Feb 21, 2057, 1902 Hours (UTC +8)
Ladakh, India
Forward Operating Center — Ladakh, Zoji La War Memorial
The Battle of Zoji La Pass lasted a day and a half before the Indians finally fell back towards Srinagar. The earliest casualty estimates on the Chinese side suggested around 3,200 MIA/KIA and 11,500 wounded, among which was Little Hu who could not remember how he got his concussion and broken arm. Commander Li informed him and the other pilots afterwards that his injuries occurred when Little Hu valiantly leapt in front of a missile that was about to hit Chen Xinyue (who blushed profusely at both his bravery and her own carelessness) and the whiplash from the blast knocked his head into the harness. This also explained the extensive damage to the unit which would be out of commission for several weeks.
“Ugh! I hate resting. I wanna get out there and fight!” Little Hu said to Chen Jiahao while playing a phone gacha game with his uninjured hand.
Commander Li had given them all time to rest. Even if the pilots couldn’t remember it, the grueling push through Ladakh had been physically and mentally taxing for all of them. Despite his injuries, Little Hu was the only one not completely spent, though he would have been just as gung-ho to get back to battle even if he was uninjured. He was by far one of the most enthusiastic pilots not only in their unit, but the entire Unified Chinese Army.
The new forward operating base they had moved to was set up at the Zoji La War Memorial, where Indians who had helped take the pass from Pakistanis over a hundred years ago were honored in stone. Out of a strange mutual admiration for martial spirit, the only structure not flattened for the Chinese prefab barracks and defense installations was the memorial itself, which Chen Jiahao had briefly walked through to ease himself out of the pilot’s cocktail hangover. He didn’t understand a word of Hindi, but he felt the importance of the place and the honor bestowed on those who were not able to live to see what they had accomplished for their nation.
A part of Chen noted that, ironically, a unified Pakistan and India would have put up a much tougher fight against the Unified Chinese Army. Ambassador Yan Shufeng had gotten all of the national credit for convincing Pakistan to remain out of the war, though Chen wondered if there had ever been a chance Pakistan would have aided India. In spite of the fact that from Chen’s perspective they constituted the same civilization, the Pakistanis apparently thought it preferable for foreign invaders to have Kashmir over India.
Well, as President Wu liked to put it, material reality was downstream of human spirit. Countries with greater levels of spiritual development always prevailed over those with lesser. China simply had more advanced forms of social integration than India. The century of humiliation had drilled that lesson into her.
“Don’t taunt me, Jiahao!” Little Hu said.
Chen Jiahao was confused for a moment before he realized Little Hu was referring to the basketball Jiahao was spinning in his hand.
“Ah, sorry. Your injuries make me want to remind myself how nice it is to have working hands,” Jiahao said, spinning it again.
“What a bad egg! To kick a man while he’s down, you’re a devil, Jiahao!”
Jiahao chuckled. “Oh, you would be playing phone games anyway and you know it. I try to get you out on the court when you’re in fine condition and you always have an excuse. See! I see you grinning about your broken arm. It means I can’t dunk on you.”
Little Hu gave a fake gasp. “Would you say such a thing about a war hero? I jumped in front of a missile, surely you don’t think I would balk at jumping in front of a hoop.”
“Oh you would jump alright, but it wouldn’t be high enough.”
For some reason, the word “jump” made the two of them go silent and gaze at each other for a second. When they couldn’t figure out why, they both broke out into laughter, finding the sudden seriousness ridiculous.
“Well, you can have your two points. I’d rather have the sympathy of our dear sisters, Chen and Yang. There is nothing sweeter on Heaven or Earth than a—” Little Hu paused to sit up from the sofa and look to make sure the other two weren’t in the room. “—than a beautiful woman’s concern. Maybe I ought to break my other arm!”
