by Chuck Dixon
He rested the AK on the humped root of a paloverde stretching out above him. He set the ring sight on the group of silhouettes moving double time out of the fog between the buildings. He waited until the phalanx shape was clear and set the upright tang on the third man on the right leg of the “V.”
The rifle barked and the man in his sights collapsed, a slug in the soft tissue where his leg met his hip. The lead man turned to look back momentarily. Dwayne dropped him with a single round through the ass. The man spun to the ground.
Dwayne rolled from the cover of the root to move low in an ape-like gait for the shelter of bushes to the south, away from N’itha and the camp over the ridgeline.
He was counting on the two wounded men to slow the chase. In the thick of a hedge of berries, he glanced back. The remainder of the phalanx was moving at a run to his last position. They didn’t miss a step. Just hopped over their fallen buddies and kept on. The rest of the team would be coming too, breaking into two units to sweep north and south. To flank him. To cut him off.
The AK to his shoulder, he snapped off two shots at the group that was slowing beneath the paloverde to eyeball his spent rounds and look for boot prints. Time for fucking around was over. Dwayne dropped one with a center shot. A double tap that hurled the man against the bole of the tree. The rest returned fire with that peculiar burring sound. Hot rounds arced close above him, strings of iridescence that buzzed as they crashed through the cold air.
They were shooting high. Not shooting to kill. Driving him. Or trying to scare him into surrender. They wanted him alive.
Distance. All he could do was cover as much ground as he could before they caught up or got ahead of him. Every second he bought N’itha was precious. Dwayne was up and running, breaking through the brittle thorns to stay ahead of the silent men.
35
Up Satan’s Fundament
Their eyes adjusted to the dimness while they climbed down deeper into the earth. The way was lit by oil lamps set on shelves spaced along the ramps, ledges, and ladder ways.
“Jesus, it smells like ass down here,” Jimbo groused. “Like a dead man’s ass,” Chaz said.
“Like something that died and came out of a dead whore’s ass,” Boats added. When it comes to obscenities, Navy wins every time. The miasma in the air was overpowering with the scent of piss, feces, and sweat. The funk was covered over by the stink from the oil lamps and was turned palpable by the close, humid air trapped in the excavation. In addition, there was the sharp tang of spoiled cabbage everywhere. Cabbage, garlic, and rice was the main diet of the coolies working on the massive dig. The smell of it came from a wooden cookhouse constructed on the floor of the pit. The same odor was also rich coming off the sweating laborers.
Teams of coolies worked a row of giant bellows that drew air from the surface down into the tunnels that branched out from the southern end of the pit. The bellows were constructed of huge leather bags sewn in segments. They collapsed and inflated like giant accordions. Suspended in wooden frames the bags stood twelve feet tall and were operated by a capstan cleverly devised to depress and raise the bag, filling it from oiled cloth hoses strung upward to the surface and expelling the air through pipes of bamboo run down the tunnels, secured to the ceiling beams. The coolies stood atop the frame turning the lateral wheel to the beat of a drum. Ten bellows, one for each tunnel, dominated the large entry chamber to the tunnel complex. The fresh air made work within the tunnels possible. Without it, the men would suffocate in their own exhalations.
“Central air,” Chaz said.
“From the Flintstones,” Boats said.
Shan led the team deep into a tunnel off to their left. It split into two tunnels, and they stayed to the left at the fork. The tunnels had wooden timber walls and ceilings with matted tree branches set between to further hold back the weight of the surrounding earth. A walkway of planks ran down the center of the burrows.
They gave way to coolies trotting past, bent under baskets of soil on their backs and other coolies moving down the other way with empty baskets and timbers. In addition, boys, some no older than six, raced back and forth with buckets of drinking water. They slapped aside anyone in their way with their long-handled wooden ladles. Another boy passed them carrying gourds filled with lamp oil, his only job to keep the lanterns filled.
