Left for Dead

by Sean Parnell

  “I was wounded, Xian Sheng.” There was no arguing that. The blood was thawing and dripping from Feng’s scalp, over his nose and onto his cracked lips. “I crawled to a hill and watched. I heard them speak. They escaped on the airplane with the PLA colonel and others . . .” Yet he saw in Zaifeng’s blazing glare that it wasn’t enough, and he keened and bent his neck forward. He knew what was coming and began mumbling prayers.

  “But you returned on your horse, Feng.” Zaifeng’s breaths were spewing hard. “How did they not see your horse?”

  “My . . . my horse lies down in the snow when I tell him, Xian Sheng.”

  Zaifeng blinked, and for a moment he saw the scene. Feng lying there wounded, the sole survivor of this misadventure, with his obedient horse on its side, regarding his master with expectant eyes, awaiting further instructions. He recalled having seen Feng do this trick with his horse before, and remembered laughing. Why would this man lie? Why would he return to the fortress at all, if he knew he was going to die?

  “Enough,” Zaifeng snapped. “Go.”

  Feng didn’t have to be told twice. He scrambled to his feet, bowed low, then once more as he stumbled backward past Po, out the great door, and ran.

  Zaifeng roared in frustration and hurled the jian across the room, where it spun through the air, impaled itself in a teakwood wall, and twanged.

  He stood stock-still for a full minute, calming his rage. Po hadn’t moved from his spot, and Zaifeng could smell his fear. A truly effective commander could never lead his men this way, not with threats of violence, or obedience born of trepidation. They would either follow you out of love, conviction, and loyalty, or not at all.

  “Mastering others is strength,” he murmured. “Mastering yourself is true power.” It was a quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, from his Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way and Its Virtue.

  He walked to the potbellied stove in the center of his zŏng bù, opened the door, and added a dry log to the fire. The flames licked up and haloed his form, then he strode to his dynastic desk and sat down. He opened a drawer and began withdrawing some documents and notebooks, ordering them on his blotter.

  “Assemble the men, Po,” he said. “Let them feed, then have them uncover the helicopters and ensure they are fueled and checked. Once that is done, have them load the Gantu-62 canister aboard the second helo. That team must be in full protective posture, and most careful. The rest should load weapons, ammunition, and stores, but make sure to use the weight scales so as not to overburden the aircraft. Clear?”

  “Yes, Xian Sheng.”

  “Good. We leave for the island in one hour. Directly, no detours.”

  Zaifeng had no concerns about flying through CCP-controlled airspace. His pilots were PLA defectors who’d gone missing from their posts a year before. They knew all the frequencies and military codes that could get them safely past air traffic controllers. He gestured at an ornate box that looked like a treasure chest, sitting beside his desk.

  “Send someone in half an hour to take this with us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Po said. “But, if I may. We are short of men now for the mission.”

  “Their deaths served a purpose. Now we will have one empty helicopter to crash into the sea as our decoy.”

  “But the pilots, Xian Sheng . . . They will die.”

  Zaifeng turned and squinted at his lieutenant. “As did the Kamikaze. Do we not have as much honor as the Japanese?”

  “Of course, Xian Sheng.” Po saluted and left.

  For a while, Zaifeng selected precious objects from his drawers—the flask with the lock of hair from Puyi, some ornate Qing Dynasty emerald and ruby rings, some photographs of his mother and grandmother. Most of the rest were old texts and books, including the famous biography of his grandfather, written by the Scottish diplomat Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston.

  When he was done, he closed the chest, walked to the hatch of his dungeon, and went down. He emerged carrying a large olive-green box by its folding handle. It looked like a typewriter case, and he set it in the middle of his zŏng bù, knelt for one last prayer before his golden Buddha, and went out.

  An hour later, Zaifeng stood in the fortress courtyard. His three Harbin Z-20 helicopters whined in the night and their large main rotors were already turning, whipping ringlets of falling snow through the air. All the men were aboard and he was alone, with a QSZ-92 pistol strapped to his thigh and his bo in one hand. He walked to the gate in the fortress’s concrete wall and pulled it open. Then he freed all the remaining horses, slapped their slick rumps and drove them through and away.

