Lieutenant Lin walked in front of the group. He called out two names: Chou and Fang. The sergeant quickly echoed his commands.
Lieutenant Lin walked to the center of the mat and smiled at her, whispering so only she could hear, “Let’s see how exceptional you really are.”
He stepped away from the two students, now standing in the middle of the mat, and exclaimed, “Fight!” The voice of the lead instructor broke her spell and she focused on the boy in front of her.
Li looked at Fang and felt a rage swelling up inside her. Her heart beat faster as she bobbed lightly on her feet. He came at her fast, his gloves rising to the fighting position, but she was ready.
Li had always been an exceptional athlete. While growing up, she had run track at a local running club for girls. She swam competitively, but she had never played a contact sport. She had never really fought anyone. As the bully crept closer to her, the anger inside her mixed with the familiar excitement that she got during her most competitive races. The thirst for victory pulsed through her veins. She desperately wanted to teach this boy and the lieutenant a lesson.
Fang was a foot taller, at least fifty pounds heavier, and much too confident. He started in on her with a left jab. It was quick, but not as quick as Li. Using the lessons her hand-to-hand combat instructor had taught her over the last week, she ducked under and snapped her hips to the right, using the motion to drive her clenched right fist into his undefended stomach. It was a quick, twisting movement, and a powerful, targeted blow.
He doubled over, eyes wide, unable to breathe. Fang’s mouth came open and his mouth guard fell out just as her left knee came up into his face, her kneecap crunching into his nose and teeth. A mix of blood, saliva, and two teeth spilled onto the floor, and the boy fell like a sack.
Li kept bobbing, light on her feet. She watched her opponent, waiting to see what would come next. But he didn’t get up. The instructor, alarmed at the blood, called off the training and sent one of the other pupils to get the nurse.
Lieutenant Lin began yelling at her. “What did you do that for?”
She didn’t know what to say. She shrugged, saying through her mouth guard, “Because you told us to fight.”
The man in the suit kept watching her, a wide smile on his face.
The man in the suit watched the girl from the other end of the gymnasium. She had just put down a much larger male candidate. “How has she been doing?”
Lieutenant Lin was back over with him now. Begrudgingly, he admitted, “She has received high marks, Mr. Jinshan. She has excelled in each evaluation that we have given her. But I don’t think she has the fortitude for the People’s Liberation Army.”
Jinshan looked at Lieutenant Lin with skepticism. “Fortitude?”
“Yes.”
“Are we talking about the woman who just embarrassed a much larger man in physical combat?”
Lin scowled. “She got lucky. That boy was complacent.”
Jinshan asked, “How does she get along with the others?”
“She is an introvert. We have not observed her speaking much with the other candidates beyond that which is required.”
The boy who had just been pummeled was walked off to the side by a nurse. She held a bag of ice and a blood-soaked gauze pad to his mouth.
“That boy won’t be happy when he heals. She just humiliated him.”
Lieutenant Lin didn’t reply.
The annual Junxun programs for China’s rising college freshmen served several purposes. They helped serve as a method of drilling a sense of discipline and patriotism into an increasingly pampered generation of teenagers. They registered the best and brightest of China’s children for the military, in case there ever came a time that a dramatic military expansion was needed. And they served as an excellent recruiting tool for China’s military and government agencies.
Many of these students would be sent around the world to foreign universities. Those students were flagged by China’s intelligence organizations. It was crucial for the well-being of the motherland that these students brought back what they learned to benefit China. Some of them were asked to perform extra work on behalf of China’s intelligence agencies. Refusal was not permitted.
In some cases, Junxun was used to identify students who were not already planning to attend a foreign university, but who showed all the qualities that Jinshan’s special team of spies would want in a sleeper agent.
This Junxun location pulled all the top recruits from the Guangdong region. The group that started with more than one hundred would eventually go down to about ten. All but one of them would be sent on to various government programs.
Every year, Cheng Jinshan came and got the pick of the litter. This year it looked like it would be this girl named Li.
Lieutenant Lin said, “Her father is a colonel. Did they tell you that? He has asked to be notified if she is selected for any particular government programs.”
Jinshan said, “Give me this colonel’s name.”
Lin wrote it down and handed him the paper, which Jinshan stuffed in his pocket. He looked at the girl. She had gone back in line and stood at attention. Two other boys were fighting on the mat now.
This girl was special, Jinshan could see that. He wanted her on his team. This would be one of the ones that he sent to America. She would need to modify her identity. No ties back to China. The work she would be doing would be too important. This girl wouldn’t just be a student there. Jinshan wanted her to become a US citizen. To stay there and infiltrate an agency of his choosing.
He would decide what role she would play later. For now, he needed to find a way for she and her father to part voluntarily.
He looked over at the boy being tended to by the nurse. The one she had just dispatched in short order. The boy’s eyes were ablaze. He looked straight at the girl. There was a great deal of anger there. That could be useful.
Li’s room was the only one occupied on her floor. The male candidates all slept in the dorm rooms one floor below. So when she heard the footsteps that night, it not only woke her up, it alarmed her.
Mosquito netting covered her bed. They all had it. They slept with the windows open, as there was no air conditioning. A luxury for the rich. The bugs were something awful this time of year. She lifted up the net and checked her alarm clock. It was just past midnight.
In the three weeks she had been at the camp, no one had come up to her floor at night.
Her relationship with the other candidates had remained poor. After defeating Fang in front of the others a few days ago, she had temporarily thought that she might have won increased respect. She had been sadly mistaken. The chiding at meals had increased, and Lieutenant Lin glared at her. After hours, when the other candidates would gather to socialize, she retreated to the solitude of her own floor. It was a lonely existence, but there was an end in sight. She only had to do this a little longer. Then she would find out what, if any, government assignment she would get, and head off to university.
The footsteps grew closer. Was it an instructor? Was this part of the training? The hard floors of the hallway carried the echo. Just one person, by the sound of it. But her door was locked, and only the instructors had the keys. So she need not worry about…
A jingle of keys, and the sound of the door handle turning.