SEAL Team 666

41

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.