by Rob Wood
“Out of the showroom and onto our helipad!” commented Simmonds.
The blades hadn’t stopped swinging when the door opened and out stepped a lean, dark man wearing half-rimmed colored glasses. He was clutching a suitcase as he leaned down under the wash of the rotor blades and jogged toward them.
“Thank you for your hospitality, sirs,” he said looking around the members of China Team—evidently unaware that Cochrane was a woman. “I’m Dr. Chunlin, I won’t take much of your time, I assure you. But I am excited to get to see a ripe, er, fresh victim of radiation.”
“Happy to oblige,” said Partridge. “I’m the Executive Officer Brian Partridge. Ms. Cochrane, Lieutenant Purdy, and Lieutenant Bill Simmonds will be taking you down to sickbay. You can change into a protective suit there.”
“I brought my own,” he smiled nervously, tapping his suitcase.
“I’m Cody Cochrane.” Cochrane stuck out her hand and greeted the doctor in Chinese. “Where did you practice, Doctor? I was wondering if you could tell me about the prevalence of CT scans in rural China?”
Purdy gave her a look that said, “WTF?” Chunlin considered a moment and nodded, “Pleased to meet you.”
In sickbay, Dr. Chunlin was quick, almost abrupt in his movements. Even after he had donned his gray nuke suit, he clutched the suitcase to his chest and carried it right up to the gurney where the corpse was. With one hand he drew back the sheet. He turned and asked, “Would you have a small table? Somewhere I could place my case and equipment?” He spoke, still holding the case with one hand.
All eyes turned to scan the room for an instrument table. Inside of five minutes, the duty nurse had rolled up a small steel tray on wheels. On this Chunlin opened his case. He took out a probe and forceps. He lifted each eyelid and checked the pupil and veins of the dead, sightless eyes. He tweezered the skin. He checked the degree of bloat. He gently moved the limbs to check for rigor mortis. He snapped a long series of shots of the corpse with a small digital camera.
He was done in less than 45 minutes and packed up. He handed Purdy a business card, saying, “Here’s my information. I’d appreciate it if you could give it to the hospital that receives the body and performs the autopsy. I’d like a copy of that sent to me.”
Purdy nodded slowly, “Well, okay. I’ll see what can be done.”
“Good,” said Chunlin. “Shall we go?”
The Colibri dwindled to a speck on the horizon in a matter of minutes. China Team watched it disappear.
“The mother can book,” said Simmonds appreciatively. “All that fuel burned for a mere hour aboard the Vinson.”
“It wasn’t what I expected,” said Purdy. “I’d say he has an unusual examination routine. He was very fast. Didn’t check for a possible non-radiation fatality. He just took our word for it.”
“Anything else?” asked Cochrane.”
“What about that comment about a ripe victim? The ‘Chinglish’ was in full flower, eh?” chuckled Simmonds.
“I tell you what,” put in Cochrane. “His Putonghua, or standard Chinese, wasn’t that great either. And I know I sound like a bigot, but he doesn’t look Han Chinese. It’s as if he’s a minority who learned Chinese as an adult.” She turned to Purdy. “ I’m suspicious.”
“And you were testing him with that question on CT scans?’
“Yeah. Want to see if we can get a little more info on Chunlin Shao?”
It wasn’t a quick process. Purdy watched her, hunkered down over the computer screen, following leads, clicking through file after file, including those accessed by Baidu, the Chinese computer search engine. Cochrane found lots of references to Fudan University’s radiation medicine program, but many fewer citations involving Dr. Chunlin Shao.
“It’s not surprising,” she told Purdy in frustration. “In China they’re all about the group. About the university’s achievement, for example, not the individual. So Chunlin shows up mostly as a staff member or a contributor to a professional paper.”
But it wasn’t a moment later that she murmured, “What have we here?” She swung the computer screen over where Purdy could see it. There was a big group photo of the participants in a north China seminar on radiation exposure at industrial sites.
“The guy on the end,” she said. “That’s supposed to be Chunlin Shao. Look anything like our guest?”
