Chapter 157: Chaotic Battle in Shenyang (10)

The demands of the American spies were absolutely satisfied. While ordinary Chinese citizens starved to death every day, vast quantities of food were wasted on these spies daily, and they were even provided with the finest young women on a rotating basis.

The National Security Agency could not determine whether the activation of corrupt elements was a "Falcon" operation orchestrated by the Americans. After all, corrupt individuals had been effectively utilized by the Americans throughout more than thirty years of reform and opening up, so it could hardly be considered a high-level classified operation.

The Special Committee grew even more apprehensive. This single plan had plagued China for so many years, and even now, at the apocalyptic end of days for humanity, it continued to wreak havoc. How many innocent lives would a higher-classified Falcon Plan destroy?

Li Fengyi hardened his resolve to unearth this falcon. Since there was no way out anyway, failing to destroy it meant being destroyed by it.

Wu Nianfu piled gasoline drums around the cannons, placing them among the civilians under tight guard.

During the initial artillery bombardment, many civilians near the cannons were left permanently deafened, and a significant number exhibited symptoms of dementia.

Infiltrators into the Qipanshan Base discovered that Shenyang was riddled with surveillance equipment such as cameras set up by Wu Nianfu. The prisons housed a considerable batch of high-I.Q. criminals specializing in electronic and software technologies.

When the Special Committee’s military supply base in Shenyang was struck and detonated by Wu Nianfu earlier, these monitoring devices had played a major role by calibrating the artillery landing points. In response, the Special Committee military thoroughly inspected the perimeter of Qipanshan, unearthing numerous surveillance components which were later recycled by salvage companies as spare parts.

A massive amount of military hardware was lost at the time. However, because the Special Committee possessed information on all national warehouses, including top-secret strategic stockpiles, they opened various depots near Shenyang to replenish their arms and supplies, successfully completing the task of reclaiming Northeast China—excluding the mountain ranges.

Within the following month, they completely resupplied their military provisions from the rear to provide a safeguard against unexpected events, refusing to rely entirely on the legacy left by the predecessors of the Republic.

Reconnaissance also revealed that the horde of tens of millions of zombies in Diaobingshan City had originally been rushing toward Shenyang along the mountain roads during the conflict between the Special Committee and the Qipanshan Base. Seen on the map, the straight-line distance was very short, but due to the winding mountain roads, the distance was stretched, and the narrow pathways also limited the zombies' passage capacity. After the Special Committee stabilized the situation and formed a complete encirclement of the Qipanshan Base, this horde of zombies—having not yet reached its destination—turned around and retreated back into the Changbai Mountain range.

This led Li Qiang to believe that the zombies were not stripped of their courage, but rather had become even more cunning, never striking unless certain of success. They loved to loot a burning house when facing the Special Committee, but the question was: how did they discover the Special Committee's movements?

After receiving a report from the special forces stating that they had killed numerous isolated zombies trapped in cars along the Shen-Si Expressway during their infiltration of the Qipanshan Base—and connecting this with data from the Ministry of Science and Technology indicating a zombie visual range of one hundred meters and a pheromone transmission distance of fifty kilometers—the General Staff Headquarters had an epiphany. They ordered the military to conduct a systematic, grid-like sweep across the Special Committee's territory to exterminate every single zombie, refusing to spare even one merely because it was trapped and immobile. These isolated zombies could all function as surveillance nodes with a fifty-kilometer transmission radius.

The Military Intelligence Department of the General Staff made a classified report to Li Fengyi, announcing that they had established contact with the People's Liberation Army bases in the Greater Khingan, Lesser Khingan, and Changbai Mountains.

After allocating personnel to organize the intelligence data from the various former departments of the General Staff, their first phase was to locate all the most urgently needed warehouses across the country. The Special Committee then issued corresponding notifications based on the conditions of survivors in various regions, adhering to the principles of preventing starvation without causing waste, and avoiding excessive militarization to prevent regional warlordism.

A small fraction of these warehouses had already been discovered by people—for instance, residents near the depots certainly knew a thing or two, and domestic and foreign enemies like Wu Nianfu had also probed them, managing to breach the security facilities. The vast majority of warehouses, however, remained classified as military secrets and had yet to be discovered.

By informing the survivor bases in urgent need of supplies while simultaneously maintaining people's livelihood, the Special Committee also legitimized its own organization: not only were they notorious for heavy exactions during peacetime, but at critical moments, they also provided services to the people.

