One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  The skipper stayed at the wheel on the exposed quarter deck. Two of his mates lay on the deck, skewered through with arrows. The skipper had a shaft through his arm but still held fast to the wheel, roaring orders into the voice pipe. Shan and Wei stood to the gunwales firing their rifles, delivering deliberate fire on the mounted archers. The deck around them was a forest of arrow shafts with more missiles tearing the air around them.

  A mate ran up and down the main deck banging a gong and shrieking until an arrow through the chest spun him about. A second drove deep into his skull, the point bursting from an eye socket. He dropped to the deck lifeless. The gong rolled away from his dead hand to bounce along the boards.

  Up on the quarterdeck, Shan climbed up to sit athwart a section of the iron-armored shielding, working his rifle to send rounds toward horses and men. Arrows spanged off the plating around him. Wei called up to him, cautioning safety. Shan ignored him, levering and firing without heed to the storm of shafts tearing past him. The gunboat was slowing as the current battered against it.

  Screaming at the top of his lungs, the skipper called into the voice pipe for speed. A blast of black smoke erupted from the stacks. The paddles, spinning lazily in the streaming water, stalled and banged and reversed to churn the water to froth once more. The ship shuddered in the grip of a violent lurch as the Abundance bucked the tide, the bow swinging back midstream.

  The sudden forward movement of the ironclad tossed men stumbling to the deck.

  Wei’s voice rose in alarm from the quarterdeck. He was at the gunwale pointing over the side, calling to the skipper who stood braced at the wheel, eyes fixed on the way ahead. Shan was nowhere to be seen.

  Through a gun port, Lee saw a man in the water being carried away into the wake of the gunboat’s churning paddles. The Ranger tore off his gun belt and was through the port and into the river, stroking through the yellow water for the man bobbing on the current. Arrows ripped into the water all around him as he swam. Lee kept on, kicking and pulling for Shan, the current pulling him along the hull of the Abundance. The man was facedown and showing no sign of movement, drifting away like flotsam.

  Bat leaned from the port, watching Lee move farther and farther away behind the ironclad. Chaz yanked her away from the opening as a pair of arrows soared through, ringing off the armor where her head had been.

  On the gun deck, Carberry was hurling abuse in English and orders in mangled Mandarin at his crews who were pushing the trucks of their three bearing guns through the ports. His translator lay pinned to the deck with arrows.

  “Fire! Fire all guns, ye poxy yellow curs!” the Yorkshireman bellowed.

  Under the seismic kick of the three big guns discharging at once the Abundance canted starboard, rocking on its keel. The deck was covered at once in a choking, rotten-egg smog of black powder smoke.

  On shore, the cavalry faltered when three charges of grapeshot whirled into them from close range. Gouts of river mud geysered upward along the bank. Mixed with the black muck were parts of men and horses mangled by the pitiless rain of thousands of steel balls. The mud boiled under the barrage, water vaporized in the deadly combination of heat and impact. Out of the mist rode what was left of the bowmen. They turned their mounts to climb the slope of the banks and out of the line of fire of the rifle and cannon of the gunboat. A few horses remained at the water’s edge including one stamping, mad with pain, in a greasy pile of its own guts. The animal’s keening screams echoed through the silence left in the wake of the thunder of the guns.

  Jimbo stood and put a round through the suffering creature’s head. He did the same for a second horse, limping along the bank trailing the stump of a hind leg.

  “What about him?” Bat said, pointing her empty pistol at an archer, both legs shot away at the knees, trying to claw his way up the bank. The man was wailing at the top of his lungs.

  “Fuck him,” Jimbo said, pushing a fresh cartridge into the Whitworth’s breech.

  Bat snatched the rifle from the Pima’s hands. She sighted on the wounded archer through the scope with all the skill taught her in IDF sniping school at Tze’elim. She put a slug through the man’s head. His shrieks were cut off in an instant.

  “You know, everyone who we see here was dead before our grandparents were born,” Jimbo said, taking the smoking rifle back.