Purdy shook his head. “Not in the least.”
“Hey, guys!” Simmonds, out of breath, stuck his head in the doorway.” “Medical’s all shook up. You got to see this!”
They followed him at a dogtrot down a couple of floors to sickbay.
“What’s up, Simmonds?”
“No, you gotta see for yourselves.”
In the morgue room there were two people suited up and in heated conversation around the familiar gurney.
“Probably the chief medical officer and a nurse,” thought Cochrane. “That body language says ‘I am not pleased!’”
China Team hung back at a safe distance, but they could still see clearly. The sheet over the right forearm had been drawn back. At the end of the wrist, the hand was curled and the sausage fingers splayed slightly because of their bloat. But there were only three fingers. Where the forefinger should have been, there was a stump ending in a dark red circle.
13
GUANGXI
“Washington is unhappy—to say the least.” XO Partridge was bent forward, running a hand absently up and down the tight curls of his gray hair, talking to the top of the conference table as much as to the members of China Team.
“Our Hong Kong Consulate got scammed. What’s worse, someone cut the corpse before we could deliver it to Japanese authorities. That’s not going to look good.”
“Does stealing a finger joint count as piracy at sea, I wonder?” Cochrane raised her eyebrows. The XO, humorless in the best of situations, shot her a near lethal look.
“Who nicked the floater’s finger? Do we have a nuclear theft or not? If so, where is this stuff?” he asked. “What sort of commodity is this Lily Zhang ? Ally? Enemy? Con artist?
“You can bet the deep thinkers at Langley and Suitland are all over this, analyzing the shit out of it. The problem is they’re there, and you’re here.” He eyeballed Cochrane and Purdy.
“So, here’s what we’re going to do. Lieutenant Purdy, you are being granted an extended leave . . . to spend with your girlfriend, fiancé, paramour—whatever—Ms. Cochrane here. The two of you are going to do whatever it is young people do on R&R in mainland China—anything that’s legal. And bye the bye, you’re going to wring some answers out of this Lily Zhang. Where is she, Cochrane?”
“Xinghua Press says she is filming in Guangxi Province, sir.”
“Well, have fun in Guangxi, people. The consulate will obtain expedited tourist visas for you. That probably means a whole lot of eyes will be following you. Nonetheless, see what you can find. Cochrane—take an intel kit with duplicate passports and gear. And both of you—be careful!”
Purdy and Cochrane flew from Hong Kong to Guilin, capital of Guangxi, arriving at 8 p.m., and checking in at the Wish for Harmony Hotel. They planned to spend the night, then try and locate Lily Zhang, who was supposed to be filming south of them near Yangshuo.
“Finding her shouldn’t be that difficult,” said Cochrane. “CCTV says she’s in Yangshuo. I bet every local there knows exactly where the movie set is.”
“What say, then, we dig into this R&R stuff and go out for a bite of dinner?” said Purdy.
“Ever the foodie, eh?” laughed Cochrane. “Just so you know, our relationship ends with ‘dinner and a movie,’” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “Even though we’re sharing the same room.” She gave him a no-nonsense look. “Restaurant?’
“How about street food? It’s more of an adventure.”
They ambled north, roughly toward Jiefang Xilu, a restaurant street, looking for the lights, fabric dividers, and the buzz that would alert them to an alley closed off fo
r a gypsy dining experience. Not that food was gypsy inspired, but the stalls and booths came at night and vanished again in the early morning hours.
They found a row of cabanas and tables. The people-watching was as interesting as the food. Although they all sat at communal tables, diners were sorted by genus and species. You could identify the middle-class urban family eating out with their one child in tow. Businessmen bunched together in a cloud of smoke. Each one was offering his brand of cigarettes to the others, advertising his status and generosity according to the brand. Old people might be indulging in a lively game of Mahjong. Young women, slender as reeds, bought a single skewer of candied fruit and moved on. If they were with girlfriends, they all held hands or looped their arms around one another’s waist.
