One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Inside the city, the military presence was more in evidence. There were sailors and soldiers from a dozen nations either on leave or on guard. French sailors in white uniforms, blue waistcoats, and canvas gaiters, and disc-shaped black caps on their heads. More redcoats marched in tea-stained pith helmets and belts and gear white with fresh pipe clay. Sikh cavalry in crimson turbans looked dour, their lances, long blades gleaming, couched in their arms. On one side of a square was a palatial building flying the American flag. Soldiers in Union blue jackets and white trousers stood at the ready by a pair of Gatling guns set either side of the entry steps of what was probably a consulate.

  The Euro troops were vastly outnumbered by Chinese imperial troops. The soldiers of the Manchu emperor were even more varied than the western troops. Men waving huge banners covered in dragons, storks, clouds, and tigers, ran before trotting troops holding long bolt action rifles at shoulder arms. Men in crimson garb decorated with the character of the Qing Dynasty stood at every intersection and gateway.

  Tartar horsemen with curved bows and packed quivers of long arrows on their saddles went past them in columns. They wore fur-lined caps even in the stifling heat. Each had a curved sword in his sash, and a long-barreled musket slung over his back. Their officer, riding in the front, wore a steel helmet trimmed in white ermine, and a cowl of glimmering chain mail. Their silk banner was the size of a queen-sized bed sheet and bore a stylized rearing horse stamping on a twisting serpent.

  In their mile-long walk through the heart of the city, the team saw more soldiers in one place than they’d seen in the years of their own service and deployments.

  “You believe this shit,” Boats said in awe when the Tartar cavalry galloped past over the cobbles.

  “Hell yeah,” Jimbo said with a boyish leer. These trips to the past had turned him into something of a history nut. He was loving the spectacle.

  “We might be in over our heads this time,” Bat said, wary eyes on a clutch of white-clad spearmen glowering at them from a doorway.

  “I hear you, lady. I been on six deployments, and I’m feeling like I’ve never been to war before,” Chaz said.

  Their little column made to a broad gate in the walls that surrounded the city. They joined a queue of carts, bearers, sedan chairs, and pedestrians awaiting passage through the gate. The way was cleared occasionally for military traffic. The largest group consisted of British troops in red jackets and plaid trousers. They were led by a pair of bagpipers and a flagman carrying a furled Union Jack.

  Anyone coming into the city was being hassled by imperial troops in white pajamas and blue vests. Merchants had their wares scattered on the ground. Bundles were unraveled, and baskets tipped open. One man squealed in complaint and got the butt end of a spear in the teeth in answer. Others, especially women, were rudely searched. The only ones to escape the rough treatment were the occupants of lushly decorated sedan litters or those who dropped coins into the hands of the sentries.

  To the team’s relief, those exiting Shanghai were not subject to those kinds of searches and abuse. They were waved through by sullen soldiers barking for them to move along quickly. The sentries would not meet the eyes of the barbarians.

  Once through the gate, the team passed through rows of trenches and earthworks that were unmanned, in ill repair, and many were filled with stagnant water. Dragonflies hummed over the weed-choked surface of the stinking pools.

  “Shanghai’s been threatened with a siege over and over for the past twenty years,” Jimbo said, interrupting Yahoo’s continuous commentary. “First by the Imperials threatening to throw the Europeans out over the opium trade. Then by the Taipings who kept promising to take the city but never succeeded.”

  “So, where’s the war?” Chaz said, walking alongside Jimbo. “It’s winding down now. The Taipings are holding a few towns but Nanking’s their capital. Most of the fighting is around the city. That’s where the last of the Heavenly King’s troops are,” Jimbo said.

  “Is this Hong Shoo-juan there?” Chaz asked.

  “He’s been dead for a few months by now,” Jimbo said. “Dead from a stomach ailment.”

  “So, he’s explaining himself to Jesus.” Chaz smiled.

  Jimbo caught Yahoo glaring at them, his face dark with rage, as he stumbled along carrying the crate of rifles with the help of another coolie. Yahoo saw that Jimbo was studying him. Within seconds, his face melted back into its usual bland smile.