The floors of the tunnels were ankle deep in muddy water. The passageway widened at intervals where more coolies worked pumps to carry the groundwater up to the open pit, where it was hauled upward along with the loose earth and rocks.
Despite the wisps of fresh air being pumped down to them, the funk in the air grew thicker the lower they went. It was cooler in the deep tunnels which provided some degree of relief from the close atmosphere.
“You okay?” Chaz said to Jimbo. The Pima’s one eye was wide and moving side to side. His mouth pressed closed, breath whistling rapidly through his nose.
“Give me some time to get used to this,” Jimbo said.
“You were claustrophobic back in basic,” Chaz said, recalling an incident when a slit trench collapsed back at Benning.
“Can we stop talking about it? Okay?” Jimbo said and shoved Chaz ahead of him.
Shan stopped at a fork in the tunnel to speak to a work leader who looked like every other muck-covered laborer except for a red turban wrapped about his head. The man pointed down the burrow straight ahead. Shan bowed and motioned for the others to move on.
The floor sloped downward at a sharp angle to where a pool of water had gathered. It reached their hips as they waded to the other side where it inclined upwards again, the floor drier and sandy there. Jimbo touched the ceiling above the pool and felt rock. The diggers had dropped the level of the excavation to burrow under a shelf of granite. He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse about his surroundings.
“This is the tunnel we want. The Mogui Gangmen,” Shan said to Lee.
“They name the tunnels?” Lee said.
“Most peasants are innumerate. No idea about numbers. They can remember names if the names are memorable,” Shan said.
“Like what?” Boats called from behind Lee.
“The Path to Heaven. The Root of Sorrows. The Silken Throat,” Shan said.
“What’s this one called?” Lee asked.
“The Devil’s Ass,” Shan said, turning back to them with a crooked grin.
Farther along the tunnel, they found a team of men with mallets hammering lengths of iron pipe into the ceiling. Stacks of pipe rested on a wooden cart. They’d seen the open ends of piping protruding from the ceiling. These were vent holes allowing for passage of air. Deeper down the tunnel they came across another crew hammering solid rods upwards to make pilot holes for other coolies following behind to install the vent pipes.
The work environment was something out of a nightmare, but Jimbo was astounded at the level of ingenuity and the awesome brute force needed to create these mines. Everyone had a job. Everyone understood their role. No one was idle. The tunnel inched closer to the wall with every passing moment because of the combined, machine-like labor of thousands of men.
“Gung ho,” Jimbo said under his breath. “What you say?” Byrus said, close behind.
“It’s the only Chinese I know except for kung pao,” Jimbo said. “It means ‘work together.’”
“Gung ho,” Byrus said, trying the phrase out. “It is good.”
The ring of hammers echoed from the gloom ahead. They reached a crew setting timbers and crossbeams. Ahead of them were the sounds of the digging crew; the chunk of spades, picks, and mattocks working to break the clay soil.
Shan and Lee left the team to find the digging leader. A brawny man in drooping mustaches and red turban spoke with them. He looked at Shan’s chart in the lamplight. The foreman shook his head and barked objections. Shan explained with great patience, but the guy showed no sign of budging. Lee put up a hand to interrupt, fishing in a pocket to produce a single gold coin that he held under
the other man’s nose. The foreman’s mouth clapped shut and his eyes fixed on the gleaming disc.
“You like that?” Lee said and slid his Bowie knife from the sheath. Holding the coin in the palm of his hand, he pressed the blade of the knife into the soft metal to make a crease. The coin snapped in half in his fingers. Lee held the half-coin out to the foreman allowing him to take it.
“Half now. Half later. You feel me?” Lee said, holding up the remaining half of the coin before replacing it in his pocket.
The foreman nodded with vigor, securing the half-coin in a leather purse worn on the belt about his pajama pants. He grinned, showing yellow teeth with a prominent gap in the front.
