The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

The heat of Ying’s rant seemed to leave her. “I’m sorry. It’s just that …” She paused, as if considering whether to say more. “Twins are very common in my family,” she said. “For the past four generations, there have always been twins. But twins are not allowed by this government. My sister and I survived only because my parents were visiting Hong Kong when we were born. But when I gave birth, I was not so lucky.”

  Eric followed her eyes to Mei.

  “I gave birth to two girls,” Ying said. “Mei and her sister. I remember the delivery. I heard them both crying. I could tell that they both were strong. I know they were strong. But then they took one away, told me she had died.” Ying brushed a tear from her eye. “Someday, Mei will want to be a mother, and when she does … If Mei has twins, I want her to have what I couldn’t have, for her own sake and for the twins’ sake, because my sister is my …” Her face turned hard, and Eric realized she would say no more.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  A silence settled over the bathroom.

  For Eric, it was excruciating. Every fiber of him felt they should be fighting to get away. “Why are we waiting? Aren’t they going to find us?”

  “We are waiting for help. Without it, we’ll never make it.” Her tone was once again cold. “Do you have any idea what we are up against here?”

  Eric had to admit he didn’t.

  “You are sitting inside an eighty-eight-story underground military complex that contains one of the world’s most advanced security systems. The backbone of this system is video surveillance. There are cameras everywhere. And every camera has facial recognition software. That means that everywhere you go, those cameras track you, keeping tabs on you. Along with your chip, they verify your location at all times.

  “In addition to the cameras, there are two thousand soldiers housed in this building. But that’s just the beginning, because the building itself is inside the Fort Yue Fei military base, which is the size of a small city and has an additional forty thousand military personnel.

  “So you see, for us to stand any chance of escaping, we have to have all those cameras shut off and all the soldiers occupied with something that they feel is more important than catching us.”

  Eric nodded, sobered by the staggering odds against them. Yet it gave him some hope, because the resistance must be a lot larger than he had thought. Ying and her sister were clearly not alone. There must be dozens of conspirators helping them if they hoped to create such a huge diversion.

  “How many people are helping us?”

  She leveled that fierce stare at him once more, preemptively daring him to question her reply.

  “One.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Trial by Fire

  Tangshan Military Laboratory, China

  Fifty-one stories above the bathroom where Eric, Ryan, Mei, and Ying were waiting, a soldier stood in front of his own bathroom mirror. He brought one hand up in front of his face and turned it one way, then the other, inspecting it. Then he squeezed his fingers into a fist. Instantly the cord-like tendons and blue veins rose against the surface of his skin, and a hard ball of muscle emerged at the base of his forearm. He felt the strength, the latent power. He nodded to himself. He knew what these hands could do. These hands had completed basic training, then jump school, then sniper school. He had impressed his instructors—a gifted soldier, a born killer—and they had sent him to Chengdu to train in special operations: small-unit skills, sabotage, search and rescue. It was because of these hands that he had graduated second in his class, if only for political reasons. And it was because of these hands that he had been assigned to security at the Tangshan Military Laboratory.

  Slowly and methodically, like a pious man performing a sacred ritual, he approached the sink and turned on the faucet. Bracing his hands on both sides of the basin, he ducked his head under the cold water. It spread over his shaved head in rivulets that streamed off his nose and chin. It was frigid cold, but he savored it. It reminded him of his home far away, on the top of the world.

  He waited there for many minutes, as if in a meditative trance. Only when he felt the coldness pass all the way down to the tip of his spine did he lift his head.

  He took a close look in the mirror, inspecting himself. And for the first time in a long time, what he saw was beautiful. A massive scar ran down one side of his face from hairline to neck. The other side of his face was pink, slick as plastic, as if it had been badly burned. Yet it was still beautiful. Now, at the end, he finally saw it. His face, his body, his mind. It all made sense.

  They called him Sòng Píng, but that was not his real name. He was Sonam Paljor, son of Yéshé Dorje of Dagzê in the Nyingchi Prefecture. Member of the Tibetan Resistance. Survivor of six brutal months in the Drapchi Labor Camp. Exiled from his home, smuggled out of the Tibetan Autonomous Region in a logging truck and given sanctuary by Professor Lam. He had been a student at the Southern Xinjiang university, forcibly conscripted into the People’s Liberation Army. Brutalized and brainwashed. Fed propaganda and sawdust. And converted into an elite soldier.

  A soldier who was about to kill, to go against the teachings of the Buddha. As quintessentially sacrilegious as it was, he knew that it was his destiny. For he knew that this was no accident. Karma had brought him here. There was no other way to explain it. It was the pain, the scars, the disfiguration, that had made this incredible stroke of fortune possible. Arriving at the very place where the Chinese had made their genocide virus that wiped out his village and took away the girl he loved most in the world. He understood the statistical impossibility of it. No Tibetan in four generations had been given the opportunity that he had right now: the chance to strike at the heart of his enemy.

