Courtyard House: From Deputy Division Commander to Civilian, Progressing All the Way

"Godfather, please take care." Lou Xiao'e bowed deeply.

Lin Yang turned around, the hem of his black coat billowing sharply in the cold wind of the corridor.

He strode down the hospital stairs and got into the Hongqi sedan that had been idling.

"Go to Fengtai Railway Station," Lin Yang coldly ordered.

An hour later.

The top-secret military platform at Fengtai Railway Station.

A special military train, pulled by two diesel locomotives coupled together, is emitting a deep rumble.

The train was equipped with anti-aircraft machine guns at both the front and rear, as well as fully armed guard carriages.

This is Lin Yang's mobile command center for his trip to Northeast China to reorganize heavy industry.

The rain had stopped, but the night sky before dawn remained a deep, dark black.

Lin Yang stood in front of the boarding ramp of the special train.

I turned around and took one last look at the city of Beijing hidden in the night.

Those conspiracies simmering in the shadows, those rats lurking in the basement...

They will all be completely crushed into powder in the steel storm he is about to unleash.

He didn't linger any longer, his leather shoes making a crisp sound as they stepped on the metal pedals.

After stepping into the warm and bright carriage, Lin Yang went straight to the large mahogany desk.

He took off the sheepskin gloves with a black leather texture and casually tossed them onto the corner of the table.

Then, he took a sharpened red and blue pencil from the pen holder, bent down,

On that map of the Northeast's industrial strategy, which covered the entire table,

It drew a striking red line across the entire Liaodong Peninsula.

The special train roared forward in the darkness before dawn, its wheels screeching against the rails with a deafening roar.

The red line drawn on the map by Lin Yang with his red and blue pencils seemed to possess some irresistible magic, firmly fixing the fate of the entire Northeast heavy industrial base to this desk.

As the train passed Shanhaiguan, the scenery outside the window began to change.

In early spring, the Liaodong Peninsula still carried a chill in the air. Through the car window, Lin Yang could vaguely see the towering chimneys in the distance. Some chimneys were spewing thick black smoke, while others stood silently under the hazy sky like dead steel giants.

This is the eldest son of the new China's industry, the heart of heavy industry built with the full strength of the nation during the First Five-Year Plan.

But now, the heart beats heavily and slowly.

"Minister, we'll arrive at Fengtian South Station in half an hour." Chen Feng pushed open the door of the private compartment and reported in a low voice, "The local arrangements for picking us up have been sent over. The leadership teams of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, the Municipal Revolutionary Committee, and several large heavy industry enterprises are all waiting on the platform. I heard they've also prepared a welcome banquet at the State Guesthouse."

Lin Yang sneered and threw the pencil in his hand onto the map.

"A welcome banquet? I, Lin Yang, am here to check the accounts, to uncover the truth, not to feast on their sea cucumbers and abalone." Lin Yang stood up, grabbed the woolen coat draped over the back of his chair, and put it on. "Inform the train conductor that the special train will not stop at the South Station. It will be rerouted directly to the internal freight station of the military region's logistics base. Let those guys wait patiently in the cold wind."

"Yes!" Chen Feng immediately accepted the order and went to make arrangements.

This unconventional approach was Lin Yang's way of giving the local officials in Northeast China a warning. From the very first second he set foot on this land, he wanted to tell everyone that there was no room for maneuver in the Ministry of Heavy Industry's rectification campaign.

Half an hour later, the special train slowly came to a stop at a heavily guarded military cargo yard.

There were no welcoming crowds with gongs and drums, only heavily armed field army sentries and several military jeeps that had been waiting there.

Lin Yang stepped off the special train and took a deep breath of the air, which smelled strongly of coal and rusty steel.

"Go straight to the military district guesthouse," Lin Yang ordered as he climbed into the jeep.

Meanwhile, on the platform of Fengtian South Station.

A dozen or so local officials, dressed in sharp Zhongshan suits, were shivering in the cold wind. They kept glancing at their watches, their foreheads beaded with cold sweat.

"What's going on? Wasn't the special train supposed to arrive at the station at 8 o'clock sharp? It's already 8:30, and we haven't seen a trace of it!" A deputy director of a local heavy industry bureau anxiously rubbed his hands.

Soon, a station dispatcher ran over, sweating profusely, his voice trembling: "Distinguished leaders... the special train... the special train has been rerouted. Half an hour ago, it went directly into the military region's freight station. Minister Lin... didn't come to the South Station."

The moment those words were spoken, the air on the platform froze.

Several scheming business leaders turned pale. They had prepared an impeccable speech, intending to fool this young, iron-willed minister at the dinner table, but who knew he wouldn't even give them a chance to meet.

"It's over. This living devil isn't going to show us any mercy." Someone sighed in despair.

……

The military district guesthouse is a secluded three-story Soviet-style building.

This place has been completely taken over by the special operations team led by He Yuzhu. From the main gate to the corridor, there are guards every three steps and sentries every five steps, and all communication lines have been subjected to the highest level of physical encryption.

Lin Yang sat in his temporary office on the second floor, with a thick stack of personnel files directly obtained from the military region's intelligence department in front of him.

"Chen Feng, the problems in Northeast China are more complicated than I imagined." Lin Yang frowned as he flipped through a production capacity report from Ansteel. "Aging equipment is one issue, but more fatal is the factionalism and exaggeration within management. Those who truly understand the technology and dare to speak the truth have all been marginalized."

Chen Feng stood aside and nodded: "Minister, if we want to break through here, the investigation team sent down by the ministry alone won't be enough. Even a powerful dragon can't suppress a local snake. We need to find a sharp, clean, and knowledgeable knife in the local area."

"Do you have any suitable candidates?" Lin Yang closed the report and looked up at Chen Feng.

Chen Feng immediately pulled a thin brown paper bag from his briefcase and handed it to Lin Yang.

"Minister, this person might meet your requirements. His name is Pei Yihong."

Lin Yang took the file and pulled out the documents inside.

The young man in the photo is about thirty years old, with thick eyebrows and big eyes, and his eyes reveal an unyielding stubbornness.

"Pei Yihong, a top student from the Department of Metallurgy at Tsinghua University, was assigned to the First Heavy Machinery Plant in Fengtian after graduation." Lin Yang read aloud as he looked at his resume. "At the age of twenty-six, he was promoted to deputy head of the technical department and participated in the comprehensive improvement of equipment built with Soviet assistance."

"A very impressive resume." Lin Yang turned to the next page, raising an eyebrow slightly. "But how come you were demoted to a weighbridge operator at a coal yard in the southern suburbs three years ago?"

Chen Feng sneered and explained, "Three years ago, the factory launched a Great Leap Forward in production, and the steel production targets set by the higher authorities were simply impossible to meet. In order to curry favor with the higher-ups, the factory director at the time forced the illegal addition of scrap materials to the steelmaking furnaces to make up the numbers."

"This Pei Yihong is a stubborn man. He took the technical parameters and slammed his fist on the table at the factory-wide meeting. He said that steel made in this way would be a murder weapon if it were used in the military or bridge industry! He refused to sign the conformity report."

"The result was predictable." Chen Feng shrugged. "The factory director directly labeled him as 'sabotaging production and having right-leaning ideology.' That very afternoon, he was sent to the dirtiest and most tiring coal yard in the entire factory in the southern suburbs to count coal slag. He did this for three years. During that time, countless people advised him to write a self-criticism and admit his mistakes so that he could be transferred back to the technical department, but he didn't write a single word."