  He took one last look at the waterfall that coursed from the cliff and down through his power wheel, all of it glistening with ice, and then he regarded his zŏng bù, its beautiful roof and columns and dragons, and nodded.

  He walked to the first helicopter, climbed aboard, and returned the bows of his commandos as they sat, fully geared up, on the benches. Then he moved on into the cockpit and ordered his pilots to leave.

  The helos lifted off, and standing behind the pilots, Zaifeng told them to circle the fortress once, and he looked down through the cockpit window at all he’d constructed and loved for so long. Then he told them to make headway and speed.

  He didn’t look back again as he pulled a remote detonator from his pocket and pressed the trigger, and his zŏng bù exploded in a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame and a thousand spinning splinters.

  It was no longer the home of the Swords of Qing. He would either be going to his rightful throne in Beijing, or to his death.

  Chapter 35

  Pingtung, Taiwan

  Colonel Wi Lung Chun had chosen the far western end of his airstrip for Dr. Ai Liang to conduct her inspection of Hank Steele’s gruesome hand.

  Just beyond the tarmac was a wide flat plain of six-foot-high elephant grass, where Panther’s ASSC commandos practiced their parachute insertions. They always jumped with their sleeves rolled up, and all of their forearms displayed pink wounds from the razor-sharp blades of thick grass. If you didn’t have those rite-of-passage scars, you were not ASSC. The parachute landing zone was bordered by razor wire hung with trespass warnings and lies about mines. It was a place far away from prying eyes, where you could quietly and honorably die.

  A large mobile chem-bio laboratory had been driven down from the Taiwanese army’s 33rd Chemical Troops Group Detection and Decontamination Battalion in Kaohsiung. It was a long, olive-green, heavy-duty truck and trailer, purchased from a firm in Florida called Germfree, and built to Biosafety BSL-3 specifications, with generators, air filtration, and water pumps. The system was foolproof for inspecting mycobacterium tuberculosis, St. Louis encephalitis virus, and Coxiella burnetii, but no one from the 33rd had ever encountered, or heard of, Gantu-62.

  Outside the trailer, which was parked at the end of the tarmac, the army chemical corps had set up a large decontamination tent, where six troops in full MOPP IV gear waited with their sweat running into their black plastic boots. It was nearly sundown, but still very warm. Fifty yards removed from that, Panther’s commandos had established an armed perimeter where the colonel waited behind a Humvee with Eric Steele and his father, but no one else from Steele’s crew. Panther didn’t have enough PPE gear on-site for everyone, so his troops and guests had nothing more than standard N95 masks. They were trusting Colonel Dr. Ai Liang, and God.

  Dr. Liang was inside the trailer for nearly an hour, during which time Steele and his father stood there six feet apart, occasionally glancing at their watches, regarding the perspiring chem-bio troops and squinting at the distant sea. Hank smoked his pipe and they hardly exchanged a word, while Panther leaned into his command vehicle and spoke on his Harris radios to general officers in Kaohsiung. In side glances Panther noted the startling physical similarities of the two Americans. He knew they were both special agents of some sort, were father and son, and it didn’t take psychic talent to recognize they had family issues. Panther was an expert
commando and killer, but he had five kids of his own.

  The sound of a pneumatic seal hissed in the evening air, then the steel pressure door of the trailer opened and Dr. Liang emerged. She wore a fully enclosed black helmet with a curved glass faceplate linked to an oxygen hose, a pressurized blue suit, silver gloves, and boots. She locked the door behind her, and as she came down the three metal stairs Steele thought she looked like a costumed child on Halloween.

  A pair of chem-bio troops guided her into the decon tent, and for another ten minutes she was sprayed from a series of pipe nozzles, rinsed, and doused once again like a Mini Cooper in a car wash. She came out the other end, wading through a pool of foam, where two more troops unlocked her helmet, handed it to her, and backed away.

  Dr. Liang walked across the tarmac toward Steele, Hank, and Panther. She no longer had any respiratory protection, so they removed their masks too. She stopped ten feet away. Her glasses were fogged and her hair askew, but her comely features were calm.

