Warriors (10 page)

But the very best of these men and women never left Xinbu Island. They remained in place and had the honor to provide maximum security for General Moon himself and the secret military base that he commanded.

The Te-Wu “Headmaster,” as he is traditionally called by students (in English, oddly enough), was perhaps the most feared man in Asia. And, for certain, he was the second most powerful man in China. If he achieved his vision, and if the gods smiled on him, he would soon become the single most powerful man in China. And, soon thereafter, perhaps, the world.

His name was General Sun-Yat Moon.

To meet him, a person would never know that the polished, dashing, and urbane gentleman was someone capable of unspeakable cruelty. A deceptively kind-looking man, the general had recently suffered a stroke, which had partially immobilized his face. To his delight, the stroke left him more feared than ever. A dangerous man with a beatific smile—and a seraphic countenance.

He was tall for a Chinese gentleman, well over six feet. His thick head of longish hair was dead straight, brilliantined to a gleaming blue-black. A thick comma of it was arranged artfully on his forehead, and his perfectly smooth skin was the familiar shade of flat light yellow. His startling eyes, pewter grey, were hooded and thickly lashed.

He kept his origins secret, but he seemed a northern type. Tibetan, some people thought, or perhaps Manchurian. Moon was lean and well muscled, someone who took extremely good care of himself. A martial arts expert, he was also a crack shot and the onetime national fencing champion of China. Educated abroad, he studied history and political science at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Even now, when he spoke English, he did so in a clipped Oxbridge accent that many in his circles found either perplexing or, privately, amusing.

Moon had fought his way up through the military and political ranks, his rise as inexorable as a waxing tide. A seasoned battlefield commander, he had presided over the slaughter of thousands of demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A vicious hard-line Communist, Moon had been deputy chief of the much-feared Special Activities Committee of the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army of China. Known even in Beijing for his extremist ideological stands, he had been in operational command of more than a million Chinese storm troopers.

Fast-forward and multiply the numbers under his command by a factor of five. And now his battle commanders presided over a new kind of army. These twenty-first-century warriors had cast off the old ways. They were fiercely nationalistic and full of fight. They were warriors of the old school in a new century and Moon was just the powerful, good-looking, charismatic man to lead them.

One of his many responsibilities as chief of the MSS (China’s secret police force) was the Te-Wu Academy he had founded on Xinbu Island. He ruled there the way he ruled the MSS. With an iron fist encased in steel mail. He was known for his brutality and reveled in it. The Te-Wu secret police graduates who moved out into the far reaches of the world seldom forgot where their sworn allegiances lay. Or how important to the homeland was the successful fulfillment of their sworn duty to the service.

And to General Moon and his capricious turns of mood. The slightest trespass could lead to a slap on the wrist. Or instant execution. Usually hanging, sometimes decapitation.

If Moon was angry, and wished to make an example of a subordinate, his beheading was videotaped and DVDs of the grisly execution were sent to his surviving family members. The final shot was always the same. A grinning General Moon, holding the victim’s bloody severed head aloft for a close-up.

Moon lived and traveled in great secrecy. His primary residence was not the luxurious mountaintop compound on the island. He lived in Hong Kong aboard a vast floating palace amid the tumult and turmoil of Kowloon Harbor. Hong Kong had been his birthplace and he felt an almost gravitational pull to that place.

He had raised his three daughters there: the twins—a serving Te-Wu officer named Jet, and Li, who had been killed—and then there was the baby of the family, Chyna. Chyna Moon, trained in the shadow arts since birth, had climbed far and fast through the ranks of the MSS, graduating at the top of her class from her father’s Te-Wu Academy before attending Cambridge University in England.

The trained assassin was now a full professor, a don, at the seven-hundred-year-old university. She was also a full colonel in the MSS Secret Police, living and working undercover in Great Britain at her father’s old alma mater. She was running a small cadre of assassins in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. Moon’s youngest daughter was his pride and joy and he trusted her, and her alone, with the most sensitive assignments.

