SEAL Team 666: A Novel Page 19

Laws pointed toward Ruiz and nodded. “That’s right. I thought the same thing. So I looked more closely at the character for chi.”

  On the whiteboard, he drew two characters side by side that looked almost the same, but the one on the right had more flowing script.

  He pointed to the character on the left. “This character is chi. Now, most characters are comprised of two internal parts. The radical, which helps define it. This is usually found on the left side. In this case it’s the bug radical, which is typically used for insects, reptiles, dragons, etcetera. The other part of the character is the phonetic and helps us know how it’s pronounced.”

  He pointed to the character on the right. “This character is pronounced the same way as the first. We can tell this by comparing the phonetic portion of the character. But as you can see, the radicals are different.”

  Walker realized as Laws said it that he was able to discern the difference. Up until that point, it all looked like squiggles. But the more Laws explained, the more it began to make sense.

  “This is the ghost radical. Note these two strokes that look like legs and this square with a cross in the middle to represent the large demon’s head. The last part is a curl, which represents a demon tail.” He added the character for dragon after this version of chi. “At first I mistook it for the other radical. Between my tired eyes and the sheer difficulty of reading all these characters, I read the phonetic of the character and assumed it meant hornless dragon.” He shook his head. “Never assume. It’s exceedingly common in Chinese to see character pairs. Long is no different. But the character chi with the ghost radical only pairs with the character mei, which refers to ‘mountain’ or ‘forest demons.’” He faced them for impact. “When I say it only pairs with mei, what I mean is that in all of my dictionaries and on Internet searches, I couldn’t find any instance of the chi with the ghost radical pairing with any other. We’re talking about it not appearing in more than fifty thousand combinations. Not once.”

  “I think I’m starting to understand.” Holmes nodded. “Continue.”

  “This goes all the way back to the Hanshu dynasty in 111 CE when chi first appeared with a ghost radical. In every instance it had to do with something bad. Something evil.”

  “If those characters never appeared together, then how can they be together in the text? What does that mean?” Yaya asked.

  Laws pointed at him and grinned. “And that was my question once I finally figured out the etymology of the words.”

  Ruiz turned to Walker and mouthed etymology. Walker grinned, but he was starting to get into what Laws was telling them.

  Laws circled chi long several times with the red marker. “One of the exceptions to the pairing rule has to do with a name.”

  “So you searched for Chi Long,” Walker said.

  “Yep! I searched for Chi Long, using the same ghost radical. I found a single occurrence when researching the San Guo Shi Dai, or Three Kingdoms period of China. This time was around 220 to 280 CE. There’s not a lot of real history that’s been saved, except the writings of Chen Shou. Romance of the Three Kingdoms was a novel written by Luo Guanzhong in the fourteenth century. It’s provided much of the textual fabric for sinologists. The occurrence of Chi Long appeared in an associated text when referring to a great warrior that belonged to Sun Quan, emperor of the Kingdom of Wu, during the Three Kingdoms period.”

  He produced a colored picture, which he passed around. On what appeared to be a background of parchment paper was a Chinese warrior in flowing robes wearing ancient, dragon-influenced armor. His face and hands had been eaten away, leaving only bone, muscle, and sinew. If anything looked like a demon, this did.

  “This was one of Emperor Sun’s greatest warriors. It was said that he was shot with over a thousand arrows and lived.”

  “That would indicate an invulnerability to weapons,” Ruiz said, serious for the first time.

  “What happened to him?” Yaya asked.

  Laws shrugged and sat down. “I don’t know. He could have faded into history. He could have died drinking ancient Chinese beer. He could still be alive today as a demon. All I know is that the text I saw referred to Chi Long as a person, usually in the possessive, so clearly there’s something or someone alive who is using the name Chi Long with the ghost radical.”

  “So we have the possibility of encountering an eighteen-hundred-year-old Chinese demon who’s evidently been creating an army of chimera creatures.” Holmes sat back. “That about right?”

  “That sums it up,” Laws agreed.

  “Well, then,” Holmes said, standing. “We’d better figure out how we’re going to beat this thing if we ever encounter it.” Then he grabbed his coffee and the file and left the room.

  “I’ll get right on it,” Laws muttered. “Right after I find that volume of Chinese Mythological Demons for Dummies I misplaced.”

  Walker watched as Laws closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.

  43

  FROM THE DIARY OF LARRY WALKER.

  It’s day three of the exorcism. My heart has broken so many times in the last seventy-two hours I can’t begin to tell you how much I hurt inside. One day you’ll read this and know that all your pain, all of your agony, is my fault.

  Sometimes I wish that it was your brother they did this to. He’s older and stronger. I think he would have taken it better. Although I have to admit, you have absorbed so much self-mutilation and punishment to your flesh that I am amazed at what is survivable.

  I don’t know how damaged you will be because of this. But if you survive, I know you’re going to hate me. So I leave this to you. After all, if you’re going to hate me, I want you to hate me for the right reasons.

