Sword of Shiva (For fans of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown)

by Jeff Edwards

  He could do this. He could withstand another round of the beatings. He could live through another session with the cattle prod. He would clamp his teeth together and summon the will to endure. He told himself again and again that he would not answer their questions. He would not betray his people, no matter what these Chinese animals did to him.

  If his interrogators came close enough, he would spit in their faces. With luck, they would become enraged enough to beat him into unconsciousness.

  The door swung open, and—after uncounted hours in semi-darkness—even the relatively weak florescent light from the corridor was enough to make Sonam’s eyes blink and water. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was not in for another encounter with the soldiers. This was something different.

  The man standing in the open doorway was small framed, and very neat in appearance. He was Chinese, like the soldiers, but the resemblance seemed to end with that. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and he had none of the swagger of the military men. There was nothing brutish-looking about him. He looked like a clerk, or a petty bureaucrat. The man’s eyes were lifeless, like the eyes of a doll. His features were quite ordinary, and his expression appeared to signal mild indifference.

  Squinting toward this unremarkable figure, Sonam wondered if the little man had wandered in by mistake.

  He was still puzzling over this new development when another man entered the room, carrying a black nylon zipper bag and a small wooden folding table. Like the clerk, this man was dressed in civilian clothes. He quickly erected the table, laid the nylon bag on the tabletop, and exited the room, closing the door behind him.

  The clerk did not look at the black bag, but Sonam felt his own eyes drawn to it. The nylon was scuffed, and the seams were gray with hard use. He knew suddenly that the expressionless little man was not a clerk, and—with equal suddenness—he realized that he did not want to see what was inside that bag.

  The little man spoke without preamble. “I will ask you questions,” he said. His voice was low and inflectionless. He did not mangle the Tibetan language, as so many of the Chinese did. Unlike Sonam, whose speech was shaded by the Indian influence of Dharamsala, the man had almost no accent.

  Sonam stared at him without speaking.

  “You will answer my questions,” the little man said. “Please understand that this is not a boast, and it is not a prediction. It is a simple statement of fact. You will answer my questions.”

  Still, Sonam said nothing.

  The man walked to the table and unzipped the nylon bag. He looked up at Sonam, his face as impassive as ever. “You may answer my questions now, in relative comfort, or you can answer them six hours from now, when you have no fingers, no testicles, no eyes, and your throat is raw from screaming.”

  Sonam knew instinctively that these were not empty threats. There was no hint of malice in the man’s voice, but there was not a trace of mercy either.

  The man reached into the nylon bag, and pulled out a pair of long-handled pliers with a heavy-looking square head. “I will ask you questions,” he said again. He opened and closed the pliers several times, as though testing the movement of the metal jaws. “The first time you refuse to answer, I will clamp these upon the index finger of your right hand, and I will crush it to a bloody pulp.”

  He stared directly into Sonam’s eyes. “Do you understand?”

  Sonam’s head began to nod almost of its own accord, but he caught himself and held his muscles rigid. He would not answer, even with a gesture.

  The little man stepped forward, stopping within easy reach of the chair.

  Sonam remembered his plan to spit in the face of his torturer. The man was certainly close enough now, but Sonam’s mouth had gone dry. He could not summon a single drop of saliva.

  He flinched as the man grasped his right hand. He tried to jerk his hand away, but his forearms were strapped to the arms of the chair at wrist and elbow.

  The steel jaws of the pliers were cold as they closed around his finger, midway between the second and third knuckles. There was a brief twinge of discomfort as the serrated teeth of tool pinched his skin, but the little man adjusted the alignment of the pliers, and the sensation vanished.

  Sonam saw it when it happened, the minute shift in posture as the little man tensed the muscles of his upper body and rammed the handles of the pliers together.

  The pain ripped through Sonam, piercing him as deeply and profoundly as the Chinese rifle bullet had done. The bone in his finger splintered and gave way with an obscenely liquid crack that he heard and felt with equal clarity. His vision narrowed, and then collapsed upon itself until all he could see was a searing pinprick of blood-colored light.

