The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  THE PETROVSKI

  EFFECT

  A TESS Novel

  RANDY MOFFAT

  The Petrovski Effect

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2012 Randy Moffat

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Booktango books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  Booktango

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403

  www.booktango.com

  877-445-8822

  ISBN: 978-1-4689-1865-6 (ebook)

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PRELUDE

  CHAPTER 1—JOB OFFER

  CHAPTER 2—A WHOLE IN THE GROUND

  CHAPTER 3—Q-KINK KOMMAND

  CHAPTER 4—CRACKED EGGHEADS

  CHAPTER 5—CURTAIN FALLS

  CHAPTER 6—UNDERGROUND ZERO

  CHAPTER 7—CONFESSION AND THE SOLE

  CHAPTER 8—A NICK ON THE CUTTING EDGE

  CHAPTER 9—LEAP INTO THE VOID

  CHAPTER 10—FREEFALL

  CHAPTER 11—LANDING HARD AND RUNNING

  CHAPTER 12—SALES PITCH

  CHAPTER 13—TESS TAKES OFF

  CHAPTER 14—PAIR OF DICE LOST

  CHAPTER 15—TESS’ JOSS

  CHAPTER 16—THE BUSINESS OF TESS IS BUSINESS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My personal thanks to the memory of my parents who have crossed the great divide in the last two years but whose patience and love were vital as a model to me in the past. In the present I need to also profusely thank Janice, my wife who has put up with the endless annoyance of being married to me . . . and remained such a fundamentally good person that she still helped where she could.

  PRELUDE

  Li Sho Po looked so Chinese he could have passed for national poster boy. Gazing at his beaten image the Chinese would have wedded him to their hearts—until China, the innocent dove that she is discovered what a rotten wife beater the groom was and summarily kicked him out of the house with a frying pan to the noggin. Ironically, this is pretty much what happened to him.

  Historically some people are marked by destiny to do great things—Po was the opposite of those people; whatever notoriety Po achieved was for bringing down the bell curve of squalor; most memorable as a paragon of perversion and someone whose virtue was primarily to be used as a bad example. He was awful.

  At 11 years old he had left his Gansu village yards ahead of a lynch mob for debauching the mayor’s daughter. The mob was primed, had a noose knotted and a tree branch selected—but they lost him in the dark.

  That was the high point. Life was a downhill toboggan ride from there. Whatever bad joss was represented by having evaded a peasant’s life of pulling a plow in lieu of an ox was almost instantly negated when he visited his nearest military recruiter. At that moment Po was not driven by a keen sense of marshal ardor so much as a sharp sense of hunger.

  Six months later the seed of his future reputation was made when he and his new army chums were involved in what then passed for battle among the warlords. Typically this was a brief display of fireworks followed by a full scale rout. Most of Po’s mates were fleeing with practiced ease to the rear hoping to outrun aggressively pursuing bullets. Not one to innovate during a mass panic Po was trundling along after the rest when he tripped into a shell hole, probably not so much from ineptitude as badly failed Dutch courage. He found himself lying on top of a comrade whose leg had been half removed by an artillery shell and who weakly begged to be carried to the dubious succor of their surgeon-butcher in the rear. Since the aid station lay on his way and the alcohol overcame what would normally have been a fine instinct for self preservation, Po picked the man up, threw him in a fireman’s carry across his shoulders and staggered away from the theoretical fighting. Po was almost to home plate when yet another artillery shell from the other team passed just by his shoulder moving in the same direction as his feet. The shell did not strike him or explode but swept past his shoulder with great force and kept on going. It was close enough that the wind of its passage knocked him to one knee for a moment and simultaneously removed the head of the man on his back without his noticing. He resumed running with full pants. Three hundred yards further on he rounded a large boulder and was challenged there by an officer. The Captain was vigorously waving a pistol to discourage desertion from good cover and demanded to know what Po was doing. Po replied that he was carrying a wounded comrade to medical support because he had lost his leg. “Leg! You idiot!” Cried the officer. “You mean his head!” Po flung the body onto the ground and stared at it in confusion for some time. He finally looked up and said, “You are correct honorable officer, but he said it was his leg!”

  The officer related this story to the warlord with a slap of the knee at an orgy several days later. The warlord spit rice wine out his nose and maintained that Po was the bravest man he had ever heard of—carrying corpses to sanctuary, He immediately called Po before him, promoted him to Sergeant and assigned him to his intelligence gathering team. As a team they showed not the slightest trace of intelligence, but processed a genuine zeal at shoving bamboo under cuticles and a positive skill at water boarding. In this company Po was given leave to develop and exercise his lowest talents and terrorize several villages that were assigned to him as part of his patch.

