476: Chapter 476 Debt Collection at Your Doorstep: Burn It If You Don't Pay

No. 1 raised three fingers on his right hand.

Three, two—

"Viper, the price we agreed upon earlier." The mercenary suddenly threw down his cards. "My transport costs have increased by thirty thousand. I need to pay off customs in the Philippines to get through."

"You were the ones who insisted on adding a 'transport insurance fee'. What did I say?" Viper extinguished his cigarette. "The money Barrett pays is calculated by the head—half for the dead, nothing for the living. No matter how much stuff you transport, in the end, it still depends on how many Chinese people are killed."

"Then just kill a few more."

The mercenary said this in a tone as if he were talking about having another cup of coffee. He reached out to grab the liquor bottle—

The explosive charge detonated.

The blast wave flipped the folding table, sending playing cards flying, and the whiskey bottle smashed against the ceiling, showering everyone with glass shards. Two UMNO Youth guards were slammed directly against the wall by the shockwave, while another had his pant leg set on fire by the overturned diesel stove and crawled toward the door screaming.

Lin Xiao-No. 1 vaulted through the blasted hole in the wall, the silencer of his Viper-7 carbine nearly pressed against the back of the mercenary's head as he fired—a 9mm subsonic bullet entered the cerebellomedullary cistern and exited through the center of his forehead, the bullet embedded in the concrete foundation. The last thing the white mercenary saw was the King of Hearts on the back of his hand, face down, covering the twelve hundred dollars he had just lost.

Viper hadn't even drawn his gun yet. No. 1's muzzle was already pressed against the center of his forehead, the cold silencer leaving a circular white mark on his brow.

"Who, who are you—"

No. 1 used his left hand to pull off his mask. The face before him was an exact match for Chen Guohua's ID photo—a middle-aged Teochew man's appearance, with crow's feet at the corners of his eyes and corners of his mouth drooping gently, looking like a grocery store owner haggling with you at a wet market.

Then, this gentle middle-aged man said in fluent Malay, "Forty-two lives."

He crouched down, opened the notebook to that page, and held it up in front of Viper's eyes.

"You wrote this line—'Do not spare the families of the deceased.' Now, I'm collecting for them."

A gunshot rang out. Viper took a bullet to the knee first—the subsonic bullet shattered his right patella into fragments. He fell to his knees screaming, his forehead sliding off the muzzle, blood splattering onto the playing cards and dollar bills on the concrete floor.

No. 1 was in no hurry to kill him. He took a micro-camera from his tactical vest, attached it to the beam of the tin shack, and Lens aimed at Viper and the seven corpses kneeling on the ground. Then, he picked up Viper's military notebook from under the overturned table and flipped through it page by page for him to see.

The first page was a floor plan of the Chinese village in Lahad Datu. The second page was a list of villagers, with the method of execution noted after each name—shooting, stabbing, strangulation, live burial. Four names were marked with "live burial," one of which was an eleven-year-old boy. At the bottom of the list was a handwritten English note, scrawled but spelled correctly: "Do not spare the families of the deceased. It's inconvenient to send the old ones to nursing homes, so dispose of them."

"Did you write this line?" No. 1 flipped the notebook to that page and held it up to Viper's eyes.

Viper's lips were trembling. After his kneecap shattered, the excruciating pain made him clench his teeth so hard that his upper and lower teeth clicked together, but he could still hear the sound of his own handwriting rubbing against the paper—he had indeed written this sentence, and signed it after finishing.

"I, I can confess—"

"No rush."

No. 1 stood up, took a portable projector from his tactical vest, and attached it to the corner of the wall. The projector started, and the panoramic footage of the massacre at the Lahad Datu Chinese village filled the entire wall of the tin shack.

He dragged Viper in front of the wall, making him kneel before the row of corpses in the footage.

Viper's kneeling posture was exactly the same as the first person he had shot and killed in the village.

