479: Chapter 479 Two Lives, Mother and Daughter, You Only Count One?

"Matched." No. 7 tapped her knuckles twice on the channel.

The camp signal, sixty-three kilometers west of Tawau, was only twenty-three kilometers away from the CIA safe house coordinates provided by Viper—it wasn't Shafiq's main camp. It was another mercenary assembly point. At 2:15 AM, seven people had been crouching in the canopy of a dipterocarp tree for three hours.

In the night vision goggles, the camp in the valley leaked the light of diesel lamps—six standard US military tents, two modified Land Rover Defenders, and a satellite communication antenna set up in the center of the camp. Under the base of the antenna were three green sealed crates, stamped with the Blackwater bear claw logo.

There were four sentries on the perimeter of the camp. Two were smoking in the southeast corner; their cigarette butts shone like two searchlights in the night vision goggles. One was dozing off against the door of a Land Rover on the west side, his rifle slung diagonally across his shoulder, muzzle pointing down, with rainwater dripping from the barrel. The last one was on the north side, typing on a ruggedized laptop, the blue light of the screen reflecting on his face—a white man with a thick beard and a faded tattoo on his left forearm.

Lin Xiao-No. 7 took a micro-telephoto Lens from her tactical vest and aimed it at the white man typing at the antenna base in the center of the camp. She zoomed the Lens in twenty times. On the screen, the white mercenary wasn't writing an email—it was a form. The form header was in English: "After Action Report - Operation Python Strike". Below were the date, location, participating personnel, ammunition consumed, and number of targets killed. The last column was "Remarks," and in the remarks was a line of text:

[Lahad Datu operation. 42 confirmed. Pregnant female counted as 1. Payment pending.]

"Same tattoo," Lin Xiao-No. 7 said in a low voice on the communication channel. "Blackwater, bear claw with three drops of blood. The one next to Viper has it too."

She closed the Lens and slid down from the buttress root of the dipterocarp tree. As soon as her soles touched the rotting leaves, her optical camouflage switched to the brown-black color of leaf humus—this thing worked better than any camouflage in the Borneo rainforest. The seven team members landed silently, fanned out, and advanced toward the camp.

When approaching the camp's outer wall, Lin Xiao-No. 7 stepped into thin air—it was empty beneath the rotting leaves. Her knee sank into a pit, soaking in half a human skeleton. The nylon rope wrapped around the ribs had rotted and crumbled at the slightest touch.

"Watch out—this area was a dumping ground for a logging company before the war," No. 4 whispered on the channel.

Lin Xiao-No. 7 pulled her leg out without stopping. The first anesthetic micro-particle was deployed at 2:31 AM.

The two sentries in the southeast corner fell first. The particles diffused in the rain curtain, causing respiratory muscle paralysis within fifteen seconds of inhalation; they couldn't even scream. When the second sentry hit the ground, his fingers dug into the mud, tearing his fingernails, grabbing a handful of rotting leaves and bone fragments. The sentry by the Land Rover on the west side was the third to fall. As he slid down against the car door, his body armor scraped against the steel plate, making a very faint, muffled sound.

Lin Xiao-No. 7 had already leaped to the north side of the camp a second before he slid down. She covered the bearded mercenary's mouth from behind with her left hand, and clamped the web of her right hand over his Adam's apple.

"The report you just uploaded," she said in English, her voice very low. "The one about Lahad Datu village—you wrote 'Pregnant female counted as 1'. Do you know if she was carrying a boy or a girl?"

The bearded man's Adam's apple rolled violently under her grip. He tried to kick over the laptop with his feet, but Lin Xiao-No. 7's knee was already pressed against his lumbar spine, arching his entire back, and his toes only scratched meaningless grooves in the mud.

"I can tell you, it was a girl," Lin Xiao-No. 7 whispered in his ear. "Seven months old, fetal heart rate of 140. When you fired at her, the bullet passed through the mother's abdominal cavity, first breaking the fetus's left arm, then piercing the mother's heart. Two lives, mother and daughter—you only recorded one number on the chart."

She pulled an MK23 pistol from the bearded man's tactical vest. She pulled back the slide; there was already a round in the chamber, the hammer was cocked, and the safety was off. She removed the magazine—there were eleven rounds in total, all with filed-down tips, ground into cross-shaped incisions. This was the characteristic of Dum-dum bullets: the bullet fragments upon entering the human body, leaving a small hole the size of a finger at the entry point and a crater the size of a bowl at the exit.

A new message popped up on the laptop screen. The sender's code name was "Hammerhead," and the message content was only one line: [Payment cleared. Next target: Tawau Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Deadline 12/22.]

Lin Xiao-No. 7 read the line, and her grip tightened. The sound of crushed laryngeal cartilage was muffled in her palm, squeezing out between her fingers like crushing a water-soaked coconut shell.

She took the laptop and the hard drive. From the camp tents, she seized seven satellite phones, three encrypted radios, and four military backpacks full of documents—printed operational orders, weapon handover lists, and satellite intelligence reports. All documents bore the same code name: "Operation Python Strike". The authorization signature line at the end of the files was signed with a cursive English name: Barrett.

At exactly 3:00 AM, the squad withdrew. Only six tents and seven corpses remained in the valley. Beneath the camp antenna, Lin Xiao-No. 7 spray-painted a line of Hakka on the folding table in red paint: [Debt collected. What should be paid back next?]

Three days later, Naypyidaw Presidential Palace.

Li Lanzhi projected the organized evidence package onto the main screen of the command center. The documents popped up page by page—the original employment contract between Blackwater and the Malaysian coup regime, with a contract amount of 27 million US dollars; the payer was an offshore company in the Cayman Islands called "Aegis Horizon Partners," whose actual controller was Barrett.

The action log of the British Gurkha mercenary group, which detailed the dates, coordinates, and number of executions during their "clearing" of twelve villages in the Sabah mountains. The log was handwritten in English, and the last line was signed by the Gurkha commander: [Capt. Hari Bahadur Gurung, Queen's Gurkha Signals. 12/19.]

Communications intercepted from retired French Foreign Legion personnel involved smuggling "Milan" anti-tank missiles into Sabah. Attached to the communication records was a photo of a cargo ship entering the port—taken at Berth 3 of Sandakan Port, Sabah. A Panamanian-flagged cargo ship was unloading, and the crane was lifting military green wooden crates marked with [MILAN ER]; the box serial numbers matched the French Army arsenal inventory.

There was something even more lethal: 124 encrypted cables between British MI6 and the Rashid regime, all decrypted by Vega. The contents of the cables covered coup planning, military aid arrangements, public opinion manipulation, and how to block any unfavorable proposals in the UN Security Council. The last cable was sent three hours before Rashid was captured alive. The sender's code name was "C," and the content was only one sentence: [Assets will be terminated if capture imminent. Do not let them talk.]