  His mouth was flooded with the bitter taste of adrenaline, and still the steel jaws continued to move toward each other—crunching through shards of bone, crushing muscle, tendon, and flesh into a formless mass of pulverized meat.

  The heavy square jaws met, the section of finger between them smashed into a ribbon of bloody gel. But the pliers were not finished yet. They twisted and pulled, opening and closing repeatedly, like a crocodile trying to get a better grip on the prey trapped between its teeth. The metal jaws worked their way upward and downward from their starting place, searching for undamaged bits of the mangled finger, finding the broken ends of shattered bones, grinding everything to ragged mush.

  Sonam’s finger—the thing that had once been his finger—became the very center of the universe. It eclipsed everything. There was nothing else. No life. No world. No thought. Only the ravenous metal jaws, and the pain.

  It took him at least a minute to realize that he was screaming. High-pitched keening wails that sounded more animal than human. It took him a minute or two more to force himself to stop. At last, he managed to bring it under control, and he sagged against the straps of the chair, sobbing.

  Distantly, through the pounding roar of his pain, he heard the voice of the little man.

  “I prefer to begin with a small demonstration,” the voice said. “Something effective enough to gain your attention, but small enough for you to recover from if you choose to cooperate.”

  There was still no malice in the man’s speech. No suggestion of threat, and no flavor of sadism. This was not the voice of a man who caused pain for his own pleasure. It was the voice of unconditional confidence, and flawless willpower. And Sonam knew that the little man would not give up the task until his objective had been met. He would not beat his victim into unconsciousness, and he would not make stupid mistakes. He would work methodically and meticulously, and he absolutely would not stop until he had the information he had come for. It would happen now, while there was still enough of Sonam’s body left intact to call itself human, or it would happen hours from now, when there was very little remaining but pain and shredded flesh.

  “We will begin again,” the little man said. “I will ask you questions, and you will answer them. Do you understand?”

  Sonam nodded.

  “Good,” the little man said. “The site of my next demonstration will be your left testicle. If you lie to me, or if you refuse to answer my questions again, I crush your testicle just as thoroughly as I have crushed your finger. Do you understand?”

  Sonam nodded again. “I…” His voice was a guttural croak. “I will… tell you… what you want to know…”

  “Yes,” the little man said quietly. “I know you will.”

  CHAPTER 4

  USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

  UNITED STATES NAVAL STATION; YOKOSUKA, JAPAN

  FRIDAY; 21 NOVEMBER

  1321 hours (1:21 PM)

  TIME ZONE +9 ‘INDIA’

  A heavy layer of clouds hung over Yokosuka harbor. The temperature hovered in the mid-fifties, but the wind blowing in from Tokyo Bay seemed much colder. True winter was still several weeks away, and the bite in the air was just a foreshadowing of things to come.

  Silhouetted against the murky Japanese sky, the profile of the American destroyer
was unusually angular. The ship’s phototropic camouflage had darkened to the color of slate, closely mimicking the gray monochrome of the waves that lapped against the vessel’s long steel hull.

  Commander Katherine Silva stood on the fantail, and tried to imagine what the ship would look like two weeks from now, when the red carpets had been laid and the patriotic decorations had been hung. The lifelines would be draped with red, white and blue bunting. The American flag that now rustled fitfully at the end of the flag staff would be replaced by the oversized ‘holiday colors’ that were reserved for Sundays and special occasions.

  The decorations and the holiday flag would be visual symbols of a ritual steeped in centuries of nautical tradition. USS Towers would undergo a change of command ceremony—the transfer of authority from one commanding officer to another.

  That ceremony, just fourteen days in the future, would be the culmination of everything Silva had worked for. After the customary Navy pomp and flourishes, she would step to the podium and assume command of this vessel. With a brief exchange of protocol and hand salutes, her title would change from Commander to Captain. She would become commanding officer of one of the most advanced warships ever crafted by man.

