One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “They only need the longboat to get to shore. They’ll scuttle it once they reach port.”

  “Then how will they get back to... here?”

  “These guys? Trust me; they’ll find a way. We always work it out,” Morris said, turning to Taan with a smile.

  Taan pierced him with a cold stare.

  A voice came from a speaker above them. “Mo, you ready to wind this thing up?”

  “I’ll give you the ‘go’ sign in ten,” Morris answered. He then touched the keyboard and spoke again.

  “Geteye? Your guys ready?”

  “We are inflating now, doctor,” a voice in African-accented English responded.

  “Thanks. Get back to me when it’s fully deployed.” Morris touched another key.

  “You have my jolt ready, boys?”

  “Powered up and running hot.” This time a Persian accent. “Wait for my word.”

  Taan knew from Morris’ explanations that a balloon was climbing into the night sky through that open hatch in the boathouse roof. A balloon with a magnesium/carbon alloy skin and reinforced cable leading down to the Raj and, ultimately, through transformers, into the Tube before him. If he understood correctly, the mini-nuke provided a multi-megawatt charge to the balloon that resulted in a multi-gigawatt explosion of energy as the balloon gathered electromagnetic energy from the surrounding air. The massive static charge powered the Tube and provided the terrific electrical force needed to punch a hole in the time continuum.

  How it worked from there was beyond the understanding of Jason Taan. He prided himself on possessing a fine mind capable of making simultaneous complex calculations. But that was with strictly fiscal matters, material things like money, profits, and trends. What the Taubers accomplished with their purely theoretical imaginings seemed to him to be, frankly, magic.

  Morris received and acknowledged transmissions through the speakers of a bud in his right ear. He turned to Taan, an eyebrow raised.

  Taan felt a charge in the air, a frisson of electricity that chilled rather than warmed. Through every surface came a rapid, insistent pounding that felt as if it might shake the ship apart down to the last rivet and weld. It ended as abruptly as it began. Through the reinforced glass of the window wall, he could see the haze of fog growing thicker, rising to envelop the whole Tube array in a cloud of white.

  As one, the eight figures shoved the longboat up the ramp and down the platform to disappear into the shroud of condensing air. The mist climbed the walls and filled the large chamber beyond. He watched fingers of ice grow on the far side of the panes of glass as the air in the room beyond fell to arctic temperatures.

  “Are they...” Taan halted, uncertain of how to phrase what he wanted to know.

  “Gone into the past,” Morris said with a mixed sense of awe and gratification.

  13

  Cast Adrift

  Gray dawn light cut through the chill mist as the longboat drifted, stern turning starboard, on a mild current. The air was thick and hot with a cloying musty smell coming off the water.

  Boats gripped the tiller to bring the bow facing the flow. The rest of the crew was recovering from the crushing effects of travel through the manifestation field. The rush of nausea, swimming vision, and all-over body ache were what they’d learned to anticipate, so they were not overwhelmed.

  Not so for the Bruise Brothers. The pair of keepers lay across the thwarts on their hands and knees, heaving up the steaming remains of a fish and noodle dinner the others had seen them wolf down just an hour before. The team knew better than to travel through the Tube on a full stomach. For the next ten minutes, their unwanted chaperones would be out of commission.

  Lee and Jimbo stripped Shan of his weapons, boots, belt, and tunic. Chaz and Byrus did the same for Wei. The pair slowly regained their senses to find they were stripped to their underwear with two rifles trained on them.

  “What is this?” Shan said, eyes on the wavering barrel before his eyes.

  “This is where we say bye-bye,” Jimbo said and motioned with the rifle at the brown water drifting past under the billowing white mist.

  “You want us to drown?” Shan said, making to rise.

  “We want you to swim, asshole. The field stays open thirty minutes or more. You’ve only lost five. Plenty of time to swim back to the Raj,” Lee said, holding the other rifle on them. Bat and Chaz were working oars to keep the longboat in place.

  Sounding like an angry dog, Wei barked out a string of Cantonese until Shan translated Lee’s words for him. Wei’s eyes went wide, tinged with fear.

