Chapter 359: Meeting the Undercover
Xia Lili didn't dare to look into Li Qihan's eyes. She lowered her head and muttered "It's okay" in a low voice.
She stood up with the help of Li Qihan's arm, and quickly brushed off the dirt and grass on her body, trying to use her actions to cover up the huge waves in her heart.
Li Qihan naturally withdrew his hand, as if everything that had just happened was just a small episode in the tactical coordination.
"Check your equipment and move on in five minutes."
Li Qihan turned to the assembled team members, and his voice returned to his usual calm and decisive tone.
Only he himself knew that the skin on the side of his neck, which had been ironed by her breath, still seemed to retain a strange warmth.
The team continued to move forward cautiously along Route B.
The journey ahead was still difficult, requiring constant chopping of vines, wading through streams, and trudging through the mud, one step deep and one step shallow.
But fortunately, apart from occasionally scaring away some birds and small animals, we did not encounter the expected man-made ambushes or extremely threatening natural dangers such as wild elephants.
That excessive calm made the experienced team members even more alert, like the silence before a storm.
After several hours of arduous marching, based on the map and the Camel's constantly calibrated positioning, they finally reached the edge of the target area.
Through the gaps in the dense bushes, you can see that the terrain ahead is slightly wider, and a small village is scattered in the valley.
This is the meeting point.
Sanbianpo Palang Village.
The village before me presented a dilapidated and depressing scene, with dozens of stilt wooden or bamboo houses scattered sparsely, many of them tilted, their roofs thatched and rotten.
There are almost no traces of modernization in the village. There are no electric poles, no cement roads, only muddy dirt roads connecting each household.
Some skinny dogs were foraging for food beside the garbage dump, and a few ragged, skinny children were squatting under the eaves, looking towards the jungle with blank yet wary eyes.
The whole village was dead silent, and the air was filled with a complex smell of livestock manure, rotting matter and fireworks.
This is obviously one of the countless villages in the Sanbianpo area that is shrouded in the shadow of poverty, isolation and crime.
The villagers here are all workers hired by the criminal gangs in Sanbianpo. They have been exploited all the time. Any little money in their pockets will be used to buy the "leaves" produced by the criminal leaders. The criminal leaders' pockets are getting fatter and fatter, while the villagers' health has been ruined generation after generation.
According to the predetermined plan, someone needs to sneak into the village and meet with the undercover agent.
Xia Lili was identified as the best candidate to carry out the liaison mission because of her relatively unfamiliar face and calm adaptability.
She quickly camouflaged herself in a cover point, took off her combat uniform, and changed into a dull-colored tube skirt and loose top commonly worn by local women. She painted her face and exposed skin a sallow and dull yellow with special oil paint, and wrapped her hair with an old headscarf.
She carried a backpack filled with cheap groceries and looked like a poor mountain dweller who came to visit relatives or sell small commodities.
Li Qihan and other team members were scattered and hidden in the commanding heights and hiding spots outside the village to provide long-range surveillance and support.
Xia Lili took a deep breath, adjusted her breathing, walked out of the jungle alone, and stepped onto the muddy path leading to the village.
She tried her best to imitate the slightly hunched gait of the local women, and walked with her head lowered and her eyes submissive towards the big banyan tree in the village that served as a meeting point and was hung with prayer flags.
Before reaching the banyan tree, she took advantage of the backpack and took out a small mirror disguised as an ordinary wooden comb from an inconspicuous little pocket.
She pretended to adjust her headscarf and glanced quickly at herself in the mirror.
What was reflected in the mirror was a completely unfamiliar, weather-beaten, haggard face. Only those eyes, clear, sharp, full of vigilance and determination, still belonged to Xia Lili herself.
The moment her eyes met her own in the mirror—
Xia Lili's eyes suddenly blurred, and the familiar feeling of detachment came over her again. Cold illusions flooded into her mind like a tide.
The hallucination was so clear it was breathtaking:
She followed a middle-aged man wearing ordinary local clothes and with a vigilant look. After exchanging secret codes, they seemed to have successfully arrived behind a stilt house deep in the village.
There was a small garden there, barely enclosed by a bamboo fence, where some wilted vegetables were planted.
The contact person looked around and lowered his voice to shout a code word in the direction of the pile of debris in the corner of the garden.
Immediately afterwards, a figure suspected to be an undercover agent hesitantly emerged from behind the debris.
At the moment the undercover agent appears!
"Bang!"
A dull and sudden sound tore through the apparent tranquility of the village!
A ball of blood suddenly burst out from the contact man's temples. Before he could even make any sound, he fell straight forward to the ground and died instantly!
Almost at the same time, seven or eight burly men armed with weapons suddenly jumped out from behind the surrounding stilt houses, next to the firewood piles, and even from the alley they had just passed through. They instantly surrounded her and the undercover agent who had just been exposed, and pointed their black weapons at them.
Resistance was futile, as she and the undercover agent were quickly disarmed and roughly tied up.
The illusion ended with her being locked up in a dark, damp place, tortured, and ultimately reduced to a cold corpse. She was hastily wrapped and thrown into the turbid, fast-flowing river outside the village under cover of night, where she was instantly swallowed by the water...
The illusion came to an abrupt end.
Xia Lili suddenly came to her senses, her back was instantly soaked with cold sweat, and her heart was beating wildly in her chest.
On the disguised face in the mirror, the only real eyes were filled with shock and fear.
What went wrong?
How did you get discovered?
Xia Lili forced herself to calm down, and like the most sophisticated scanner, she reviewed every detail of the hallucination over and over again.
Finally, she caught a key point that had been overlooked before!
Just as she was exchanging secret signals with the contact person, a short and thin man in a tattered sweatshirt happened to walk past them with his head lowered. His steps seemed to pause slightly, and he glanced at them as if unintentionally!
At that time, this detail flashed by in the illusion and did not attract the attention of "her in the illusion".
But now it seems that the short and thin man is most likely the spy!
It was he who noticed this unusual contact and quickly notified the ambushers.
"That's the flaw!"
Xia Lili's mind suddenly became clear.
She immediately and decisively changed her plan of action. She no longer rushed to the big banyan tree that served as the initial meeting point, but pretended to be attracted by a small stall selling low-quality tobacco on the roadside.
Xia Lili squatted down and locked her eyes with the short and thin man who was wandering not far away and whom she had just identified from the hallucination.
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