During the second phase, they compiled a list of all secret military bases nationwide and established contact with them one by one. A very small number had vanished; due to satellite failures, remote video connections could not be established, and the causes remained unknown.

The Ministry of Industry was already considering increasing the construction of high-power relay base stations.

The greatest harvest of this phase was the restoration of contact with the Second Artillery Corps' thousands of kilometers of strategic tunnels. The strategic forces demanded access to the national cryptographic codes to determine whether to submit to the leadership of the Special Committee, and these codes were currently being sought.

Several aerospace bases also required cryptographic codes to rejoin the fold. They stated that once reinstated, they could find a way to launch a few satellites according to the Special Committee's orders to test the results, which came as an extraordinarily pleasant surprise.

Where on earth were the national cryptographic codes kept?

Everyone scratched their heads in frustration. Top-secret departments had traditionally moved in tandem with central leadership, and during the apocalypse, they had been wiped out entirely along with them.

The most valuable achievement of the second phase was establishing contact with the secret bases in the Greater Khingan, Lesser Khingan, and Changbai Mountains. Although they possessed strategic nuclear weapons and held the highest security clearance, meaning they could not immediately rejoin, after patient persuasion by the General Staff, they nevertheless agreed to achieve intelligence sharing.

According to their reports, zombie hordes blanketed nearly every hilltop across these three mountain ranges!

They were utterly unable to venture outside as they had right at the start of the apocalypse. Back then, even though wild animals had grown gigantic, as long as one was careful, patrols were still feasible. Currently, they could only survive on stockpiled supplies. Fortunately, when constructed, the contingency of a nuclear war cutting off outside support had been factored in, leaving them with abundant material reserves.

At present, all the Special Committee could ask them to do was observe the movements of the zombie hordes and perform early warning duties within them.

The most depressed party of all was the zombie hordes themselves. They could sense that the finest food was right beside them, yet they were unable to consume it. Defensive structures capable of withstanding near-surface nuclear blasts were not pushovers; scratching with hands and gnawing with teeth proved completely useless. They grew frantic with anxiety until they finally grew accustomed to it.

The Russian border was maintained primarily for defense for the time being; that terrain was far too vast to be resolved in a short period.

The main offensive direction was the Korean Peninsula. Pushing through to the coastline would completely consolidate a strategic theater.

The mountain zombies were dealt with primarily through containment. The Ministry of Industry, led by Sun Xiaoshan, designed and finalized automated machine-gun turrets utilizing graphic image recognition technology. These turrets could automatically aim and fire at humanoid, moving objects lacking body heat. Their effectiveness at night was less than ideal, primarily because zombies were cold-blooded creatures and could not be detected via infrared methods; the front lines could only be illuminated using searchlights.

Acoustic detection methods were impractical. The background noise of wind blowing through leaves in the mountain forests masked the sounds of zombie activity, and the two sound wavelengths shared the same frequency, making effective identification impossible.

While relieving himself behind a tree, a soldier was accidentally wounded by friendly fire. Having survived numerous brushes with death, soldiers possessed rather fiery tempers; clutching his backside, he cursed angrily, "Damn the Ministry of Industry! My entire future aesthetic depends on this spot!"

Upon receiving the accident report, Sun Xiaoshan broke out in a cold sweat. In accordance with the National Compensation Law newly revised by the National People's Congress, he brought the person in charge along with a basket of fruit to visit the injured female soldier at the field hospital, compensating her for buttock cosmetic surgery and psychological distress.

As the chief designer, the person in charge was legally required to follow up until the victim made a full recovery. Consequently, he had to shuttle back and forth between his workplace and the hospital until the reunification of South Korea later on, when an surviving plastic surgeon was found to perform cosmetic surgery on her buttocks.

Acting with a sense of responsibility toward the victim, the person in charge thoroughly tested the victim's buttocks and felt that the performance was excellent, having fully restored all due functions. The young woman became pregnant...

They got married. Riding the fast lane of the Planned Marriage and Birth Law, with high yield and high transport capacity, they had twelve children in ten years, and the young woman was honored with the title of "Heroic Mother" in the Pantheon of Apocalyptic Human Heroes.

Xu Zibin commented, "A single stray shot forged a heroic mother."

The person in charge happily told anyone he met, "My children are just enough to form a soccer team." Later on, when his children turned out to be rather mediocre, he gloomily remarked to his children on his deathbed, "I shouldn't have said you could form a soccer team. I didn't realize Chinese soccer was so terrible and passed that bad luck on to all of you..."