Chen Jiahao couldn’t deny he felt a pang of jealousy at that, both for Little Hu’s bravery in stopping the missile, and for the tenderness their co-pilots showed him. Chen Xinyue in particular, usually an abrasive goblin, had come by to give Little Hu his food and ask him demurely how he was feeling. To this Little Hu smoothly replied with incomprehensible babbling due to being shot up with opiates. Not wanting to make the same mistake again, Little Hu bravely cut back his own analgesic allotment and suffered through some of the pain to not come across like a baboon.
While bantering with Little Hu, Sister Yang arrived and caused Chen’s heart to miss a beat. Like all of them, she was in off-duty clothes—a rare privilege only the TOCU pilots were given—and like a true sister rather than one in name only, she was wearing clothes fit only for the house. She was barefoot and wore jean short-shorts showing off legs toned by ten thousand squats and a thin white blouse overhung the shorts and hugged her willowy torso. Chen’s favorite detail, however, was that her raven black hair was pulled into a high ponytail. The way he liked it. She only wore that ponytail when she was lounging comfortably with her fellow pilots.
The expression on her face, however, was not one of comfort.
“Everything okay, Sister Yang?” Chen Jiahao asked.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“I’m alright,” she said as she took a seat opposite the couch Little Hu was laying on. She set her phone on the table. “I just got some news about a disaster in Sudan.”
“What happened?” Chen Jiahao asked, though he didn’t particularly care.
Disasters were happening everywhere all the time. For his own sanity, he couldn’t care about all of them or he would be a nervous wreck. To prevent this, he sorted disasters into those he could help and those he could not. If there was a mudslide in Gansu, that was something he could be deployed for and assist with. A terrorist attack in Africa? That was beyond his ability to affect. Unfortunately for her, Sister Yang was predisposed to be moved by every bad thing she heard about from every corner of the globe.
“Something bad enough for a media blackout,” Sister Yang said. “I have a friend in the intelligence bureau. I don’t think Commander Li would mind if we knew, but I would rather not put him in a bad position by hiding our secrets, so please tell no one.”
Both Chen Jiahao and Little Hu nodded. If there was one thing their tight-knit cohort was capable of, it was keeping secrets. In an optimal society, democracy could be conducted without secrecy, but such a society was only partly built in China. Things were still better than the Liberal Democracies like the United States and England, where truth and secrets were commodities to be bought, sold, and repackaged by unaccountable market actors. But even in China, secrecy still had its place.
“What did your friend in the intelligence bureau say?” Little Hu asked.
Sister Yang lowered her voice. “There is some kind of giant monster made of stone that emerged from the desert. They call it a rock devil in Arabic, and it’s been destroying Sudanese towns one after another. It’s awful!”
Little Hu and Jiahao looked at one another and burst out laughing.
“Sister Yang, that’s not a natural disaster, that’s a bad webnovel plot!” Little Hu said in-between fits of laughter. “I wouldn’t even read that!”
She pouted. “The intelligence bureau wouldn’t concern itself with a webnovel. If this has intelligence buzzing it has to be real, even if it sounds fantastical. There are already confirmed fatalities, idiot!”
Chen Jiahao could not move past how cute Sister Yang’s pouting face looked in order to take her news seriously.
“Do you perhaps mean the same intelligence bureau that…” Little Hu paused. He couldn’t remember why he had an issue with the intelligence bureau, he just felt he did.
“They make mistakes, I get it. It’s a difficult job,” Sister Yang said. “But this isn’t a mistake. He couldn’t show me them because he would get in trouble, but my friend said there are satellite photos of the damage. Entire towns were wiped off the face of the map! Brothers, this is scary.”
“Scary indeed. Like Godzilla! Right, Jiahao?” Little Hu said.
Chen Jiahao wasn’t paying attention. His blood ran cold at the mention that Sister Yang’s friend in the intelligence bureau was a man. It put him in a sour mood, though a mood that for some reason seemed more complex than mere jealous.
“Enough goofing around. If it’s real, they’ll tell us soon enough,” Jiahao said, standing up from his chair and pulling on the furred jacket he draped over the back.
“You’re going out?” Sister Yang asked.
