The Bone Hunters by Robert J. Mrazek Page A

and waited to be summoned.
    â€œEnter,” said Zhou, a benign smile on his pink, rotund face.
    At his age of fifty-eight, his bald head retained a fringe of the rare ginger hair color that had once been lacquered into a luxuriant pompadour. Only his butterscotch eyebrows remained thick and bristly above his gold-flecked brown eyes.
    â€œThank you, my lord,” said his oldest son.
    Li came and stood by the inlaid mahogany dining table that had once graced the palace of the Yellow Emperor in Xinm. He formally bowed to his father again before sitting down across from him.
    Zhou speared a chilled jumbo prawn from a filigreed silver platter and placed the crustacean in his mouth. He chewed the tender meat with pleasure before taking a sip of well-chilled sauvignon blanc.
    â€œWe will be arriving in thirty-five minutes, my lord,” said Li.
    There were no longer any royal titles in the Chinese ruling class, but one of the women in Zhou’s personal entourage assured him that based on genealogical research, Zhou was a direct descendant of Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty. Liu Bang had assumed the formal title of Huangdi, or Yellow Emperor.
    In a rare moment of self-perceived humility, Zhou had announced that even though he was entitled to be called emperor, in the future he was to be addressed by all as simply Lord Zhou. This included his family.
    Li favored his mother’s looks, his face almost simian in caste with a bulging lower lip and close-set black eyes. Also in contrast to his corpulent father’s, his sinewy body was muscular and strong, and he worked hard to keep it so as an example to the men. His only physical weakness lay in his severely myopic eyes. In public he masked theaffliction with contact lenses, but in private he wore thick spectacles.
    â€œThese people need to be taught a lesson,” said Zhou. “An object lesson to show the others.”
    â€œIt will be done, my lord,” said Li as the train’s speed began to perceptibly slow down.
    Zhou had his own set of the train’s gauges and instruments in his personal car. He had been fascinated by trains from the time he was a little boy, back when the steam locomotives barely exceeded forty miles an hour on the old narrow-gauge tracks.
    Now he could afford to indulge his passions. This fifteen-car train had cost Zhou three hundred million dollars, but it was proving to be a sound investment. It housed and fed his paramilitary team of two hundred Special Forces troops along with their weapons and attack vehicles.
    Alone among the oligarchs, he had foreseen the rapid development of high-speed rail in China, a network that had grown exponentially since 2007. More than twenty thousand miles of track now connected every part of China except the western provinces.
    Zhou hadn’t been born at the time of the Chinese revolution, but his father, Xi Shen Wui, had become a senior bureaucrat in the party and he had paved the way for his son’s rise to the politburo. Zhou had come to power during the capitalist reform period in the late 1990s.
    One of the first oligarchs, he had built partnerships with other members of the politburo before outmaneuvering them and stripping them of their holdings. His fortune was now estimated at eighteen billion dollars.
    Much of his wealth was situated in Sichuan Province, historically called the “Province of Abundance.” His holdings included millions of acres of oranges, peaches, grapes, and sugarcane. His pig farms produced nearly ten percent of the pork output in the country. In recent years, he had acquired a major interest in the companies producing vanadium, cobalt, titanium, and lithium, along with a string of newly constructed chemical companies.
    â€œDid your legionnaires enjoy their feast?” he asked.
    He inserted a gold-tipped oval Turkish cigarette in his ivory holder, lit it, and took a deep, contented puff.
    â€œTo a man, my lord.”
    Zhou had arranged