  “That doesn’t change anything,” Bat said.

  She leaned far out of the gun port, looking back the way they’d come. Nothing but smoke drifting over the churning wake.

  Chaz called to the skipper to stop the engines. Wei was fighting with the captain for the wheel.

  Bat ran to starboard to scan the near shore. She could see two small figures, one dragging the other, through the shallows toward the banks of the river island. It was Lee Hammond pulling the still form of Shan behind him.

  Shan awoke below deck. He was lying, soaking wet, on a straw mat. His fine silk outfit was caked with stinking mud. The black American was wrapping a bandage about his head. Shan’s skull throbbed. Wei stood by watching, his face creased with concern.

  “How many fingers?” Chaz said, holding three fingers before Shan’s eyes.

  “Three.”

  “You banged your head on something when you fell off the boat. It’s going to hurt awhile,” Chaz said, tying two strands of the bandage in a knot to secure it in place.

  “I went into the river?” Shan said. “I do not remember.”

  “Hammond went in after you. Saved you from drowning.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I guess he thought your sorry ass was worth it,” Chaz said and stood to go.

  The river widened again once past the archipelago of islets and sand bars. The Abundance moved to the center of the current, far out of arrow range from either bank. The broad expanse of the Yangtze stretched like ochre colored silk under the light of the setting sun before them. The river was dotted here and there by smaller vessels winding north with goods to sell the besieging army.

  Shan came up on deck, his head aching the way the American told him it would. His vision was blurred. Probably a concussion. Not his first. He had changed into a shirt and pants he found in the slops of the boat’s crew store. He looked across the open deck for the man named Lee Hammond.

  The skipper was back at his post; a bandage wrapped tight where the arrow had pierced his forearm. The bodies of dead crewmen were tossed into the water to join the flotsam of dead bound for the sea. The decks were doused with buckets of water to wash the blood out the gunnels. Eager crewmen were in a contest to find as many intact arrows as they could. The decks and masts bristled with them, and each sailor found a bundle of their own.

  Shan could see Lee Hammond standing on the forward deck. He was stripped to his underwear and wringing out his uniform over the side. The woman sat on the deck by him, cleaning her rifle.

  “They are Tartar arrows,” Shan informed Lee as he stepped up. “Each one is worth a pipe of bhang or time with a woman when we reach Nanking.”

  “I thought the Tartars served the emperor. Those guys were flying rebel colors,” Lee said, draping his tunic and trousers over a line to dry.

  “The second son of God made a better offer. Or maybe they are rogues. Pirates. It is a time of madness for China.” Shan shrugged.

  “You know a lot about your country’s history?” Bat asked, running an oiled rag down the barrel of her lever action.

  “I read all history. A soldier learns from what has come before,” Shan said.

  “You’re a soldier? Not just a gunfighter?” Lee said.

  “Lanzhou Night Tigers. China’s first and best at counter-terror.”

  “That’s special ops. Elite unit.”

  “Like you. Rangers,” Shan said.

  “They just look for the biggest and dumbest and make them Rangers,” Lee answered.

  Shan nodded sagely. “Same in China.”

  “Same everywhere, brother,” Lee said, taking a seat on the deck by
Bat to clean his own weapon.

  Shan watched them awhile before leaving them to strip off his own drenched clothing.

  “He didn’t thank you for saving his life,” Bat said.

  “Sure he did,” Lee said.

  30

  To the north, a tower of smoke stood miles high on the horizon. It rose into the air, a black, unmoving smear in the morning sky, across the course ahead of the Abundance.

  By afternoon, they reached the first of a series of pontoon barricades stretched across the river. The ironclad slowed to a stop to queue in behind junks and barges to be inspected before being allowed to continue on to Nanking. Before them, the black cloud of smoke divided the sky in two. They could hear, faintly over the chunder of the idling steam engine below, the boom of artillery. It was a continuous thunderation, waxing and waning in frequency but never stopping. The city was still more than ten miles ahead.

