Mike Maden - River of Gods

Dr. Weng Litong was officially listed as an adjunct faculty member in the electrical engineering department, but in reality she was the head of the Expert Working Group for Robotics Weapons Systems, which was under the direction of the PLA’s General Armament Department, which itself was under the authority of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China. She was, in fact, the most powerful person on the university campus and, arguably, in the entire province of Shaanxi. The Central Commission recently turned its focus to unmanned weapons systems, particularly LARs—lethal autonomous robotics—which they now considered to be the future of warfare.

Weng was the daughter of a prominent PLA Air Force general who sat on the Central Military Commission, and her mother was an active Party functionary and a noted economist in her own right. But Weng’s brilliant mind and ruthless cunning had won her the honors and responsibilities she now enjoyed, including her top-floor office towering over the tree-lined boulevard.

Weng earned her first engineering doctorate at the age of eighteen at the prestigious Tsinghua University, where she was first recruited by the General Armaments Department into their “Flying Doves” program, sending tens of thousands of talented young Chinese students abroad for espionage and intelligence-gathering activities. Weng was provided a new identity and legend and sent to MIT, where she earned a second doctorate in robotics and electrical engineering.

The specially selected “doves” were expected to demonstrate the mythical qualities of the favored bird: fierce loyalty and fecundity. Weng exhibited both qualities admirably. Besides distinguishing herself as an engineering student, the young spy recruited and ran eleven Chinese expats and Chinese-American doctoral students, who all went on to significant positions within the American national security establishment. The lovely and brilliant young graduate student easily charmed her American colleagues with her gracious and unassuming demeanor, even as she arranged for the arrest and execution of Chinese nationals whom she identified as having betrayed the Revolution while studying abroad.

Weng’s nationalistic zeal and engineering brilliance, however, didn’t blind her to the reality that China was badly losing the drone arms race to the United States. Her Expert Working Group set up over a dozen RPV labs around the nation, each focusing on specific applications—land, sea, and air—and each had achieved some measure of success.

Bio-bots were proving to be one of the most promising developments. Animals were nature’s perfect machines, engineered by evolution to run, crawl, fly, and swim for survival. They also had the advantage of nature-engineered intelligence, still far superior to China’s feeble attempts at AI. During World War II, the Americans hired the behaviorist B. F. Skinner to train homing pigeons as autonomous guidance systems for bombs, and the Soviets deployed trained bomb-carrying dogs as autonomous antitank weapons against the Germans.

But as exciting as some of her bio-bot breakthroughs were, none was as startling or decisive as the drone technologies the Americans already deployed. This led her inexorably to the logical solution: steal everything the Americans made.

She accomplished this task through the vast network of international student and faculty exchanges—functions that NPU was famous for arranging—as well as planting vast quantities of Chinese-manufactured computer chips and processors with “back door” apps that were commonly installed in American systems. Hacking, of course, was another primary source—and the primary reason why so many Chinese weapons systems, manned or unmanned, bore such an uncanny resemblance to their American counterparts. Capturing or stealing platforms in the field, however, allowed Weng and her teams to reverse-engineer actual working systems, and no one was better at acquiring them than Guo Jun, her best operative. Thanks to him, she now possessed her first working model of a Silent Falcon.

But she had a problem.

She glanced out of her top-story window. It offered a 180-degree view of the sprawling campus, most of it ancient. But her glass-and-steel tower was in the new section. Construction cranes were raising four more towers nearby, all funded with PLA money. But her eyes focused on the famous statue down below. Even this high up, the white limestone torso of the warrior statue was gargantuan. It was one of the most famous sculptures on campus. Famous, but in the wrong location. So she had it moved to where she could see it daily. The giant warrior’s bowed head nearly touched the grass, his muscular back and shoulders exposed to the sky. In front of his head, two massive stone hands thrust up out of the grass holding a great stone sword parallel to the earth in obeisance to an unseen master. It was the image of the victorious, all-powerful warrior humbled before its master.

Guo was such a warrior. Perhaps the greatest in China’s military. Guo and his handpicked operators, posing as an elite police unit, had won the international Warrior Competition in Jordan two years before, besting more than thirty other SOF teams from around the world. Guo had won the individual sniper competition as well.

But for all of his skills, Guo lacked humility.

It was the reason she would eventually have to execute him.

She picked up her secured phone and dialed.

PLA Safe House

Johannesburg, South Africa

Guo and his team returned to their secured residence in South Africa’s largest city, melting back into the largest population of ethnic Chinese on the continent. His secure satellite phone rang. Only Dr. Weng had his number. He clenched his jaw, answered.

“You violated your orders,” Weng said.

“My orders allow me to kill when it is necessary to protect the identities of my team members.”

“How were your identities compromised?”

“The two guılao s possessed advanced surveillance and intelligence capabilities. It was highly unlikely but still possible that we had been under their surveillance with the Silent Falcon. When they arrived at the scene in the surveillance vehicle, I assumed we had been compromised.”

“Ridiculous. We hacked the World Wildlife Association cloud server. The Silent Falcon in their possession was meant only for animal research purposes. That’s how we knew to send you there to retrieve it in the first place.”

“Things aren’t always as they appear. Perhaps they were undercover.”

“Spies? Impossible. But even if it were so, it would have been better to capture them and bring them here,” Weng said. Still, there was some nagging doubt. The Belgian’s identity was confirmed with the documents recovered by Guo. Just another feckless Westerner “chasing her bliss.” But the American was a member of Pearce Systems with known ties to the American government. The woman’s death was truly of no consequence. But killing the American robbed Weng of valuable insight. “Why didn’t you capture them instead of killing them?”

“I had intended to. But the African gangsters I employed overreacted. Short of killing the Africans on the spot, there was no way to stop the carnage.”

“But you did kill the Africans?”

“Of course, but later. They were drug addicts and criminals. They were a liability, so they were eliminated.”

“Why did you employ such unreliable elements?”

Guo hesitated before answering. When Weng recruited him into her organization, she’d promised him the chance to win glory for himself in battle. His greatest desire was to prove to himself he was the world’s best warrior. His loyalty to China was an accident of fate. Had he been born an Israeli, he would have gladly joined the Sayeret Matkal; born an American, he would have joined the SEAL teams. All that mattered to him was to be the best. That was hard to do as an errand boy.