Irving Waters - The Wuhan Mission

This publisher expressed to me that this book, with its original title, did not comply with their guidelines. As a result they did not wish to offer the book for sale.

“Due to the rapidly changing nature of information around the COVID-19 virus, we are referring customers to official sources for health information about the virus. Please consider removing references to COVID-19 for this book.”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, descriptions of those characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The morning smog over Wuhan was worse than usual as Xue Lin biked through the spiderweb of streets to work. It had been four months since she had arrived here and begun working as a lab assistant at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was dull work, mostly repetitive data entry, but she didn’t care too much as she had other things on her mind.

Her boss, Doctor Wu had made numerous passes at her but she had always let them slide. His thinly veiled advances showed her his weakness. It made him malleable, easily manipulated. Dr. Wu was in charge of the Biosafety Level IVFacility which was guarded by two armed members of China’s Ministry of State Security. None of the lab assistants were allowed into that section of the building. Only Wu had clearance to get through that particular door.

Her bike’s brakes squealed as she stopped at the traffic light next to the Exotic Food Market. She always felt so disgusted as she passed the market because the stall on the corner was a dog vendor. She loved dogs, and the appalling scene of caged dogs and steel drum cookers and welding torches often made her gag.

After two more sets of lights, she arrived at the Institute. She parked her rusty bike and entered the building, greeting no-one on the way in, as was her way. She had managed to stay relatively anonymous despite her good looks. She always tied her hair up in a bun with steel chopsticks and she wore thick rimmed glasses, no makeup, loose fitting black cargo pants and running shoes. Her appearance of course was not enough to put off her boss Dr. Wu who liked to lean over her and smell her hair as she worked. She neither encouraged, nor put a halt to his subtle but clumsy moves. Always in control, she knew just how much to allow before swiveling her chair to face him, throwing him off balance.

Xue Lin had been orphaned at the age of five, but as she was a very cute little girl, she had soon been adopted by an American couple who had been working in Beijing in the nineties.

Doctor Wu had been running the Biosafety Level IV Facility for nearly a year, and was obviously making good money as he drove a nice car and had sent his twenty year old daughter to New York City to study. He talked about her often: ‘what shopping she had done and how much her education was costing’. He was clearly very proud of her.

As the head honcho, each day he patrolled the whole Institute of Virology checking on everyone’s work, but his office and lab were in the Biosafety Level IV Facility deeper into the building. He never mentioned his own work to anyone. All that anyone knew was that he was experimenting on mice and primates that were occasionally replaced, as the dead subjects were incinerated.

This morning, as Dr. Wu arrived at the Institute building, Xue Lin appeared to be working diligently in her cubicle. He eyed her suspiciously. He was quite surprised to see her there before any of the other lab assistants, it was only 8:15am.

He passed by Xue Lin’s cubicle, and he greeted her informally standing behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder. She swiveled into him slowly, without pulling him off balance, and looked up at him with a coy smile.

“Good morning Doctor Wu! How are you feeling today?”

“I am fine, Xue Lin. Your smiling face always gives me hope for a better world.”

Xue Lin drew his attention to her computer where there was an administrative botch-up that she had made. He bent over her, even closer than usual. She winced a little at the stale smell of cigarettes and his night’s drinking binge. She used her scissors to snip his lanyard and slid his security pass into her lab coat pocket.

“I’m just going to make a cup of tea. Would you like one?” she asked Dr. Wu as she stood up and offered him her desk chair, so that he could more comfortably work on the administrative bungle that she had made especially for him.

“Yes, Xue Lin, that would be wonderful, thank you honey.”

Xue Lin went out past security to her locker and grabbed her backpack, throwing it on, then moved back up the hall to the metal detector. The metal detector beeped as she walked through it. The security guard came around the machine towards her.

Xue Lin pulled her chopsticks out of her hair and took two large strides launching herself at him, taking him to the ground with her legs around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides. He tried to reach for his pistol but she plunged the chopsticks into his neck, and then with both hands she gripped the two chopsticks together and drove them into his heart.

China had experienced many rebellions and uprisings throughout the centuries. The Communist Government was still poised ‘with military hammer lifted’ waiting to crush any opposition from the enormous population it wished to control. The number of ‘mass incidents’ had been growing almost exponentially over the past three decades. In 1989 the Tiananmen Square protest had been successfully crushed with military force, killing thousands of protesters, but the Government’s hard-line methods caused an international uproar, and public dissent was still high.

The Communist Party was struggling to control the flow and content of information. The internet was full of reasons for the population to rise up. In 1997 when Hong Kong was being handed back to China by the British after 100 years of capitalistic freedom, the population fell suddenly under the rule of the Communist Party. A bold population was a dangerous force. Mass surveillance was now in play, but control needed to be absolute. The Government debated new tools to intimidate, scare and potentially lock down the people and possibly even cull parts of the growing mass of people living on its soil.

The Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping deeply desired a new way to control the vast ocean of people. His predecessor, Chairman Deng Xiaoping had brought down martial law like a sledge hammer, and incredibly, the detail that the foreign devils remembered was the ‘tank man’ citizen standing in front of a tank column, stopping them in their tracks. The photo that went around the world embarrassing the Chinese Government. Clearly something new was needed.