by Chuck Dixon
The blow from the rifle butt shattered the gear on the man’s face. Dwayne brought the rifle down two more times, feeling bone give way with wet snaps.
A shift of movement through the trees. Dwayne rolled to the scant cover of a young tree. Streaks of red pulsed close by. The sand steamed where the rounds struck between himself and the body of the man he brought down. The ozone smell of electrical fire hung in the air.
The hunters had left a reserve force back at the compound. He’d either lost count of the pursuers, or they’d called for back-up. The men searching for him on the desert would be coming back this way. He was trapped between two forces in a ravine with only two ways out, both blocked.
There was another way out. It required sideways thinking, and he didn’t like it. But it could put a span of distance between him and the men after him.
Dwayne reached an arm around the tree and let off a long rip of fire from the AK. He tossed it aside; bolt locked back on an empty magazine. Red streaks cut the night behind him as he launched himself for the body of the man he’d butt stroked. He rolled, grabbing fistfuls of the man’s uniform, pulling the corpse atop him.
The body juddered over him as hot rounds punched into it. One lanced across the meat of his calf, feeling like he’d been struck there with a ball bat. They were still trying to take him in one piece. He could hear boots pounding on sand. The squawk of a radio transmission grew louder as the ring of men drew tighter. Dwayne freed an arm to let off random rounds into the dark from the .45. Dwayne’s other hand found the steel bracelet on the man’s wrist and fumbled his fingers along its interior face. A display lit up iridescent blue on the smooth metal. He ran the tips of his fingers over the face the way he’d seen Samuel Renzi do. He had no clear idea of what he was attempting. Dwayne only knew that this was a swear-to-Jesus forlorn hope of a longshot, and he was taking it. The voices of men neared, speaking hushed. The clink of equipment. The tramp of boots on sand. A light grew over him. A white cloud spread to engulf him. Searchlights and gas?
He realized that the source of the brilliant light was the device on the wrist of the dead man. The chilled mist was thickening, dropping over him like a freezing blanket. His stomach heaved. His vision swam. All was cold air and white radiance.
Dwayne’s eyes fluttered open to a painful light above him. He shoved the body off him and sat up, his vision moving in and out of focus.
The night was gone. Replaced by a desert sun high in the sky. The paloverde trees were gone as well. He lay on a field of rock scree between the ridgelines of the ravine. The rocks above were the only thing that remained unchanged from only a few seconds before.
He was in the same place but not in the same place. And not in the same time.
Whenever he was, Caroline was far away and free to escape. He rolled onto his hands and knees and puked until he was dry.
38
Boats had dozed off and came around to find that he was not on a beach at Oahu with that cute chick from the insurance commercial. “Shit,” he hissed and looked around to see silent shadows moving through guttering lamplight. The air was close and heavy with the scent of sweat and cabbage. Men were passing baskets filled with dirt one way and empty baskets the opposite way. He was still in the tunnel.
He looked up to see Wei’s broad face grinning down at him.
“I fell asleep. Fuck you, okay?” Boats said, rising to his feet to tower over the other man.
Wei’s grin only widened. “Yeah. So, what did I miss?” Wei’s head tilted.
“Shoulda learned more Chinese than ‘How much for the beer?’ and ‘Does she have a sister?’” Boats grumped before taking a swig from a canteen and spitting it out in a long stream. He poured a splash over his head.
Voices reached him from up at the head of the tunnel. He heard an exchange in rapid-fire Mandarin. Angry words. The clink and chop of tools had ceased. The laborers slowed their work and then stopped entirely, looking to one another with wide, frightened eyes.
Boats moved at a crouch up the tunnel, parting coolies as he went. Wei scurried in his wake.
Choi, the excavation foreman, was in a heated discussion with a guy who could not have looked more out of place in the mine. An official-looking dude in midnight blue silk pajamas and slippers of brocaded gold cloth, now caked with mud. The dude wore one of those caps that looked like a little lampshade worn upside-down on the shaved crown of his head. His long queue of braided hair was bound in silver cords. His manicured hands were encrusted with rings of gold studded with gems. The peacock feather in his silly cap was bent double against the low ceiling beams of the tunnel. And the dude was pissed.
Two soldiers with rifles and sheathed long swords stood with him looking either displeased at what they were hearing or unhappy to be this far up the Devil’s Ass. They turned baleful eyes and gleaming bayonets toward Boats and Wei.
Boats grasped the gist of the argument from the gestures of the little mandarin. He was asking where Choi got the balls to draw so many coolies to this particular tunnel? He threw a handful of copper coins into Choi’s darkening face. Someone talked. The mandarin knew all about the hostile takeover of his digging operation. He turned and met Boats’ eyes with a combined expression of disdain and disgust. The mandarin pointed a folded fan at the giant SEAL and seethed orders between clenched teeth.
Boats felt Wei close by him. Wei had undone the flap of his holster and was closing his fingers on the butt of the Remington. Boats gripped him by the wrist.
“Slow your roll, Wang,” Boats hissed.
Wei’s eyes grew wide in his sweating face. His lips were tight against clenched teeth.
The tough little fireplug understood the mandarin’s words and was scared shitless. Boats wished that he knew what the mandarin was saying. Then he realized that he should be glad he didn’t know.
Jimbo and Chaz trotted down the branching tunnel to reach the fork where the Devil’s Ass began. It was their turn in the hole. Byrus followed behind Jimmy Smalls’ eternal shadow.
“You seem to be dealing with this better, bro,” Chaz said.