  “Clock’s ticking, guys. Make your choice. Go home to hot food and cold beer or take your chances in Manchu China,” Jimbo said and nodded to the water.

  “In your undies,” Boats added.

  The pair slipped over the side and into the muddy stream. Shan lowered himself in, one hand remaining on the gunwale to fix them all with a murderous expression before immersing himself. They swam and, with the aid of the river current, were out of sight in the icy fog within seconds.

  “Think they’ll make it?” Chaz said.

  “I give a shit?” Lee said and sat on a thwart to take an oar.

  A mist rode atop the swirling current of the river to join the artificial bank of fog created as a byproduct of the manifestation field. The team rowed the longboat toward the western bank of the Yangtze, glowing with lantern light in the gloom.

  There was no telling where the port began and the river ended; the entire harbor was filled with boats bobbing in the water. Junks, barks, barges, and smacks with sails down and masts swinging in time with one another on the ebb and flow created by the retreating tide. Beyond them, closer to the mainland, taller masts and smokestacks were visible. The black edifice of coastal fortifications stood about the harbor rim. Crenelated stone walls with stout towers, wide bases, and sloping walls at the intervals.

  The team rowed in among a wide mixture of boats anchored in the open water or moored to narrow wooden docks that snaked out from either arm of the encircling waterfront. It was a maze of wooden craft noisy with activity. A funk of smoke, garlic, and frying fat hung over the water. Voices could be heard calling as well as the sounds of livestock. Pigs squealed, chickens squawked, and geese honked to add their own part to the cacophony.

  Bat stood at the prow of the longboat to guide them along a serpentine path between the closely moored vessels looming either side. The shore was invisible, so she aimed them toward the taller masts that she could only presume were docked along the wharf front.

  “Take this next right,” Bat called back.

  “That’s starboard, darling,” Boats said from the tiller.

  “You want me to learn ship talk or find a way out of here? This right here. Turn now,” she said.

  “Damn place looks like a floating trailer park,” Chaz grumped at an oar. A woman dumped a bucket of stinking ooze into the water close enough to his left, or port, to splash him.

  They saw figures moving on the decks, but none came to the rails to take a look at them. Just another boatload of round-eye barbarians to them. They found a path through the archipelago of boats and out onto open water. They could see the port of Shanghai now. Rows of wooden sailing ships, steamships, and mixes of the two rested along stone piers. Merchant and military craft side-by-side. Flags flew from the tops of masts, some of them unfamiliar. British, French, Imperial Russia, Spain, and others. The Stars and Stripes were atop the yardarm of a steam warship fluttering lazily in the warming air of the morning.

  Boats steered them along the towering wall of one of the piers, massive stone pilings green with weed. They glided, oars inboard, between the pier and a big stern-wheeler riverboat moored there. The longboat came alongside a set of steps ending in a slime-covered shelf. Bat tied the bowline secure through an ancient ring of rust-crusted iron. Boats did the same at the stern. Without a word to one another, they unloaded the wooden cases containing their rifles, gear, and ammunition. They formed a ch
ain up the slime-slippery steps and handed each crate up until they were all stowed up on the pier. All climbed the steps, leaving Boats to secure the oars in place before pulling out the cocks in the floor of the longboat. It filled quickly and settled into the brown water until only the very tops of the oarlocks were visible in the eddying muck. Then it vanished below into the opaque water in a cascade of bubbles.

  The pier was a madhouse of men unloading the sternwheeler on one side and a sailing ship on the other. Chinese men, nearly naked but for loincloths, worked like ants hauling bales and rolling barrels while others created orderly stacks all along the quayside. Orders were shouted in pidgin Chinese by European handlers.

  No one noticed their arrival or paid the slightest attention to eight Yankees making their way landward carrying four large wooden crates by rope handles between them.

  14

  Shanghai

  Bathsheba Jaffe fought down the sensation that all eyes were on her.