  Lee was walking drag with Bat. He turned to look back at the walls of the city. They showed signs of age and wear from either the ravages of warfare or time. The black barrels of cannon were visible along the battlements. Banners hung limp in the still, humid air. From the top of one of the towers, he was surprised to see a kite flying high in the sky, a waggling golden dragon with the morning sun sparkling off its painted scales.

  The road took them through the earthworks and became a causeway crossing between vast flooded fields of paddies separated by earthen dikes. They spread to the horizon in either direction.

  Countless men and women worked in the knee-deep water harvesting rice stalks, and baskets slung over their backs. They wore broad conical hats and worked with curved sickles. Young kids played along the dikes, throwing stones at ducks or chasing one another. Older children worked on the banks, beating the grain from the stalks creating mounds that gleamed white on the dirt. Some kind of bosses, in yellow robes and pillbox hats, rode on the backs of donkeys, calling out orders or just berating the workers for the hell of it.

  The causeway forked left and right after a few miles and Yahoo led the team onto the smaller path to the right which led down through dogwood trees to the river. The Yangtze was wide and brown with boats moving along in either direction at center stream. Junks plowed west against the current, passed by steamships, paddles churning the water to yellowish foam. There were two-man fishing smacks anchored off the bank with men working nets and poles. Close into shore upriver; a shallow-draft ironclad sat at anchor away from the current at the center of the river’s span.

  It flew the French tri-color from a stern mast. There was movement on the deck, and they could see shirtless sailors seated along the upper deck above the gun ports. Some had fishing lines in the water. The trail off the main causeway joined what looked like a towpath at the crest of the bank. Yahoo nodded and grinned and pointed, assuring them that this was the best way west, the best way to Nanking.

  “We have a three-hundred-mile hump ahead of us to reach Nanking by the eighteenth of July,” Lee said, surveying the path. It was occupied mostly by foot traffic. Wheeled conveyances and military traffic were up on the main road, a less direct route, and one filled with opportunities to be stopped by officials and asked unanswerable questions.

  “Does anyone have an idea of today’s date?” Jimbo asked. “There’s no calling home to ask,” Lee said.

  “I’ll bet my left nut none of these bearers even know the year,” Chaz said, eyeing the coolies seated now atop the crates resting by the road.

  “Hold on.” Bat fished inside her tunic to pull out a sheaf of yellowing paper. She held up a tattered copy of the Hong Kong Daily Express. The headlines concerned the visit of Giuseppe Garibaldi to London. The date on the masthead read 3 June 1865.

  “I bought it off a stand in the first square we passed through. The vendor said it came across on a steamer sometime last week,” she said.

  “So, today could be as late as the thirteenth. We have more than a month to reach Nanking,” Jimbo said, taking the paper and scanning the columns, fascinated.

  “A month in this shithole?” Boats griped.

  “Mo missed by over thirty days,” Chaz said, reading the boxes on the back of the paper in Jimbo’s hand. Ads for patented stomach bitters, cures for cathartic constipation, eyeglasses, and hair ointments.

  “Don’t bitch. We’re on the right side of our target date,” Lee said.

  “A long way on the right side, bro. This place is crawling, right? O
ne of us is going to come down with something,” Boats said, swatting at a swarm of mosquitos that had taken an interest in him.

  “We’ve had every shot in the book, sailor,” Lee said. In preparation for their op back to a place rife with disease, they’d all had shots for malaria, yellow fever, rabies, typhoid, cholera, three kinds of meningitis, an alphabet of hepatitis, encephalitis, and tetanus boosters.

  “Just keep your dick buttoned up and away from the local honeys and you’ll come back fine, Boats.” Chaz grinned.

  “I still say there’s shit flying around here that’s not in the medical books, okay?” Boats said, crushing a bug that had landed on his neck, leaving a splotch of insect guts and his own blood.

  “We still need to average twenty miles a day if we want to get into our target area with some wiggle room,” Bat offered.