  To guarantee their passage through the various checkpoints, the skipper showed his own documents, medallions, and certifications to a succession of imperial officers. Each time, a handful of brass coins changed hands before the proper stamps were applied to the official documents, and the Abundance was cleared to the next chokepoint.

  The final river gate was guarded by a pair of wooden warships with archer towers built amidships. Helmeted bowmen peeped over timber battlements, the necks of their long reflex bows visible over their heads. A mandarin in yellow silks worn under chain mail armor stepped daintily over a gangplank and onto the deck of the Abundance. He demanded to know who the gweilo were. They’d not seen Europeans this far north in weeks. He had been told that Pasha Gordon and his army of barbarians had sailed back to Shanghai never to return. It was up to Shan to sell the presence of the strange company of Yankees traveling aboard one of the emperor’s gunboats. The mandarin squinted and sniffed at the offered documents before ordering a supernumerary to apply the necessary stamps and embossments.

  The environment along the river changed once they drifted past the final gate. The scenery went from the expected mud banks, rice paddies, and escarpments to a maze of piers, wharves, and landings, all packed with either merchant craft or riverine navy vessels. A city of tents spread as far as the eye could see on either side of the river. The smoke of thousands of campfires created a white cotton haze over the river surface. This was home to a half million soldiers of the emperor’s army and double that number of slaves, engineers, butchers, bakers, millers, masons, carpenters, liverymen, gunsmiths, merchants, whores, and the rest of the vast company of camp followers needed to keep a force this size provisioned for an extended siege.

  Troops in white coats and pants, trimmed in red, marched with shouldered spears and banners. Cavalry in bamboo armor trotted in long columns, lance points gleaming in the orange light of the lowering sun. At the foot of a wharf, a platoon of men, naked but for loincloths, dragged a siege cannon to shore at the end of ropes. The cannon rested on high iron wheels; its scaled barrel worked into the head of a furious dragon.

  The hills rising beyond the banks were bare of trees, the slopes strewn with fresh stumps and tall heaps of deadfall. From the sea of tents, they could hear the rasp and whine of saws working, the ring of hammers striking anvils, and the tink, tink, tink of chisels on stone.

  Set along one bank, rows of bodies hung like obscene laundry from long cables stretched between poles. The weight of them bowed the cables downward at the midway point, the victims at the center of the spans twisted with feet dangling only inches from the ground. They wore placards in Chinese characters about their necks proclaiming the charges that brought them to the hangmen.

  Before the bow end of the Abundance, the column of black smoke filled a third of the sky. From within the dark cloud came flashes of white light that bloomed and died. Threads of white vapor crossed the sky, rockets looping and twisting to explode with muted popping sounds.

  Here the sound of the guns grew louder. A ceaseless barrage booming and coughing and sending missiles into the air that trailed sparks on the way to their targets, invisible around a head-land that lay before them.

  The Complete Abundance chugged around the final curve that would bring the team to their ultimate destination.

  Nanking.

  The city rose off the eastern bank behind high walls set before violet hills speckled with flashes of radiance from cannons set in earthworks high on the slopes. Answering fire from guns placed along the battlements created blossoms of sudden light in the gloom. Across an expanse of canal, continuous cannon fire blasted out from an outer fortification. This was Dibai Castle, the Dragon’s Neck. It had been captured by the imperial Qing army weeks before, its guns trained now to fire on the city.

  Adding to the din were hundreds of mortar barges anchored in chains mid-river. Huge tub-like barrels angled upward from within angled hulls of heavy timbers bolstered with bands of iron. The mortars belched balls the size of grapefruit. These were fashioned from stones dug from a quarry miles away, hauled to the riverside and worked into lethal rounds of the proper caliber by a legion of coolie laborers. The mortars went off, firing at will, with a monstrous thud, the recoil thrusting the barges deeper in the water to create rings of turbulence that set the vessels about them bobbing. The stones sailed in high wobbling arcs to come down somewhere within the walls of Nanking.

