Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

“You’ve also had a helicopter tour. How many people in Beijing can claim that?”

Everyone got out, and together they entered the visitors’ center—a large room with white lace curtains and numerous display cases. The pathologist, hoping to make the most of his ten minutes, hustled across the room to the introductory display.

The place was chockablock with baggage and cranky Chinese, Japanese, and American tourists whose boats had been unable to pass through the narrow open channel. Now they would board buses and either go downstream to Wuhan, thus ending what had been advertised as a memorable experience but had concluded as a series of sights unseen, or go to a little port farther west and head upstream against the increasingly difficult current.

Hulan gave her name to a woman in a bright kelly green uniform who sat behind the front desk. The woman called to the site and said someone would be down for the inspector in a few minutes. Hulan then found David, Fong, and the pilot staring into one of the exhibit cases. She wanted a minute alone with David, but she wouldn’t ask for it and give the pathologist more to gossip about in the MPS hallways other than that she and David hadn’t spoken during breakfast. Hulan stared at David, trying to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided her eyes.

“I guess we should get going then,” he said.

Hulan walked them to the exit. When the pilot and Fong went on ahead, she grabbed hold of David’s arm. “I think this is right,” she said, when what she meant was she wished she could relive last night, the past year, the day Chaowen first fell ill. She would do them all differently.

The hurt on his face lacerated her.

“You’ll be back tomorrow,” she said, when what she meant was that he hadn’t let her finish her confession last night. She had been ready to acknowledge fully her failure as a mother, not his as a husband and father.

He stared out to the parking lot. Fong was standing next to the helicopter, apparently waiting for David to take the backseat.

“Take my cell phone,” she said quietly, when what she meant was that she understood that he could never forgive her. She could never forgive herself either. “It doesn’t work in the gorges, but you might be able to reach me in the hotel.”

And with that he pushed through the swinging doors.

“Tell the pilot to come right back after he drops you off,” she called out, when what she wanted to say was that she loved him.

The chopper revved noisily to life, wobbled uncertainly into the air, hovered for a moment, then swung away downriver and out of view.

During these last few days Hulan had unraveled in many ways. Coming out here, she’d been skeptical of Vice Minister Zai’s secret romantic plan, but then she’d found herself being drawn in and drawn out by David. It was wonderful to be held again by him, to talk to him, to make love to him, but she saw now that those fleeting moments had weakened her defenses. Last night in the cave, she’d been pushed even further, which aroused a terrifying set of memories going back many years. During the Cultural Revolution she’d experienced what zealotry could do to people. She’d also seen the damage and death that her actions and inactions had caused. She’d accepted responsibility for her mindless obedience and the tragedies that had come as a result. She lived with it every day in the person of her mother. She felt guilty every time she chatted with Neighborhood Committee Director Zhang or saw Vice Minister Zai. She let her day-to-day life become a penance, and she’d become an inspector at the Ministry of Public Security so she could right her past wrongs. But how many times had she failed in that? Her father’s death, more than 150 women at the Knight factory, Lily yesterday….

None of those came close to the way she had failed her daughter. Last night when she’d tried to confess—after all these months of holding her guilt inside—she heard the words come out of her mouth and magically transform into syllables with very different meanings as they’d reached David’s ears. She hadn’t meant to accuse David; she’d hoped to tell him that she’d made terrible mistakes—hanging on to China and refusing to give up the past—which led ultimately to Chaowen’s death. Even though she had wanted finally to accept responsibility for her failings, she was unprepared for his complete condemnation.

The pain of that and the knowledge that her punishment could never end forced her to focus her mind just as she had these past months. She collapsed her grief, her loss, her suffering, her guilt, until it was a tiny, manageable speck. Then she tucked it into her heart and opened her brain, letting the All-Patriotic Society’s chants, sermons, exercises, and donations fill it. This coping mechanism didn’t inhibit her ability to intellectualize; she understood that one disturbed Chinese woman didn’t represent everyone in the All-Patriotic Society, just as she knew that a few pedophiles didn’t represent all Catholic priests or that Osama bin Laden didn’t represent all Muslims. She could look at the group from David’s perspective and see that it might even be beneficial to some people.

