Ball Lightning

“ ‘But I found inspiration there anyway. When I came home, we started using gene technology to modify bees. It might have been the earliest application of genetic engineering. Little was accomplished the first few years, since molecular biology was still primitive throughout the world, and also because the political suppression of genetics in the Soviet Union a short while before had caused technology of that sort to lag behind. But by the early eighties we finally made a breakthrough in breeding highly toxic, highly aggressive bees. Marshal Dmitry Yazov personally observed a test in which one attack bee stung a bull to death. The marshal was greatly impressed, and I, as director, was awarded the Order of the Red Star. Money poured into the project, and further studies were made of the possibility of combat use of attack bees. Our first breakthrough came in target discrimination. New bees were bred to be highly sensitive to certain chemicals, which our forces could apply in minute amounts to their bodies to avoid accidental harm. The next development was in bee toxicity: joining the initial highly toxic variety that could kill instantly was a new breed, equally deadly, but with mortality delayed by five to ten days, so as to increase the burden on the enemy….

“ ‘This storage tank contains one hundred thousand attack-bee embryos.’ ”

Here Lin Yun sighed, and her voice trembled. “You can imagine how I felt when I heard this. My eyes darkened and I nearly collapsed, but, still holding out hope, I asked her if they had ever been used in combat. But I had already guessed the answer. Without noticing my expression, she told me even more excitedly that, due to the war with Cambodia and border conflicts with China, Vietnam was constantly asking the Soviets for weapons, causing headaches for the Politburo, which gave them only perfunctory replies. When Lê Duẩn visited, the general secretary promised to provide the most advanced weapons systems to Vietnam—meaning none other than the attack bees. She was sent to Vietnam with one hundred thousand attack bees. You can imagine how incensed the Vietnamese were when the advanced weapons systems they had been dreaming about turned out to be a beehive. They said that the Soviets had engaged in shameless deception toward their comrades while standing on the front lines of a bloody war against imperialism.

“While it was true that the Soviet leadership was giving them the brush-off, she personally believed that no one had been cheated. Although the Vietnamese didn’t realize the attack bees’ power at first, they did put them into action, deploying a special forces division from the General Department for Military Intelligence to handle it.

“Before they did, the Russian woman took the division through a weeklong training and then went with them to the front lines. Trembling, but still clinging to a pitiful thread of hope, I asked her, ‘Which front lines? Cambodia?’ She said, ‘Not Cambodia. The Vietnamese army had the absolute advantage on that front. It was the northern front. Against you.’ I looked at her in terror, and said, ‘You… you went to the Vietnam-China border?!’ She said she had—not to the farthest front lines, of course, but to Lang Son, and she had watched every time the five-man teams of wiry young guys applied an identification agent to their collars and ran off to the front carrying two thousand attack bees…

“Finally noticing the state I was in, she asked, ‘What’s wrong? The whole time, all we conducted were experimental attacks. We’d hardly gotten any of your people by the time the war ended.’ She said it so casually, like talking about a ball game.

“If we were only chatting between two soldiers, then I was out of line, since I ought to have been able to remain relaxed even when discussing the Zhenbao Island Incident.{Zhenbao Island, also known as Damanskii Island, was the site of a border clash in March 1969 during the seven-month undeclared conflict that marked the height of the Sino-Soviet Split.} But I didn’t want to tell her the cause of Mom’s death, so I ran out, leaving her staring in shock. She chased me and caught up to me and begged me to tell her what she’d done wrong, but I struggled free and ran aimlessly through the frozen streets.

“It snowed that night, and for a moment I felt the grim face of the world. Later, a police patrol van rounding up drunks took me back to the hotel….