SEAL Team 666

42

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.

Laws pointed toward Ruiz and nodded. “That’s right. I thought the same thing. So I looked more closely at the character for chi.”

On the whiteboard, he drew two characters side by side that looked almost the same, but the one on the right had more flowing script.

He pointed to the character on the left. “This character is chi. Now, most characters are comprised of two internal parts. The radical, which helps define it. This is usually found on the left side. In this case it’s the bug radical, which is typically used for insects, reptiles, dragons, etcetera. The other part of the character is the phonetic and helps us know how it’s pronounced.”

He pointed to the character on the right. “This character is pronounced the same way as the first. We can tell this by comparing the phonetic portion of the character. But as you can see, the radicals are different.”

Walker realized as Laws said it that he was able to discern the difference. Up until that point, it all looked like squiggles. But the more Laws explained, the more it began to make sense.

“This is the ghost radical. Note these two strokes that look like legs and this square with a cross in the middle to represent the large demon’s head. The last part is a curl, which represents a demon tail.” He added the character for dragon after this version of chi. “At first I mistook it for the other radical. Between my tired eyes and the sheer difficulty of reading all these characters, I read the phonetic of the character and assumed it meant hornless dragon.” He shook his head. “Never assume. It’s exceedingly common in Chinese to see character pairs. Long is no different. But the character chi with the ghost radical only pairs with the character mei, which refers to ‘mountain’ or ‘forest demons.’” He faced them for impact. “When I say it only pairs with mei, what I mean is that in all of my dictionaries and on Internet searches, I couldn’t find any instance of the chi with the ghost radical pairing with any other. We’re talking about it not appearing in more than fifty thousand combinations. Not once.”

“I think I’m starting to understand.” Holmes nodded. “Continue.”

“This goes all the way back to the Hanshu dynasty in 111 CE when chi first appeared with a ghost radical. In every instance it had to do with something bad. Something evil.”

“If those characters never appeared together, then how can they be together in the text? What does that mean?” Yaya asked.

Laws pointed at him and grinned. “And that was my question once I finally figured out the etymology of the words.”

Ruiz turned to Walker and mouthed etymology. Walker grinned, but he was starting to get into what Laws was telling them.

Laws circled chi long several times with the red marker. “One of the exceptions to the pairing rule has to do with a name.”

“So you searched for Chi Long,” Walker said.

“Yep! I searched for Chi Long, using the same ghost radical. I found a single occurrence when researching the San Guo Shi Dai, or Three Kingdoms period of China. This time was around 220 to 280 CE. There’s not a lot of real history that’s been saved, except the writings of Chen Shou. Romance of the Three Kingdoms was a novel written by Luo Guanzhong in the fourteenth century. It’s provided much of the textual fabric for sinologists. The occurrence of Chi Long appeared in an associated text when referring to a great warrior that belonged to Sun Quan, emperor of the Kingdom of Wu, during the Three Kingdoms period.”

He produced a colored picture, which he passed around. On what appeared to be a background of parchment paper was a Chinese warrior in flowing robes wearing ancient, dragon-influenced armor. His face and hands had been eaten away, leaving only bone, muscle, and sinew. If anything looked like a demon, this did.

“This was one of Emperor Sun’s greatest warriors. It was said that he was shot with over a thousand arrows and lived.”

“That would indicate an invulnerability to weapons,” Ruiz said, serious for the first time.

“What happened to him?” Yaya asked.

Laws shrugged and sat down. “I don’t know. He could have faded into history. He could have died drinking ancient Chinese beer. He could still be alive today as a demon. All I know is that the text I saw referred to Chi Long as a person, usually in the possessive, so clearly there’s something or someone alive who is using the name Chi Long with the ghost radical.”

“So we have the possibility of encountering an eighteen-hundred-year-old Chinese demon who’s evidently been creating an army of chimera creatures.” Holmes sat back. “That about right?”

“That sums it up,” Laws agreed.

“Well, then,” Holmes said, standing. “We’d better figure out how we’re going to beat this thing if we ever encounter it.” Then he grabbed his coffee and the file and left the room.

“I’ll get right on it,” Laws muttered. “Right after I find that volume of Chinese Mythological Demons for Dummies I misplaced.”

Walker watched as Laws closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.