Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“They are reading from the Christian Bible, I can’t make out the words, the English speaker is blanking them out … the narrator is mainly repeating himself, saying … ah, yes, saying they are trying to establish contact with their reporter Wise here in Beijing but they are having technical difficulties … just repeating what he has already said, a memorial ceremony for the man Yu, friends … no, members of his worship group, and that is all, really. They are now repeating what happened before at the Longfu hospital, commenting also on the Italian churchman whose body will soon arrive back in Italy.”

Fang grumbled and lifted his phone, calling for the Interior Minister.

“Turn on your TV!” he told his Politburo colleague at once. “You need to get control of this situation, but do so intelligently! This could be ruinous for us, the worst since those foolish students at Tiananmen Square.”

Ming saw her boss grimace before setting the phone down and mutter, “Fool!” after he did so, then shake his head with a mixture of anger and sorrow.

“That will be all, Ming,” he told her, after another minute.

His secretary went back to her desk and computer, wondering what was happening with the aftermath of the man Yu’s death. Certainly it had seemed sad at the time, a singularly pointless pair of deaths which had upset and offended her minister for their stupidity. He’d even advocated punishing the trigger-happy policemen, but that suggestion had come to nothing, for fear of losing face for their country. With that thought, she shrugged and went back to her daily work.

The word from the Interior Minister went out fast, but Barry Wise couldn’t see that. It took another minute for him to hear the voices from Atlanta on his IFB earphone. Immediately thereafter, he went live on audio and started again to do his own on-the-scene commentary for a global audience. He kept turning his head while Pete Nichols centered the video on this rump religious meeting in a narrow, dirty street. Wise saw the police lieutenant talk into his portable radio-it looked like a Motorola, just like American cops used. He talked, listened, talked again, then got something confirmed. With that, he holstered the radio and came walking directly to the CNN reporter. There was determination on his face, a look Wise didn’t welcome, all the more so that on the way over, this Lieutenant Rong spoke discreetly with his men, who turned in the same direction, staying still but with a similar look of determination on their faces as they flexed their muscles in preparation for something.

“You must turn camera off,” Rong told Wise.

“Excuse me?”

“Camera, turn off,” the police lieutenant repeated.

“Why?” Wise asked, his mind going immediately into race mode.

“Orders,” Rong explained tersely.

“What orders?”

“Orders from police headquarter,” Rong said further.

“Oh, okay,” Wise replied. Then he held out his hand.

“Turn off camera now!” Lieutenant Rong insisted, wondering what the extended hand was all about.

“Where is the order?”

“What?”

“I cannot turn my camera off without a written order. It is a rule for my company. Do you have a written order?”

“No,” Rong said, suddenly nonplussed.

“And the order must be signed by a captain. A major would be better, but it must be a captain at least to sign the order,” Wise went on. “It is a rule of my company.”

“Ah,” Rong managed to say next. It was as if he’d walked headfirst into an invisible wall. He shook his head, as though to shake off the force of a physical impact, and walked five meters away, pulling out his radio again to report to someone elsewhere. The exchange took about a minute, then Rong came back. “Order come soon,” the lieutenant informed the American.

“Thank you,” Wise responded, with a polite smile and half bow. Lieutenant Rong went off again, looking somewhat confused until he grouped his men together. He had instructions to carry out now, and they were instructions he and they understood, which was usually a good feeling for citizens of the PRC, especially those in uniform.

“Trouble, Barry,” Nichols said, turning the camera toward the cops. He’d caught the discussion of the written order, and managed to keep his face straight only by biting his tongue hard. Barry had a way of confounding people. He’d even done it to presidents more than once.

“I see it. Keep rolling,” Wise replied off-mike. Then to Atlanta: “Something’s going to happen here, and I don’t like the looks of it. The police appear to have gotten an order from someone. As you just heard, they asked us to turn our camera off and we managed to refuse the request until we get a written order from a superior police official, in keeping with CNN policy,” Wise went on, knowing that someone in Beijing was watching this. The thing about communists, he knew, was that they were maniacally organized, and found a request in writing to be completely reasonable, however crazy it might appear to an outsider. The only question now, he knew, was whether they’d follow their verbal radioed order before the draft for the CNN crew came. Which priority came first …?

The immediate priority, of course, was maintaining order in their own city. The cops took out their batons and started heading toward the Baptists.

“Where do I stand, Barry?” Pete Nichols asked.

“Not too close. Make sure you can sweep the whole playing field,” Wise ordered.

“Gotcha,” the cameraman responded.

They tracked Lieutenant Rong right up to Wen Zhong, where a verbal order was given, and just as quickly rejected. The order was given again. The shotgun mike on the camera just barely caught the reply for the third iteration:

“Diao ren, chou ni ma di be!” the overweight Chinese shouted into the face of the police official. Whatever the imprecation meant, it made a few eyes go wide among the worshippers. It also earned Wen a smashed cheekbone from Rong’s personal baton. He fell to his knees, blood already streaming from the ripped skin, but then Wen struggled back to his feet, turned his back on the cop, and turned to yet another page in his Bible. Nichols changed position so that he could zoom in on the testament, and the blood dripping onto the pages.

Having the man turn his back to him only enraged Lieutenant Rong more. His next swing came down on the back of Wen’s head. That one buckled his knees, but amazingly failed to drop him. This time, Rong grabbed his shoulder with his left hand and spun him about, and the third blow from the baton rammed directly into the man’s solar plexus. That sort of blow will fell a professional boxer, and it did so to this restaurateur. A blink later, he was on his knees, one hand holding his Bible, the other grasping at his upper abdomen.

By this time, the other cops were moving in on the remainder of the crowd, swinging their own nightsticks at people who cringed but didn’t run. Yu Chun was the first of them. Not a tall woman even by Chinese standards, she took the full force of a blow squarely in the face, which broke her nose and shot blood out as though from a garden sprinkler.

It didn’t take long. There were thirty-four parishioners and twelve cops, and the Christians didn’t resist effectively, not so much because of their religious beliefs as because of their societal conditioning not to resist the forces of order in their culture. And so, uniformly they stood, and uniformly they took the blows with no more defense than a cringe, and uniformly they collapsed to the street with bleeding faces. The policemen withdrew almost immediately, as though to display their work to the CNN camera, which duly took the shots and transmitted them around the world in a matter of seconds.