by Sean Parnell
Zaifeng rose, picked up his bo, and slipped off his formless black shoes. It was very cold in the hall yet he hadn’t ignited his stove, but he often trained half naked in the snow, so this chill inside was nothing. He walked to the dungeon hatch, pulled it open, and descended the dark stone stairwell.
The man they called Casino was still in the dreary cavern and chained to the glistening stone wall. Yet his bonds had been slackened because he’d been cooperative—in fact, inventive with his whispered pleas to the American president—so draining his already failing body of strength would have been unnecessarily cruel. He was still the enemy, of course, and a traitor to the Chinese people, but the Swords of Qing were not animals.
Zaifeng appeared at the foot of the stone stairwell, framed in the yellow glow of its string of small bulbs. He walked toward his prisoner, tapping his bo on the slick rock floor and unmoved that its temperature was peeling the skin from his soles.
Casino raised his head. He had black bristles now across his slackened jaw and his eyes were rimmed with exhaustion, resembling a raccoon’s. For the first time since having him captured and brought to the fortress, Zaifeng called him by his real name.
“Chan Myung,” he said. “Did they give you a meal today?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” the prisoner whispered, then coughed. The lieutenant called Po had told him to always address Zaifeng that way.
“Good. And I have news for you. Your tasks are complete, and you preformed them well.”
Chan Myung sat a bit more erect on his stool. His feet were roped to its legs and his thighs shivered.
“I did the best that I could,” he said.
“Yes.” Zaifeng began to walk back and forth across Chan Myung’s vision, tapping his bo on the floor, and the prisoner followed him with his bloodshot eyes, as if watching a pacing tiger. “And now, I feel that you deserve a full explanation.”
“I would only want freedom, nothing more.”
Zaifeng stopped and looked at him. “You will be liberated very shortly.” He resumed pacing. “I feel it important that the Communist Party understands. And as we all know from our schooling, the education of the masses begins with a single pupil . . . like the very first plant one waters in a farmer’s field, which then spreads its seeds across the land.”
“You will be releasing me back to the Party?”
“Let us say that your message shall soon be delivered . . . and so will mine. When the Americans believe that the People’s Liberation Army has destroyed one of their aircraft carriers, with all aboard, Beijing shall hear us, loud and clear.” Zaifeng stopped moving and faced his prisoner, gripping the bo like a Roman centurion as he gazed at the dripping ceiling. “At any rate, Chan Myung, hear this. My grandfather was the last great emperor of China. He was imprisoned by the imperialist Japanese, made impotent as they raped Nanking, then collared like a dog and made their puppet in Manchu. And what happened, Chan Myung, when again we enjoyed liberation? When he should have regained the throne of the Forbidden City? You and your kind came along.”
“But, Your Highness,” Chan Myung stuttered, “I was not born—”
“The Japanese, at least, understood what an emperorship means!” Zaifeng boomed and Chan Myung fell silent. “You did not. You imprisoned him again, humiliated him, reeducated him in the foul godless rantings of Mao Zedong. We were made to wear dunce caps, confess our sins, stripped of our livelihoods, our honor flayed from us along with our skins!”
Zaifeng inhaled a long breath and exhaled steam from his lungs. He grew quiet again and went on.
“Yes, the Japanese raped Nanking, but you Communist thieves rape the world. In place of a glorious dynasty, you are now a kingdom of corporations. Where once every man was freethinking, you have turned us into submissive fools. Your Party tells us how we may think, what we must say, what books we may read, which of us must be silenced, who must be stripped of their livelihoods for ill thoughts and expressions, and who shall be rewarded for cowardly compliance.”
Zaifeng lowered his gaze and tipped his bo toward Chan Myung, who tried to swallow but couldn’t.
“You have stripped us of our cultural greatness, in exchange for making sneakers for Nike and smartphones for Apple, using our precious little girls as slaves.”
“I . . . we . . . we can repent, Your Highness,” Chan Myung whispered. “We can change—”
“It must end, Chan Myung. We must have honor again.” Zaifeng’s expression softened. He’d said what he needed Chan Myung to hear. “But I can assure you of this. You will be remembered as a hero to the Chinese people, the free Chinese people, because without you the CCP could never have been overthrown.”
