Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“What’s happening?” Wise asked, surprised by the sudden shifts in language and the way the three churchmen had leapt to their feet.

“A pastoral emergency. A member of Yu’s congregation is in the hospital. She needs him, and we will go with our friend to assist in his pastoral duties,” DiMilo said. The cameras were still running, but this was the sort of thing that got edited out. But what the hell, Wise thought.

“Is it far? Can we help? Want us to run you over?”

Yu thought it over and quickly decided that he couldn’t make his bike go as fast as the American news van. “That is very kind. Yes.”

“Well, let’s go, then.” Wise stood and motioned to the door. His crew broke down their gear in a matter of seconds and beat them all out the door.

Longfu Hospital turned out to be less than two miles away, facing a north-south street. It was, Wise thought, a place designed by a blind architect, so lacking in aesthetic as to be a definite government-owned building even in this country. The communists had probably killed off anyone with a sense of style back in 1950 or so, and no one had attempted to take his place. Like most reporters, the CNN team came in the front door in the manner of a police SWAT team. The cameraman’s tool was up on his shoulder, with the soundman beside him, Barry Wise and the producer trailing while they looked for good establishing shots. To call the lobby dreary was generous. A Mississippi state prison had a better atmosphere than this, to which was added the disinfectant smell that makes dogs cringe in the vet’s office and made kids hug your neck harder for fear of the coming needle.

For his part, Barry Wise was unnaturally alert. He called it his Marine training, though he’d never seen combat operations. But one January night in Baghdad, he’d started looking out the windows forty minutes before the first bombs had fallen from the Stealth fighters, and kept looking until what U.S. Air Force planners had called the AT amp;T Building took the first spectacular hit. He took the producer’s arm and told him to keep his head up. The other ex-Marine nodded agreement. For him it was the suddenly grim looks on the faces of the three clergymen, who’d been so genial until the phone had rung. For that old Italian guy to look this way-it had to be something, they both were sure, and whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pleasant, and that often made for a good news story, and they were only seconds from their satellite uplink. Like hunters hearing the first rustle of leaves in the forest, the four CNN men looked alertly for the game and the shot.

“Reverend Yu!” Yang Quon called, walking-almost running-to where they were.

“Eminence, this is my parishioner, Mr. Yang.”

“Buon giorno,” DiMilo said in polite greeting. He looked over to see the newsies taking their pictures and keeping out of the way, more politely than he’d expected them to do. While Yu spoke with Yang, he walked over to Barry Wise to explain the situation.

“You are right to observe that relations between the Catholics and the Baptists are not always as friendly as they ought to be, but on this issue we stand as one. Upstairs, the officials of this government wish to kill a human baby. Yu wants to save that child. Franz and I will try to help.”

“This could get messy, sir,” Wise warned. “The security personnel in this country can play rough. I’ve seen it before.”

DiMilo was not an imposing man in physical terms. He was short and a good thirty pounds overweight, the American figured. His hair was thinning. His skin was sagging with age. He probably went out of breath going up two flights of stairs. But for all that, the Cardinal summoned what manhood he had and transformed himself before the American’s eyes. The genial smile and gentle disposition evaporated like steam in cold air. Now he looked more like a general on a battlefield.

“The life of an innocent child is at risk, Signore Wise,” was all DiMilo said, and it was all he had to say. The Cardinal walked back to his Chinese colleague.

“Get that?” Wise asked his cameraman, Pete Nichols.

“Fuckin’ A, Barry!” the guy said behind his eyepiece.

Yang pointed. Yu headed that way. DiMilo and Schepke followed. At the reception desk, the head clerk lifted a phone and made a call. The CNN crew followed the others into the stairwell and headed up to the second floor.

If anything, the obstetrics and gynecology floor was even more drab than the first. They heard the shouts, cries, and moans of women in labor, because in China, the public-health system did not waste drugs on women giving birth. Wise caught up to see that Yang guy, the father of the baby, standing still in the corridor, trying to identify the cries of his own wife from all the others. Evidently, he failed. Then he walked to the nurse’s desk.

Wise didn’t need to understand Chinese to get what the exchange was all about. Yang was supported by Reverend Yu and demanded to know where his wife was. The head nurse asked what the hell they were doing here, and told them all that they had to leave at once! Yang, his back straight with dignity and fear, refused and repeated his question. Again the head nurse told him to get lost. Then Yang seriously broke the rules by reaching across the high countertop and grabbing the nurse. You could see it in her eyes. It shocked her at a very fundamental level that anyone could defy her state-issued authority so blatantly. She tried to back away, but his grip was too strong, and for the first time she saw that his eyes were no longer a display of fear. Now they showed pure killing rage, because for Yang human instincts had cast aside all the societal conditioning he’d absorbed in his thirty-six years. His wife and child were in danger, and for them, right here and right now, he’d face a fire-breathing dragon barehanded and be damned to the consequences! The nurse took the easy way out and pointed to the left. Yang headed that way, Yu and the other two clergy with him, and the CNN crew trailing. The nurse felt her neck and coughed to get her breath back, still too surprised to be fearful, trying to understand how and why her orders had been disregarded.

Yang Lien-Hua was in Labor Room #3. The walls were of yellow glazed brick, the floor tile of some color that had been overcome by years of use, and was now a brown-gray.

For “Lotus Flower,” it had been a nightmare without end. Alone, all alone in this institution of life and death, she’d felt the contractions strengthen and merge into one continuous strain of her abdominal muscles, forcing her unborn child down the birth canal, toward a world that didn’t want it. She’d seen that in the nurses’ faces, the sorrow and resignation, what they must have seen and felt elsewhere in the hospital when death came to take a patient. They’d all learned to accept it as inevitable, and they tried to step away from it, because what had to be done was so contrary to all human instincts that the only way they could be there and see it happen was to-to be somewhere else. Even that didn’t work, and though they scarcely admitted it even to one another, they’d go home from work and lie in their beds and weep bitterly at what they as women had to do to newborns. Some would cradle the dead children who never were, who never got to take that first life-affirming breath, trying to show womanly gentleness to someone who would never know about it, except perhaps the spirits of the murdered babies who might have lingered close by. Others went the other way, tossing them into bins like the trash the state said they were. But even they never joked about it-in fact, never talked about it, except perhaps to note it had been done, or, maybe, “There’s a woman in Number Four who needs the shot.”