  Within a couple months Po was so universally loathed by their inhabitants that they set out to murder him—a group gathered in a democratic meeting to discuss the best method they could use to hasten his demise. A crude bomb was devised and the committee’s duly nominated designees set about filling a tall vase with gunpowder, rocks, broken glass and then sticking a short fuse in the top. As it happened, that night Po had told a bartender who was buying him drinks that he was afraid of monsters under his bed. The open bar was courtesy of the ‘Send Po to Purgatory’ political action committee on the theory that sleeping men make easier targets. The level-headed bartender chose not to argue with psychotics and gave Po a practical solution to his problem instead. Po should cut the legs off the bed which would allow the monsters no room to live. It would not have taken drink to convince Po this was a fine idea. Lacking a saw in his quarters he settled for throwing his tick upon the floor. He artfully placed his pantry, which had previously occupied the mattresses’ space on the floor, onto the vacant bed-frame. He then dropped quite senseless upon the mattress and began a rhythmic series of convulsive 90 proof snorts. The village PAC, hearing the roaring of the snoring inside Po’s hut lit their fuse, rolled their vast explosive through the door and ran for cover. They were well advised to do so. Their exuberant bomb exploded and removed the door as well as half the ceiling. They could have saved their powder. Lying limp on the floor and protected by his heavy bed frame, most of the force of the explosion went upward, passing over Po. The explosion rained rice flour followed by the bed over him. Some fluke of the walls and crumbling ceiling caused the waves of explosive force to reinforce in some places and to lessen in unpredictable others so that Po’s pants were torn into shreds and removed completely during his brief imitation of a propeller. When the committee returned to admire their work and congratulate themselves, they were startled on peeking through the remnant of the door to see Po rising through the bed-frame, ghostly white with roof dust and pantry flour, apparently brandishing h
is willie and crying out unintelligibly. Mistaking his garbled cries for another drink as the gibbering of the vengeful dead, the assassins were filled with superstitious dread. The murder team fled with squeaks of their own, pursued by what they took to be Po’s poltergeist yelling and screeching for revenge after them. The women of the village, overcome by curiosity at the clamor raised by the men rushing shrieking for the woods, came out of their homes. Reaching the street they were shocked both by the demon Po and his exposed naughty bits. Fearing rape from another astral plane they added their own screaming to the general uproar and fled after the men. Within minutes the village was appropriately silent as a grave and inhabited by the single soul in search of spirits. Po halted in the local shebeen—a place he already haunted while alive. There the not-so-ethereal Po bellied up to the bar, drank most of a jug of wine and went comatose lying on the bar itself.

  In this way he earned his lifelong nickname ‘No Pants Po” and set out to terrorize the villagers come daylight even more than he had the night before. The fun could not last.

  Though wholly illiterate, even Po in his worst alcoholic haze had the ability to read the writing on a men’s room wall and understood that his warlord master would only last another few months against his many opponents—especially with an army manned by men as ludicrous as Po. He betrayed them all to Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in the middle of the night. His reward for this treachery was promotion to Captain in the Nationalist Army during the last stages of their Northern march. Po was placed in command of a remote pillbox at Jiangxi when the Kuomintang surrounded the communists with a series of strong-points. Po’s Pillbox was at the end of a horseshoe of mountains and topping forbidding cliffs that was an unlikely point of attack by the encircled forces far below.

  To hold the pillbox he was given eight men.

  It took the soldiers eight days, one day per man, to know that they hated Po’s guts and were determined to be rid of him as a charitable gift to humanity. Key among humanity’s chosen benefactors were two privates named Lee and Park and under their guidance the group decided to frag Po. In a traditional fragging a grenade is flung into a bunker with the hated officer, but the team lacked a grenade so they pondered alternate courses of action in council. The new plan was a model of simplicity and clever substitution for absent petards. The plan had three parts. First get Po drunk; second beat him to death, and then third throw him off a cliff next to their bunker so that the wounds could be blamed on the fall and the fall on the drink. The plan was brilliantly conceived but poorly executed.

  Step one of the plan went perfectly, though they had to pool their salaries for a month to lay in enough hooch to fill Po’s hollow leg. The conspirators made toast after toast until Po passed out. At a now rather uncoordinated signal from inebriated leader Lee, phase two began and the men lugged Po, dead to the world again, up the stairs from the pillbox, dropping him twice, recovering him clumsily and holding him up unsteadily so his fizz was easily accessible to flying fists. Po’s team then began to take turns punching him as hard as they could. Had they not indulged so heavily during Phase One of their own plan, they would have lined up in an orderly fashion and taken neat turns with the scragging, but in their eagerness to knock Po’s socks off they tended to elbow eagerly forward and get in each other’s way, determined to take a lick before he kicked off. Their muddled efforts did shove Po’s nose over nicely, provided him with several spectacular cuts that looked horrible and bled copiously. It was mostly gamin though because they had not seriously harmed the thick skull beneath the gore. Artfully they further improved the illusion of falling-off-a-cliff injury by planting a bumper crop of hematomas that mottled his body nicely all over with fervent but poorly aimed body blows. The effect looked remarkably like a bloody mess but the damage was superficial and Po’s legs stayed more or less under him.