It was then that Chan Myung realized that Zaifeng was mad, and that he would never be leaving this place.
“May I ask a question?” He was weeping now.
“Ask.”
“Why did you make me give the Americans a false location, so they could rescue me?”
“So that when you did not appear, they would believe that the Party had caught you, and that you were dead.”
Chan Myung gathered some courage, his last.
“But you are delusional, Zaifeng! The Americans are soft. Covid wasn’t enough to make them go to war with Beijing, and it decimated countries all over the world. What makes you think that this insane plan of yours will work?”
“Faith,” said Zaifeng. He squeezed a button in the middle of his bo, and a long slim bayonet sprang from its snout like a stiletto.
Chan Myung closed his eyes.
Chapter 31
Ulaanbadrakh, Mongolia
Allie Whirly could fly just about anything, but the Russian Antonov AN-2 was a stubborn beotch. It was the world’s largest single-engine biplane, looked like an obese Sopwith Camel from World War I, and weighed almost four tons, empty. The passenger cabin, nothing more than a shell of ribbed girders and rattling metal skin, could deliver twelve paratroopers from the left rear cargo door, if none of them were impaled on the bladed tail. You jumped from this airplane only if you were a Soviet Spetsnaz, or crazy.
This one had been gifted to the Mongolian Air Force by the Russians after the Vietnam War, was striped in ugly olive-and-white camouflage, and still had the faded Soviet star on its flanks and patched-up bullet holes. Ten years back it had been sold off to a Mongolian crop duster, which was why Steele had been able to rent it at Chinggis Khaan airport in Ulaanbaatar with a reference from Oren Belmont and six thousand euros in cash. He’d lied and told the proprietor they were only taking it sightseeing.
“At night?” the crop duster had marveled.
“My pilot’s snow-blind. She likes the moon.”
But there was no moon, nor stars. There was a two-thousand-foot ceiling of thick purple thunderheads and a 40 mph headwind, and the route to Ulaanbadrakh was a rolling carpet of snow below, from which craggy ice hills popped up without warning. Roaring headlong at five hundred feet above ground and 160 miles per hour, the Antonov rattled like a garbage can in a hurricane, and the engine was so loud that in order for someone to hear you, you had to shout in their ear.
Allie was in the cockpit’s left seat, left glove on the airplane’s old-fashioned yoke, right glove on the center console throttle, wearing her leather flying jacket and the Snoopy helmet and goggles she’d borrowed from Belmont, with no intention of ever bringing them back, if she survived. The cockpit instruments were marked in Cyrillic, but air speed indicators and altimeters looked the same in any language. Shane Wiley hunched in the right seat, wearing a fur hat and leather gauntlets as he stared wide-eyed out the six-paneled frosted-up windshield, regretting his reenlistment. Allie had dubbed him her copilot, even though he hadn’t flown anything since training in a Piper J3 as a kid.
“Can you fly this thing?” she’d asked him as they took off.
“Why the hell would I have to?”
“In case I get shot in the face.”
“Well, I can probably crash-land it.”
&nbs
p; “That’ll work.”
In the rear passenger cabin, which had been stripped of seats long ago, Steele, Slick, and Miles sat boots to rump near the open left door. A black icy wind whipped through its maw and hammered their faces, while their spines were pounded like kettledrums by the bouncing steel floor. They all wore the Italian alpine suits, boots, and gloves they’d taken from Vladivostok, plus balaclavas picked up en route in Irkutsk, but none of that did much for the wind shear. They were rigged with only T-10 main parachutes—no reserves. They’d be jumping from five hundred feet, with no time for emergency procedures. If any of their mains failed, they’d be jelly on toast.
“Two minutes!” Dalton Goodhill yelled and held up two fingers as he crouched near the door. The Antonov wasn’t rigged as a jump plane, so there was no steel cable running along the ceiling for their static line hooks. Instead, Goodhill had snapped them to a large steel eyebolt on the floor used for securing a crop dusting tank. He wasn’t really sure it would hold.