  As he looked at himself, he saw an intensity that was almost unbearable, a history and the weight of an entire race. Behind his eyes roamed the ghosts of 1.2 million dead Tibetans. In him were the skeleton-men who had died of starvation beside him in Drapchi prison. In him were the glassy-eyed supplications of boys and girls used for medical experiments. In him was the humiliation of his tutor, who had struggled under the blackboard of her false crimes. In him were the hundreds of thousands of women subjected to forced sterilization. His own dead mother.

  Every brutality and humiliation that his people had suffered was there. Sixty thousand monasteries destroyed, the looting of his country’s most precious artifacts, the clear-cutting of its forests. The farce of China’s promises of progress, modernization, and equality. And finally, the murder of his beautiful Chodren.

  He, Sonam Paljor of Dagzê, was now at the end of that long history. He was the tip of the spear, a spear made of human bone aimed at the enemy’s heart.

  * * *

  The sound of the fire alarm jolted him out of his ruminations. He had been expecting it, but it still made his gut tighten with adrenaline.

  He picked up the rucksack, heavy with weapons and explosives, and headed for the stairwell.

  In the hallway, he saw the other soldiers rushing to and fro, shouting and scrambling to their action stations. He ignored them. White warning lights flashed on the walls, and an alarm made a steady deedum-deedum sound that he found almost soothing. It occurred to him that it must have been designed that way, so as not to induce panic.

  Opening the stairwell door, he was struck by a terrific roar—the shouting and screaming of thousands of voices rising up from below. From this height, the stairwell appeared bottomless. He could not yet see the mass of humanity making its frantic clamber upward. But they were coming.

  It was as just as Hui Lili had promised. Now it was his job to use the chaos of the crowd to fulfill his part of the plan: destroy the Security Command Center, a heavily armored safe room that was the nerve center for the building’s security.

  Perched at the back of the building’s mezzanine and overlooking its sole entrance, the SCC served as a watchtower to con
trol and scrutinize all who entered the building. It was a shiny metal box, smooth and riveted like the fuselage of a warplane, suspended thirty feet above the floor and designed to repel any assault. It had bulletproof windows thick enough to stop a rocket-propelled grenade, and armored walls as solid as a tank’s. It also had three .50-caliber machine-gun turrets. One of these turrets had Sonam particularly worried because it protected the SCC’s main door. A door he intended to blow wide open.

  * * *

  The guards inside the SCC watched in horror as the lab’s employees poured out of the stairwells and elevators, flooding the floor beneath them and running toward the exit. Some were horribly burned—pink as cherry blossoms, or with charred black skin speckled with white globules of fat, like meat left too long on a fire. People screamed and shoved and trampled one another, knocking over the turnstiles and metal detectors in their desperation to escape. Outside the building entrance, the guards could see a brigade of firefighters trying to get in, but they had little chance against the panic-stricken tide.

  The guards watched in awe and confusion. This was far beyond anything they had ever trained for.

  So, it was no surprise that they failed to notice the corporal with the scarred face who calmly emerged from the crowd and ascended the metal staircase to the SCC. His mutilated face filled the computer monitor of the corporal nearest the door, but that soldier’s eyes were glued on the catastrophe unfolding outside the main window. He did not see the man take a heavy metal disk from his rucksack and place it on the door frame, then slip away, smooth as a cat, over the hand railing and down to the floor below.

  * * *

  It was Sonam who had taught Hui Lili how to use the sabot mine that blew the nanosite containment tank. Its impact on the SCC would be similar, only more gruesome. When the tungsten carbide–tipped round atomized the armored plating, it would fling hundreds of bits of metal into the security chamber. This superheated shrapnel would bounce around inside the armored room, unable to escape, piercing and repiercing everything inside.

  One second, three soldiers were staring awestruck at the mayhem of the fleeing workers.

  BOOM!

  The next second, the bulletproof window was washed over with blood.

  Sonam scrambled back to the door. There was a smoking black hole the size of his fist near the lock, but the door was still intact. He yanked hard on the handle. It gave, but just barely.

  He pulled a grenade from his utility vest, but just as he was about to yank the pin and set the grenade in the hole, he saw the machine gun turret swivel, and the crazed, bloodstained face of Lieutenant Dèng staring down the barrel at him. Sonam spun away just as the machine gun erupted with fire. He half rolled, half fell over the guardrail, landing hard on his side, which knocked the wind out of him. He gasped, tried to breathe, but no air would come in. Bullets zipped past him, a few ricocheting up and into the crowd. A man and then a woman grunted and fell, the high-caliber rounds killing them instantly.

  Sonam rolled away, willing his lungs to suck in air, then scrambled to the only place where the machine guns couldn’t reach him: directly under the security center. Once he was in its shadow, his diaphragm finally kicked in again. He sat for a moment with his back to a support beam, chest heaving, trying to assess the situation, while the deafening drama of the fleeing workers played out just fifteen feet in front of him. He had to act quickly. Every moment he wasted gave Lieutenant Dèng the chance to call for reinforcements. And every moment the SCC remained operational meant that General Meng could still track the twins.

  But he had run out of plan. He looked at the grenade still in his hand and considered just tossing it at the door, but that would never work—it would just come rolling back down the staircase. He looked around desperately, suddenly afraid that his first real military operation would be an unmitigated failure.