He had not a doubt in his mind that one day Chyna Moon would rule all China in his stead. She would rule with an iron fist.

The glorious beginning of what history would long remember as the “Moon Dynasty” was the general’s most cherished dream.

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hyna’s portrait, in a monogrammed silver Cartier frame, now stood on the vast polished walnut desk that dominated his office at the Academy. Moon reached for one of the phones and spoke to his personal assistant, Li, who, like the two armed guards on either side of the door, was related to the general. He liked, for security reasons, to fill such positions with family members.

“Has Dr. Chase arrived?” he purred. “Good. Please have him shown in, won’t you?”

While he waited, he flipped through the Chase dossier his assistant had pulled for him. Recent photos of the man’s wife and children caused his eyes to dilate. Hollow-eyed ghosts wandering through the hellish death camps in North Korea. Skin and bone, all three of them. The decision to send them there had been Moon’s alone, and it had been a wise one.

Moon was all but certain that, one day, the Americans, the CIA or the SEALs, would come looking for Dr. Chase and his family. A long time ago he had decided that if Chase and his family were separated, if the man’s wife and children were imprisoned in North Korea, well, that would make it just that much more difficult for the Americans to—

“Dr. Chase to see you, General,” a voice on his intercom said.

“Show him inside, please.”

The intricately carved double doors opened silently and Bill Chase entered the vast, sunlit office blinking his eyes. Chase was dressed in the loose white clothing used for tae kwon do, having just competed in an Academy competition. His face and clothing were wet with perspiration, and Moon pulled a linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to the American.

“Ah, the good doctor himself, returned from the field of battle.”

Moon spoke English. To his hostage, he sounded like an Old Etonian, which, in fact, he was.

“You’re in a disgustingly good humor this morning,” Chase said, wearily, collapsing into a wide leather chair. He’d been up all night working on new arming and disarming codes for the Centurion missile launch system. He was utterly exhausted, as usual. He worked twelve hours a day at his desk, another six in his rooms every night. He had to. His life, and the lives of his wife and children, depended on it.

“With good reason,” Moon said expansively. “One of my former star pupils, an early graduate of my Academy, executed a rather delicate mission in Washington yesterday. Extremely delicate, you see. But I had no doubt Colonel Chow would succeed. The Te-Wu Academy has much to be proud of this day.”

Chase said, “Bravo. Let me guess. You finally pulled the trigger. Your archenemy, President McCloskey, is dead. Congratulations. Now you can blow up the whole fucking world without nearly as much fear of retaliation.”

“True enough, Dr. Chase, true enough.”

Moon, a self-satisfied expression on his face, rocked his chair back and put his boots up on his monumental teak desk. Behind the general hung a massive gilt-framed oil painting by Titian, a twelve-foot-long mural quietly removed by razor-wielding Nazi art lovers from a wall at the Musée du Louvre one dark night in the winter of 1942. Moon had acquired the priceless picture from a Japanese collector’s estate in Tokyo in much the same fashion a few years ago.

Chase had spent hours studying that epic canvas, knowing how much it revealed about his captor and torturer: there were Roman legionnaires with short, bright swords, helmets and shields shining with sun-glinted gilt, a powerful conqueror in his chariot behind six rampaging white stallions, an entourage of muscular Roman centurions in their trademarked plumed helmets herding downcast captured Gauls through the streets in chains; there were Greeks in buskins and tunics of Ionian blue, coal black Egyptians in flashing desert reds with images of Isis and Osiris, black dray horses struggling to surmount a hill with a massive wooden catapult, and the recognizable faces of Hannibal, Ramses, Alexander, and, of course, Caesar.

Moon’s pantheon of heroes was lacking a few icons, in Chase’s opinion: Stalin, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, and Caligula, to name but a few.

Moon was typically dressed, Chase saw, wearing his perfectly pressed white silk mandarin jacket with Burmese white jade buttons. On his lapel, a cloisonné pin symbolic of his stature: the white crane, symbol of the first rank. Also, around his neck, a string of 108 beads like a Buddhist rosary, from which hung delicate strings of coral representing the Five Elements.