  “And these boots are already killing my feet,” Chaz said with a wince.

  “Bitch, bitch, bitch,” Jimbo said. “Do what Bruce did.”

  Byrus was seated on the bank, yanking off his socks. His boots hung about his neck on a length of cording.

  “If I had his callused-ass feet, I just might,” Chaz groused.

  With a grunted command from Lee, echoed by Yahoo, the coolies lifted the crates and formed a column to follow the winding river pathway.

  Aboard L’Arrogante, the French gunboat anchored in the still water at a bend in the river, Mssr. Quentin Ratal, photographer of Le petit Parisien, stood atop the sloped roof of the ironclad and aimed his camera shoreward. A group of what appeared to be American soldiers were in conversation at the crest of the muddy banks, their entourage of coolies resting while the group shared their thoughts with one another. It seemed a likely subject for a photo with the forest of young trees on the slope behind to frame the grouping. In any case, he was bored and anxious to take a photograph of almost any subject.

  He slid the plate home in the camera, set the tripod steady, draped the black curtain over his sweating head, centered the group of Yankees in the front site of his viewfinder, and whipped the cover from the lens, counting silently to ten before replacing it. He removed the smothering cover cloth and was pleased to see that the group was still relatively stationary. They would be small figures in the overall composition, but it would make for a fine photograph. Enough to justify his meager stipend from the Parisien.

  Ratal removed the camera from the base of the tripod to take it below decks where he could remove it in his cramped cabin-come-darkroom. The collection of soldiers and bearers broke up their tête-à-tête to continue their long march upstream.

  16

  Under the All-Seeing Eye

  In the great and seemingly limitless pantheon of Hindu gods and saints, there is Visvamitra.

  Gifted with special powers of sight, Visvamitra is a seer whose vision is not limited by the confines of time and space. His predictions of future events are unfailingly accurate as if the veil of time does not exist for him.

  How apropos that Sir Neal Harnesh named his vast, world-spanning search engine for this demi-god of infallible prophecy. But the power program of Sir Neal, hidden as a Trojan horse within the hard drives of millions of computers across the world, could see the past and present with the same degree of exactitude as the mythic figure born of the god Brahma.

  In addition to continually scanning Sir Neal’s vast collection of handwritten documents, manuscripts, letters, and journals, the program also searched for any changes in the online archives of thousands and thousands of print publications across the past eight centuries. The slightest anomalous change would be noted while Visvamitra churned through terabytes of data an hour, twenty-four hours a day, completing a search/review of every archive on the planet every seventy-two hours.

  That is how Sir Neal became aware of the substitution, over one hundred and fifty years after the day, of a photo of performing jugglers in an October 1865 edition of Le petit Parisien with another image.

  A photograph of American soldiers standing at rest in the shade of a grove of dogwoods on the bank of the Yangtze River on or about the fifteenth of June the same year.

  “No more! No more!” N’itha shouted, stabbing at the remote control.

  “Give me that!” Rick Renzi said from the hospital bed, taking the remote from her hands and tabbing the power button to turn off the John Wayne movie, dubbed in Spanish, playing on the tv.

  “Good. It’s good now,” N’itha said and returned to cutting slices from a tequila basted chicken on the rolling tray by Ricky’s bed. She was feeding him like a baby, and he was allowing himself to be spoiled.

  N’itha did not care for television of any kind. Unlike Byrus, who had become a movie addict since his arrival in The Now. She found the images and sounds confusing and irritating. Recorded music did not have the same effect, and she had taken to Shakira in a big way. Caroline Tauber suggested that perhaps N’itha, being from a primitive Neolithic culture whose storytelling had not advanced past songs and spoken stories, didn’t have the cultural basis to make sense of the shifting images on the screen. Byrus, on the other hand, had been exposed to some representational art and heard more complex stories as part of his mythology. It was a working theory—Caroline admitted that she could be all wrong. In any case, she was sure there was a doctoral thesis in there for some anthropologist. If their immigrants from the distant past were ever allowed to speak to an academic.

