430: Chapter 430 Whose country was it back then?

Of the forty-seven targets, forty-five were already under control.

"What about Lee Hsien Loong?" Night Owl asked.

A Shadow Blade intelligence officer turned the tablet toward him. The screen displayed real-time thermal imaging of a three-story detached villa on Orchard Road—two heat sources in the living room, one in the second-floor study, and one in the basement. Ten meters outside the villa, seven members of the Shadow Blade-7 team had completed their optical camouflage, each having locked onto the doors, windows, back alley, and underground garage exit.

"The target is in the basement." The intelligence officer pointed to the red heat source outline in the basement—it was sitting in front of a large piece of equipment, fingers tapping on the keyboard. "He is destroying documents. It started twenty-seven minutes before we cut the signal—he began burning them before we even entered Singapore."

Night Owl pulled the suppressed pistol from his waist, removed the magazine to check it, and pushed it back into the chamber. "Of course he started burning them early. He knows he can't get away."

Lee Hsien Loong's residence was not a blast-proof bunker like the Presidential Palace. It was merely a colonial-style bungalow built in the 1960s, with white-painted exterior walls and bougainvillea planted in the yard. Its basement was not designed to withstand bunker-busting bombs—it was a study and archive room that his father, Lee Kuan Yew, had expanded in the 1970s, with walls made of ordinary reinforced concrete and the only security measure being a combination security door.

The Shadow Blade-7 team did not blow the door.

The team leader pulled a portable ultrasonic detector from his tactical vest and pressed it against the wall above the security door. The sensor scanned for three seconds, and the internal structure diagram of the combination lock popped up on the screen—a four-digit mechanical wheel, no tamper-proof circuits, no lockout delay. This was a West German-made combination lock from 1978; its designer had never imagined that someone would come to pick it with an ultrasonic detector.

The team leader used the tip of a ceramic dagger to pry open the keypad casing, inserted two probes into the mechanical contacts of the wheels, and then pressed the detector's automatic decoding key. The wheels rotated silently inside, and the probes read the mechanical resistance of each number one by one—seven seconds later, four numbers popped up on the screen: 0-8-0-9. Singapore's National Day.

The door opened.

Lee Hsien Loong's shadow lingered on the desktop for a moment, and then he reached out and pressed a key on the keyboard. The last message on the screen was deleted, and the hard drive indicator light went out. The documents were burned, and the drafts were deleted. His fingers left the keyboard, not trembling, he just pressed hard on the nose pads of his glasses and turned his chair toward the door.

The team leader stood in the doorway, his optical camouflage suit transitioning from the beige wallpaper of the basement to the bone-white reflection of the blade. Six team members stood behind him, all their suppressed rifles pointed at the center of the basement. Lee Hsien Loong looked at them without standing up. He sat in the leather chair that had accompanied his father for thirty years, his hands resting on his knees.

On the table sat a laptop with the power unplugged, a paper shredder, and a black-and-white photograph in a frame—Lee Kuan Yew standing in Independence Square, with the newly raised star and crescent flag behind him.

"The Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun." The team leader said, "Where is it?"

The corner of Lee Hsien Loong's right eye twitched. This was the first time since he entered politics that anyone had dared to speak to him in this tone. But he did not lash out—because he saw the team member behind the leader had already pulled open his wardrobe drawer and was holding a mahogany box from it. The box was carved with a sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum crest, the copper clasp had oxidized to a dark green, but the lacquer surface was still shiny—this was the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, bestowed by Emperor Showa upon Lee Kuan Yew's grandfather, Lee Muk-mun, in 1943 after the Japanese army occupied Singapore. Lee Muk-mun was the Chinese representative of the Legislative Council of the British Straits Settlements at the time, and after the Japanese occupation, he turned to serve as an advisor to the Special Municipality of Shonan-to. The record of the bestowal of this medal is still preserved in the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo, numbered Shonan—Medal—No. 47.

The team leader opened the box. The Rising Sun emblem of the medal glowed with a dark gold light under the emergency light. He pulled a miniature camera from his tactical vest, took close-ups of the front and back of the medal, the inside of the box, and the award record paper at the bottom, and then transmitted them directly to the Naypyidaw Command Center via the Vega encrypted link.

Forty-five seconds later, this high-definition close-up appeared on the official Shuguang Cloud accounts across seventeen global social media platforms. The headline consisted of only one line: "The heirloom Lee Hsien Loong carries with him—the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun bestowed upon his grandfather by the Emperor of Japan in 1943."

The accompanying image was a photo of Lawrence Wong's grandfather, Wong Ah Fook, wearing the uniform of the Japanese Military Police, placed side-by-side with Lee Muk-mun's Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun. Two lines of captions: "Lawrence Wong's grandfather translated and interrogated, Lee Hsien Loong's grandfather was responsible for management. The third grandson—is running now."

5:34 AM, at the eastern end of the Strait of Malacca.

A forty-two-foot yacht was speeding southeast at thirty knots. The yacht's registration mark had been chiseled off. Inside the cabin, Singaporean President Tharman Shanmugaratnam—according to the constitution, the President is the head of state of Singapore, while the Prime Minister is the head of government—was holding the handset of a satellite phone against his forehead.

The phone had no signal. It had disconnected in the first minute after the yacht sailed out of the East Coast Park yacht club marina—it wasn't out of power, the frequency band had been hijacked. The loudspeaker was playing the same recording on a loop: "You are currently located within the Federation of Myanmar naval identification zone. Stop the ship immediately for inspection. Attempting to escape will result in interception on the high seas."

Tharman Shanmugaratnam slammed the satellite phone onto the console. He was only accompanied by a secretary and a part-time driver from the yacht club—a twenty-year-old Malay youth, who was currently gripping the helm with trembling hands. He hadn't told anyone where he was going. He had simply grabbed a briefcase after receiving the news of the Changi base explosion at 3:40 AM and had his driver take him to the club marina. The briefcase contained a Thai passport, a Cambodian driver's license, three hundred thousand US dollars in cash, and four credit cards from different banks.

After the boat sailed out of the marina, he looked back at Singapore. The fire in the direction of Changi had already turned the entire East Coast red. He had lived on this coast for twenty-eight years. He did not intend to look a second time.

Then he heard another sound.

It wasn't the waves, it wasn't the engine, it wasn't the radio—it was the sound of the water being cut. Four white wakes emerged from the darkness behind the yacht, approaching at a speed of over fifty knots. Those were four "SEAL" underwater delivery vehicles, each carrying two Shadow Blade naval special operations team members, with night-vision micro-radar and suppressed machine guns mounted on the bows.

When the yacht was surrounded, Tharman Shanmugaratnam was trying to pull his passport out of the briefcase. He wanted to prove that he was not the President of Singapore, just an ordinary businessman going to Jakarta to visit relatives. But the twenty-year-old Malay driver had already turned off the engine. He turned around, raised his hands above his head, and said a sentence to Tharman Shanmugaratnam that made the President collapse onto the sofa: "I remember you. When you were distributing rice in the HDB estate where I live, you said—'Don't be afraid, the country protects you.' Whose country was it then?"