  Human patience has its limits. After four minutes of meaty thuds they had failed to deliver the coup de grace and the two leaders of the mutiny got impatient. A frustrated conspirator Lee resolved to end it and he stepped center-stage where he shoved the current pugilist roughly aside to deliver a spectacular uppercut that threw Po backward into the none too sober or competent arms of the two drunks nominally assigned to prop Po up. He flipped over their inebriated hugs from the force of the blow and tumbled back down the stairs, landing inside the bunker head first.

  The man that Lee had shoved aside to make the blow was his co-leader Park. Park’s great native powers of belligerence were inflamed so that with creatively shouted epithets he shoved Lee right back whereupon they turned truculently on each other and smacked together with a hollow thud like rams defending a harem. Each seized the other in a bear hug and the pair began to wrestle ludicrously around and around the pillbox, Po forgotten. It was a merry dance now standing and now rolling on the ground, but timed to the tune of accompanying shouts of mindless encouragement from their equally inebriated comrades and punctuated by squeals as Park or Lee gouged an eye or scrunched a scrotum.

  Po meanwhile, having smashed his head onto the concrete floor of the bunker on landing, had woken up for the first time in a half hour. Dazed by the liquor, the beating, and his final knock on the noggin he shook his addled brain. What senses that remained registered the commotion outside and the limbic system of his brain assumed that the communists below were now attacking and flipped the human fight or flight switch to ‘on’. Made brave with booze he stumbled to the machine gun and after three attempts and much bobble-headed study squeezed down on the butterfly switch on the machine gun at the embrasure of the bunker.

  In one of those Kharmitic coincidences the universe seems to pivot on it just so happened that about three hundred communists actually were crouched in the tree-line in front of the pillbox, having climbed hard for the past four hours through the woods into sneak attack position. They were panting, exhausted, and fed-up after banging their heads on tree limbs and cursing every degree of the 60 degree slope in the dark. Po began to fire out of the pillbox just as they gathered to catch their breath momentarily. Panicked by their assumed discovery, half of them immediately turned and fled. The remainder of the attack force alternately braver or stupider that their departing comrades opted instead to attack and to attack badly. The communist soldiers rushed forward in an angry chaotic mass that bore only a minor semblance to a military maneuver. They were firing wildly as they yowled and wheezed up the remaining slope. Their hearts threatened to explode during this last 60 meters spent at a flat out run. Done in they were done in as they blundered neatly into the hail of bullets from Po and his gun. Po’s teammates, standing stupefied outside and caught between the pillbox’s gun and the communist’s own lightshow were chopped to pieces in seconds. Po was dazzled and confused by all the pretty twinkly lights outside and he sprayed his gun back and forth and back and forth pointing at them with the convenient object in his hand which happened to be the Maxim. The motion made him dizzier still, and presently sleepy from the rocking motion he laid his head on the gun as it continued to fire, snoozing with his fingers still lying heavy on the trigger. The few remaining communists not mowed down in Po’s hosing were suddenly bereft of leaders. Those still alive remembered what discretion was and retreated into the bosom of the night. Their retreat was nicely lit by the fountain of tracer rounds spigotting up into the black sky like a urinating magician.

  The unattended machine gun whose operator was literally asleep at the controls kept firing for two more minutes with Po’s head nestled on one crooked arm and his hand wedged firmly in the grip and his finger on the forgotten trigger. The gun turned a lovely cherry red and then glowed white as it overheated until it exploded, taking out Po’s right eye, lacerating his already beautifully lacerated face with shrapnel and flinging him backward, his finger jammed still between handle and trigger. There he lay oblivious, until Kuomintang reinforcements found him later that night. When the dead were counted, Po was the only surviving hero of wh
at was obviously a valiant defense against overwhelming odds. The grateful Generalissimo promoted him on the spot to Major and gave him a medal which he awoke to find pinned to his hospital pillow when the last of the anesthetic he’d drunk wore off. He celebrated sobriety by trading the medal for a bottle of rot gut which he used to anesthetize himself again.

  These events became almost a template for Po’s life.

  Major No Pants Po, the hero of Pillbox 17 left the hospital sporting his new rank on his eye-patch and was put in command of the main supply depot. Two days later the communists broke out of Chiang’s trap. Po, watching the direction the wind was blowing their red banners, added his own white banner. Semaphore complete, the cautious workers of the world were astonished to hear the Kuomintang’s hero of hamburger hill call them comrade, articulate his complete conversion to communist ideology and felt his arms around them in a bear hug of international proletarian brotherhood. They let him keep the rank in the red army . . . and the eye-patch.

  The communist army took Po with them on the extended picnic that history later called the long march. Only 1 in 10 survived it. Po made Light Colonel in the communist army primarily because his boss and his boss’s boss lay down simultaneously and died of diphtheria. Pickled Po was apparently immune.

  Po was then hopefully and repeatedly hurled in the direction of the Japanese by a long list of handlers; all praying he would announce himself a convert to fascism, hoist the rising sun and declare for Hirohito. Like a whipped dog he kept turning back up. His reappearances at the communist lines were invariably deplored because he was invariably pursued by furious Japanese soldiers intent on mayhem . . . and they brought their artillery with them. His last boss, desperate to be rid of such a jinx, got him promoted instead.