by Tom Clancy
Yang Lien-Hua was in Labor Room #3. The walls were of yellow glazed brick, the floor tile of some color that had been overcome by years of use, and was now a brown-gray.
For “Lotus Flower,” it had been a nightmare without end. Alone, all alone in this institution of life and death, she’d felt the contractions strengthen and merge into one continuous strain of her abdominal muscles, forcing her unborn child down the birth canal, toward a world that didn’t want it. She’d seen that in the nurses’ faces, the sorrow and resignation, what they must have seen and felt elsewhere in the hospital when death came to take a patient. They’d all learned to accept it as inevitable, and they tried to step away from it, because what had to be done was so contrary to all human instincts that the only way they could be there and see it happen was to—to be somewhere else. Even that didn’t work, and though they scarcely admitted it even to one another, they’d go home from work and lie in their beds and weep bitterly at what they as women had to do to newborns. Some would cradle the dead children who never were, who never got to take that first life-affirming breath, trying to show womanly gentleness to someone who would never know about it, except perhaps the spirits of the murdered babies who might have lingered close by. Others went the other way, tossing them into bins like the trash the state said they were. But even they never joked about it—in fact, never talked about it, except perhaps to note it had been done, or, maybe, “There’s a woman in Number Four who needs the shot.”
Lien-Hua felt the sensations, but worse, knew the thoughts, and her mind cried out to God for mercy. Was it so wrong to be a mother, even if she attended a Christian church? Was it so wrong to have a second child to replace the first that Fate had ripped from her arms? Why did the State deny to her the blessing of motherhood? Was there no way out? She hadn’t killed the first child, as many Chinese families did. She hadn’t murdered her little Large Dragon, with his sparkling black eyes and comical laugh and grasping little hands. Some other force had taken that away from her, and she wanted, she needed another. Just one other. She wasn’t being greedy. She didn’t want to raise two more children. Only one. Only one to suckle at her breasts and smile at her in the mornings. She needed that. She worked hard for the State, asked little in return, but she did ask for this! It was her right as a human being, wasn’t it?
But now she knew only despair. She tried to reverse the contractions, to stop the delivery from happening, but she might as well have tried to stop the tide with a shovel. Her little one was coming out. She could feel it. She could see the knowledge of it in the face of the delivery nurse. She checked her watch and leaned out of the room, waving her arm just as Lien-Hua fought the urge to push and complete the process, and so offer up her child to Death. She fought, controlled her breathing, struggled with her muscles, panted instead of breathing deeply, fought and fought and fought, but it was all for nothing. She knew that now. Her husband was nowhere near to protect her. He’d been man enough to put her here, but not enough to protect her and his own child from what was happening now. With despair came relaxation. It was time. She recognized the feeling from before. She could not fight anymore. It was time to surrender.
The doctor saw the nurse wave. This one was a man. It was easier on the men, and so they gave most of the “shots” in this hospital. He took the 50-cc syringe from stores and then went to the medication closet, unlocking it and withdrawing the big bottle of formaldehyde. He filled the syringe, not bothering to tap out the bubbles, because the purpose of this injection was to kill, and any special care was superfluous. He walked down the corridor toward Labor #3. He’d been on duty for nine hours that day. He’d performed a difficult and successful Caesarian section a few hours before, and now he’d end his working day with this. He didn’t like it. He did it because it was his job, part of the State’s policy. The foolish woman, having a baby without permission. It really was her fault, wasn’t it? She knew what the rules were. Everyone did. It was impossible not to know. But she’d broken the rules. And she wouldn’t be punished for it. Not really her. She wouldn’t go to prison or lose her job or suffer a monetary fine. She’d just get to go home with her uterus the way it had been nine months before—empty. She’d be a little older, and a little wiser, and know that if this happened again, it was a lot better to have the abortion done in the second or third month, before you got too attached to the damned thing. Damned sure it was a lot more comfortable than going through a whole labor for nothing. That was sad, but there was much sadness in life, and for this part of it they’d all volunteered. The doctor had chosen to become a doctor, and the woman in #3 had chosen to become pregnant.
He came into #3, wearing his mask, because he didn’t want to give the woman any infection. That was why he used a clean syringe, in case he should slip and stick her by mistake.
So.
He sat on the usual stool that obstetricians used both for delivering babies and for aborting the late-term ones. The procedure they used in America was a little more pleasant. Just poke into the baby’s skull, suck the brains out, crush the skull and deliver the package with a lot less trouble than a full-term fetus, and a lot easier on the woman. He wondered what the story was on this one, but there was no sense in knowing, was there? No sense knowing that which you can’t change.
So.
He looked. She was fully dilated and effaced, and, yes, there was the head. Hairy little thing. Better give her another minute or two, so that after he did his duty she could expel the fetus in one push and be done with it. Then she could go off and cry for a while and start getting over it. He was concentrating a little too much to note the commotion in the corridor outside the labor room.
Yang pushed the door open himself. And there it all was, for all of them to see. Lien-Hua was on the delivery table. Quon had never seen one of them before, and the way it held a woman’s legs up and apart, it looked for all the world like a device to make women easier to rape. His wife’s head was back and down, not up and looking to see her child born, and then he saw why.