The man bawled out an order and held his open hand out. A coolie rushed up, bowing and lowering eyes, to place a ball of twine roughly the size of a volleyball in the foreman’s hand. The foreman growled and pointed. The coolie took a loose end off the ball and ran back up the tunnel toward the pit, the end of the twine in his fist. As it played out behind the racing coolie, Lee saw that there were knots in the twine, spaced like the depth-meter back on the Abundance. The foreman’s lips moved, counting the knots as they were plucked from the ball.
They waited, the foreman gripping the shrinking ball of twine until it grew taut in his fists. He bowed his head to them, smiling. Minutes later the coolie returned, panting and bathed in sweat. The foreman barked a question at him, and the coolie gasped a response. The foreman gestured for Shan’s chart and placed a filthy finger on the vellum. He marked a spot just shy of the defensive wall at the spot where they wished to enter the city. Shan spoke and placed his own finger at a spot a few inches from the foreman’s smudge; a spot well past the wall and under the city proper.
The foreman nodded again, slowly, lips pursed. Then he held up two fingers. Shan turned to Lee.
“I get it; he wants more money. Typical contractor.” Lee dug out the half-coin and tossed it to the foreman.
“The same when we’re inside Nanking.”
Gold broke the language barrier. The foreman bawled orders, and the digging began anew.
It was the morning of July 7th, 1865.
They had twelve days to breach the walls ahead of the imperial army.
36
The leader of the excavation up the Devil’s Ass was a man named Choi. A Mongol mother and a Han father made for one tough bastard. He was a ballbuster and a hard charger and ran his crew like a disciplined machine.
Choi suggested to Shan that he could hire more coolies to speed the work. A sack of copper coins doubled the workforce within hours. Supplies and empty baskets raced down into the hole along the right wall. Laborers burdened with loads of dirt moved up and out along the left wall.
“We dig this much twelve times in a day,” Choi said to Shan, holding his hands a distance of four feet.
Shan translated, and Lee did the math in his head. Roughly eight feet an hour. Sixty plus yards every twenty-four hours. They consulted the chart and estimated the burrow would come up near their target in ten days, give or take.
“That’s shaving it close,” Lee said.
Shan turned to Choi and asked if the work could move faster.
“Tunnel small. Men big,” Choi said, holding his palms close together. Only so much room for the men at the head of the dig to swing a pick.
Shan narrowed his eyes, deciphering the foreman’s atrocious Mandarin.
“Some dirt is soft. Some is clay. There is dirt. There is rock. Dig fast. Dig slow.” Choi shrugged.
“Ten days,” Shan said to Lee.
“There’s no reason for all of us to be down in this mine all that time,” Lee said. “We’re just in the way. I say two of us stay down here and the rest go up for now. We can spell each other on eight-hour watches.”
Jimbo nodded eagerly. Returning to sunlight and open sky sounded like heaven to him.
The team, minus Lee and Shan, searched the camp for Bat and Wei. They found them camped in a row of tents along a wall at the back of the stockade. Bat was setting up house with a tent Wei bought for them in the market place. It was a red and yellow striped bell tent with enough room for them all to sleep if they didn’t mind being chummy. Bat used an improvised sign language and a handful of copper to hire a couple of kids to fetch water and tend a campfire. An iron kettle of water was steaming to a boil over the fire as Jimbo led the others into view.
“Where’s Lee?” Bat asked. The team was slathered in mud and already stripping off tunics, boots, and pants. The two hired boys took the clothing and, without instruction, spread them to dry in the sun.
“We’re doing shifts in the hole. He took first watch with Horse-face,” Jimbo said before dumping a ladle of water over his head.
“What’s it like down there?” Bat said.
“Nasty,” Chaz said.
“A shithole,” Boats said.
“Is a good mine. Strong,” Byrus said, offering his professional opinion as a former mine slave.
“Will it take us where we need to be?” Bat said. No one had an answer for that.
Lee sat in a niche in the wall, staying out of the traffic moving along the walls of the tunnel. Shan stood by him watching support timbers being handed down the line toward the head of the dig up one side the tunnel. Basket loads of soil and stone were being passed down the other. Water boys trotted from one man to another, offering drinks from ladles.