  And at that same moment, Captain Bowie would relinquish command of the ship. When their salutes were lowered, one era would come to an end and another would begin. Bowie would say final goodbyes to the men and women who had served under his command.

  Some of the crew were new to the Towers, having received orders to the ship recently, like Silva herself. But others had been with Bowie on the last deployment, when the destroyer had gone head-to-head with a rogue nuclear missile sub under the Russian ice pack. A few had been with Bowie on the deployment before that, when the Towers had fought a running battle with a wolf pack of attack submarines, from one end of the Persian Gulf to the other.

  They had fought for Captain Bowie, and bled for him. Some of the crew had even died for him. In return, Bowie had brought them victory. More importantly, he had given them the opportunity to save the lives of literally millions of their countrymen. He had made every member of the crew, from the most junior seaman to the most senior officer, feel like warriors. And now he was leaving.

  Silva had seen it on the faces of the crew members over the last few days, as it gradually became real to them that their captain was leaving. The ship would have a new captain, of course. Silva would be captain. But their captain would be gone, and Katherine Silva would be trying to fill the shoes of the man who had made them heroes.

  A raindrop struck the side of Silva’s face, and ran down her cheek like a tear. It was immediately joined by a hundred other drops, and then a thousand, as the bleak Japanese sky began pelting the harbor with rain.

  Silva ran toward the nearest watertight door leading into the skin of the ship. She ducked into the aft passageway and took one last glance at the sky before the door slammed shut behind her. The gray clouds were growing darker and more menacing.

  She hoped to God that it wasn’t an omen.

  CHAPTER 5

  MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE COMPOUND

  AUGUST 1ST BUILDING

  BEIJING, CHINA

  FRIDAY; 21 NOVEMBER

  7:53 PM

  TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

  There was a quiet tap on the door. Vice Premier Lu Shi didn’t look up from the stack of documents on his desk.

  He had not been reading the documents. In fact, his eyes hadn’t really been focused on them at all. His mind was back in the hospital room in Lhasa, eyes locked on the pitiful wreck that had once been his son … seeing Lu Jianguo’s mangled body obscenely violated by the tubes and wires of those damnable machines.

  The tap on the door was repeated, slightly louder this time. Lu Shi forced his mind back to the present. He blinked several times, trying to reorient himself to his chair, his desk, his office. “Enter.”

  The door opened, and his personal assistant, Miao Yin, stepped into the room. She was a beautiful young woman in her mid twenties, her exquisite elfin features framed artfully by the straight-banged pageboy hairstyle that was so popular among female government workers. Her large dark eyes met Lu Shi’s gaze, and she nodded, her head tilting with the slightest suggestion of a bow. “Please forgive the intrusion, Comrade Vice Premier. Minister Shen requests a moment of your time. He does not have an appointment, but he assures me that he urgently needs to speak to you.”

  Lu Shi stared blankly at his secretary. Unlike most senior government officials in China, he was not sleeping with any of his female underlings, but that didn’t keep him from appreciating Miao Yin’s loveliness. Ordinarily, the mere sight of her would be enough to lighten his mood.

  But all such thoughts had been dimmed by the shadows that had descended upon Lu Shi’s heart. The presence of Miao Yin barely registered on his consciousness. He had no eye for her beauty, and no real memory of its existence. He had forgotten what beauty was.

  His mind was drawn inexorably back to the hospital room. The cloying reek of medical disinfectant. The vaguely human shape under the green sheet. The face of his son, half swathed in bandages—one sightless eye pointed toward the ceiling.

  “Comrade Vice Premier?” Miao Yin spoke softly, but her voice startled him.

  “Yes?”

  His secretary repeated her minimal bow. “Minister Shen… He is waiting in the outer office.”

  Lu Shi rubbed his hand across his chin, feeling the scrape of stubble against his palm. He had forgotten to shave.