Steele cranked himself onto his feet, which was a bitch, since he had a 60 lb gear bag clipped to the D rings on the front of his chute harness, with a snake line running from there to the bag’s deploy pocket. Making it even more awkward was his H&K 416 strapped across the bag’s top and a Russian RPG 26 anti-armor rocket strapped underneath. Goodhill had to grip the front of Steele’s harness and help him up, and Steele grabbed a fuselage spar and threw his boots apart like a sailor on the rolling deck of a submarine.
Steele turned and offered a glove to Slick, knowing it would be even harder for her, with the weight of her M249 SAW, yet neither he nor Miles had offered to switch weapons with her till they hit the ground—you just didn’t pull that chivalrous crap anymore, especially if a woman was an Alpha. However, lending a hand to a battle buddy was SOP, and so was the shove Miles gave her ass. Then Miles was next, Slick gave him a hand, he banged the top of his helmet on the ceiling, the plane made a hard left bank, and he slammed into that side of the fuselage, grabbed two steel ribs overhead and bellowed “Goddammit Whirly!” but no one heard him.
Goodhill, as jumpmaster, jabbed himself in the chest with three fingers and the three waddled toward him and the door. He checked that their yellow static lines were running clean to the hook and that each of his jumpers was properly gripping the slack. Then he grasped the doorjamb with his left hand, Steele’s harness with his right to keep him from premature ejection, stuck his big bald dome out the door, and looked down. He was not wearing a hat but only a headset linked to Allie and a pair of goggles, and his cheeks flapped in the roaring wind stream like a cocker spaniel’s jowls on a joyride.
Steele tried to orient himself to the ground, but at this speed and altitude the view was nothing but blurred patches of white and black blobs rushing by. He heard Allie cut the engines back, looked to the left at Goodhill and saw him shout something into his boom mic. Then Goodhill shot him a thumbs-up, turned the digit out toward the sky, stepped back into the cabin, and Steele released his static line, palmed both sides of the door, and hurled himself into oblivion.
It was like being smacked in the face by a sheet of ice needles, then his harness jerked him like he was being hanged, his boots whipped up above his nose, and with the snap and flap of unfurling nylon all at once he was suspended in blessed silence. He knew he had no time at all to prepare for landing, so he quickly unclipped the gear bag, and it went sailing away between his boots and bounced at the end of the line. He was racing at the ground at fifteen feet per second and rocketing forward with the wind. He reached up, grabbed the front right riser, and hauled down, and the chute spilled air and spun him around. It didn’t help much, but it would all be over in seconds.
Right before he slammed into the snow like a burlap bag of wet cement, he looked over his right shoulder and saw the target. There was the Mongolian village, exactly like the images Ralphy had sent to his phone, with those little gers like a bunch of mushrooms covered with white icing, flickering yellow glows coming from their slit windows, and wisps of smoke from their roof holes.
And beyond the village, maybe two klicks past some flat pastures that rose into hills, he saw something like the kind of dust trail you’d see rising from a Humvee convoy in the desert. Except that it wasn’t dust, it was snow, and the Humvees were charging horses. And then Mother Earth sledgehammered his spine.
His was on his back in the snow and his chute was trying to drag him back to Ulaanbaatar. He thumbed the righthand Capewell, yanked the pin, and the canopy collapsed. He jumped up, tore off his harness, pulled his Glock blade from his calf scabbard, ran to his gear bag, and started slicing the snake line and straps. He heard an impact and a grunt to his left and knew that was Slick, and to his right Miles plowed face-first into a hill. In half a minute Steele was wearing his LBV full of ammo and grenades, his 416 was slung across his chest, and the RPG 26 was slung across his back. He remembered he didn’t have body armor.
Well, Grandpa didn’t have any either . . .
Slick ran to him, fully geared up and spewing breath. She was burdened like a turtle under her kit and that M249, but she looked wicked and wild-eyed. Miles appeared, loping through the snow, yanking his 416’s charging handle on the run. No one said a word. Steele thrust two fingers toward the village and they took off at a dead run.