  Your mother called me an asshole. Not because I wasn’t a good provider, but because I was never there for her. I didn’t change after her death, either. I was an asshole to Brian and I was an asshole to you. My defense, if I’m even allowed one, is that there was only one way I knew how to provide a future for my family. Sure, I could have stayed like the other Navy chiefs and lived hand to mouth until I retired. But that’s no kind of life. That’s subsistence living. That’s one step above the poverty line and it isn’t fair that you kids should have to live a life like that.

  So I made deals.

  Some people say I stole. I never did. Everything I dealt I bought from the DRMO at auction. I have the receipts for everything if anyone ever asks. I’d buy a surplus of chairs from DRMO, sell them to a guy in Subic for a hundred cases of beer, then sell those to resorts in Mindanao who were having trouble getting local vendors because of all the Muslim separatists. I’d triple my initial investment this way and a hundred other ways.

  Making deals wasn’t about what you were selling. It was always about who you were selling it to. It’s a personality game. You have to know people who know people, and I knew everyone.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  See, in order to make money, you have to take advantage of someone. To make a lot of money, you take a lot of advantage of someone. Most of the times people realize it. After all, they’re still making a profit. Their problem was they didn’t have the means or know the right people to make the kind of profit that I did. And that usually left them feeling pissed.

  But I wasn’t a good guy all the time.

  There were the occasions when I took advantage of a situation if I didn’t like the people. And this is where you come in. I made a mistake in Corregidor. I was hired to trade for some penicillin. I got the penicillin, but got a better offer in Manila. A bar owner wanted to corner the market on the drug, knowing that the girls had to have clean bills of health on their red cards. He paid me triple what I was going to get from the Malay doctor on Corregidor.

  I figured I’d be able to take the cash, buy some more penicillin, and get it to Corregidor after only a few days’ delay. But I hadn’t anticipated the supply would dry up. When I realized that I couldn’t get any more, I tried to buy back what I’d sold at a loss, bu
t the bar owner just laughed at me.

  I wired my contact in Corregidor. The reply I got back told the rest of the horrifying story. The drug was to be used to halt an outbreak of meningitis at a local orphanage. They had to have it. Without it they’d all die. And they did.

  Forty-seven children.

  Dead.

  Because of me.

  The last line of the telegram I received in return said that I’d pay for this.

  Two weeks later I noticed the change in you. I don’t know how it got in you. I don’t know who did it. All I knew was that one minute you were a happy-go-lucky kid having a great life in the P.I., and the next you were like a ravenous dog with the mouth of a sailor.

  Then I lost you for four months.

  I’m still trying to figure out what exactly happened to you. According to the woman who convinced the priest to rescue you from the garbage dump, you are possessed by a Hantu Kabor. Turns out that’s some sort of Malaysian grave demon. It sucks out the souls of the dead, but can be harnessed to do the same with the living. As it was explained to me, as if this were something logical, the demon possesses you for as long as it takes to break down your internal defenses. Once that happens, it eats your soul and moves on. I’ve seen the sort of people they claim have been its victims. And Jackie, they scare me. They scare me worse than anything because I don’t want you to end up that way.

  They just sit there, staring at the world.

  No, that’s not right. That would entail some sort of interaction. They sit there with the world staring at them. They’re like rocks. Or clay. Or a hill. They are nothing. There’s nothing left inside except for the elements that made them.

  They’re empty.

  But you were strong.

  You kept it at bay. Through whatever hell you were in, you kept it from consuming you.

  And you are still holding on.

  You have more scars than any child should ever have. You have been bleeding from your eyes and ears for a full day now. Your arms have been trying to dislocate, so we’ve put you in a straitjacket. Your heart has been at a steady two hundred beats per minute. Your breathing is rapid-fire. Your eyes shine with the heat of the beast.

  But I think whatever the priest is doing is working. Amidst your screams of terror and agony, I think the shine in your eyes is beginning to dim.

  That has to be good, right?

  That means you’re getting better, right?

  Oh Lord, please make it so.

  44

  SPG OFFICES. AFTERNOON.

  They’d found them. Or at least they thought they had.

  Walker sat with the rest of his team as Musso laid out more information about the target set.

  “We’d originally believed there was a Chinese connection. Based on the hard work Mr. Laws conducted deducing the elements of Chi Long, and perhaps identifying the supernatural connection, we were further lured into the idea that this was a Chinese Triad–organized endeavor. But the events of the last two hours have dissuaded us substantially from that. The sinolinguistic association was merely a result of the language shift in an ethnically divergent group within Myanmar.”

  Walker glanced at Ruiz. Neither of them understood what the briefer had said.

  Jen caught it and gestured toward Musso.

  “Bottom line, we’re now certain that the origination of the crates comes from the Karen. They trace their history back to the Mongols. They still use a version of Chinese, but they use many of the more archaic terms and characters. This would be the reason for the ghost radical appearing in the chi character. The Karen are currently indigenous minorities in Thailand and Myanmar. They have been waging a silent war against the military junta that has been in control of Myanmar for the last twenty years. They are separated both ideologically and politically from the Myanmarese and wish nothing more than to remove them from power and replace them with the Karen, who can trace their history back to a far earlier rule.”

  The briefer paused.

  Holmes took the opportunity to ask a question. “How do you know specifically it’s the Karen?”