  Her dumpy tunic and baggy trousers, belted at the waist with an ammo belt and holster, served to hide her figure. Her hair was cropped above her ears, sprigs of black curls hidden by the white neckcloth that hung from the back of her kepi. She wore no make-up and had smeared a bit of dirt on her cheeks and chin for good measure.

  Still, she had the feeling that somehow everyone around her knew.

  She stayed close by Lee Hammond while they cut between the rows of sweating laborers until they’d wended their way to the foot of a broad embarcadero, which bustled with carts and wagons and countless pedestrians moving along with purpose. The embarcadero was lined with three-story buildings built in long rows. They all had signs hung from them in a babel of Asian and Occidental languages.

  Bat watched young boys who were shinnying up lantern poles to snuff the lights atop them as the sun rose to light the harbor. Merchants called from carts, some banging pots and pans together to draw attention to their wares. Another stood upon a box and swung live chickens over his head, held by the legs, and bawled his pitch to an uncaring crowd. A trio of drunken English sailors, supporting one another with arms about their shoulders, sang a shanty as they stumbled past. A quartet of men trotted through the mass carrying a fat man seated in an open sedan chair. A servant banging a gong ran ahead of the chair to clear a path. The carriers and gong player were dressed in matching livery of white silk trimmed in black and conical hats tied down around their chins. The passenger was an Anglo in a naval uniform of some kind, and he cursed the bearers between pulls from a flask. Other sedan chairs moved more sedately. These were covered boxes with silk drapes and gilt frames.

  The team found themselves getting attention for the first time. Beggars thronged about them, open hands or wooden bowls held out. They were mostly children, and some had shocking afflictions. Missing limbs, missing eyes, scars from wounds, and the ravages of sores. Their clothes were filthy rags, their feet bare and black with ground-in dirt. They surrounded the team, preventing the newcomers from making any forward progress. Bat recoiled from them.

  “Should I give them something?” she said.

  “And attract more of them?” Lee said, trying to wade through the clutching, chattering mass. The Rangers had seen their share of desperate poverty in some of the shittiest corners of the world but never anything like this. The mob about them was growing, now joined by adult beggars perhaps sensing a soft touch in these brown-clad laowai, foreigners. The chicken merchant was here, shouting and waving his hens to create a snowfall of white feathers over the crush.

  The crowd parted when a man taller than the rest pushed his way into the mass swinging a wooden club over his head. When the beggars failed to yield, he laid about with blows to shoulders and arms. A way opened to the team.

  “Hai! Hai! Duidelijk een pad, rotzakken!” the man shouted before resorting to sing-song pidgin Cantonese, all the while with the clay pipe clenched between his teeth. He wore a white shirt and suspenders with a braided nautical cap slanted on his head. He had thick shoulders and arms and a ponderous gut hanging over his belt. The beggars and merchants scattered, howling curses as they retreated to a safe distance.

  “English, ja?” the man said, grinning as he stepped up to Lee.

  His breath was rancid with liquor and tobacco.

  “Americans,” Lee said.

  “Yankees. Is good, ja?” The man eyed the team and their burden of wooden crates.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Lee said and made to shoulder by until the man stepped in his way, smile fixed on his face.

  “You looking for something, ja? You are needing something, ja?”

  “We’re looking for pack horses. Mules,” Jimbo said.

  The man broke into a laugh that made his paunch wobble and face redden.

  “He say something funny?” Lee said, growing tired of this exchange and the Dutchman’s attitude.

  “Nee! Het is grappig!” The man snorted and wiped his nose with the back of his arm. “Only the army has horses. There is not a horse, mule, or donkey for sale in all of Szechuan Province.”

  “We need to carry this cargo inland to Nanking. How does stuff get freighted around here?” Lee said.

  “All is carried by coolies. Plenty coolies. Goedkoper…cheaper than horses. A few pence a day, ja.” The Dutchman nodded with enthusiasm.

  “So, where do we find all of these coolies?” Lee said.

  The team followed the Dutchman across the crowded embarcadero. The big man menaced, approaching beggars and merchants with the wooden club to clear the way. They stopped to allow a double column of soldiers march by. They were English redcoats with rifles at their shoulders and sweating under heavy packs. A whiskered non-com strode before them calling cadence and swinging a riding crop.

