Warriors

CHAPTER 13

It was a school for assassins.

The Te-Wu Academy, a massive square, windowless ten-story block of pure white marble, was located on Xinbu Island in a remote region of the South China Sea. An underground railway connected the building with two other massive installations. One, a submarine base, was built right on the sea. The other, the Weapons Design Center, was built near the base of the mountain range.

The high-end resort known as Xinbu had been built for China’s military and political elite, and only the highest-ranking members of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, even knew of its existence. Xinbu had been built on an artificial reef. The hotels, vacation resorts, and apartment buildings along the northern coast provided a convenient cover for things the men in Beijing would rather the world not see.

The prying eyes of America’s spy satellites were useless here.

Xinbu Island was in fact home to some of China’s most closely guarded military secrets. Most prominent was the newest one, an ultra-top-secret subterranean submarine pen. Its very existence was known only to General Sun-Yat Moon, the men who had built it, and a handful of Moon’s allies, all of whom were among the most powerful men in China, both in the military and the government.

Moon had ordered Xinbu Naval Station built to provide a deep underwater entrance that ensured absolute secrecy. Here, a whole new generation of radically advanced nuclear submarines now came and went without drawing the attention of satellites passing overhead or any two-eyed, two-legged spies lurking about on the surface ships of the sea.

Moon’s new fleet of undersea monsters, known as Centurions, were the key to his plan for China’s rapidly approaching world dominance. The Centurions, which he had named, would play a vital role in the coming drama. The general was an ardent worshipper at the throne of Caesar and his mighty legions. He had code-named his project in honor of Caesar’s commanders, those warriors who were, as Caesar said, “first over the wall and first through the breach.”

The Roman centurions.

And General Moon had chosen his project team brilliantly.

Under Moon’s supervision, the Centurion Submariner Project had been conceived, designed, and executed by one extraordinary man. A scientific genius who, for five long years, had lived and worked deep within China’s massive military complex.

His home was an office and a small room on the top floor of Xinbu’s new Advanced Weapons Design facility. It had taken nearly three years to bring his vision to reality. And, surprisingly enough, the key to the enormous power of the Centurion Project was not complexity. It was simplicity itself.

The man behind this startling new concept in submarine design was none other than the legendary American scientist and Nobel laureate, Dr. William Lincoln Chase.

In order to keep himself and his family alive, and to ensure their ultimate freedom, Chase had agreed to a significant challenge coming directly from General Moon. To completely reimagine submarine warfare in the twenty-first century. The result was the futuristic four-hundred-foot Centurion-class nuclear sub. Here, wholly unbeknownst to the world’s intelligence community, was a weapon so powerful and so advanced, it was already demonstrably capable of changing the worldwide balance of military power dramatically in China’s favor.

In addition to the new Centurion Naval Base, Xinbu Island was home to the notorious Te-Wu Academy, created by General Sun-Yat Moon. Te-Wu was both a school and training ground for the world’s best assassins. Here, only the hardest of the hard and the very brightest and best of the thousands of applicants were admitted each year. Sadly, many didn’t survive the harsh training process. They were identified by numbers, not names. A towering wall inside the Academy was dedicated to those numbers who had paid the ultimate price.

The Academy was one of the Chinese government’s best kept secrets. Graduates of the Academy, the best-trained political assassins in the world, had, for decades, been dispersed throughout the world to carry out special executions for the MSS, or China’s Ministry of State Security.

But the very best of these men and women never left Xinbu Island. They remained in place and had the honor to provide maximum security for General Moon himself and the secret military base that he commanded.

The Te-Wu “Headmaster,” as he is traditionally called by students (in English, oddly enough), was perhaps the most feared man in Asia. And, for certain, he was the second most powerful man in China. If he achieved his vision, and if the gods smiled on him, he would soon become the single most powerful man in China. And, soon thereafter, perhaps, the world.

His name was General Sun-Yat Moon.

To meet him, a person would never know that the polished, dashing, and urbane gentleman was someone capable of unspeakable cruelty. A deceptively kind-looking man, the general had recently suffered a stroke, which had partially immobilized his face. To his delight, the stroke left him more feared than ever. A dangerous man with a beatific smile — and a seraphic countenance.

He was tall for a Chinese gentleman, well over six feet. His thick head of longish hair was dead straight, brilliantined to a gleaming blue-black. A thick comma of it was arranged artfully on his forehead, and his perfectly smooth skin was the familiar shade of flat light yellow. His startling eyes, pewter grey, were hooded and thickly lashed.

He kept his origins secret, but he seemed a northern type. Tibetan, some people thought, or perhaps Manchurian. Moon was lean and well muscled, someone who took extremely good care of himself. A martial arts expert, he was also a crack shot and the onetime national fencing champion of China. Educated abroad, he studied history and political science at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Even now, when he spoke English, he did so in a clipped Oxbridge accent that many in his circles found either perplexing or, privately, amusing.

Moon had fought his way up through the military and political ranks, his rise as inexorable as a waxing tide. A seasoned battlefield commander, he had presided over the slaughter of thousands of demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A vicious hard-line Communist, Moon had been deputy chief of the much-feared Special Activities Committee of the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army of China. Known even in Beijing for his extremist ideological stands, he had been in operational command of more than a million Chinese storm troopers.

Fast-forward and multiply the numbers under his command by a factor of five. And now his battle commanders presided over a new kind of army. These twenty-first-century warriors had cast off the old ways. They were fiercely nationalistic and full of fight. They were warriors of the old school in a new century and Moon was just the powerful, good-looking, charismatic man to lead them.

One of his many responsibilities as chief of the MSS (China’s secret police force) was the Te-Wu Academy he had founded on Xinbu Island. He ruled there the way he ruled the MSS. With an iron fist encased in steel mail. He was known for his brutality and reveled in it. The Te-Wu secret police graduates who moved out into the far reaches of the world seldom forgot where their sworn allegiances lay. Or how important to the homeland was the successful fulfillment of their sworn duty to the service.

And to General Moon and his capricious turns of mood. The slightest trespass could lead to a slap on the wrist. Or instant execution. Usually hanging, sometimes decapitation.

If Moon was angry, and wished to make an example of a subordinate, his beheading was videotaped and DVDs of the grisly execution were sent to his surviving family members. The final shot was always the same. A grinning General Moon, holding the victim’s bloody severed head aloft for a close-up.

Moon lived and traveled in great secrecy. His primary residence was not the luxurious mountaintop compound on the island. He lived in Hong Kong aboard a vast floating palace amid the tumult and turmoil of Kowloon Harbor. Hong Kong had been his birthplace and he felt an almost gravitational pull to that place.

He had raised his three daughters there: the twins — a serving Te-Wu officer named Jet, and Li, who had been killed — and then there was the baby of the family, Chyna. Chyna Moon, trained in the shadow arts since birth, had climbed far and fast through the ranks of the MSS, graduating at the top of her class from her father’s Te-Wu Academy before attending Cambridge University in England.

The trained assassin was now a full professor, a don, at the seven-hundred-year-old university. She was also a full colonel in the MSS Secret Police, living and working undercover in Great Britain at her father’s old alma mater. She was running a small cadre of assassins in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. Moon’s youngest daughter was his pride and joy and he trusted her, and her alone, with the most sensitive assignments.

He had not a doubt in his mind that one day Chyna Moon would rule all China in his stead. She would rule with an iron fist.

The glorious beginning of what history would long remember as the “Moon Dynasty” was the general’s most cherished dream.