by Weston Ochse
But Yaya was a completely different matter altogether. His enjoyment bordered on the insane. He was running around their little group with Hoover chasing and barking after him. The dog seemed thrilled to have someone who liked to run as much as she did. Ruiz had mentioned that Fratty had hated running. If he had to do it, it was on the treadmill while watching basketball on ESPN. The former SEAL would run the entire time the game was playing, then get off, shower, and go to the gym to play some real basketball.
Yaya began clapping his hands and singing cadence.
Four miles. No sweat.
Five miles. Better yet.
Six miles. You can take it.
Seven miles. Gonna make it.
They didn’t need the cadence; it was just that Yaya seemed incapable of keeping quiet. He loved to run so much that when he wasn’t on mission, he’d take leave just to travel to races. He was an ultramarathoner, which meant that he liked to run races more than fifty miles long. He especially loved running the Bataan Death March in New Mexico, the Bighorn 100 in Wyoming, and the Zane Grey Highline in Arizona. He’d even raced to the top of the Empire State Building twice and loved every second of it.
They’d traveled four miles and had turned around to return. Walker’s legs felt surprisingly well. Although he’d only left training a few days ago, it was the first time in months that he’d allowed his muscles to repair themselves and it seemed to be paying off. His shin splints had only begun hurting toward the end. Now, with a picnic table loaded down with food and beer in sight, he was happy to have finished the run with virtually no pain.
When they finally came to a stop, even Hoover had had enough. Her tongue lolled long. Luckily, the support staff had brought a bucket of water for her. She plunged her entire head into the bucket and loudly began to lap up the water.
They’d also set the table up like a SEAL smorgasbord. Fried chicken, cold cuts, raw vegetables, hummus and pita, pickled peppers, stuffed olives, a cut platter of cantaloupe and watermelon, and five different kinds of beer on ice.
Holmes lit the bonfire that had been made ready, then ran into the surf to cool off.
The other SEALs followed, shouting in shock as the cold water smashed into their hot muscles. After about two minutes, they staggered out of the water, shivering.
They each downed a bottle of Gatorade before grabbing beers and huddling around the bonfire to get their warmth back and to dry their shirts and UDT shorts.
“Is Laws going to make it?” Yaya asked.
“He’s locked himself into the conference room,” Holmes said. He popped open a bottle of Longboard and took a deep draught.
“Didn’t you see the sign?” Ruiz asked. “It said ‘Come in if you are bleeding or if the place is burning down. Otherwise G-T-F-O.’”
“Laws is ass-deep in Chinese, trying to figure out what the SPG analysts couldn’t,” Holmes said. “If there’s an answer to be had, he’ll find it. Best we just stay out of his way.” They ate in silence for a while.
Holmes finished first and stuffed his plate into a plastic bag. “Yaya, what do you think about all this?”
“Great food. Do you do this after every run?” he asked.
“Not that, the team.”
“Ah, that. I kind of dug the homunculus. Little fuckers were easy to kill once you got a hold of them, but they’re ferociously strong.”
Holmes nodded. “The Triads like using them as servants for all sorts of things. They’re good at stealing things, but even better at sweeping and cleaning the floors.”
“Supernatural janitors,” Walker said, laughing around a piece of cantaloupe. “Just crazy.”
“You seem to be taking all of this in stride,” Ruiz said to Yaya.
“Supernatural has always been a heavy part of Islam,” Yaya said. “Not that we ever saw anything, but it was always understood that it could exist. Djinns have been around since time immemorial. I’m just sad I wasn’t able to help you with that one.”
Holmes shook his head. “You mean the mission from 2007? I see you’ve been reading the mission log. That wasn’t a true Djinn. An oil executive was possessed by one that had become attached to a knife he’d been given by some Bedouins.”
“You gave credit to SEAL Team 6 for that one.”
Holmes shrugged at Yaya’s comment. “We had to. We don’t exist.”
“And the other SEALs? What do I tell them when they ask me?”
“It’s a SAP, plain and simple.”
“Plain and simple?” Yaya drank his beer and shook his head. Doubt showed in his eyes.
“What about you?” Ruiz asked. “Did you know about us before you were asked to join?”
Yaya considered a moment. “I knew there was something going on. I knew there was no pest control service. I also knew that Holmes was involved in a SAP.”
“And you never asked?” Ruiz raised an eyebrow.
“I never asked. Okay, I see your point.”
“What about family?” Walker asked.
“What about them?”
“I mean do you have one?”
“A family?” Yaya laughed. “Sure, doesn’t everyone?”
Ruiz and Holmes glanced at Walker. The look wasn’t missed by Yaya. “What? Did I say something wrong?”
“They’re worried about me,” Walker said. “I don’t really have any family.”
Yaya’s eyes widened.
“Long story,” Walker continued. “I was asking you about your family.”
“I have the usual—I mean, a mother, father, two sisters. They live in Philly. My father’s a doctor there.”
“What about a wife?” Walker asked.
“I had one of those. She didn’t work out.”
“Isn’t that always the case?”