  The source of the massive tower of smoke, visible from twenty miles distant, was a huge tower set at the southwest corner of the city’s defenses. It was stone and mortar at its base and two city blocks in breadth. The upper part was five stories of timber fortifications and hoardings. It was ablaze now, an inferno that would take days, maybe weeks, to burn.

  From the spiked battlements along every wall, sporadic fire lanced out from carronades and jingals. Rockets flashed in the air from the tops of towers to snake down on curving contrails and explode in the air over the earthworks of the besiegers. Answering rocket fire twirled upward from redoubts to either strike the walls with impotent fiery eruptions or drop from the apex of their arcs to fall within the walls where they exploded to project sprays of burning shrapnel.

  In addition to the boom of cannons, thunder of mortars, hiss, and pop of rockets, and crackle of heavy muskets, an unceasing racket of horns, gongs, and drums provided a discordant soundtrack.

  Everywhere, before the walls of the city, the land lay denuded of plant life. The muddy slopes and flat approaches were gouged with hand dug entrenchments snaking toward the city on switchback courses that ended in high walls of mud-filled gabions. These forward bunkers were invested with lighter field guns that rained canister on the ramparts of the walls above in an attempt to clear them of defenders. Crews died under the return musket fire raining from the city walls and were quickly replaced with new crews. These men raced up the twisting trenches to pull away the dead and man the cannons until they themselves died or until the cannon was finally rendered mute by withering fire from above.

  Between the forward gun emplacements and the cyclopean walls, the ground was carpeted with the bodies of men who’d rushed the walls with ladders weeks before. Their bones showed white through the tatters of rags that were all that was left of their uniforms. The concentration of the dead was highest against the base of the walls—like a black wave frozen at high tide. The ruins of long ladders lay splintered among them. Stone chips from direct artillery hits on the walls rained down to splash in the mud.

  The team stood on the deck of the Abundance, all eyes on the hellish landscape spread for miles before them above the river’s east bank.

  “How the fuck are we supposed to get in there?” Boats said, speaking for them all.

  31

  She Wolf

  Through a gap in the steel panels of the shed, Dwayne watched the shadows lengthen. He could hear a generator grind to life somewhere. Lamps atop poles flickered to life, casting down cones of yellow light. The men remained in the dark beneath the porch, smoking and talking. The pair of attack dogs slept in the center of the str
eet. The hooch where he’d last seen N’itha was dark and silent.

  The shed that served as his cell was just steel sheets screwed to a wood frame. The door was secured by a stick stuck through the lock hasps. A few kicks and the door would open. The steel sheets were secured with rusting screws in worm-eaten two-by-fours. They’d come free with a good push. It would be noisy. They’d be on him when they heard it. His situation would be unchanged except for a few more bruises on his ribs.

  There was nothing in the shed but a litter of ancient corn husks and a pile of backpacks and luggage. This gang preyed on hikers and tourists; gringos who came to Baja and found more adventure than they expected. There were probably graves dug all around this gorge. Graves dug by their victims, probably.

  He searched the packs but found nothing of use. Mostly clothes. Little bottles of hotel shampoos and bags of moldy trail mix and tacky souvenirs. A manicure kit with nothing more dangerous in it than nail clippers. He crouched by the door, keeping an eye to the gap in the panels. An opportunity to break out of here would come. He had to hope it would come before the men searching for him arrived.

  The guy in the Estrella t-shirt stepped off the porch into the street. His gait told Dwayne that he was either drunk or high or both. He shambled away from the others who called out to him, laughing. He waved a hand back at them to shush them as he walked. He cupped his hands around his mouth to call into the hooch next door.

  “Jorgito... Jorgito...” he called, making a song of it.

  A few of the others stepped off the porch and into a pool of light to watch the show. One threw an empty bottle after Estrella, warning him not to awaken the horny bastard. Another added that it was only trouble to get between a dog and his bitch.