His long, finely muscled legs were encased in white sharkskin jodhpurs, and his knee-high riding boots were polished to mirrorlike mahogany perfection. He fancied himself an expert horseman, though Chase had never seen a single piece of evidence indicating the presence of even a single horse on this verdant isle.

“Did you win?” Moon said.

“Win what?”

“Your morning tae kwon do bout with the master.”

“Of course I won,” Chase replied, mopping his brow. “Your master is a bully and a lightweight.”

“So you got your blue belt today. That is very good. I’m proud of your progress, Dr. Chase. Did they tell you the meaning of the blue belt?”

“No.”

“Your new belt represents the sky or heaven. It means your tae kwon do skills are growing stronger with each passing day. Like a tall plant or a tree growing toward the blue skies of the heavens. Next you will receive the red belt. The meaning of the red belt signifies—”

“Let me guess. The planet Mars. Danger. War. Any of those?”

Moon laughed. “Please. Do sit back down. Those leather armchairs are quite comfortable, as you well know. Ah, the good doctor. Where oh where would I be without you?”

“Back in some generic office tower in Beijing, shuffling papers, I should imagine. All right. No more of your perfumed bullshit. I’m here. Let’s get to it. You said you had news of my family. What? Where?”

“I do, I do. I beg you, be patient. There is a letter from your wife. It seems that all is well with your family. That is not the primary reason I wanted to see you, but I’m sure you’re most anxious for a report on their recent activities.”

“Understatement.”

“I understand. I know this is all very difficult for you. I myself would abhor being in your position, as would any man. Unfortunately, this is war. And in war there is incalculable pain and suffering in the names of both good and evil. The good news, Dr. Chase, is that with your genius and the application of that genius, we will soon challenge and defeat the West.”

“You’re actually going to do it, aren’t you?”

“Do it? What does that mean?”

“You’re going to use the Centurions to slaughter countless millions of innocent people. Right? You are. I can see it in your eyes. You are fucking insane, Moon. Sociopath. Psychopath. You’ve got to know that on some level.”

“Why is it, do you suppose, that, throughout history, men of destiny, men of true greatness, men like my Caesar, or even our own Chairman Mao, are always tainted with that ridiculous charge. Insanity. I don’t even know what the word means.”

“You consider yourself a man of destiny?”

“Of course.”

“God save us from men of destiny.”

Moon ignored him.

“But all great men who have gone before me have borne that badge of scorn, Dr. Chase, the false accusations of insanity. Name me one who has not.”

“How about five? Jesus Christ, Buddha, George Washington, Lincoln, Churchill . . . shall I go on?”

“No.”

“I could, you know.”

“Watch your mouth, Chase. Don’t forget that any blood I shed will be on your hands, too. You designed the Centurion on a single sheet of paper right here in this office. The most destructive weapon the world has ever seen came straight out of your head, not mine.”

“For God’s sake, Moon, you think I don’t know that? You think I don’t spend every waking minute of every day living with the knowledge of what I’ve wrought? My God. That’s just fucking sadism. So what are you trying to tell me here? I came here because I want news of my wife and kids, not your sick fantasies of world domination, you ungodly lunatic.”

“All in good time, Dr. Chase. I am merely telling you that the day when your family’s suffering ends draws near. The curtains are rapidly being drawn on the Old China. The China that has suffered centuries of humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan. The foreign intervention and imperialism, the British invasion of Tibet, the Opium Wars, the loss of Taiwan, the—”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the general, so spare me the litany.”

“You laugh, Dr. Chase. But I am telling you that one system of government and one culture will prevail. Mine. The New China now enters the final phase of our planned military showdown with the West. On that day, you and I will deploy the weapons that will take America and her closest allies down.”

“Really? What day is that, may I ask?”

“Independence Day. Or should I call it . . . Dependence Day. Quite a good one, that, don’t you think?”

“July Fourth? You take America down on its national birthday?”

“Hmm. Or, one might say, its national death day.”

“And just out of curiosity, how the hell do you plan to do that?”