483: Chapter 483 Not risking one's life for a commander who has already bought plane tickets

When Black received the news that the convoy had been ambushed, he was clutching his satellite phone inside a cave. His knuckles cracked, his fingertips turned white, and tiny cracks appeared on the casing of the satellite phone—not from dropping it, but from the force of his grip. He remembered the Chinese people hunted in Lahad Datu—the pregnant women, the boy leaning against the basketball hoop, the family of six locked in their house and burned alive. The roles had reversed. It had only been a few weeks since they went from hunters to prey.

He smashed the satellite phone against the rock. The screen shattered, and every crack reflected his own distorted face—twisted into fragments in the darkness.

The Sarawak capital, Kuching, fell into isolation.

The Myanmar Marine Corps pushed south along the coastal highway, routing the last line of defense of the Sarawak garrison near Sibu. The naval fleet blockaded the port of Kuching, prohibiting any ships from entering or leaving. The garrison inside Kuching lost contact with the outside world, with enough ammunition reserves to last less than a week.

On the morning of December 25th, Zhang Cheng issued a surrender ultimatum for Kuching from the command center in Naypyidaw.

The Vega system forced a broadcast to all mobile phones, televisions, and radios in the Kuching urban area. Pop-ups appeared simultaneously on the phones of the Kuching garrison—televisions across the city switched channels, and radio broadcasts were interrupted. A trilingual surrender ultimatum covered all screens and airwaves: Malay, English, and Chinese, signed jointly by Zhang Cheng and Anwar.

At the end of the voice broadcast was a sentence added by Zhang Cheng:

"Those who lay down their weapons can go home after the war. For those who continue to resist—your commander will not die with you. He has already booked a plane ticket to Jakarta. Go ask him if the name on that ticket is his own."

Two hours later, the 3rd Battalion of the garrison in the suburbs of Kuching mutinied.

The battalion commander ordered his men to fire into the air to force everyone to stay in the barracks, then took off his own military uniform, tore down the Malaysian flag hanging in the battalion headquarters hallway, and walked out of the camp gate carrying a white cloth on a bamboo pole. On the footage transmitted by the drone, the white flag appeared to have been stitched together from bandages, with crooked stitches, drooping and dripping water in the rain.

Behind the battalion commander, over three hundred soldiers piled their rifles at the entrance of the battalion headquarters. A piece of cardboard was placed on the pile of guns, with the following written in Malay: KAMI MENYERAH—We surrender.

Zhang Cheng glanced at the screen.

"Notify Anwar. There are people in Kuching waiting for him to accept their surrender." He turned to Li Lanzhi. "Upload the footage of the mutiny to the Shuguang Cloud. Title it—'Kuching Garrison 3rd Battalion: We Will Not Risk Our Lives for a Commander Who Has Already Bought His Plane Ticket.' Let the other units that are still hesitating see whether their officers have booked tickets."

Li Lanzhi recorded this on her tablet. Halfway through, the tablet popped up a new intercepted message—at an arsenal in Kuching guarded by Malaysian military police, the garrison was moving sealed javelin missile crates onto trucks, preparing to transfer them to the city center.

She calmly noted the coordinates of the arsenal and tapped lightly on the frontline fire distribution chart—an hour later, that batch of javelins was blown into scrap metal on the trucks. The military police captain received a call before the explosion. The phone screen displayed "Unknown Caller," but the voice was that of Lin Xiao-7.

"The sealed crates are useless now. You are moving empty boxes. If you don't believe me, open one and see."

The military police captain pried open a sealed crate—it was filled with bricks.

His hands were shaking when he hung up the phone. It wasn't because he was afraid of death, but because he knew—these javelins had been here yesterday. That they had turned into bricks today meant the Myanmar forces had already been inside yesterday. They came in, swapped them, and left, without anyone noticing the entire time.

The arsenal garrison collectively hung out a white flag an hour and a half later. They didn't use bandages this time—they tore down white curtains and used ink to write crookedly: KAMI SUDAH TAHU—We already know.

"Black's last communication." The communications officer handed the intercepted message to Senior Colonel Lin Haisheng.

There was only one line of text on the message: All routes cut. No extraction. Tell Barrett—

The signal was cut off.

Senior Colonel Lin Haisheng set down his enamel mug.

"Lanfang?"

Lin Xiao-7 stopped cleaning her gun. The slide of the MK23 was stuck halfway, and the dum-dum bullet in the chamber had not yet been ejected.

Four days after the end of the Sarawak ambush, she took the scanned copy of the captured title deed book and found a small wooden house deep in a coconut grove on the outskirts of Sandakan. The tin roof had been rusted through by the sea breeze, and rainwater leaked in through the holes, hitting the muddy ground to create a row of neat little pits.

An old man was squatting on the threshold, peeling a coconut with a machete. The blade was covered in rust, but the edge was sharpened to the point where it could reflect a person's face. On the back of his left hand was a tattoo of a python coiled into a circle, and tucked at his waist was a Hakka long saber with inscriptions—the characters on the hilt were worn down to the point of being almost illegible, with only the character 'Fang' remaining.

"Lanfang." Lin Yaxing poured the coconut water into an enamel mug. "In the tenth year of the Guangxu reign, the Jia-shen year. The Dutch attacked Dongwanli, and Lanfang's last Kapitan, Liu Asheng, raised a white flag—not to surrender, but because he had hanged himself from the main beam of the General Hall. Before he hanged himself, he left a message: 'I would rather die than be a Dutch dog.'"

He pulled a wooden board from under the threshold and flipped it over. Engraved on the back of the board was a rough map—Northern Borneo, from Pontianak to Singkawang, from Dongwanli to Sambas; the mountains, rivers, and villages were all labeled in Hakka.

"My father carved this," Lin Yaxing said. "Before he died, he told me—'Remember, this land does not belong to the Dutch, nor the British, nor the Malaysians. It was carved out by us Hakka people with our lives. One day, someone will come back to take it.'"

Lin Xiao-7 pushed the slide assembly back into place and removed the dum-dum bullet.

Three days ago, after Zhang Cheng saw that title deed book from the eleventh year of the Guangxu reign in the archives, he added a new mission for the Lin Xiao Squad. The scanned copy that Old K had retrieved from the underground vault was stored on her tactical tablet—'The Lanfang Company General Hall Title Deed Book,' with the vermilion seal of the Lanfang Kapitan stamped on the cover.

"President Zhang asked me to pass a message to you," Lin Xiao-7 said. "That Kapitan seal is still in Naypyidaw. The debt of Lanfang has not expired."

Lin Yaxing's hand, which had been peeling the coconut, stopped.

He placed the enamel mug on the threshold and pulled a photograph, worn almost transparent, from his pocket. The photo was a group shot of three people—in the center was Lin Yaxing's father, on the left was his mother, and on the right was a middle-aged Chinese man wearing a bamboo hat, leaning on a Hakka long saber with two characters carved into the hilt: [Lanfang].

"I have waited seventy years for this photograph," Lin Yaxing said. "I have waited from the age of five until now. I thought Lanfang was gone."

He flipped the photo over, and on the back, a line of text was written in fountain pen: [Winter of the 38th Year of the Republic of China, a photo of the last captain of the Pontianak Chinese Self-Defense Force. The thirty-seven people behind him all died in battle in Singkawang.]

In an abandoned rubber plantation on the outskirts of Sandakan, over eighty young and middle-aged Hakka men and women gathered, carrying shotguns, machetes, and harpoons. The young man leading them was in his early thirties, carrying an old-fashioned shotgun on his shoulder, with four characters painted in red on the stock: [Hakka People Advance].