  “Some of the potatoes, baby,” Ricky said ,and N’itha scooped up a forkful of twice-baked potatoes in garlic cheese sauce and stuck it in her own mouth, giggling.

  “Funny. That’s my lunch, and you’re eating it,” he said with an exaggerated pout.

  She lunged forward to lean over him and lock her lips on his to share the mouthful.

  “Okay, now I don’t know if I want lunch or want you,” he said, grabbing for her. She leapt out of reach with a pleased squeal. His raised leg rocked in the traction harness, sending a shock of pain up his thigh.

  “Shit!” he said, wincing.

  “My Ricky!” N’itha said, alarmed, and climbed onto the bed to cover his face with kisses.

  The door opened, and a pair of men entered the room. A man in a doctor’s white coat, the other in surgical scrubs. The guy in scrubs had weightlifter muscles that strained the sleeves of his shirt.

  “Señor Markham?” the doctor said. Renzi had been admitted to the hospital under the name Robert Graham Markham. The orderly stepped around the foot of the bed to Ricky’s other side.

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen you before, Doctor... Ruiz,” Ricky said, squinting at the name embroidered on the breast of the lab coat. He pushed N’itha away. She looked displeased, sniffing as she backed away.

  “Could you leave the room, please?” the doctor said to her. She came up against the rolling tray; her hand went out to steady it.

  The orderly was kicking the brakes off the wheels on the bed and raising the side panels.

  “Am I going somewhere?” Ricky said.

  “Radiology. Your osteopath wants a look at how your knee is progressing,” the doctor said.

  N’itha remained where she was; eyes fixed on the doctor, nose wrinkling.

  “Will Dr. Ortiz be there?” Ricky asked.

  “Yes. He will be there,” the doctor said as the orderly began rolling the bed from the place.

  “My osteo is Dr. Soto. A woman,” Ricky said, pulling a stubby handgun from under his pillow.

  He fired two rounds through the orderly’s skull, dropping the big man to the floor in a shower of blood and bone fragments.

  With a howl of fury, N’itha launched herself at the “doctor’s” back, a steak knife in her fist.

  Ricky trained the .38 on the doctor, but N’itha was already on the man’s back, legs locked about his waist, her hand rising and falling to stab the man in the side of the throat over and over. Her teeth clamped hard on his ear, blood gushing over her face.

  They crashed to the floor together, the man in the white coat sl
ipping in a lake of his own blood.

  N’itha stabbed until the spray of blood from his wounds died away, and he lay still on the tiles. She was crimson with blood, still seething with rage through clenched teeth.

  “How did you know?” Ricky said to her, breathless.

  “I did not like his smell,” she said, the wrath melting from her face to flash him a bloody smile.

  17

  The Switch

  The team camped in a copse of mulberries at a bend where the Yangtze turned sharply west. They opened their crate of rations and shared salt pork and dried peas and carrots with the bearers. All were cooked in what Yahoo called “most excellent” rice.

  Water was going to be a problem. The slow-moving river was rust colored with mud. It was certainly loaded with all kinds of parasites that there was no protection from. The Chinese drank their fill straight from the bank. Jimbo filtered a bucket of the stuff through a double layer of cheesecloth, and the water that entered their collection bottle was still tawny. They filtered it a second time before boiling it over their campfire. They dropped a chlor-floc tablet and a squirt of iodine into each quart. It was a concession, and one they all agreed on. An anomaly worth the risk.

  “You know we’re all coming back with intestinal worms. No lie,” Boats said, stuffing rice and pork in his mouth with his fingers.

  “Like in Tikrit. One kebab and I’m shitting worms all the way back to the Green Zone,” Chaz said, scraping a bowl with a pair of chopsticks.

  “As much as I’m enjoying this conversation, I think I’ll take a look at the view,” Bat said, carrying her bowl from the fire to sit on a grassy ledge. Dusk was falling over the river. Lee followed and took a seat by her, a mug of hot tea for both of them.