Hulan would question Stuart Miller about what she’d heard in the cave last night and warn him that the group was making threatening noises about him. Then she would do something that was nearly unbearable for her to contemplate. She would give up the group as her buttress against her internal torment, dedicate herself to solving this case, and go home. Chaowen would not be waiting for her, and David might eventually leave, but Hulan would finally try to accept the consequences of her life. She felt a wave of doubt, then forcibly shook it from her mind.

Where was Stuart’s car? She looked up toward the dam site and saw no vehicles on the highway. She turned away and walked to a model of the dam, where she began reading:

Begun in 1994, the dam is the most ambitious engineering project in the history of the world. The Three Gorges Dam will be the only man-made edifice other than the Great Wall of China to be seen from space.

That the Great Wall could be seen from space was an exaggeration, but there’d be no getting around national pride here.

The Three Gorges Dam will be the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, providing one-tenth of the country’s electricity needs. Twenty-six generator sets of turbines will have an installed capability of 18,200 megawatts of electricity….

She moved to another display, which listed the dam’s vital statistics in Western measurements for the benefit of tourists: 20,000 workers, 953 million cubic feet of concrete, 354,000 tons of rebar, 281,000 tons of other metal. The dam, when completed, would be five times wider than the Hoover Dam. The “Lake Within the Gorges” would be 370 miles long—placid, beautiful, and useful. Gigantic cargo ships and ocean liners—which were now barred above Wuhan because of the Three Gorges’ shallow depths and narrow passages—would be able to navigate up 1,500 miles from the Pacific Ocean, making Chongqing the largest inland seaport in the world.

The receptionist found Hulan and told her that the car had arrived. She went outside, introduced herself to the driver, and got into a muddy Mercedes. They followed the river back west along a brand-new four-lane highway, stopping occasionally at booths manned by heavily armed guards so that the driver could show his stamped certification documents. Up on the hillsides, she saw military bunkers.

They passed through one more security checkpoint, then drove onto the sprawling site itself. Huge billboards appealed to the workers’ patriotic duty in large red characters: ASPIRE TO BUILD THE THREE GORGES DAM FOR OUR CHINA and FIRST-CLASS MANAGEMENT, HIGH-QUALITY WORKMANSHIP, FIRST-RATE CONSTRUCTION. Colossal red cranes towered over giant yellow earthmovers. Bulldozers and dump trucks rumbled over the earth down to the water, where they dropped their loads of rocks and boulders into the channel. Workers dressed in blue coveralls and rattan hard hats did much of the labor by hand, chipping at the earth with hammers and shovels. Reddish dust billowed up everywhere and dissipated into the gray sky.

The driver wended his way past trucks, bamboo scaffolding, and groups of men and women taking breaks. He stopped next to the massive pit and motioned for Hulan to get out. Once she was outside, the noise was deafening and the heat truly astounding. The driver handed her a hard hat and shouted directions in her ear.

She threaded her way down into the pit until she found Stuart Miller, shirtsleeves rolled up, dripping with sweat and giving instructions to a group of workers. He acknowledged his visitor with a wave, gave a few more directives, patted one of the men on the back, then came up to Hulan with his hand outstretched and his face spread in a proud smile. Only after shaking hands did he glance down, see how dirty his were, grin naughtily, then brush them off on his very dusty pants.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he shouted. He didn’t wait for an answer but took hold of her elbow and pulled her along the path. He exhibited an almost adolescent delight in showing Hulan this very male accomplishment. He expanded on many of the facts that she’d just read in the visitors’ center, pointing out that his company’s generators would be the first to become operational. Miller Enterprises was providing the first eight, another foreign company was providing the second eight, then the two companies would form a joint venture with a Chinese consortium to teach the Mainlanders how to build, install, and maintain the final ten.

“We’re just a year away from electrical output,” he boasted. “People talk about how some of the turbines will produce up to eight hundred megawatts. Do you want to know what that means in real terms? By 2009, when the dam is fully operational, the electricity produced will displace the burning of about fifty million tons of raw coal each year. Put another way, each of these turbines will generate electricity equal to one nuclear power station. Personally, I’d take a single dam built to the best specifications in the world over the possibility of twenty-four Chernobyls.”

When Hulan said something about wanting to talk privately, Stuart’s enthusiasm ebbed. He nodded, gestured back up the hill, and set a brisk pace. He waved to people as he went, and Hulan saw just how many non-Chinese were here.