452: Chapter 452 Overwhelmed by Fighter Jets, He Admitted Defeat on the Spot

Abidin watched the screen, slowly closing his eyes.

When he opened them again, he reached out to the table and picked up the "Madness" operation authorization document. Then, using both hands—left hand pressing on the cover, right hand gripping it—he tore the entire document in half from the middle.

The sound of tearing paper was crisp, like a bone snapping in the quiet conference room.

The young colonel behind him suddenly knelt on the floor and dry-heaved—he had just signed a non-disclosure agreement, and his wife back home was pregnant with their third child. Another officer slumped in his chair, burying his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Someone else took off their military cap and placed it on the table, moving as gently as if setting down a sacrificial offering.

Abidin placed the torn document on the table, looked at Zhang Cheng's projection, and said two words:

"The list."

8:20 AM, downtown Kuala Lumpur.

The air raid siren sounded.

It was not a test—although everyone's mobile phones in the city had received a text message an hour and a half ago stating "Routine air raid siren test starting at 7:00"—but the siren sound at this moment was completely different from the test. The test was an intermittent long tone, while this was a wartime air raid warning of three short bursts and one long, looping repeatedly. The air defense sirens atop the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur forced the sound into every street, every office building, and every car stopped at traffic lights.

But no one ran toward the air raid shelters.

Because all mobile phone screens lit up again at the exact second the siren sounded. This time it wasn't a text message—it was a forced-push holographic signal. The signal source was a Vega low-orbit relay satellite, with enough bandwidth to allow all 1.7 million mobile phones in Kuala Lumpur to simultaneously play a 360-degree rotatable real-time 3D image.

The image was transmitted from an altitude of 4,800 meters.

Two J-10B soaring dragon stealth fighters were flying in low-speed formation over the center of Kuala Lumpur. Their livery was the standard dark gray low-visibility camouflage of the Federation of Myanmar Air Force, with baobab leaf emblems painted on the wingtips and vertical stabilizers. The weapons bays of both aircraft were closed—the electro-optical pod mounted on the centerline of the fuselage was in training mode, with no laser emission. But Vega had superimposed simulated targeting crosshairs onto the pushed holographic image. The crosshairs moved synchronously with the onboard navigation data, sweeping over a Kuala Lumpur landmark every 0.4 seconds.

The first crosshair locked onto the flagpole base at Merdeka Square. The second encased the dome of the Parliament Building. The third pressed against the main entrance of the Army Headquarters building—less than 400 meters from where General Abidin had walked out of the underground parking garage.

The aircraft did not drop any bombs. They didn't even engage their afterburners; the sound of the engines was replaced by the sharp whine of ultra-low-altitude flight, and as they grazed the spire of the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the glass curtain wall at the top of the tower vibrated with a buzzing sound.

On the 47th floor of the Petronas Twin Towers, in the office of a multinational corporation, employees were pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows holding up their phones. Someone counted the pylons under the aircraft wings—they were empty. Someone zoomed the Lens in on the emblem on the vertical stabilizer, took a screenshot, zoomed in, and searched for "baobab leaf emblem." The first result returned by the search engine was the official website of the Federation of Myanmar Presidential Palace—on the website, underneath the same emblem, was a line in both Burmese and English: "Monyet roti: Deciduous in dry season. Survives. And grows back."

The siren was still blaring.

But people on the street had already stopped walking. An elderly Malay woman wearing a hijab stood by the fountain at Merdeka Square, looking up at the flight paths of the two fighter jets. She didn't hold up a phone, nor did she speak; she just looked up. Beside her, a young mother pushing a stroller was also watching—the child in the stroller reached a hand out from the blanket, pointing at the lingering contrails in the sky, and made indistinct babbling sounds.

The old woman turned to look at the child, then said a sentence in Malay to the young mother:

"Ayah saya kata—kapal terbang jangan tengok atas. Sebab yang jatuh bom bukan kapal terbang. Yang jatuh bom—orang."—My father used to say: Don't look up at airplanes. Because it's not the airplane that drops the bomb—it's the people.

The young mother froze for a moment, then nodded.

8:35 AM, the two soaring dragon fighter jets completed a turn south of Kuala Lumpur and entered the airspace over Pahang State via a low-altitude pass along the Karak Expressway. Their next stop was the Kuantan Air Force Base—not to bomb, but to "inspect."

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's Office in Putrajaya issued an emergency statement. The statement had only three paragraphs, in both Malay and English. The first paragraph announced that Malaysia accepted the negotiation framework of the "Strait of Malacca Joint Management Initiative" proposed by the Federation of Myanmar. The second paragraph announced that the Minister of Defense Ismail Sabri was temporarily suspended "due to health reasons," and Army Commander General Muhammad Abidin was "voluntarily cooperating with the Parliamentary Defense Committee investigation." The third paragraph had only one sentence—"All personnel at Kuantan Air Force Base have entered a standby state, and the base security level remains normal."

The statement did not mention Penang. It did not mention Tan Teik Cheng. It did not mention Operation Lalang.

But Penang knew.

In the coffee shop on Armenian Street, the television was broadcasting the press conference from the Prime Minister's Office live. The owner turned the volume up to the maximum, and everyone in the shop put down their cups, staring at the expression of Prime Minister Anwar on the TV. After reading the three paragraphs of the statement, Anwar did not answer any reporters' questions and turned to leave the podium—as he turned, a reporter shouted in English: "Mr. Prime Minister! Will Tan Teik Cheng in Penang face a public trial?!"

Anwar did not look back.

"You cannot escape." Chen Shunfa held his coffee cup, not drinking, and said those four words to Anwar's back on the TV screen.

Lin Meihua sat beside him. She stacked the photocopied teaching plans of her father neatly on the coffee table, binding them into twelve piles with rubber bands. Each pile had a sticky note on the cover with the recipient's name written on it—Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow, Speaker Law Choo Kiang, and the office door numbers of every state assemblyman on that street.

Hearing Chen Shunfa's words, she didn't look up and continued tying the thirteenth pile.

"I'm not in a hurry." She put the rubber band on, tightened it, and it snapped against the paper with a pop, "He may have run, but the teaching plans are still here. As long as the teaching plans are here, he won't get far."

Outside the coffee shop, the bell of the Mazu Temple rang out—the old temple keeper had rung it three extra times today.

Chen Shunfa raised his cup, "Did you hear that? Even Mazu says you cannot escape."