The Bone Hunters

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Wei spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the message on note cards for the evening prayer service she would be leading that night at the village meeting hall. Remembering how the mallard had recoiled at the putrid condition of the lake, Wei recalled her early childhood years when the water had been pure, a welcome resting place for migrating ducks, geese, and other waterbirds. She silently vowed that she would help restore those days again.

  Wei had left the village at the age of seven to enroll in the classical Chinese dancing academy in Chengdu. A prodigy, she had become its leading dancer at fifteen. Twenty years later, she had been forced at thirty-five to retire like the other dancers to make way for younger artists.

  Wei decided to return home to her small farming village in Sichuan. By then, her parents had died, their ashes spread on the lake they had once cherished. She moved back into the thatched hut where she had been born and set to work farming their family’s share of the community-owned acreage.

  At forty-seven, she still maintained her proud and lithe dancer’s figure. Her skin was taut and unblemished, her large brown eyes stunning against her polished ivory complexion. Her only concession to vanity lay in keeping her face covered with a broad-brimmed hat when working in the fields.

  Unlike Wei, many of the villagers had recently been beset with a range of serious health problems. The village’s “barefoot doctor” had told Wei that some of the medical conditions, including an alarming number of cases of bone cancer, were probably caused by the fact that many villagers drew their drinking water supply from the lake.

  Wei thought she knew what was happening. Five years earlier, the Dong Tao Chemical Corporation had begun buying up farmland in the area around the lake to the north of the village. Those farmers who refused to accept the company’s purchase offer had had their land confiscated by the local municipal court.

  A few months after moving back to the village, Wei walked the two miles north along the edge of the lake to the site of the factory. As she approached the chain-link fence that surrounded it, the noxious air made her eyes water and her nose run. In the distance, she could see a man wearing a mask in a bulldozer moving material from the factory to a twenty-foot-high pile of waste deposited nearby.

  Examining the terrain, she could see that each time it rained, the waste pile would leach down the hill toward the lake. The trees below it were brown and dying, the bark looking as if it had been burned by fire.

  Wei returned home determined to try to make the factory stop its actions. Nearly everyone in the village was able to contribute at least a small amount of money to the effort each month. When she felt she had enough, Wei traveled to Meishan and retained a young lawyer to represent them.

  The lawyer quickly learned that the factory manufactured chlorate, which was used in bleach and disinfectant. Its waste products included chromium 6, which was known to cause cancer and respiratory problems. Wei engaged him to bring a suit against the chemical company, alleging that it was polluting the land and water around it.

  Before the action could be brought to the regional court, however, the lawyer suddenly disappeared, and no other lawyer in Meishan would take the case. Wei remained undeterred. By then, she had acquired an inner strength to see her through any and every trial. It came down to one simple word.

  Faith.

  The holy man had arrived one night at her door in the midst of a fierce rainstorm.

  “I seek shelter, Shou Yu,” he said when she opened the door.

  “How do you know my real name?” she asked. “Wei is my stage name.”

  “I know all about you, Little Jewel,” he replied. “I have journeyed far to come to this place.”

  In manner and dress, he looked like nothing more than a common beggar, wrinkled with age and dressed in a simple wool robe drawn at the waist by a sheep’s wool strap and black cotton slippers. His smiling face reminded her of an ancient monkey. Moved by his plight, she invited him to stay for the night, making him comfortable on her spare sleeping pallet in front of the fire. In the morning she asked if he had eaten recently, and he responded, “Not for a few days.”

  He ate like a ravenous bird, consuming four poached eggs with steamed corn bread and peanut milk. The holy man remained with her for a month, slowly rebuilding his strength. Each evening he would talk to her about his own life journey from the westernmost province of China, where he once fought alongside Mao Tse Tung against the Japanese invaders, but now devoted his life to sharing the word of the Ancient One.

  “I can see that you are eager to learn, Little Jewel,” he said, “and I will do my best to teach you.”

  He had come with a message, he said, and he wanted to share it with her. It was a message of hope along with the promise of eternal life and inner peace. The Son of the Universe had descended from heaven to save the entire Chinese race, he said. He had come to her because she had been chosen to play a special role in leading her people. She was set aside to serve.

  During the days and nights he stayed with her, he told her about the discovery of the bones of the Ancient One in 1926. He was the original man, he assured her, the Son of the Universe who taught the earliest Chinese people to live in accordance with the highest qualities of the universe—truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, labor, and love. Through the Ancient One, there was a chance for every man and woman to join in that spiritual journey.

  It all suddenly made sense to her. The meaning of life itself and her place in the great firmament, simply but magically told. A week later, Wei asked the elders to introduce the holy man to the entire village.

  When he spoke to them that night bathed in the gentle glow of the oil lamps, the holy man’s words about the Ancient One’s power to heal the sick and finding a path to eternal life seemed to resonate with them all. What other hope did they have to survive the disaster looming in front of them, their drinking water poisoned, their babies dying, their crops withering in the sun? By the time the holy man had moved on a few weeks later, all but a handful of the villagers had embraced his truth.

