by Jeff Edwards
Finally, Lu Shi forced his gaze to travel up the length of the bed, taking in every detail. He paused when his eyes reached the knee level, or rather where knee level should have been. The sheet lay almost flat against the surface of the bed. There was no tenting of the fabric, no raised contours to indicate the presence of legs.
Lu Shi’s throat tightened a fraction. He had been briefed about his son’s injuries, but it was one thing to hear the words, and quite another thing to witness the reality for himself.
His eyes continued their journey up the length of the sheet-draped form, gliding over a pair of telltale bulges that must be the bandages covering the stumps of amputated legs. When he reached the upper body, the left arm lay above the sheet, wrapped in bandages, but essentially intact—at least in form. The dressings on the right arm were much heavier, and—like the legs—they ended suddenly, just above the wrist.
Lu Shi raised his eyes still further, to look at the face (if that torn and engorged mass of flesh could be called a face). A thick cervical collar held the neck in place, keeping the head tilted slightly back, to allow for the bundle of plastic tubing that disappeared into the mouth and nostrils.
The right eye and right ear were both swathed in surgical gauze, and the visible portions of the face were swollen, discolored by bruising, and crisscrossed by wandering trails of sutures. The left eye was open, and staring sightlessly toward the ceiling.
As he focused on that unblinking eye, Lu Shi felt an entirely unwelcome stab of recognition. The patient was approximately the correct age: in his middle-to-late thirties, but Lu Shi decided instantly that the similarity in ages didn’t prove a thing. He did not want to recognize this face. He wanted it to be the face of a stranger; he needed it to be the face of a stranger.
A minute spark of hope still flickered somewhere deep inside of him, just the tiniest glimmer of a chance… This might not be Lu Jianguo. This could be a bizarrely elaborate case of mistaken identity. Somehow, someone had misidentified this poor wretch as his son. And somewhere, somehow—Lu Jianguo was safe, and whole, and alive.
Lu Shi felt the heat of tears on his cheeks. Let it be so. Oh please… let it be so… Let this mangled wreck of a man be anyone but Lu Jianguo.
And then his final hope was extinguished. He could feel the last tiny flare of the spark as it was swallowed by darkness. The face of the man on the bed was ravaged and distorted, but it was not the face of a stranger. The last shreds of denial were ripped from Lu Shi with the force of a hurricane. This thing… this lump of broken humanity… was Lu Jianguo.
Something broke at the very core of Lu Shi’s being—something indefinable and incalculably fragile. He could not have named this thing, and he had no idea what it was. But he was instantly aware of its loss, and he knew without question that it could never be restored. Nothing would ever be the same again.
He stared down at the wounded animal that had once been his son. The raw silk of the red necktie flowed smoothly between his groping fingers.
During his early years, Lu Jianguo had brought his father all the usual gifts of childhood… handmade ashtrays… colorful paper ornaments… picture frames decorated with beads and bits of shell. All the worthlessly priceless trinkets made by children for their parents. The necktie had been different, not just because it was expensive, but because of the care that had gone into its selection. It had been Lu Jianguo’s first attempt to understand his father’s preferences and desires, his first attempt to offer a gift that was utterly appropriate to the tastes and needs of the recipient. It had been a boy’s first act of manhood. Lu Jianguo had been nine years old.
At that moment, Lu Shi had known that he had named his son correctly. Jianguo, meant ‘building the country.’ Looking into the shining eyes of his nine year old son, Lu Shi had seen his own wisdom in selecting that name. Lu Jianguo would build the country. And Lu Shi had not had any doubt that he was standing in the presence of the future leader of China.
Lu Shi blinked, and the memory of that long-past day fell away. He had been so certain that he knew the future of China… the future of his son.
Now, staring at Lu Jianguo’s sheet-draped form, Lu Shi was certain of nothing. After a lifetime spent planning and preparing for the future, Lu Shi discovered that there was no future. There were only dreams and plans that could be snatched away without a second’s warning. The future had been stolen, from Lu Shi, from Lu Jianguo, and from China. For the first time in his life, Lu Shi did not care about tomorrow.
He discovered that his eyes had drifted back down to the flat stretch of bed sheets where his son’s legs should have been.
“Where are they?” he asked quietly.