Deep in the alley, away from the main drag, the food got really interesting. It started with heaps of brown, sugar-glazed pig’s feet and pig snouts. There were carts of organ meats ready to be grilled. Duck and goose carcasses swung from hooks. Snails, big as a child’s fist, crawled forlornly up the sides of wooden buckets, hoping for escape.
“This area is famous for snake delicacies” said Purdy. “But I don’t recommend we go there. Ecologists complain that some of the species are being eaten to extinction.”
Cochrane made a face: “Let’s go with politically correct dining, shall we?”
They settled for a hot pot and a couple of bottles of Tsing-tao beer. The hot pot came in a big ceramic circular platter, with two bowls of mifan—steamed rice—on the side. The platter was mounded with bone-in pieces of chicken from leg and thigh, cleavered into chunks. Potato spears, long diagonals of carrot, snarls of radish string, glistening black wood ear mushrooms, and tender, chopped greens swam in a brown broth. A cloud of steam rose up, carrying with it scents of ginger and Shaoxing wine.
“This stuff is loaded with Sichuan peppercorns—be careful!” warned Purdy.
They dug in with their chopsticks, laying out bits of stew on their rice to cool and to let the juices soak into the sticky white grains.
“No offense, Purdy,” Cochrane said. “But this is a huge improvement on the Navy diet.”
The next morning, they hired a car to take them south to Yangshuo, driving along the plain of the Li River.
“I didn’t expect to see them so soon,” said Cochrane, gesturing at the misty, purple cylinders of stone rising from the green plain. These were the karst formations immortalized in so many Chinese watercolors.
“Unlike the peaks we know in the west, these are not pyramidal,” said Purdy. “There are no slow angles of ascent, just abrupt edges—like the broken teeth of an old alligator. Those in groups like teeth are called fengcong. A single tower, roughly like a rook from a chess set, that’s called fenglin—a limestone peak isolated from others by a flat plain.”
“It’s enchanting . . . surreal!” marveled Cochrane. “Like something out of Middle Earth.”
“Middle Kingdom,” you mean, smiled Purdy
They put up for the night at the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat, a stone and bamboo hostel on the bend of a Li River tributary. The retreat was run on behalf of a group of green investors dedicated to sustainable living and opportunities for local ethnic minorities, principally Miao and Dong. That meant hot water was in short supply, but friendly locals were everywhere. Getting a guide to the film location was no problem. They set off next morning, saddled with backpacks; digital camera at the ready, and walking sticks in hand. They looked like all the rest of the tourists who came here for the hiking, rock, climbing, and the mystical views.
Their guide chattered along from a prepared script—“this view is the same as the engraving on the back of a Chinese bank note, this tree and waterfall figured in the first full-color movie ever shot in a China location,” and on and on. The guide actually made it seem like a long morning. The problem wasn’t that Lily Zhang’s movie location was so far away. The problem was that it was at the top of a fenglin—and so many of the peaks looked alike. First time out, there was no getting along without the guide.
They turned up a winding road that passed homes on the very fringe of a village. A glance to the left or right prompted Cochrane to mutter, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Clotheslines dandled socks and t-shirts, along with sides of bacon and strings of sausages, bouncing and bumping into the shirts when the breeze was strong enough. And it was often strong enough.
Cascades of drying corn hung over the edge of village walls. Beyond the walls, they could just catch the eaves of houses rimmed with crowns of spiky red peppers. Occasionally some thin and ragged dog rushed out to bark at them. A few children stared, banjo-eyed and silent, but most of the adults were away working—working in the nearest big city.
After a 90-minute walk, they dropped down into the flatlands watered by the river and its meandering tributaries. This land was divided into crop squares. Each square was ribbed with raised earth, with depressions on either side to contain river water. They angled across the flatlands, their destination in view: a shard of rock, maybe a quarter mile in circumference, jutting straight up from the plain.
“This is it,” said the guide. “The movie people are at work at top. No trespassing! It is forbidden to go up there. But I will take you up for a fee.”