“I had an uncle who was a tunnel rat,” Lee said. “You know what that is?”
“Tunnel rat?” Shan said.
“In Vietnam. The Viet Cong dug all these tunnels. Miles and miles of them. They needed guys to crawl down them and scout them out,” Lee said.
“Your uncle?”
“On my mother’s side. They’re all little guys. Uncle Norton couldn’t have been taller than five four.”
“He came home from Vietnam?”
“Sure. Two tours. Still lives in the same house he grew up in. The night before I went into the army, he got drunk enough to tell me a story about his last tour.”
Shan remained quiet.
“They dropped him down a hole so tight his shoulders touched either side. Just him, a .38 revolver and a flashlight. He crawled and crawled, going deeper into this hillside. What he didn’t know, and what his unit CO didn’t know, was that there was an airstrike called in on the opposite face of the hill. My uncle’s down there when the loads start dropping. Tunnel collapses, and he’s buried alive.”
“What did he do?” Shan asked.
“He did like he was taught. Dropped face down with his hands cupped either side of his face.” Lee mimicked the motion. “Laid there with a thousand pounds of dirt on him. Wondering how long two handfuls of air would last him. Then he hears digging. Someone’s coming for him. He feels hands on him, and he’s hauled out of the dirt. Only it was by two V.C. A man and a woman. He said he didn’t know who was more surprised by that.”
“They took him prisoner?”
“He shot them dead. Both of them. Then found his way out of there.”
“I see,” Shan said.
“My mom says, after Uncle Nort came home, he didn’t sleep indoors for more than a year,” Lee said. “Spent the nights, rain or not, in a hammock in the back yard.”
Both men were silent for a while, watching the ceaseless march of the laborers moving past.
“One can never know who might save one’s life,” Shan said. “Or how to reward them for the favor.”
“Yeah. My uncle said that gratitude only goes so far,” Lee said.
“Yes,” Shan said, his face turned away from Lee.
37
Quarry
The hunters were moving more deliberately now, widening their hunt for Dwayne out to the edges of the woods where the desert began.
Dwayne lay on the lee side of a dune, watching the men spreading out in a circle at the opening of a ravine. They’d moved past him where he hid covered in brambles and shadow. He was inside their search ring with a plan to d
ouble back. Get to one of their vehicles, fuck the other rides up, and take off for any road heading away from here.
It was almost dawn, the sky lightening behind the ridgeline above him. He’d managed to keep them on the move for hours, drawing them away from the compound and away from Caroline. N’itha would have reached the camp before now. By this time, they were all inside the SUV and moving farther east into the Lagunas. He had no idea what sort of array was visible to the hunters through their NODs gear. Light enhancement, sure. Maybe thermals. The tech was unknown to him. Maybe unknown to anyone this side of whatever manifestation field they blew in through. He was left with the age-old conundrum of whether to keep moving, keeping the terrain between him and the hunters, or sticking in place to let them move on by.
He watched through a notch in the sand at the top of the dune, lying sideways with one eye on the broadening half-circle of men. He waited until the nearest one stepped behind the tower of a cirio cactus. At a half crawl, he moved fast along the shadows at the floor of the gully between the two dunes. He reached the mouth of the depression and rose to his feet, rushing bent-kneed for the cover of rocks at the base of the ravine. From there, it was a sprint for the trees. He made it into the paloverdes just ahead of the aurora of pink light growing off the desert. The dawn sky bloomed behind the mountain.
Dwayne raced through the blue shadows of the woods toward the smoke-filled canyon where the three vehicles were parked. Racing into a clearing between the trees, he ran nearly headlong into a figure in camo black and gray.
The man raised the bug-eyes of his vision gear and stalled for one precious half second in surprise. He lifted his rifle. Too late. Dwayne, still moving full out, struck the man with all his weight gathered behind the steel butt of the AK. They went down together, tumbling along the sandy soil.