“Wasn’t like that. She didn’t care how much I deployed. She just wanted me to be more devout.”
“How devout did she want you to be?” Walker asked.
Yaya held up the half-empty beer bottle. “None of this, for sure.” Seeing their expressions, he shrugged and added, “Listen, there’s devout and then there’s crazy. My father raised us as American Muslims.”
Walker crinkled his eyebrows. He’d never heard the phrase.
“Think of me as a Methodist Muslim,” Yaya said. He downed his beer, tossed it into the trash, and grabbed a new one. He twisted the top off and leaned back to rest against the picnic table so he could stare at the ocean.
“Okay. Now you have me interested. What the heck is a Methodist Muslim?” Holmes asked.
“Someone who believes in Allah and the Pillars of Islam. I pray. I fast. I give. I travel to the holy places. I believe that Allah is the one God. All the rest,” he said, waving his beer absently to the universe, “is fashion.”
Ruiz snorted. “What? You mean the burkas?”
Yaya nodded and got to his feet. “Absolutely. Ever look at the robes worn by a Catholic priest and an Aram mullah? Same damn thing except one is made from satin and the other from wool. It’s all a circus after the word of Allah. A Pee-Wee Herman doodle time for the fashionistas to get us involved in pomp and circumstance of worshipping the right god the right way.”
41
THE MOSH PIT. MORNING.
Pain lanced through Laws’s brain from the sheer amount of concentration he’d exerted over the last twenty hours. Operating on energy drinks, espresso, and a secret stash of Jolt Cola, he was as wired as any meth addict. Still, he’d made progress. At first he hadn’t seen it. There’d been so much data, he’d felt like the first IBM computer getting stuffed with the grammar rules of the Chinese language. Because it was about grammar. It was about grammar and the differences between characters as they appear in modern standard and the more ancient usages.
He’d started out by plastering every available surface with pages upon pages of Chinese characters. He’d walked back and forth, staring at them, looking for a pattern, reading here and there. Some of the documents were technical schematics of different pieces of
ship’s equipment. Once he discovered these, he ripped them free and threw them into a corner, only to replace them with new pages. He repeated this over and over until the entire floor and underside of the conference table was a graveyard of ship’s schematics and maintenance logs.
This allowed him to concentrate on the remainder. One thing he couldn’t do was read them. His ability to speak so far outweighed his ability to read that it might as well have been two different languages—which it was. It was no joke that the average high-school graduate in China couldn’t read the newspaper. This wasn’t an indictment of the education system. Chinese kids and young adults were smart and driven. No, this was an indictment of a language that after three thousand years of use had failed to create that single essential element that allowed the progress of communication: the alphabet.
Of course, he realized that their lack of an alphabet probably had little to do with their ability to create one. If the Chinese had wanted to create an alphabet, they could have created a dozen. But that wouldn’t satisfy their needs. Chinese leaders had always been sensitive to the need to control one of the largest populations on the planet. Informing the populace would have kept the leadership at a continual disadvantage. By controlling the way their written language was represented, they’d been able to maintain a vise grip on the flow of information for thirty centuries.
None of this had anything to do with the problem at hand, but railing against the ineptness of Chinese characters kept him from going insane as he paced the conference room, ate anchovy pizza, guzzled caffeinated beverages, and tried desperately to see what kept eluding him.
Around midnight he changed tactics. Realizing he couldn’t read everything and he wasn’t succeeding in finding any relevant patterns, he began to search for characters applicable to the mission at hand.
He began flipping through his radical dictionary, which contained more than ninety thousand characters, expressed by the numeration of the strokes on the left-hand side of the character.
First he looked for “tattoo.” This required the use of two characters, wen shen. The first character, wen, meant “to write,” and had to do with language and literacy and contained four strokes. The second character, shen, meant “body” or “life,” and had eight strokes.
He wrote the characters on a piece of paper, then kept that word in the front of his mind as he scanned the pages taped to the walls. He circled each iteration of wen and shen, but never found them in use together. This first attempt took an hour and left him feeling wiped out at one in the morning.
But he felt like he was on the right track. Remembering the creature that had killed Fratty, he decided to search for this. But what was it called? It seemed to be a chimera, but what was the Chinese word for such a thing? Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out how to represent the word using Chinese characters.
Finally he settled on dragon. The character used to represent it was called long, which meant that it would frame part of the whole of the word that was used to describe dragon. The character was well known. It was used frequently to describe food and was a common character on business signs. Using the dragon was considered to be good luck. So he began to search for the five-stroke character and, using a yellow marker, soon had more than a hundred marks on the pages plastered on the walls.
Once he was finished, he stood back and stared. Happy to find evidence of the character, he was slightly aghast at the number of times it appeared in all the pages. Now came the fun part. With dictionary in hand, he looked up each combination of characters and wrote the definition on a yellow sticky, which he stuck on the papers beside each character. After three hours, he fell back in a chair and drank two Jolts.
An hour later he found what they were looking for.