  “I’ve been mirroring Laws’s efforts. While he searched the documents taken from the cargo ship for a Chinese connection, I searched for something else. What I discovered were Chinese literalizations—characters to represent sounds, usually for names—of a name that occurred several times in the documents we transferred from the cargo ship, Saw Thuza Tun.” He glanced at Laws. “The only reason you didn’t find it was because the radicals used in the literalizations were nonsensical.”

  Laws nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “So the name Saw Thuza Tun is clearly a Karen name. We know this because the Karen have an entirely different naming convention in Myanmar. Surnames are not commonly used. A person is usually known by a given name consisting of one or two elements. In this case they are Thuza and Tun, which mean ‘success’ and ‘bright,’ respectively. They’re preceded by the title of the person. In this case, they give the word ‘saw,’ which is the Karen version of the Shan title ‘sao.’ Both ‘sao’ and ‘saw’ mean ‘lord.’”

  “Is that all you got?” Ruiz asked.

  “Initial searches indicate that Tun is involved with the Karen separatist movement, but that’s it. NFI,” Musso finished, meaning “no further information.”

  The room was silent for a moment as everyone digested what they’d heard. Finally Holmes asked, “What does this have to do with us? Why are the chimera being shipped to America?”

  “You’re speaking to motive,” Musso said.

  “I am. Why us?”

  “That’s an excellent question, but one for which we can make only educated postulations. Here’s what we think. If their intent had actually been to attack the U.S., they could have done it without our even knowing. We wouldn’t be having this conversation. Frankly, we all might be dead.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Holmes agreed. “We almost have too much information.”

  “Precisely,” Jen said. “Peter, show them the pictures.”

  Musso raised a hand and gestured to the back of the room. “Liz, please present the slides.”

  The room darkened and an image of a sprawling city was superimposed on Musso. He stepped to the side. “This is Rangoon, or Yangon as it’s now called. It was the former capital of Burma and Myanmar. You’ll remember that we found the ships in the harbor. They weren’t hiding. They were at berth as if they weren’t about to ship death to America. Next slide, please.”

  Another city appeared, this one not so sprawling.

  “This is Thaton, located down the coast a ways from Yangon. You’ll remember the circus name on the crates was the Suwarnabhumi Circus. It turns out that Suwarnabhumi was a semi-mythical kingdom of the Mon, which is believed to be the present-day Thaton. So we decided to search here. You’d think that a warehouse filled with crates should be immensely difficult to find. Next slide, please.”

  The next image was a truck bearing the logo of the same circus that had been painted on the crates. The quality of the photo was poor and it appeared to be taken from a low angle.

  “One of our assets provided this photo twelve hours ago. He was able to follow it to a warehouse. Next slide.”

  An overhead of a huge building with several outbuildings flashed on the screen. The resolution was magnificent. Soldiers with AK-47s patrolled the perimeter. Several trucks with the same logos painted on their roofs were parked near what was probably a loading dock.

  “Why does a circus need a warehouse?” Walker asked.

  “Bingo.” Musso grinned. “Anything else seem out of place?”

  “Why did they paint the logo on the roofs?” Yaya asked.

  “Double bingo. This whole thing is a lure. Let’s go back to the Chinese tech smuggler. I think we’ve been led to this location since we got the original lead to take down the sweatshop. The cargo ship in Macau was in a secluded location with only a few persons on board. It was too easy.”


  “Easy?” Laws sat up as anger suffused his face. “We lost one of our own. That wasn’t easy.”

  Musso held out a hand. “I meant no offense. I was just pointing out that if their intent had been to attack the U.S., they would have provided a more serious defense against possible intrusion. No one could have anticipated the ferocity of the chimera. Not you and certainly not Fratolilio.”

  Musso waited to see if his words had a mollifying effect. Walker watched Laws sit back. The fire had left his eyes, but his face still burned red.

  “Continue,” Holmes commanded.

  “The ship provided us the logo, which we in turn sent to all of our assets. This circus has never had a show. It’s never pitched a tent. It’s never had a single flyer pasted to a Third World shithole telephone pole. This circus exists for one reason.”

  “To lure us in.”

  Ruiz rubbed his face. “Let me get this straight. They want us to come get them?”

  “They want us to attack the Myanmar government. Look at the soldiers on guard outside the warehouse. They’re wearing official military uniforms. The ships are present in Yangon Harbor. They want us to recognize the affiliation with the government.”

  “They want us to take down their military so that they can rule,” Walker said slowly, as he worked it out. “So what are we going to do?”

  The door opened and Billings strode in. “You’re going to go in there and find out what’s going on.” Seeing their expressions, she added, “I’ve been on face phone with Senator Brunson and the vice president. They’re aware of the new information, but they’re not convinced that this is a lure. As long as there’s a potential threat to the United States, they want us to go in and see what we can see.”

  “Sounds pretty clear to me,” Holmes said, looking at his team. “We have a mission. Transportation is standing by. We can leave in two hours.” He turned to Musso. “Do you have a target package ready for us?”

  “I do. I’ll download it to your tablets.”

  “There’s still the bit about Chi Long,” Laws pointed out. “How does he fit into this?”