SEAL Team 666: A Novel (23 page)

Walker crinkled his eyebrows. He’d never heard the phrase.

“Think of me as a Methodist Muslim,” Yaya said. He downed his beer, tossed it into the trash, and grabbed a new one. He twisted the top off and leaned back to rest against the picnic table so he could stare at the ocean.

“Okay. Now you have me interested. What the heck is a Methodist Muslim?” Holmes asked.

“Someone who believes in Allah and the Pillars of Islam. I pray. I fast. I give. I travel to the holy places. I believe that Allah is the one God. All the rest,” he said, waving his beer absently to the universe, “is fashion.”

Ruiz snorted. “What? You mean the burkas?”

Yaya nodded and got to his feet. “Absolutely. Ever look at the robes worn by a Catholic priest and an Aram mullah? Same damn thing except one is made from satin and the other from wool. It’s all a circus after the word of Allah. A Pee-Wee Herman doodle time for the fashionistas to get us involved in pomp and circumstance of worshipping the right god the right way.”

41

THE MOSH PIT. MORNING.

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.

42

CONFERENCE ROOM. MORNING.

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.”