The first person Steele saw at the village edge was a short figure in head-to-foot furs, holding what looked like a British Enfield rifle, and running toward him with a crazy grin glowing in the dark. It was Tenzin and he yelled in English, “You motherfuckers are late!” Then, like some apparition from Genghis Khan’s hordes, a Mongol warrior in full traditional garb pounded up on a black horse from around the side of a ger. It was Gengi Phon, his huge chest bandoliered in ammunition, gripping a rifle in one hand and with a long bow and arrows slung from his back. Then his son, Ganbaatar, appeared on a great white horse from the left, dressed and kitted just like his father, and the horses snorted and reared up and stomped.
“Jesus,” Slick panted. “Where the hell are we?”
“You’re gonna die in a David Lean movie,” Miles said.
“Who the heck’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“Tovarich,” Steele called to Gengi. “Govorish po-russki?” Speak Russian?
“Da.” Gengi nodded.
“Flank them,” Steele said to Gengi, and then to his crew, “Try not to kill the horses. Don’t use the rockets unless you have to.”
Gengi understood that somehow and said, “Thank you. I like horses.” He jerked his steed to the right, Ganbaatar jerked his to the left, and they took off in opposite directions.
“Can you hit anything with that?” Steele jabbed a finger at Tenzin and his World War II rifle.
“I can freaking blow your ear off at a hundred meters and leave your glasses on.”
“Good. Find a hill.”
Tenzin took off at a run.
Two women rushed from the door of the nearest ger. One was a tall Mongol wearing long camel furs, the other a small striking Asian woman wearing incongruous fashionable glasses and dressed in the full uniform of a PLA colonel. She wants to die like a warrior, Steele thought. He went to her, gripped her small shoulders, and looked down into her eyes. He’d thrown his stupid brown contacts away and she stared back up at him.
“Colonel Liang?” he said in English.
“Yes, yes.” She was breathing hard but looked steady and determined.
He pulled his father’s 1911 from his hip holster and pressed it into her trembling hands. “We’ll be back,” he said. “But if things go wrong, save the last bullet for yourself.” He turned to Miles and Slick.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Slick said.
“Straight up the middle.”
“Wife’s gonna be pissed,” Miles said.
Steele opened into a run, between the rows of gers, with Miles on his right and Slick on his left, pounding through the ankle-deep snow. They broke from the village onto a dipping plain of white
with black thorn bushes poking up here and there like porcupine heads, and where the plain rose up into shallow hills, they could already see the horses barreling toward them and hear their hooves and hissing snorts. Then all at once the purple clouds above split, as if Moses had waved his staff, and the moon burst from the sky like a halogen searchlight and they all flipped their NVGs up away from their eyes.
Steele threw a fist in the air, skidded to a stop in a spray of snow, and threw himself prone, with Miles and Slick slamming down ten meters to either side. They shouldered their weapon stocks, flicked their safeties off, took long deep breaths, peered through their Aimpoints and ACOG, and saw a full squadron of black-clad gunmen, heads bent over their horses’ whipping manes, getting closer, and closer. . . .
“Wait for it,” Steele said in a cold flat tone to his crew. “Wait for it. . . .”
At fifty meters out, the cavalry point man jerked upright as a longbow arrow impaled his neck from the right and he flew off his horse. Tenzin’s rifle cracked from somewhere, and the second man wailed and collapsed on his steed and the horse kept on galloping and thundered by. The rest of the horsemen opened up, their Chinese QBZ-95 bullpup assault rifles banging out blinding white barrel bursts and gunfire that echoed back from the village like hammers on car fenders.
“Now!” Steele barked and his 416 jerked as he blew one assaulter off his horse on the right, then another on the left, and he heard Slick’s M249 spitting bursts and Miles’s rifle cranking and spinning out shells in the air. He saw Ganbaatar on his horse, charging from the left into their flanks, whipping some sort of gleaming scimitar above his horse’s ears, and it sliced into one man’s throat and removed his entire head.
“Up!” Steele yelled.
He jumped up and moved forward at a measured pace, his 416 at his shoulder, firing at everything that showed above the head of a horse. One of the animals went down in the snow, kicking and screaming, but he couldn’t think about that now. Slick matched him step for step on the left, firing bursts, switching drums, and on the right Miles saw two of the horsemen had abandoned their saddles and were crouching in the snow trying to pick Steele off. Miles pulled two Dutch grenades from his kit, yanked the pins, fastballed them thirty meters directly between the two, and the double bangs blew them right off their feet.