There was the ... doctor, was he? And in his hand a large needle full of—
—they were in time! Yang Quon pushed the doctor aside, off his stool. He darted right to his wife’s face.
“I am here! Reverend Yu came with me, Lien.” It was like a light coming on in a darkened room.
“Quon!” Lien-Hua cried out, feeling her need to push, and finally wanting to.
But then things became more complicated still. The hospital had its own security personnel, but on being alerted by the clerk in the main lobby, one of them called for the police, who, unlike the hospital’s own personnel, were armed. Two of them appeared in the corridor, surprised first of all to see foreigners with TV equipment right there in front of them. Ignoring them, they pushed into the delivery room to find a pregnant woman about to deliver, a doctor on the floor, and four men, two of them foreigners as well!
“What goes on here!” the senior one bellowed, since intimidation was a major tool for controlling people in the PRC.
“These people are interfering with my duties!” the doctor answered, with a shout of his own. If he didn’t act fast, the damned baby would be born and breathe, and then he couldn’t ...
“What?” the cop demanded of him.
“This woman has an unauthorized pregnancy, and it is my duty to terminate the fetus now. These people are in my way. Please remove them from the room.”
That was enough for the cops. They turned to the obviously unauthorized visitors. “You will leave now!” the senior one ordered, while the junior one kept his hand on his service pistol.
“No!” was the immediate reply, both from Yang Quon and Yu Fa An.
“The doctor has given his order, you must leave,” the cop insisted. He was unaccustomed to having ordinary people resist his orders. “You will go now!”
The doctor figured this was the cue for him to complete his distasteful duty, so that he could go home for the day. He set the stool back up and slid it
to where he needed to be.
“You will not do this!” This time it was Yu, speaking with all the moral authority his education and status could provide.
“Will you get him out of here?” the doctor growled at the cops, as he slid the stool back in place.
Quon was ill-positioned to do anything, standing as he was by his wife’s head. To his horror, he saw the doctor lift the syringe and adjust his glasses. Just then his wife, who might as well have been in another city for the past two minutes, took a deep breath and pushed.
“Ah,” the doctor said. The fetus was fully crowned now, and all he had to do was—
Reverend Yu had seen as much evil in his life as most clergymen, and they see as much as any seasoned police officer, but to see a human baby murdered before his eyes was just too much. He roughly shoved the junior of the two policemen aside and struck the doctor’s head from behind, flinging him to the right and jumping on top of him.
“Getting this?” Barry Wise asked in the corridor.
“Yep,” Nichols confirmed.
What offended the junior policeman was not the attack on the doctor, but rather the fact that this—this citizen had laid hands on a uniformed member of the Armed People’s Police. Outraged, he drew his pistol from its holster, and what had been a confused situation became a deadly one.
“No!” shouted Cardinal DiMilo, moving toward the young cop. He turned to see the source of the noise and saw an elderly gwai, or foreigner in very strange clothes, moving toward him with a hostile expression. The cop’s first response was a blow to the foreigner’s face, delivered with his empty left hand.
Renato Cardinal DiMilo hadn’t been physically struck since his childhood, and the affront to his personhood was all the more offensive for his religious and diplomatic status, and to be struck by this child! He turned back from the force of the blow and pushed the man aside, wanting to go to Yu’s aid, and to help him keep this murderous doctor away from the baby about to be born. The doctor was wavering on one foot, holding the syringe up in the air. This the Cardinal seized in his hand and hurled against the wall, where it didn’t break, because it was plastic, but the metal needle bent.
Had the police better understood what was happening, or had they merely been better trained, it would have stopped there. But they hadn’t, and it didn’t. Now the senior cop had his Type 77 pistol out. This he used to club the Italian on the back of the head, but his blow was poorly delivered, and all it managed to do was knock him off balance and split his skin.
Now it was Monsignor Schepke’s turn. His Cardinal, the man whom it was his duty to serve and protect, had been attacked. He was a priest. He couldn’t use deadly force. He couldn’t attack. But he could defend. That he did, grasping the older officer’s gun hand and twisting it up, in a safe direction, away from the others in the room. But there it went off, and though the bullet merely flattened out in the concrete ceiling, the noise inside the small room was deafening.
The younger policeman suddenly thought that his comrade was under attack. He wheeled and fired, but missed Schepke, and struck Cardinal DiMilo in the back. The .30 caliber bullet transited the body back to front, damaging the churchman’s spleen. The pain surprised DiMilo, but his eyes were focused on the emerging baby.
The crash of the shot had startled Lien-Hua, and the push that followed was pure reflex. The baby emerged, and would have fallen headfirst to the hard floor but for the extended hands of Reverend Yu, who stopped the fall and probably saved the newborn’s life. He was lying on his side, and then he saw that the second shot had gravely wounded his Catholic friend. Holding the baby, he struggled to his feet and looked vengefully at the youthful policeman.
“Huai dan! he shouted: Villain! Oblivious of the infant in his arms, he lurched forward toward the confused and frightened policeman.
