She was so incredibly pure.
8
The Chinese heart is well versed in quiet, seething hate — and General Song Biming was more accomplished than most. The ill-informed might believe that General Song hated Bai for personal reasons. While it was true that Bai had stolen Song’s girl all those years ago, there was much more to it than that. In Song’s mind, it was as simple as up and down or black and white. Bai was evil and Song was good. Was not good supposed to hate evil? If a child drew a picture of an evil man, fat and frowning Bai Min would have provided a likely model. Where Song was tall and fit, with salt-and-pepper hair and a ramrod-straight military bearing, Bai was a head shorter and as round as a steamed meat bun. Song had once read that the ex-lover of a heavyset British MP had described sex with the man as like having a very large wardrobe with a small key fall on top of her. Certainly an apt assessment of anything to do with Bai Min. Song took perverse pleasure in the fact that the onetime object of his affection had chosen someone so foul with whom to spend her life.
Among his more disgusting qualities was the fact that he steadfastly refused to trim his wild eyebrows. This only added to the troll-like visage of his prune of a face. Of course, he had not always been so. Somehow he’d been handsome and gallant enough to win Ling’s hand. He was already a powerful general by the time the weight of his backstabbing had stooped his shoulders and twisted his face. By then it did not matter. In fact, Song had heard that President Zhao preferred his generals to be less handsome than he was. Bai’s status had seen to it that Ling was able to shop at good stores and live in nice apartments. Still, her once beautiful face held a perpetual look of astonishment at how ugly her husband had turned out, as if someone had just blown a puff of air into her eyes. She surely knew, as did Song, that General Bai was up to his neck in something rotten.
Song leaned back in his creaking leatherette chair and took a sip of tea.
He and Bai were both general officers, but as a lieutenant general, Bai had line-item authority over the furnishings and maintenance budget at the shared war-simulation facility run by the Science and Technology Commission of the People’s Liberation Army. Apart from elite party members and a few department heads, furniture used by Chinese government officials tended toward the utilitarian, but the tightfisted bastard Bai went out of his way to see that all the desks on the south side of the complex were secondhand, surely stained with the tears of the minions who had occupied them before. Song’s assistant, a short major with a broad smile and an even broader wife, had a desk that looked as if it had been used as part of a barricade to fend off some guerilla army. Where the south wing was tattered and sprung, every chair and sofa in the north wing was shiny and plush. Normally, such trivialities would have mattered little to Song, but events were not going his way. He sipped his tea and looked grimly at the floor-to-ceiling world map projected on the far wall. Flashing icons showed the location of both Chinese and enemy aircraft, ships, mechanized units, and ground troops in various locations from Japan to the Philippines. Three Chinese Type 094 Jin-class submarines prowled the waters of Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.
Song took another drink of tea and watched the light representing the submarine nearest San Diego, California, flash, then disappear from the screen.
The outcome of this scenario was not his fault, but he would be blamed for it nonetheless. The rank of general was lonely at best, but Song did little to engender good feelings from his comrades — the men who would normally have watched his back during these perilous times. He drank in moderation — surely a reason not to be trusted — and despised parties. He steered clear of side “investments.” There was no private villa for him with a live-in mistress in the mountains outside Beijing. Men with bent or broken morals felt judged whether one judged them or not, and Song Biming found himself a pariah at staff meetings, where discussions always seemed to turn to growing bank accounts and manly prowess with nubile young women. Song had no stories — or at least none of interest to the other generals. None of those men wanted to hear about how Song’s buxom but slightly chubby wife of thirty-one years made the best pork buns in all of China. He listened politely to their whore stories, noting that though most of the exploits had to be highly embellished, sex with his wife sounded vastly superior to any of their imagined escapades. His wife was a good woman, enough of a natural expert in that realm to keep him more than satisfied. She was inquisitive about his work, interested but not nosy, and ambitious enough to push him when he needed to be pushed. She’d resigned herself early on to the fact that she was not his first choice for a wife — and was fine with that, as long as she was his last. So far, he’d kept his end of that bargain. She’d given him more than three decades of unquestionable support, and a fine daughter, who had, in turn, given them a beautiful granddaughter, Niu, who was the light of his life — and the only thing that could take his mind off the tragedy of his work.
Song was a proud man. One did not get to be a general in the People’s Liberation Army without having a certain measure of gravitas and ego. But this downward spiral of fortune made him feel sorry for his family. His wife had been nothing but faithful, pinning all her hopes and dreams on his career. She certainly didn’t deserve this. Any semblance of status he’d ever had was rapidly slipping away — in no small measure because of General Bai Min. Something had to be done — and soon.
Song’s hand began to tremble with rage and he set the cup down on his desk in a puddle of spilled tea. Bai, that deceitful old dog, would find much pleasure in the results playing out on the screen. China was losing this simulation — as she always did eventually, when correct data was used in the program. Unlike war games involving actual troops, the enemy in this simulation did not lay down arms at the appropriate moment to make China look good. Computers did not lie — unless they were told to, and even then they spat out the only truth they knew. Song was ever exacting in his requirements that his programs be realistic and accurate to the nth degree, running thousands of permutations for each battle. He was privy to the latest intelligence data — which he insisted be raw, not preanalyzed or, as the Americans said, spun to suit PLA purposes. He’d stupidly thought that his mandate from Chairman Zhao for a true representation of fighting outcomes would be used to improve China’s capabilities. Instead, the computer-generated losses had been used to beat him over the head — principally by General Bai, his old foe since their days at the National University of Defense Technology, China’s premier military academy, when Bai had stolen his woman.
Religion took the blame for a great many wars; God was merely an excuse. The root of most conflict boiled down to two things: territory or women. President Zhao craved territory, not enough to start a war, not yet. No, the next conflict would only appear to be fought over territory. If a war with the West happened in the near future, it would be Song and Bai’s feud that started it.
Song breathed deeply, regaining enough control to pick up his tea. He needed to return to the matter at hand — watching his computer program demonstrate how the West would soundly beat China. Light after light blinked out, one after another on the screen, signifying the loss of Chinese assets. Computer simulations unfolded much faster than they did in real time, adding to Song’s misery. What was that quaint American saying? That was it. The Americans were handing them their asses.
The motherland did well at the beginning of each scenario — but she always lost in the end. And Song always had to watch.