The man in the white coat seemed to follow the direction of Lu Shi’s gaze. He cleared his throat nervously. “Your son’s legs, Comrade Vice Premier? I… I’m not really sure. One of them was severed before he arrived, and the other…”
Lu Shi silenced the man with a glare. “Not my son’s legs!” he hissed. He turned his head toward the Army major.
The man stiffened visibly. “Yes, Comrade Vice Premier?”
“Where are the men who did this?” Lu Shi asked. “Where are the criminals who…” His voice trailed off in mid-sentence. He paused, and continued at a volume just above a whisper. “The terrorists who… did this thing… Where are they?”
The major swallowed before answering. “We… ah… We believe their plan is to escape through the mountains into India. Given current weather conditions, it is likely that they will travel by way of the Nathu La pass.”
“I see,” Lu Shi said softly. “Then you do not know where they are?”
The major responded with a single shake of his head. “Not yet, Comrade Vice Premier. General Zhou has men and aircraft combing the mountain passes between here and the Indian border. The General has also ordered increased satellite surveillance of the most likely escape routes. We will locate the terrorists, Comrade Vice Premier. They can’t hide from us indefinitely.”
Lu Shi nodded slowly. “What of the prisoner? The terrorist you have in custody… Has he broken?”
“Not yet, sir,” the major said. “But he will.”
Lu Shi turned his eyes back to the bed. “Inform General Zhou that the Army is to immediately surrender the prisoner to the Ministry of State Security.”
The words were spoken calmly, but the major could not entirely conceal his grimace. “Comrade Vice Premier… That won’t be necessary. I assure you that our interrogators will soon have the information we need.”
Lu Shi did not look at him. “I’m not offering you a suggestion, major. I’m giving you a direct order. I don’t want the information soon. I want it now. Do you understand?”
The major snapped to attention and saluted. “Yes, Comrade Vice Premier!”
He executed an abrupt about-face, and marched briskly from the room.
Lu Shi stood without moving for several minutes after the major had gone. The only sounds in the room were the sibilant rasp and gurgle of the mechanical respirator.
At last, he looked up and made eye contact with the man in the white lab coat. “Disconnect the machines.”
The man’s face was suffused by a look of pure horror. “Comrade Vice Premier, we can’t do that! These machines provide critical life support functions. If we disconnect them, your son will die!”
Lu Shi turned back toward the bed. “Will he ever be free of these machines? Will he recover enough to leave this bed?”
The man cringed under the hard edge of Lu Shi’s voice. “That… That seems unlikely, Comrade Vice Premier. Your son has suffered massive cerebral trauma.”
The man swallowed. “I… I don’t believe he will ever be entirely free of the need for life support.”
Lu Shi’s voice was low and cold. “Then my son is already dead,” he said. “Disconnect the machines.”
CHAPTER 3
QUSHUI PRISON
SOUTHWEST OF LHASA, TIBET
WEDNESDAY; 19 NOVEMBER
7:42 PM
TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’
There was a sound somewhere on the other side of the door. Strapped to a steel chair in the dimly-lighted gloom of the interrogation cell, Sonam came awake instantly.
He had been drifting in that strange half-world between consciousness and oblivion. The pain was still too constant and too insistent to let him sleep, but he could find some relief by letting himself slide down into a haze of senselessness.
His face and upper body ached from repeated beatings and frequent jolts from an electric cattle prod. At least two of his ribs were broken, and every breath brought a stab of pain. The bullet hole in his left thigh throbbed in time with his pulse. The vicious bastards had done a good job of patching up his leg; he had to give them that much. The bullet had been removed; the wound had been neatly sutured, and they kept the dressings clean. Of course, their reasons hadn’t been humanitarian. The Chinese Army was not concerned with his health. They just wanted him kept alive for questioning.
Sonam’s interrogators had been careful to keep well clear of the injury. They had limited their attentions to the parts of his body above the waist. That still left them quite a bit of territory to work with, and they had used it with appalling brutality.
The noise was repeated, and this time Sonam recognized it—the scrape of a boot heel on concrete. It was followed almost immediately by the sound of a heavy key sliding into the door lock, and the dull rasp of the bolt being withdrawn. The soldiers were coming for him again.
Sonam felt a surge of panic, coupled with a sudden urge to urinate, or vomit, or both. He forced himself to slow his breathing.
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 confid
ence, 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.