Jinan Military Region, China
FOUR A.M. STILL DARK. A single long blast of a whistle. Within ninety seconds every member of the cadre was out of bed, dressed and standing stiffly to attention. The doors burst open with the instructors already waiting outside, yelling commands. A green Shacman lorry stood nearby on the parade ground, its exhaust fumes turning blue in the cold, pre-dawn air. This unit of the People’s Liberation Army had no name; officially it did not even exist. It was known, only to a very few, as Project 49.
The lorry pulled up at the edge of the sports ground, under the blazing glare of the arc lights. The men, all in peak physical condition, dismounted and queued in silence to be weighed and measured by a team of officials in white coats with clipboards. Unsmiling nurses in surgical gloves handed out flasks for their urine samples and stuck labels on them as they were returned. The men were taken six at a time, led in batches to the start point, the course measured out precisely, right down to the last centimetre. Exactly one kilometre. No more, no less.
The first grey light of dawn was beginning to creep over the horizon as the final group completed the course and were ordered back onto the truck. The officials gathered to one side in a huddle, their voices hushed and conspiratorial as they pored over the results. The timings were uncannily close together. Twenty-four men had run that course this morning and all were within touching distance of the standing world 1000-metre record. The slowest, at two minutes and twenty-five seconds, had just beaten the women’s world record.
But there would be no Olympic podium for the men of Project 49, no hand-on-heart moment of public glory as the national anthem was played to a packed stadium. Instead, these young men were destined for another purpose and the world would never know their names.