“Well, you know,” said Purdy. “I think my girlfriend and I will just stay here and look around, maybe picnic and then head back on our own.”
As the guide cheerfully sauntered back to the hostel, a hefty tip in his back pocket, Purdy and Cochrane gazed up at the rock. At the top, the very steepest part, there was a thin ladder of horizontal lines, spaced like the frets on a guitar. “Must be stairs there,” said Purdy. “Not so much anyplace else. No wonder they chopper-in the movie equipment.”
“But it’s doable,” said Cochrane. “Shall we?”
“You don’t balk at anything, do you, Cochrane?” Purdy smiled appreciatively.
“Not much.”
The first part of the ascent was mostly a matter of stretching the quads and raising the knees high, almost to the chin. Gusts of wind tried to pry them away from the rock, and they had to hang on hard.
Mostly, however, the challenge was “reading” the rock face. The natural footholds just weren’t spaced as comfortably as stairs. The higher they went, it seemed the footholds grew narrower, and Cochrane ended up with her arms stretched out gripping the rock, with her face pressed against its steep, cold incline.
With the gritty cliff pressed to her cheek, the wind thrumming in her ear, she looked off to the side, across the broad terraced fields, with the river just a twinkle and a glimmer in the distance.
“Simply beautiful,” she thought. “I’m glad I’m here and not back in a classroom.”
Purdy shadowed her the whole way, discreetly but carefully. He marveled at her gifts—athleticism, confidence, seeming peace of mind.
Looking straight up would put her balance at risk, so Cochrane reached up with her hands instead, blindly feeling for ledges, cracks, anything to support hands or toes.
She found a ledge and grasped it with her hand. She moved her right foot up to a toehold and bounced upward, pushing down on the ledge until she was head and shoulders above it and could twist and torque her way into a sitting position. The ascent was actually a little easier than it had looked from the base. This was fun, really. Up and up she went, Purdy close behind. It was a game of seeking out the bulges, roots, rocks and crevices that would help them up.
They didn’t talk much. The only sound was the intake and exhalation of breath like pistons working. She had that damp glow—like when she went jogging and the endorphins came pouring in. Or, like really good sex. This was great exercise. Too bad it was just another Navy assignment.
At last they came to the steps hewn out of the limestone. Not that this was a piece of cake. The distance between risers was hardly ergonomically designed. In fact, sometimes they had to make the stair-step ascent on all fours, pawing away at the top steps while t
heir feet found footholds further down. Still, they were making good time.
Up they went. Cochrane lost count of the steps. They were moving quickly, and she was panting, face into the cliff. Suddenly, there was an end to stone. Curiously, her entire field of vision was taken up by gold and blue embroidery. She could see every stitch. She pushed back with her arms and lifted her head to see. Her gaze arced up from brilliantly embroidered sandals to a tunic of blue, gold, and white, cinched at the waist with a broad black belt from which hung a quiver of arrows. As she glanced further upward, she saw the tunic was parted at the breast and gleaming steel shown through on the left side. A bow chord cut diagonally down from shoulder to hip. The figure towered above her . . . a figure holding a halberd, what the Chinese call a pudao.
Her hair whipping in the wind, Lily Zhang looked down at them.
“Welcome. I’ve been expecting you.”
14
ONE HUNDRED STEPS
Purdy and Cochrane exchanged bewildered glances but followed Lily Zhang as she led them toward a dusty wood and paper door that covered a cave hollowed out of the karst.
Crossing the courtyard to the cave door, Cochrane marveled at the juxtaposition of cut tree branches, old-fashioned hoes, broom straw brushes and iron pots alongside the mantis-like segments of a steel crane, a good-size gasoline generator and fuel, plus piles of camera cases, gel bags, coils of electrical cable, tripods and light jacks.
“Where worlds collide,” she thought, “the very old and the very modern.”
They skipped over a railroad track that looked like it was sized for the seven dwarfs.
Cochrane gestured at it and made a face.
“Tracks for a camera dolly,” Purdy said matter-of-factly.