The footage continued to play. A seven-month-pregnant Chinese woman lay in the ditch at the entrance of the village, the splashing water slowly turning red. The eleven-year-old boy leaned against the basketball hoop, a piece of cardboard on his chest reading "Future Informant," the cardboard soaked through with blood, the ink bleeding and blurring into a blue cloud.

"These images will be pushed to every connected device globally within forty-eight hours." No. 1's voice had no emotional fluctuation. "Your execution footage is just one of them. Your superiors, your colleagues, your family—all of them will see how you die."

Viper's forehead hit the ground. The first time was a dull thud, the second time splashed water—the concrete was saturated with diesel and blood, making a wet, squelching sound when he hit it.

"I confess! I confess—the Major rank is fake! The credentials were provided by the Americans! There are more than twelve javelin—there are four more hidden in the freezer at the Lahad Datu fishing port! The CIA has a safe house in Tawau, the person in charge is named Holt, a former Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel!"

He spewed everything out—seventeen armed unit designations, commander names, hideout coordinates, and supply line schedules. After his kneecap shattered, every time he spoke a name, his upper and lower teeth clattered together with a few crisp clicks.

After extracting all the intelligence, Viper died of hemorrhagic shock.

Lin Xiao-No. 1 held Viper's mobile phone against the back of his head—at the moment his index finger pressed the shutter, in the white reflection of the flash, the forty villagers with various causes of death projected on the wall behind him seemed to float gently in the light for 0.25 seconds.

He put away the camera and turned to walk out of the tin shack.

On the threshing ground, the remaining UMNO Youth militants were silently hunted down or captured alive. Two survivors were pinned to the ground. No. 1 crouched down and asked one of them in Malay, "Does anyone among you know how to write Chinese?"

The captive's eyes widened. These men were wearing Malaysian military uniforms, with the UMNO Youth emblem embroidered on their headscarves, but they didn't understand Chinese. He asked twice, but there was no response.

"Then I'll just have to use Pinyin." No. 1 sighed, took a spray paint can from his tactical vest, pulled open the rolling door panel of the tin shack, adjusted his wrist angle slightly, and pressed down hard—red paint sprayed a line of text onto the white iron door:

[ TANAH INI PINJAMAN DARI NENEK MOYANG ]—This land is borrowed from our ancestors.

Below, a line of small characters written in Hakka: [Must return. Not return? Burn.]

He whispered something into his helmet communication channel, and the team members scattered on the other side of the freshwater swamp confirmed the information for each action point in turn, after which he pressed the encrypted upload key.

When the first mission video of the Lin Xiao squad was transmitted back to the Naypyidaw command center, the timestamp was 1:14 PM.

In the video, Lin Xiao-No. 1 was crouching in front of a charred Chinese grocery store, speaking into Lens in Hakka: "The coordinates for the seventeen extremist armed strongholds in the interior of Sabah have all been obtained. Three of them have resident CIA advisors, and two have British mercenaries. The supreme commander is the Chief of Staff of the remnants of the Malaysian Army's 3rd Division—Shafiq Rahman, currently hiding in a jungle camp forty kilometers west of Tawau. The coordinates have been uploaded to the command system."

The footage cut to the red paint on the outer wall of the tin shack. Zhang Cheng recognized that line of Hakka. He didn't know the specific word, but he knew what it meant in the East Malaysian Chinese community—it was the ancestral motto of the Hakka people who had been cultivating land in Sabah for two hundred years. The land is borrowed from the ancestors, and it must be returned. If not returned, burn it.

Li Lanzhi received the coordinate package transmitted back by the Lin Xiao squad on her tablet. She opened the file, and seventeen coordinates were marked sequentially on the electronic map of East Malaysia, each coordinate accompanied by the target's personnel count, equipment list, activity patterns, and the best entry route. The last line of the list was Shafiq's hideout—marked as "Priority Alpha Target."