“It’s hot in here,” he replied.
She sighed. “Do you think I am being naive and gullible, Chen Jiahao? Answer me honestly.”
“No, I don’t. I think your friend in the intelligence bureau is probably good at his job, and doubting you means doubting him and doubting him means doubting the intelligence bureau which means doubting China. I would never,” he replied, stepping around her chair in the small lounge and grabbing his thermos of tea from the counter.
The cold mountain air blasted him the moment he opened the sealed door. Hearing the door open, Chen Xinyue yelled at him from her room down the hall to get out before he let out the warm air. Her shrill nasally voice grated against him and he slammed the door behind him.
Outside, the camp buzzed with activity, still only half assembled after the rapid advance. Unlike the special pilot’s base his unit had before the most recent offensive, they shared this one with the 52nd brigade. One foot out the door, Jiahao was almost run over by a utility truck carrying giant pots and woks for the mess hall, the driver distracted by the sudden appearance of the celebrated pilot and hero of the Battle of Zoji La Pass, Chen Jiahao. Other soldiers nearby were equally enthralled despite orders to treat the TOCU pilots with respect and leave them alone.
Ignoring their gazes, which seemed to be asking him whether he was a sociopath for caring more about Sister Yang’s friend than the massacre of Africans on the other side of the world, Chen plunged into the snow towards the war memorial.
He was stopped by a line of tanks passing through the Srinagar–Leh Highway which had become the main thoroughfare for the forward operating center. The familiar smell of gasoline penetrated through the numbing cold. It was a comforting smell, not unlike the jet fuel that had filled his nostrils for so many years. Gasoline to him was the smell of integration with something greater, a sensation he felt now amongst the rolling tanks. Unlike while piloting his TOCU, however, there was an incompleteness to this synthesis. A question hung over who or what this “something greater” was.
The tanks soon passed and Chen Jiahao crossed the road to the war memorial. In the few hours since his previous visit, the monument had been defaced with bullet holes from Chinese soldiers using the names of fallen Indians as target practice. He sat down in the snow with the lingering fragrance of gasoline on his nose and tried to make sense of his foul mood.
At first, Jiahao thought it was because of one thing only: Yang Anming’s male friend in the intelligence bureau. Then he realized it was actually two: Both her friend and a sudden, uncharacteristic wellspring of concern for the Sudanese, despite never having felt any concern for victims of international disasters before. Finally, after a good bit of thought, he realized that it was actually one phenomenon bothering him that explained both conundrums. It was thus:
That Chen Jiahao felt no common nationhood with this distant man who he was irrationally jealous of for sharing an ounce of Yang Anming’s attention, but that he did feel a swell of sameness with the families harmed by this “rock devil.” The trouble with this, and why it so suddenly upset him, was that it was immoral. If he brought this same apathy toward his compatriots into his cockpit, what would happen? Would he allow his fellow countrymen to die? Would he balk at doing his duty as a Chinese soldier? Would he become some cowardly pacifist? He knew there was no way he could keep this dissonance inside him forever. He needed to speak with Commander Li at once.
“Pilot Chen Jiahao?” said a voice behind him.
Chen turned to see a cadre of smiling senior officers. He knew immediately what they wanted. Unlike the enlisted men and junior officers, these men were of sufficient rank and status that they could come up to him and ask for photos. Behind them, other soldiers looked on enviously, wishing they too could get a picture with the celebrated pilot to send back to their family. Just that photo alone conferred a certain prestige on an entire family.
“I’m Brigade Deputy Leader Wang Yifan,” one of the officers said. “This is…”
Wang Yifan proceeded to introduce the other five senior officers who Chen Jiahao would never meet again but who were compelling him to take a selfie with each of them individually. Their phone cameras were already out before the Brigade Deputy Leader bothered to ask, “may we take a picture with you? Pilot Chen?”
The correct answer to which was, “yes of course! I would be glad to. Thank you for your continued diligence in conducting this offensive, Brigade Deputy Leader.”