Deadly Wands

by Brent Reilly

CHAPTER 10

  William planned it carefully. The Siberians told them the location of every enemy unit in their way. A few days before the Olympics started, one hundred ten thousand Americans surprised the military units, clearing a wide path to the Mongolia capital.

  William shocked the world by sacking Karakorum, slaughtering its residents, and taking everything of value. The city received tribute for three centuries, so the warehouse section was actually larger than the rest of the city combined. The Bank of Mongolia vault alone took up an entire block. The thousand horse-drawn wagons that William earlier sent to a nearby ranch joined thousands of others from the capital, and soon stretched several kilometers.

  Given his family history, William made sure they didn’t burn the air-sealed wand-storage facility. The million wand sets he found there would soon arm a million Americans and Free Europeans.

  While the slowest division moved the heavily loaded wagons east to the coast, where William had cargo ships waiting, the rest of the near-marathoners transported the gold and precious jewels on their backs. They went one day east, dropped their packs, returned the next day, loaded up, then flew east again in the morning. Ten thousand half-marathoners from the fleet took the loot the rest of the way. The marathoners continued attacking Mongol units south to give the wagons the month they’d need to travel within one day’s flight of the ships.

  Many rich Mongols owned estates near Karakorum. Mongolia always had more horses than people. After looting those mansions, the Americans used those horses as pack animals and the Siberians drove the herds north, where they’d be turned into enough jerked meat to feed an air force.

  The irony itched enough to scratch: the Americans only found so much to take because the Mongols created the richest kingdom known to man. What the Mongols spent over three hundred years taking, the Americans stole in just a month. A clever singer penned a ballad called A Tribute to the Tribute that soon become popular worldwide.

  While everyone said the world was at war, the only real battles were at the Empire’s perimeter. Each conquest added to the world’s largest market. The Khan governed two-thirds of the world’s population, and three-quarters of its wealth. Genghis argued that the only way to have lasting peace was if one government ruled everyone. While critics equated the Empire with institutionalized slaughter, the Mongols said every conquest brought them closer to world peace.

  And most of them actually believed it.

  While Peking was rightfully called the capital of the world, because it housed the Mongol government, Karakorum could accurately be called the richest place on Earth because three centuries of tribute literally piled up there. It was less of a city and more a vast storage facility. Not bad for an old yurt town in Mongolia’s oldest farmland. It’d take one hundred thousand quads, each hauling one hundred kilos at a time, weeks to move all that wealth. Plus everything on the wagon train.

  Genghis stored his riches in Karakorum because the world’s best air force protected it. Far from the nearest city, it’d be hard to loot even if no Mongols protected it. There was no where to take it to. The formidable Gobi Desert made the trip to China hard, Siberia’s frozen wasteland lay to the north, the vast Stans to the west, and the empty Manchurian forests to the east. Plus, it only had four gates and was nearly surrounded by two rivers.

  What never occurred to anybody -- before William -- is that the Pacific Ocean is only a thousand kilometers away. Landlocked, the Mongols never thought to fear the sea.

  The Great Khan soon led a vast air force north, only for one hundred thousand Americans to bomb them with incendiaries the first night they camped in Manchuria’s vast forests. Several square kilometers of trees ignited like a huge bonfire, roasting the Mongols. The well-rested long-distance Americans engaged the tired Mongols day and night for an exhausting week. The mostly short-range Mongols had to fight sleepy, hungry, and dehydrated as the Americans burned their supplies, tents, and food. Genghis assumed the Americans would run, then assumed he could overwhelm them, when what he should have done is sent his marathoners around the American blocking force to intercept the wagon train full of gold plodding towards the coast.

  But, because the long-distance Mongols left the slower ones behind, Genghis lost his best quads in that initial ambush. Having half the endurance of the Americans meant they needed twice the quads just to match parity, but the weaker Mongols streamed in over several days, so the Americans always enjoyed air superiority.

  The Mongols would have withstood the assault better if they had traveled slower, but together, instead of flying all out for a week. In contrast, the Americans slept the afternoon before the attack, and enjoyed dinner first. William had them pack a million food kits and water sacks so they could eat and drink in the air.

  It’s so much easier to kill quads on the ground than in the air, so the trick is exhausting them so they cannot fly, and then give them nowhere to hide. Burning the forest forced the survivors into the air, where they had to fight individually in the dark against formation fliers. Then they had no cover when they needed to rest.

  Genghis Khan led two hundred fifty thousand quads, but only had one hundred thousand of the best when he got ambushed. The Americans finished them off in time to sleep before the next fifty thousand arrived. And the next. Genghis had to leave just to find replacements. By the time a large enough force arrived, the Americans had sailed. With another half a million wand sets and a quarter-million more coin sacks.

  When the ships returned to San Francisco, American University carefully counted it. Entitled to half of the spoils, William knew he couldn’t spend it in a thousand lifetimes, so he started an organization to fund highways linking the largest cities in the Americas. The first highway would pave over the old dirt trail from San Francisco to Anchorage to speed up heavy supplies.

  Losing that much wealth shook the Mongol Empire to his core. And the Peking Stock Market fell into a financial coma, losing 90% of its value as soon as investors appreciated the magnitude of the disaster.

  Maybe he was delusional, but William could hear his grandma laughing hysterically.