As automatically as a robot, the younger cop merely extended his arm and shot the Baptist preacher right in the forehead.
Yu twisted and fell, bumping into Cardinal DiMilo’s supine form and landing on his back, so that his chest cushioned the newborn’s fall.
“Put that away!” the older cop screamed at his young partner. But the damage had been done. The Chinese Reverend Yu was dead, the back of his head leaking brain matter and venting blood at an explosive rate onto the dirty tile floor.
The doctor was the first to take any intelligent action. The baby was out now, and he couldn’t kill it. He took it from Yu’s dead arms, and held it up by the feet, planning to smack it on the rump, but it cried out on its own. So, the doctor thought as automatically as the second policeman’s shot, this lunacy has one good result. That he’d been willing to kill it sixty seconds before was another issue entirely. Then, it had been unauthorized tissue. Now, it was a breathing citizen of the People’s Republic, and his duty as a physician was to protect it. The dichotomy did not trouble him because it never even occurred to him.
There followed a few seconds in which people tried to come to terms with what had happened. Monsignor Schepke saw that Yu was dead. He couldn’t be alive with that head wound. His remaining duty was to his Cardinal.
“Eminence,” he said, kneeling down to lift him off the bloody floor.
Renato Cardinal DiMilo thought it strange that there was so little pain, for he knew that his death was imminent. Inside, his spleen was lacerated, and he was bleeding out internally at a lethal rate. He had not the time to reflect on his life or what lay in his immediate future, but despite that, his life of service and faith reasserted itself one more time.
“The child, Franz, the child?” he asked in a gasping voice.
“The baby lives,” Monsignor Schepke told the dying man.
A gentle smile: “Bene,” Renato said, before closing his eyes for the last time.
The last shot taken by the CNN crew was of the baby lying on her mother’s chest. They didn’t know her name, and the woman’s face was one of utter confusion, but then she felt her daughter, and the face was transformed as womanly instincts took over completely.
“We better get the fuck out of here, Barry,” the cameraman advised, with a hiss.
“I think you’re right, Pete.” Wise stepped back and started to his left to get down the corridor to the stairs. He had a potential Emmy-class story in his hands now. He’d seen a human drama with few equals, and it had to go out, and it had to go out fast.
Inside the delivery room, the senior cop was shaking his head, his ears still ringing, trying to figure out what the hell had happened here, when he realized that the light level was lower—the TV camera was gone! He had to do something. Standing erect, he darted from the room and looked right, and saw the last American disappear into the stairwell. He left his junior in the delivery room and ran that way, turned into the fire stairs and ran downstairs as fast as gravity could propel him.
Wise led his people into the main lobby and right toward the main door, where their satellite van was. They’d almost made it, when a shout made them turn. It was the cop, the older one, about forty, they thought, and his pistol was out again, to the surprise and alarm of the civilians in the lobby.
“Keep going,” Wise told his crew, and they pushed through the doors into the open air. The van was in view, with the mini-satellite dish lying flat on the roof, and that was the key to getting this story out.
“Stop!” the cop called. He knew some English, so it would seem.
“Okay, guys, let’s play it real cool,” Wise told the other three.
“Under control,” Pete the cameraman advised. The camera was off his shoulder now, and his hands were out of casual view.
The cop bolstered his pistol and came close, with his right hand up and out flat. “Give me tape,” he said. “Give me tape.” His accent was crummy, but his English was understandable enough.
“That tape is my property!” Wise protested. “It belongs to me and my company.”
The cop’s English wasn’t that good. He just repeated his demand: “Give me tape!”
&n
bsp; “Okay, Barry,” Pete said. “I got it.”
The cameraman—his name was Peter Nichols—lifted the camera up and hit the EJECT button, punching the Beta-format tape out of the Sony camera. This he gave to the police officer with a downcast and angry expression. The cop took it with his own expression of satisfaction and turned on his heel to go back into the hospital.
There was no way he could have known that, like any news cameraman, Pete Nichols could deal seconds as skillfully as any Las Vegas poker dealer. He winked at Barry Wise, and the four headed off to the van.
“Send it up now?” the producer asked.
“Let’s not be too obvious about it,” Wise thought. “Let’s move a few blocks.”
This they did, heading west toward Tiananmen Square, where a news van doing a satellite transmission wasn’t out of the ordinary. Wise was already on his satellite phone to Atlanta.
“This is Wise Mobile in Beijing with an upload,” the correspondent said into the phone.
“Hey, Barry,” a familiar voice said in reply. “This is Ben Golden. What you got for us?”
“It’s hot,” Wise told his controller half a world away. “A double murder and a childbirth. One guy who got whacked is a Catholic cardinal, the Vatican ambassador to Beijing. The other one’s a Chinese Baptist minister. They were both shot on camera. You might want to call Legal about it.”
“Fuck!” Atlanta observed.
“We’re uploading the rough-cut now, just so you get it. I’ll stand by to do the talking. But let’s get the video uploaded first.”
“Roger that. We’re standing by on Channel Zero Six.”