  Then he noticed a pair of clear plastic pipes that ran into the SCC. It was a vacuum-tube message system like the ones he’d seen at the drive-in banks in Tangshan. It was used to send IDs and other documents from the guards at the main entrance up to the Security Center. Sonam didn’t hesitate. He opened the cylindrical carrier, stuffed the grenade in, pulled the pin, and punched—SEND.

  With a sudden rush of air, the cylinder went up the clear pipe and curved down into the SCC.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Dèng was moving from gun turret to gun turret, trying to find the pig-faced traitor. His head was throbbing and he was covered in blood, but he realized that most of it was not his. He was hurt, but for the moment, his fury was greater than his pain. He would kill the hàn jiān, even if it was his last act on earth. Then he heard a sound that he heard at least two hundred times a day: the pneumatic suck of a message tube arriving. He frowned in puzzlement. The cylinder slid into its receptacle, and a little door slid open, inviting him to take it. He stepped forward to inspect it and gasped.

  * * *

  The muffled blast sent an arc of shrapnel into the large bulletproof window, bulging it outward.

  Sonam raced back up the staircase and placed another grenade in the door, pulled the pin, then vaulted over the railing once more. Another blast. He pounded up the stairs. Amazingly, the door still hung on by its lock, but luckily the hinges had been rattled off. He squeezed through the gap and was finally inside.

  His first priority was to shut down all the video cameras. He moved quickly, trying to ignore the blood and gore that covered every surface and dripped from the ceiling. Finding the long bank of control switches, he killed the cameras.

  Next, he ordered a full evacuation of the building. A recorded voice told all personnel, including all military personnel, to leave the building immediately. Then he killed the elevators. After that, he found a computer that still worked, and pulled up the employee chip-tracking program. He found Meng’s ID tag down in the Great Lab and deduced which stairwell he would have to use to get to the surface. Then he shut down that program, too. Now the twins and the Americans were invisible and could go where they wished.

  He took a deep breath. With the core of his mission accomplished, he pulled out a phone. He had prepared two texts that could be sent quickly, even audibly, if necessary: Done and Fail. He selected Done and hit send. When he was sure the message had gone through, he killed the boosters that carried the cellular signals from deep within the underground complex to the surface. Zero bars for everyone.

  Next, he pulled his commando knife from its sheath and unplugged and cut the power cables to all the vital equipment in the room.

  Now it was time to leave. There was nothing left to do here. He was content that he had done his job. He had survived his first combat experience.

  Tibet was not a nation of warriors, but that had not always been the case. Once, before it took the nonviolent path, Tibet had been home to the greatest warriors in Asia. They commanded a vast empire that spread from Afghanistan to deep inside modern-day China. At this moment, Sonam felt a link to those warriors a thousand years forgotten—as if he had been born not from modern Tibet, but from that proud race that would use violence to defend itself.

  He knew what he was supposed to do now, what he had promised Hui Ying he would do as soon as he had destroyed the command center: get out. Melt into the panicked crowd and escape. But he also knew he couldn’t do that.

  Fleeing was not what fate intended for him. His destiny was to find Meng and kill him in the name of all Tibet.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Takeoff

  Andrews Air Force Base, Prince George’s County, MD

  A cold night rain had turned the tarmac into a polished black opal that caught and refracted the red and blue landing lights in long diagonal sheets.

  In the darkness, five men with heavy rucksacks walked toward the lowered gangway of a white Gulfstream G650.

  The last man, Patel, the sharpshooter, heard her coming. She was runn
ing, panting as if she had been running for miles. Steam rose from her head and neck.

  “Curtiss!” she screamed.

  “Hunter? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “My ass you are. Patel, get rid of her.”

  Patel set down his bag and moved to grab her. It should have been an easy thing, a Navy SEAL subduing an exhausted civilian woman. But he made a critical mistake. He treated her as if she were a typical 135-pound woman.

  As he made a lazy grab for her shoulder, she used his momentum, grabbing his wrist with one hand and pulling herself into him while simultaneously ramming her other elbow up under his jaw. His teeth smacked together with the sound of someone cracking a walnut. Patel collapsed to the tarmac, out cold.

  A split second passed in which nothing happened, the other SEALs not believing their eyes. Then they rushed her. She got in an elbow and one good groin kick before they pinned her down.

  She shrieked in fury, struggling with every bit of strength she had, the veins in her neck and forehead bulging purple against her skin. “I want them back! I want them back! I WANT THEM BACK!”

  Curtiss stood over her, watching the incredible energy pour out of her. It literally took three men to keep her down. This one would have made one hell of a soldier, he thought. “Hunter, I swear, the only thing that’s keeping me from putting a bullet in that thick skull of yours right now is your old man. If it weren’t for him, I’d do it.”

  “Fuck you, Curtiss. Fuck you and your damn secrets. How dare you play with people’s lives like this! You let me believe they were coming back, that they were safe. But you have no idea if they’re safe or not. You don’t even know if they’re alive!”

  Curtiss didn’t answer. He just looked away, furious at being caught in a lie.

  “God damn it, I’m coming with you!” she screamed.

  Curtiss shook his head. “You’re staying right here. Boys, get her over to the MP station. We have a plane to catch.”