal-black eyes, high-cheekboned face, and thick mop of black hair dangling over
his ears. He looked pale but improbably serene, showing no sign of the torture
he had endured, and those eyes were still wide open and frozen in a final
instant of surprise. He had a strong, projecting chin, but his head ended a few
inches below that chin in a jagged eruption of blood, tissue, and bone. His head
had been hacked off with a machete and was impaled on a bamboo stake, and he
seemed to be staring at me.
I stared back. That abrupt transition from human flesh to bamboo stake wrenched
my gut and paralyzed my legs. I was scared stiff. The mob that had killed him
was in front of me now, the killers waving machetes and screaming Allahu
akbar, God is great. There were about two dozen of them, mostly men in their
twenties and thirties, all riding motorcycles slowly down the main street of the
little farmtown of Turen, Indonesia.
It was a typical warm afternoon in what seemed a bucolic, prospering community.
A tropical drizzle had created a shine ... read full excerpt from: Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia ebook