  “Minister Shen,” he said. He cleared his throat, and sat up straight in his chair. “Yes, of course. Send him in.”

  Miao Yin backed out of the door, and was replaced a few seconds later by the hulking form of Shen Tao, the Minister of Defense.

  Shen paused in the doorway long enough to show proper respect, and then clumped into the room on his sturdy legs. At first glance, the man’s barrel-shaped physique could be mistaken for fat, but Shen’s round body was solidly muscular. His face was equally misleading. Behind his features and placidly oblivious facial expression, a quick mind was at work.

  Lu Shi waved him to a chair.

  Nodding his thanks, the Minister of Defense pulled the chair a half-meter forward, and shifted it a few centimeters to the right, before settling himself into the offered seat.

  It was an unconscious gesture; Lu Shi was confident of that. It was also typical of the way Shen operated. He accepted everything, from hospitality, to orders, to challenges, on his own terms. Yes, I will take the chair that you have offered me, but I will move it to a place of my choosing.

  On other days, Lu Shi admired this trait. Today, he had no patience for maneuverings of any sort. He also had no patience for polite apologies, or the niceties of official etiquette, both of which were going to come pouring out when Shen began to talk. Lu Shi preempted the pleasantries by speaking first.

  “I understand that the terrorist has broken under questioning. What have you learned?”

  ‘Terrorist’ was Lu Shi’s label for the murderous young fool who had been captured after the destruction of the Qinghai train.

  Shen nodded. “You are correct, Comrade Vice Premier. The subject is now quite responsive to our inquiries…”

  Lu Shi felt a flush of cold anger. “He is not a subject. He is a terrorist, and a mass murderer. And he is not responsive to your inquiries. You have tortured him, and he has broken. Now, may we please stop wasting time with circumlocutions?”

  He locked eyes with the Minister of Defense and repeated, “What have you learned?”

  To his credit, Shen didn’t flinch or break eye contact, but his tone of voice was no longer self-assured. “The subject … the … ah … terrorist, is named Sonam Dawa. He is a member of a faction of rebel Tibetan criminals who call themselves Gingara, a word that seems to translate as ‘the Messenger.’ He was part of a three man raiding team, commanded by a man named Jampa Dorjee, also a member of this Gingara. And the third man…”


  Lu Shi waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, yes. The third man was an old drokpa shepherd who calls himself Nima. I knew all of this several hours ago. What else have you learned? Where have these terrorists gone? What was their escape plan? Where are they now?”

  Shen blinked. “Their plan was to … ah … escape through the Nathu La Pass, to the Indian side of the Himalayas.” He swallowed. “We have not yet located the other two members of the raiding team, but they have had three days since the attack to cross the border. They are probably safe on the Indian side of the mountains by now.”

  “On the Indian side, perhaps,” said Lu Shi. “Whether or not they are safe, remains to be seen.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Do we know their final destination, Comrade Minister?”

  Shen nodded. “Yes, Comrade Vice Premier. This group, this Gingara, has based itself in a small village known as Geku, approximately forty kilometers on the Indian side of the border.” He paused. “Were you considering a covert operation? Sending a small team into India, to root out these terrorists?”

  His words were nearly lost on Lu Shi, whose thoughts had drifted back to the hospital room in Lhasa. The half-human form of his beautiful son, under the green bed sheet…

  He shook his head violently. “No! There will be no covert operation. We will not answer this cowardly raid with a raid of our own.”

  Minister Shen’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t understand, Comrade Vice Premier. Are we not going to respond to this attack?”

  Lu Shi felt his anger drain away, to be replaced by a clarity of purpose that was almost staggering. “We will respond,” he said. “We will destroy them completely.”

  “The terrorists?”

  “No,” Lu Shi said. “What was the name of the village? Geku? We will destroy them all. We will show them what it means to harbor the enemies of China.”

  Shen’s face had gone from shock to incredulity. “Comrade Vice Premier… We can’t do that… The international community…”