The Wuhan Mission

Xue Lin drew his attention to her computer where there was an administrative botch-up that she had made. He bent over her, even closer than usual. She winced a little at the stale smell of cigarettes and his night’s drinking binge. She used her scissors to snip his lanyard and slid his security pass into her lab coat pocket.

“I’m just going to make a cup of tea. Would you like one?” she asked Dr. Wu as she stood up and offered him her desk chair, so that he could more comfortably work on the administrative bungle that she had made especially for him.

“Yes, Xue Lin, that would be wonderful, thank you honey.”

Xue Lin went out past security to her locker and grabbed her backpack, throwing it on, then moved back up the hall to the metal detector. The metal detector beeped as she walked through it. The security guard came around the machine towards her.

Xue Lin pulled her chopsticks out of her hair and took two large strides launching herself at him, taking him to the ground with her legs around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides. He tried to reach for his pistol but she plunged the chopsticks into his neck, and then with both hands she gripped the two chopsticks together and drove them into his heart.

Chapter 2 The Chairman

One Year Earlier

China had experienced many rebellions and uprisings throughout the centuries. The Communist Government was still poised ‘with military hammer lifted’ waiting to crush any opposition from the enormous population it wished to control. The number of ‘mass incidents’ had been growing almost exponentially over the past three decades. In 1989 the Tiananmen Square protest had been successfully crushed with military force, killing thousands of protesters, but the Government’s hard-line methods caused an international uproar, and public dissent was still high.

The Communist Party was struggling to control the flow and content of information. The internet was full of reasons for the population to rise up. In 1997 when Hong Kong was being handed back to China by the British after 100 years of capitalistic freedom, the population fell suddenly under the rule of the Communist Party. A bold population was a dangerous force. Mass surveillance was now in play, but control needed to be absolute. The Government debated new tools to intimidate, scare and potentially lock down the people and possibly even cull parts of the growing mass of people living on its soil.

The Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping deeply desired a new way to control the vast ocean of people. His predecessor, Chairman Deng Xiaoping had brought down martial law like a sledge hammer, and incredibly, the detail that the foreign devils remembered was the ‘tank man’ citizen standing in front of a tank column, stopping them in their tracks. The photo that went around the world embarrassing the Chinese Government. Clearly something new was needed.

Dr. Wu’s terrifying meeting with Chairman Xi Jinxing happened in January 2019 when Dr. Wu was summoned to an empty restaurant by a party official and made to wait an hour nursing a cup of hot water with just a few green tea leaves in it. Dr. Wu smoked half a packet of cigarettes while waiting, a nervous wreck. He knew that the Chairman was one of the most powerful men in China and could have him put in a cell for the rest of his life, or worse.

Chairman Xi Jinxing was responsible for the disappearance of dissidents and wayward lawyers, and he’d had parts of history wiped from the books. He had even banned pictures of Winnie the Pooh after the character was used to mock him.

The Chairman walked into the restaurant with six guards in black suits. Dr. Wu pulled himself to his feet, stubbing out his thirteenth cigarette, and bowed deeply, stammering a weak greeting. The Chairman sat himself down heavily in the chair opposite him at the large ornate table and indicated to the staff to bring food and the usual dangerous beverage in small shot glasses that they were both accustomed to drinking on such occasions.

“You are a man of strength. You are clever. Brilliant. Healthy!” said the Chairman.

“Men like you and me do not celebrate getting older. We celebrate getting better. Am I correct?”

“Yes, yes” smiled Dr. Wu nervously, looking with embarrassment at the ashtray he had completely filled to overflowing.

“I believe,” continued the Chairman, “that lessons often appear in the form of mistakes or failures. And yet the only real mistake is ‘not learning the lesson.’

We know that we have learned the lesson when our actions change.

“Tiananmen Square was such a mistake. Chairman Deng Xiaoping taught us a great lesson that day: ‘Brute force cannot create lasting peace. You need willing cooperation.’”

“Very wise sir, very wise” Dr. Wu nodded, wondering where he was going with his obtuse line of conversation.

“Death is not sad. The sad thing is that most people do not really live at all”

The Chairman’s eyes were piercing. Dr. Wu was quite terrified.