  They would need allies, Wei decided, and she began trying to rally the farmers in the nearby villages to their cause. By then she had taken to wearing the same simple garb as the holy man. Her proselytizing of the faith began to find converts around the countryside. Many came to meet her and listen to the message of truth. A roving reporter at the provincial newspaper even wrote a story about her.

  • • •

  Zhou Shen Wui gazed out at the sun-splashed provincial countryside as it flashed past the bulletproof windows of the pressurized railroad car. With the train traveling at more than two hundred fifty miles an hour, the distant panorama sped past in lush copper brushstrokes. Whenever his eyes would lock on something closer to the train, the fleeting image of a horse or a tractor would disappear a millisecond later.

  Li Shen Wui bowed at the entrance to the dining compartment and waited to be summoned.

  “Enter,” said Zhou, a benign smile on his pink, rotund face.

  At his age of fifty-eight, his bald head retained a fringe of the rare ginger hair color that had once been lacquered into a luxuriant pompadour. Only his butterscotch eyebrows remained thick and bristly above his gold-flecked brown eyes.

  “Thank you, my lord,” said his oldest son.

  Li came and stood by the inlaid mahogany dining table that had once graced the palace of the Yellow Emperor in Xinm. He formally bowed to his father again before sitting down across from him.

  Zhou speared a chilled jumbo prawn from a filigreed silver platter and placed the crustacean in his mouth. He chewed the tender meat with pleasure before taking a sip of well-chilled sauvignon blanc.

  “We will be arriving in thirty-five minutes, my lord,” said Li.

  There were no longer any royal titles in the Chinese ruling class, but one of the women in Zhou’s personal entourage assured him that based on genealogical
research, Zhou was a direct descendant of Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty. Liu Bang had assumed the formal title of Huangdi, or Yellow Emperor.

  In a rare moment of self-perceived humility, Zhou had announced that even though he was entitled to be called emperor, in the future he was to be addressed by all as simply Lord Zhou. This included his family.

  Li favored his mother’s looks, his face almost simian in caste with a bulging lower lip and close-set black eyes. Also in contrast to his corpulent father’s, his sinewy body was muscular and strong, and he worked hard to keep it so as an example to the men. His only physical weakness lay in his severely myopic eyes. In public he masked the affliction with contact lenses, but in private he wore thick spectacles.

  “These people need to be taught a lesson,” said Zhou. “An object lesson to show the others.”

  “It will be done, my lord,” said Li as the train’s speed began to perceptibly slow down.

  Zhou had his own set of the train’s gauges and instruments in his personal car. He had been fascinated by trains from the time he was a little boy, back when the steam locomotives barely exceeded forty miles an hour on the old narrow-gauge tracks.

  Now he could afford to indulge his passions. This fifteen-car train had cost Zhou three hundred million dollars, but it was proving to be a sound investment. It housed and fed his paramilitary team of two hundred Special Forces troops along with their weapons and attack vehicles.

  Alone among the oligarchs, he had foreseen the rapid development of high-speed rail in China, a network that had grown exponentially since 2007. More than twenty thousand miles of track now connected every part of China except the western provinces.

  Zhou hadn’t been born at the time of the Chinese revolution, but his father, Xi Shen Wui, had become a senior bureaucrat in the party and he had paved the way for his son’s rise to the politburo. Zhou had come to power during the capitalist reform period in the late 1990s.

  One of the first oligarchs, he had built partnerships with other members of the politburo before outmaneuvering them and stripping them of their holdings. His fortune was now estimated at eighteen billion dollars.

  Much of his wealth was situated in Sichuan Province, historically called the “Province of Abundance.” His holdings included millions of acres of oranges, peaches, grapes, and sugarcane. His pig farms produced nearly ten percent of the pork output in the country. In recent years, he had acquired a major interest in the companies producing vanadium, cobalt, titanium, and lithium, along with a string of newly constructed chemical companies.

  “Did your legionnaires enjoy their feast?” he asked.

  He inserted a gold-tipped oval Turkish cigarette in his ivory holder, lit it, and took a deep, contented puff.

  “To a man, my lord.”

  Zhou had arranged for three Bengal tigers that had been captured in Nepal to be delivered to a smuggler of rare animals in Guangdong. There they had been tranquilized and delivered to the train by truck. The freshly butchered animals were then roasted for the men on the way to their current mission.

  “I abhor the taste of tiger meat, but your legionnaires apparently believe it bestows one with bravery and strength,” said Zhou.

  “My men have great bravery and strength,” agreed Li.

  Zhou looked at him skeptically. “On the other hand, tiger eyeballs are considered an excellent tonic for impotence.”

  “I do not have that problem, my lord,” said Li humbly.

  “And reportedly good for improving eyesight too,” he said, glancing at his son’s thick spectacles.

  Li said nothing. Removing them, he cleaned the lenses with a white silk handkerchief.

  “Are they ready for their mission?” said Zhou, his chin hardening.

  “Like tigers,” said Li.