After running to use the bathroom, he grabbed one of the portable whiteboards out of the common area and wheeled it into the conference room. Slipping occasionally on the avalanche of papers from under the table, he began to write furiously on the board.
42
CONFERENCE ROOM. MORNING.
Walker woke with a mouth as dry as the Sahara. Too much beer. He’d have to learn to say no next time they offered it to him. He caught himself smiling in the mirror. No sooner had the thought passed through his mind than he realized he could never say no to good beer. Instead, he’d have to try and achieve beer mitigation, as an old marine gunny sergeant had once described it. When asked what beer mitigation was, the gunny had responded with nearly maniacal glee that it was PT—physical training!
After brushing his teeth and running some water through his hair, Walker went into the kitchen, where he found Ruiz reading the newspaper.
“Any sign of Laws coming out?” Walker asked.
Ruiz shook his head. “I heard some cursing in there, but that’s it.”
Walker poured himself coffee, added one sugar, then carried it into the other room. He stared at the door to the conference room for several minutes before he made his decision. He went to the door, turned the knob, and cracked it open.
The room looked like some kind of hurricane had slammed into it. Paper was stuck to the walls in several layers from floor to ceiling. It was on the table and covered the floor. Beneath the table was a pile of paper so large it looked as if it had been used to cover the body of a dead man.
A whiteboard had been brought into the room. On this was a combination of characters and diagrams that could have only been made by the love child of Michio Kaku and Carl Sagan. It was either physics, algebra, or some sort of scientific notation he’d never seen before. Here and there he recognized some Chinese characters. Laws was sprawled in one of the chairs.
“You get us a clue?”
Laws turned his head. “I think so.”
Walker’s eyes widened. “No shit?” He stuck his head out the door and called for the others. While he waited for them to come, he found a seat and sipped his coffee. “Man,” he said. “You look like crap.”
“Thanks.” Laws smiled weakly. “I feel like crap.”
Ruiz and Holmes joined them, each with his own coffee. Holmes carried a folder with the familiar red cover sheet that proclaimed it as secret.
Finally Yaya and Hoover came in. They’d been running together and both were still a little winded. Yaya had a bottle of water. He made some room on the floor by pushing some papers away, put down a collapsible doggie dish, and filled it with water for Hoover.
Walker admired the skill with which Yaya had befriended Hoover. In the short time the new SEAL had been with the team they’d become all but inseparable. Even now, as the dog lapped at the water, she looked up at Yaya to see if he was there. In fact, it almost looked as if Hoover was grinning.
“I think we can start now,” Holmes said as he snapped the file shut and laid it in front of him. “SPG didn’t learn anything we don’t already know. So what can you tell us that a whole platoon of college-educated CIA agents can’t?”
Laws swiveled in his chair and stared at Holmes with tired eyes. The only thing that didn’t seem exhausted about him was the grin he wore. “I can tell you who the bad guy is.”
Suddenly he had their full attention.
Even Holmes seemed impressed. He leaned forward and clasped his hands together on the table. “So who is it?”
“First things first,” Laws said, standing. “Let me show you how I got there.” He stepped over piles of paper to get to the board. He grabbed a red marker and tested it to see if it still worked. When he was ready, he turned back to the assembled SEALs, poised like a seventh-grade math teacher.
“It all begins with the long,” he said. Laws circled a Chinese character. “This is long. It means ‘dragon.’ When I finally figured out what I was doing, it was this character that started things moving. You see, Chinese isn’t like other languages. There is no alphabet. No method of sounding out a word.” He glanced at Ruiz. “You know, like you did with the word ‘truck’ last week when you first learned it.”
Ruiz turned to
Walker, who knew exactly what to do next.
“Tru—” said Ruiz.
“Uck,” said Walker.
“Truck,” they said together.
“Today’s Electric Company is brought to you by the letters F and U,” Laws remarked, unimpressed.
Yaya snorted.
“Come on, guys. Give him a break,” Holmes ordered.
Walker glanced at Holmes, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Laws the entire time, but under the table his knee bobbed impatiently. Holmes wanted to get on with it, but he was willing to let Laws have his day in the sun. After all, while they’d been drinking on the beach, Laws had been secluded in the conference room like a freshman preparing for finals.
“So,” Laws continued, letting the sound carry on for a few seconds, “we were talking about dragons. Normally you’d see the characters hong long on Chinese restaurants or signs in Chinatown. That combination is very common. It means ‘red dragon.’”
He checked to see if he had everyone’s attention. When he saw that he did, he resumed. “In Western mythology dragons are considered evil, but it’s not the same in the East. Not at all. Chinese dragons traditionally symbolize power, good luck, and control over water elements. There’s literally dozens of dragons in their mythology. From shen long, which means ‘god dragon,’ to fei long, or ‘flying dragon.’ What I found curious in the papers from this ship was that the only instance I found for long was for chi long. At that point, I thought I’d figured something out, but the Chinese are tricky that way. Chi long literally means ‘demon dragon,’ but it translates better to ‘hornless dragon.’”
“That creature we fought was anything but hornless,” said Ruiz.