  “The hand was infected with Gantu-62,” she said in English with a lilt of Hong Kong.

  “Could you define that, Colonel?” Hank called to her.

  “It is a gain-of-function novel corona virus, biochemically equivalent in terms of results to VX.”

  Panther whistled low. VX was one of the world’s most deadly nerve agents. Just 8.6 milligrams of the substance could kill a 220-pound adult male merely by contact with the skin. Liang sighed and nodded at the three men.

  “Yes, I take no pride in developing this strain myself, for the People’s Liberation Army, in the laboratory which you know was destroyed. It was used on that ship in Africa as a test, to kill everyone on board. I am certain of it.” She looked at Hank. “It was the ship you found, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Wheelwright,” Hank said. “Yes.”

  Steele looked at his father and thought, Once a spook, always a spook, right, Dad?

  Liang put her helmet down on the macadam. She pulled off the silver tape sealing her gloves to her cuffs and dropped those as well. Some sort of liquid ran off her fingertips and dripped on her boots. Steele realized it was sweat. She looked directly at him now.

  “I must tell you something,” she said. She didn’t use his name, because she didn’t know his name, but she knew the tall bearded American with deeply green eyes was very capable and important. “During the Covid-19 crisis, one of your aircraft carriers was disabled by an infection on board. Do you recall?”

  Steele nodded. The incident wasn’t easy to forget for anyone in the American defense establishment. It had happened aboard the USS Roosevelt when numerous sailors had caught the virus while on shore leave in Southeast Asia. Subsequently, the ship’s captain had appealed for emergency relief from Washington, and the Roosevelt had been temporarily taken out of action.

  “The removal of that ship from the fleet was not due to carelessness on the part of the crew,” Liang went on. “It was a direct attack by one of our female agents from the Ministry of State Security. She was infected, intentionally of course, with a heavy viral load of Covid-19. She then seduced a male sailor while the crew was on shore leave in the Philippines.”

  “Jesus,” Steele hissed, and then he heard in his head Chinese expatriate Miles Guo singing, “Let’s take down the CCP . . . Let the bullets fly a little longer.” Fuckers . . .

  “Afterward, the disease spread quickly throughout the ship,” Liang continued, “but it was only removed from the fleet due to the sentimental weakness of the captain. Covid-19 was not effective as a tactical tool, only as an economic and political one. We knew then that it would take a more powerful bioweapon to eliminate such a behemoth of warfare. It would take something like Gantu-62.”

  “Does the CCP have its own cache of Gantu somewhere else?” Steele asked.

  “No. The only specimens were at my laboratory, Toqui-13. We now know that the men who took them call themselves the Swords of Qing.”

  “Suoyi ni shung chung,” Panther growled to Liang. So you claim. Until Taiwan’s National Security Bureau had a long conversation with her, he wasn’t going to trust anything she said. But Liang understood and bowed her head, as if supplicating for his recommendations of mercy.

  The rumble of an approaching vehicle turned their heads. It was an FMTV medium truck with a high cab in the front, and when it stopped and the passenger door opened, Steele was surprised to see Ralphy Persko climb down.

  He was dressed like he’d grabbed half his clothes off the rack from Ranger Joe’s, and the other half from Honolua Surf Co.—Moab boots, jungle safari pants, a Hawaiian shirt with parrots, big sunglasses, and an Australian bush hat with the side brim snapped up. He was dripping sweat from his bushy curls, had dark rings of it under his armpits, and was hauling his big Alienware laptop case and wearing a stuffed red backpack. Ralphy ambled toward Steele, panting, as two soldiers from the truck pulled a large black Pelican case out of the back and set it on the ground. Steele couldn’t help but grin.

  “Whatcha doing here, Ralphy? Had to use up your miles on United?”

  “Very funny, Seven.” Ralphy put his laptop down and tried sucking oxygen from the humid air. “The boss sent me out here to set up forward cyber and comms.” He then noticed Panther staring at him. The dude was scary-looking and Ralphy unconsciously took a step back. “He also said to tell you that Pentagon’s gone on a war footing, moving naval and air force assets this way. He says we better figure this one out, and fast.”