  “Tigers are not meant to be caged,” said his father.

  “No, my lord,” said Li.

  “A tiger never shows mercy,” said Zhou.

  “None will be shown.”

  “These people have become a security threat. I am told by Colonel Wong that there is a woman in the village who is particularly troublesome. You will make sure that she no longer makes trouble.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “You are humorless, my son,” said Zhou. “You must find something in your life that gives you pleasure.”

  “I have already found it, my lord.”

  Leaving his father, Li walked back to the fourth car in the train, which included the fitness facility and swimming pool. Stripping off his clothes, he dove into the lap pool that ran half the length of the car.

  He churned through the water with long, powerful strokes until he reached the end of the pool and did a racing turn to make his return, his arms reaching forward and the muscles of his shoulders sliding and meshing in flawless harmony.

  Wo hèn ta . . . I hate him, his brain silently screamed in perfect cadence to each stroke. Wǒ hèn tā, Wǒ hèn tā, Wǒ hèn tā.

  Twenty minutes later the train came to a stop along the length of a broad steel passenger platform. It was an hour before dawn. Although a factory city was planned in the future, nothing had been built yet in the countryside surrounding it. They were only ten miles from their objective.

  The aerodynamically designed titanium metal doors of the last four railroad cars slid open simultaneously. Li’s tactical assault force emerged from each car in columns of four, marching in lockstep as they formed up in ranks on the platform for inspection.

  Li had inserted his contact lenses and looked every inch the commander in his starched mission uniform. Aside from the gold stars on the collars, it was identical to the uniforms worn by the men standing before him.

  Dark khaki, the uniforms were formfitted to each man and employed a powered exoskeleton to carry weapons, ammunition, equipment, liquid body armor, and built-in helmet computers with night vision.

  “At least the men look ready,” said Li to his deputy commander, Colonel Wong.

  “They are—to perfection, General,” he responded. “They have been briefed on every aspect of the mission.”

  Behind them, a hydraulic platform slowly slid free from the side of the last railroad car. It held Li’s command helicopter, a jet-powered gunship with stepped tandem cockpits protected by armor plate, one 30 mm cannon, air-to-air missiles, and a new antitank rocket.

  “Prepare to move out,” ordered Colonel Wong to the closest unit on the platform.

  It was the first time their new “cavalry” unit would be used on a mission. Zhou’s engineers had developed a hybrid “stealth” motorcycle that used jet fuel to reach a speed of one hundred twenty miles an hour but could also operate in an electric mode with no sound at all. It allowed for both speed and stealth, and two men were assigned to each machine, one to drive, the second to dismount and fight when confronting the enemy. The motorcycles could handle virtually any type of terrain.

  “Are the men prepared to employ their swords?” asked Li.

  It was the only part of the unit’s equipment that had been originally conceived by Li. A childhood fan of the actor John Wayne, Li had seen the famous “bowie knife” employed by Richard Widmark against the Mexicans in the film The Alamo. He had designed his own version, which was more like a short broadsword, with both edges razor sharp. The wooden grips were engraved with his initials.

  “The men are very fond of your gift to each of them,” said Colonel Wong. “They will be put to good use.”

  Li watched as his cavalry unit mounted their machines.

  “How many believers are there in the village?” he asked.

  “Including the children?”

  “All of them,” said Liu.

  “Approximately two hundred,” said Colonel Wong. “However, my intelligence officer does not believe we will encounter serious resistance. Most of them will just be waking up.” />
  “There is always resistance,” said Li.

  “I meant organized resistance,” said Wong.

  Li turned slowly and stared at him for several seconds. When he wore the contact lenses, Li discovered that he rarely blinked. The phenomenon had led to his nickname within the ranks of his men.

  Ta¯ bù zhaˇyaˇn. He does not blink.

  “You are a good leader of men, Wong. Leave the thinking to me.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Wong, a bead of sweat rolling down his cheek.

  “Commence the operation immediately,” declared Li.

  • • •

  Arising from her bed, Wei began heating her tea water while she gazed through the kitchen window across the lake to the distant mountains. It had rained during the night, and the chrysanthemums and plum blossoms in her garden glistened cleanly in the sun.

  After performing her ablutions, she began her preparations for the ceremonial service in honor of the Ancient One that would be held that evening at the meeting hall. Every family in the village was bringing something for the feast.

  She was kneeling in front of the dried herbs shelf in the stone-lined root cellar under the cottage when she heard a shout followed by the ringing of the alarm bell in the square. Her first thought was that there might be a fire in one of the thatch-roofed buildings.

  Climbing out of the root cellar through the opening in the kitchen floor, she looked out the window to see a phalanx of machines coming swiftly toward the village. They were closing fast, the machines about twenty feet apart from one another. The line stretched in both directions as far as she could see.

  As the machines drew closer, she saw that they were actually large motorcycles with two figures dressed like spacemen riding on each one. One of the motorcycles came straight through the alfalfa field on the outskirts of the village and headed toward her neighbor Chen Wa, who was standing in the field watering his plants.