  As they tramped by, a few glanced from under the bill of their white kepis at the mixed company of Yankees. The Dutchman brought them to the front of a long warehouse building where a crowd of Chinese crouched in the shade of an awning. They shifted and glanced upward at the newcomers. The Dutchman rattled off a string of pidgin at them. One of them, a chubby-faced man in faded red pants and a filthy blouse belted with a strip of black cloth, asked a question.

  “You pay how much?” the Dutchman asked Lee.

  “What’s the going price? What do they usually work for?” Lee said.

  “A ha’pence a week. That’s five copper wen,” the Dutchman said.

  The chubby-face man stood and looked at Lee.

  “Where you go, sir? Where carry cargo?” he said in a high, reedy voice.

  “Nanking,” Lee said. Chubby’s face fell into a frown of deep disapproval. The crouching coolies muttered among themselves.

  “Twenty wen a day then,” Lee said. Less than twenty-five cents.

  Chubby’s eyes widened. All the men under the awning leapt to their feet.

  “A day? Stront!” the Dutchman hollered. “I thought you meant by the week! Verdomme!”

  “I know good men, strong men! Better than these!” Chubby insisted, stepping closer.

  “We need eight men. Eight!” Lee said, holding up eight fingers. “Pick ’em out, Jimmy.”

  “Look at their teeth, ja? The puggy, ja?” the Dutchman said and curled Chubby’s lip back with a thumb. Chubby put up with the indignity to reveal a double row of mustard-colored teeth.

  “Puggy?” Jimbo said.

  “Theopium, ja? Makes them stupid with smoke,” the Dutchman said, releasing Chubby’s lip to point at the others with the point of his club.

  Jimbo chose eight of the healthiest, picking the men based mainly on the condition of their teeth just as he would with horses. Almost two-thirds of the men had teeth black from the tar of smoked opium. Their eyes were dead as marbles and skin like paper. One of the men he chose was Chubby, who told them his name was Ya Wu. The team took to calling him Yahoo, and he did not protest. Though he was insistent that he knew much better bearers than the low-born rubbish they had chosen.

  “Let me bring them to you. They are strong men
. Good men,” Yahoo said as the others took up the load of the four heavy crates.

  “We’re on a timetable here, pal,” Jimbo said, pointing to his wrist and realizing instantly that his words and gesture were a hundred years out of step.

  “Just move your ass,” Lee growled, and his tone got his meaning across. Yahoo took up a rope handle and the team, with their new employees, started away along the wharf.

  “Neem me niet kwalijk, gelieve, ja?” The Dutchman said and held out an open palm in the universal language of “where’s mine?” Lee dug in a pouch on his belt and dropped a pair of silver coins into the waiting hand. They were fakes minted by yet another Taan-owned outfit. Circular coins with a square hole in the center and bearing the mint marks of the Imperial Bank of China. The Dutchman’s eyes gleamed wetly at them.

  “Veilig reizen, yankee vrienden,” the Dutchman said, nodding and touching the tip of his club to his hat before turning to trot away to the nearest beer hall.

  “So, which way do we go now?” Bat said.

  “Damned if I know.” Lee shrugged. “West, right?”

  15

  Mute Witness

  Yahoo served as a guide as well as self-appointed head bearer. He chattered endlessly in pidgin English to no one in particular, informing them that he learned good English at school before it was burnt to the ground, and soldiers butchered his teachers. Who these soldiers were, he did not say.

  “Teachers all killed. Fine teachers. Christian men of God. All dead now in war that never ends,” he said as part of his unrequested oral biography. He began gulping in a high giggle and pointing to a merchant selling caged monkeys from a stall.

  “This guy’s either an idiot or pretending to be,” Jimbo said to Byrus, who was also fascinated with stacks of bamboo cages filled with shrieking monkeys.

  They moved through crowded marketplaces and across broad open squares, heading for a road that would follow the west bank of the river and take them to Nanking.