  “Great,” Steele said. “Nothing too serious. Did you bring your Glock?”

  “Oh, of course, dude . . . not.” Ralphy rolled his eyes. “But I did bring some toys from S.” He jerked a thumb toward the ominous-looking Pelican case. Then he looked up at the tall gray-haired man standing next to Steele. “Who’s this gent?”

  “My father,” Steele said.

  Hank dipped his head at Ralphy, whose mouth fell open like he’d seen a ghost. He and Eric were more than just colleagues—he knew the whole family history but had never raised it unless Steele did first.

  “Holy mother of God,” he whispered.

  “No,” Hank said, “just the father of an angry son.”

  Steele’s jawline rippled, but he didn’t respond. Ralphy went on.

  “The boss says everyone in your crew, except for you and Blade, should pack their stuff and rotate back to D.C.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Guess he doesn’t think you’re gonna live.” Ralphy shrugged an apology. “And he needs to keep some assets.”

  “Yup,” Hank Steele said. “That’s the Program I remember.”

  Panther turned toward Dr. Liang. One of his commandos had given her a bottle of water and she was drinking and unpinning her hair. He snapped something in Mandarin and the commando led her to the open back of a Humvee and helped her up to sit on the tailgate. The driver revved the engine.

  “What should we do with the specimen, Colonel?” Steele called to her.

  “Burn it,” she said. “And the laboratory trailer as well, until it is no more than a puddle of metal.”

  “Wow,” Ralphy whispered.

  The Humvee drove away. Panther turned to Steele, fished a dangle of keys from his trouser pocket, and handed them over.

  “Take my jeep,” he said. “You and your father need time alone. Go to the monastery. It is a place that heals wounds.”

  It was evening in the Garden of Meditations atop a small hill at Fo Guang Shan. There were stone walkways circling around plain granite benches, smiling tubby statuettes of the deity, and candles on pedestals lit by the monks. The garden was surrounded by fifty-foot shoots of bamboo thick as horse thighs, with wispy green feathers on top. They knocked against one another in the breeze, making deep hollow sounds, like giants clucking their tongues.

  Eric and Hank sat on a bench in the flickering light, but not close. A monk in a brown frock had brought them glasses of tea, but had wagged his finger at Hank’s pipe, so he chewed on it empty but didn’t smoke. The monk knew
Panther Chun, which was why these foreigners could trespass during the meditative month when no other guests were allowed.

  They hadn’t said much. They both looked down past the edge of the garden over a long dark pitch of cut grass. A train of five hundred monks in black robes was walking from their evening “medicine meal” to the doors of their large cenobium, heads bowed, hands clasped in front of their hemp belts, and silent.

  So many years had passed for the Steeles without being in each other’s lives, that neither knew where or how to begin. Eric had learned to bury his bitterness, Hank had learned to bank his guilt, and they both knew it would take another year of conversation for each to learn what the other had seen, and heard, and felt. Yet here they were, on the cusp of a mission. The Program had torn them apart, and now the Program had brought them together. Hank knew he had to take point, so he did.

  “When you were small, and I was home,” he said in a gravelly voice that would someday be Eric’s, “I used to rock you in a big rocking chair before bedtime, and sing you songs.”

  “What did you sing?”

  “Old folk tunes. ‘Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley.’ ‘Oh Susanna.’”

  “Did I like it?”

  “You liked that I was home.”

  Eric looked up at the clicking shoots of bamboo. He remembered every minute of every day he’d spent with his father, but he’d suppressed that long ago. He didn’t trust himself to talk about that now.

  “When I was in SF, in Afghanistan,” he said, “and things were rough, I remembered stuff you said to me as a kid.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Well, I’m here.”

  Hank smiled at that and nodded. They were looking at everything but each other, at the trees and sky and stars. At the far end of the garden, a monk climbed onto a tree stand and swung a suspended log against the side of an enormous gong . . . pong, pong, pong. . . . At last Hank looked at Eric.