“ ‘This storage tank contains one hundred thousand attack-bee embryos.’ ”
Here Lin Yun sighed, and her voice trembled. “You can imagine how I felt when I heard this. My eyes darkened and I nearly collapsed, but, still holding out hope, I asked her if they had ever been used in combat. But I had already guessed the answer. Without noticing my expression, she told me even more excitedly that, due to the war with Cambodia and border conflicts with China, Vietnam was constantly asking the Soviets for weapons, causing headaches for the Politburo, which gave them only perfunctory replies. When Lê Duẩn visited, the general secretary promised to provide the most advanced weapons systems to Vietnam—meaning none other than the attack bees. She was sent to Vietnam with one hundred thousand attack bees. You can imagine how incensed the Vietnamese were when the advanced weapons systems they had been dreaming about turned out to be a beehive. They said that the Soviets had engaged in shameless deception toward their comrades while standing on the front lines of a bloody war against imperialism.
“While it was true that the Soviet leadership was giving them the brush-off, she personally believed that no one had been cheated. Although the Vietnamese didn’t realize the attack bees’ power at first, they did put them into action, deploying a special forces division from the General Department for Military Intelligence to handle it.
“Before they did, the Russian woman took the division through a weeklong training and then went with them to the front lines. Trembling, but still clinging to a pitiful thread of hope, I asked her, ‘Which front lines? Cambodia?’ She said, ‘Not Cambodia. The Vietnamese army had the absolute advantage on that front. It was the northern front. Against you.’ I looked at her in terror, and said, ‘You… you went to the Vietnam-China border?!’ She said she had—not to the farthest front lines, of course, but to Lang Son, and she had watched every time the five-man teams of wiry young guys applied an identification agent to their collars and ran off to the front carrying two thousand attack bees…
“Finally noticing the state I was in, she asked, ‘What’s wrong? The whole time, all we conducted were experimental attacks. We’d hardly gotten any of your people by the time the war ended.’ She said it so casually, like talking about a ball game.
“If we were only chatting between two soldiers, then I was out of line, since I ought to have been able to remain relaxed even when discussing the Zhenbao Island Incident.[11] But I didn’t want to tell her the cause of Mom’s death, so I ran out, leaving her staring in shock. She chased me and caught up to me and begged me to tell her what she’d done wrong, but I struggled free and ran aimlessly through the frozen streets.
“It snowed that night, and for a moment I felt the grim face of the world. Later, a police patrol van rounding up drunks took me back to the hotel….
“When I got home, I received an e-mail from the Russian woman that read, ‘Yun, I don’t know how it is I’ve hurt you. After you left, I spent many sleepless nights, but couldn’t think of anything. I am certain, though, that it’s connected to my bee weapons. If you were just an ordinary young woman, I wouldn’t have let the slightest hint of it slip out, but you and I are alike. Both of us are soldiers researching new-concept weapons, and we have common aims, which was why I told you everything. When you left in tears that night, it was like a knife in my heart. Back at my residence, I opened the lid of that container and watched the liquid nitrogen evaporate into white fog and disperse into the air. During the chaos of the Institute’s dissolution, more than a million attack-bee embryos died due to poor management, and the container you saw held the last remaining ones.
“ ‘I wanted to sit there all night until the liquid evaporated entirely; even in the bitter cold of the Russian winter, the cells would die quickly. I was destroying two decades of hard work, destroying the dreams of my youth, all because a Chinese woman dearer to me than even my own daughter hated them. As the nitrogen fog dissipated, my cold home turned even colder. The cold clarified my thinking, and all of a sudden I understood that the material inside the container did not belong to me as an individual. It had been developed at the cost of billions of rubles eked out by the hard labor of the Soviet people. At this thought, I replaced the lid and closed it tightly. Then I protected it with my life, and at last gave it to the appropriate people.
“ ‘Yun, for the sake of our ideals and our faith, for the sake of our homeland, we two women have trodden a lonely road no woman ought to follow. I have been on it longer than you, so I know a little more of its dangers. All the forces of the natural world, including those that people believe are the most gentle and harmless, can be turned into weapons to destroy life. The horror and cruelty of some of these weapons is beyond imagination, unless you have seen them yourself. But I, a woman you believe resembles your mother, can tell you that we are not on the wrong road. Fearsome things may fell your countrymen and your family, or strike the tender flesh of the child in your arms, but the best way to prevent this from happening is to create them yourselves, before the enemy or potential enemy has that chance! So I have no regret for the life I’ve lived, and I hope that you won’t either, when you reach my age.
“ ‘Child, I’ve moved to a place you don’t know, and I won’t contact you anymore from now on. Before I say goodbye, I won’t offer any vacant blessings, which are useless for a soldier. I’ll just leave you with a warning: beware the attack bees! Instinct tells me that they will appear on the battlefield again, and the next time it won’t be just one swarm of a thousand or two, but a mega-swarm of tens or hundreds of millions, blotting out the sky and covering the sun like a storm cloud, enough to annihilate an entire field army. May you never meet them in battle. This is the only blessing I can give you, child.’ ”
Now that Lin Yun had opened up about the psychological world she had long kept deeply hidden, she appeared to feel some sort of release, even as her listeners remained in shocked silence. The sun was setting. Another dusk had come to the Gobi. The glow reflected in the mirror plated everyone standing near it with a layer of gold.
“What’s happened has happened, child. All we can do about it is to accept our own responsibility,” the general said slowly. “Now take off your badge and epaulets. You’re a criminal now, not a soldier.”
The sun dipped beneath the horizon and the mirror darkened, like Lin Yun’s eyes. Her sorrow and despair were no doubt as boundless as the Gobi at night.
As Ding Yi looked at her, he heard the words she had said at Zhang Bin’s gravesite: I grew up in the army. I don’t know if I could entirely belong anywhere else. Or to anyone else.
11
Zhenbao Island, also known as Damanskii Island, was the site of a border clash in March 1969 during the seven-month undeclared conflict that marked the height of the Sino-Soviet Split.