“I’ve convinced myself that I’m not going to die here,” Jimbo said.
“That right?”
“This is no place for an Indian to die.”
“God has other plans for you?”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
“And how does a Pima brave go out? With a war cry?”
“At eighty years old, humping one of those chicks from the blackjack tables down at the casino,” Jimbo said.
Chaz chuckled. “I don’t think that’s in God’s plan, Cochise.”
“It is if God wants me to be happy,” Jimbo said, coming to a stop where the tunnel became too congested with coolies for passage. They tried making their way through, pulling men aside to make way. One of the men turned to them, eyes wild with fear. Jimbo began to speak. The coolie reached out to press his mouth closed with callused hands.
None of the laborers was speaking. They were listening with rolling eyes. Jimbo turned to Chaz, a finger to his lips. His brother Ranger unshouldered his rifle and jacked a round into the chamber. Byrus drew his gladius from its scabbard.
In the hushed silence, Jimbo could hear a metallic sound coming faintly from somewhere ahead and above them. A chipping and scraping noise. He moved to the wall and pressed his ear to a timber. The vibrations came to him through the wood. Digging.
Jimbo hissed sharply, and the laborers turned to him. He gestured for them to move up the tunnel behind him, to run for the surface. The jam of men broke up, dropping tools and baskets, to run past the Rangers toward the tunnel entrance. The way ahead was clear now but for a handful of workers who remained, eyes cast upward toward the sounds of excavation. They held tools, now weapons, in their fists. Jimbo drew his revolver with one hand and thumbed back the hammer. With his other hand, he slid his seven-inch Bowie from its sheath.
Twenty feet before them, a section between two ceiling beams crashed to t
he tunnel floor followed by a stream of soil and rocks. A pair of shadows dropped through the fresh opening and rushed toward them. Two men, naked but for filthy loincloths, eyes gleaming in faces black with muck. They swung axes before them as they charged the laborers blocking their way with mallets and picks.
Jimbo put out an arm to stop Byrus from running to meet the attackers. Chaz raised his rifle and put a slug into the face of the lead axman. The noise was painfully loud in the confined space. The man was hurled back, half his head gone. The second ax-man planted his ax in the ribs of a screaming coolie before being brought down by a mallet to the head. The other laborers chopped at the fallen man with picks.
“There’s more of them!” Jimbo shouted and held his Remington outstretched in his arm.
More figures dropped through the hole opening in the ceiling along with part of a tunnel wall. The Taiping counter-mine had struck the Devil’s Ass at a downward angle. The men approached at a run, shrieking, curved swords in their fists. They crashed into the small knot of armed coolies creating a fierce tangle of fighting men that choked the way ahead, blotting out the lantern light. They chopped their way through the laborers only to meet the guns of the two Rangers.
Jimbo fired the Remington until it went dry. Chaz pumped the lever of the rifle. They filled the narrow space of the tunnel with light, smoke, and noise. The press of swordsmen folded under the rapid gunfire. They had nowhere to run but into the teeth of the fusillade. The front rank went down followed by a second. A third clambered over the bodies of their comrades, howling vengeance, only to be gunned down to create a growing impasse of dead and wounded men that plugged the tunnel.
Chaz kept up a tattoo of rapid fire to cover Jimbo. The Pima holstered the long pistol and secured his knife under his belt to swing his rifle into play. The pair knelt on the sodden planks and kept up a withering fire into the counter-miners who were struggling to clear a way through their own dead and dying. Behind the Rangers, Byrus crouched, his face contorted with fury. The little Macedonian was waiting to be unleashed.
A boom like summer thunder filled the tunnel followed by a fog of sulfur smoke propelled by a spray of white sparks. Somewhere behind the bunker of flesh, a big bore musket fired. One of the jingals, a portable cannon capable of firing loads of grapeshot or a projectile the size of a billiard ball.
Just above Chaz’ head, a section of support beam vanished in a shower of splinters. Dirt rained down from the ceiling with the concussive blast of the weapon.
“Don’t give them time to reload!” Jimbo shouted to be heard through ringing ears. He stood up to drive a stream of .44 slugs toward the source of the flash as fast as he could work the lever. Next to him, Chaz had drawn his revolver, fanning the hammer, roaring with rage.
A second boom vibrated the walls and floor. A big stone ball whistled between them, inches from Byrus’ head, to explode in shards somewhere far behind them.
“Reloading! Reloading!” Jimbo bawled, backed away as he pulled the loading tube free to feed in cartridges from his bandolier. He felt the other Ranger’s hand push him back up the tunnel. Chaz raised the revolver to pump rounds into a mad-eyed swordsman slithering through a gap created in the mass of dead that was blocking the tunnel. His final two slugs took the man through the chest and mouth. The swordsman slid to the floor, convulsing in a gush of his own blood. Two more men shouldered through in his wake, collapsing a section of the grisly barricade before them.
“Reloaded! Engaging!” Jimbo called as he dogged home the tube on his second magazine. Chaz dropped behind him to charge his own weapon. Jimbo worked the lever and put rounds, center mass, into two swordsmen in the lead. The pair of attackers stumbled only to be shoved aside by two more. And three more behind them. Swordsmen were being replaced by men wielding fat-barreled flintlock pistols that sent embers and shot down the tunnel. In their frenzy, one of the pistoleers put a ball through the neck of another attacker. The man’s throat exploded before he fell in a heap to trip up his comrades.
A wild shot struck a timber near Chaz’ head. Jagged needles of wood appeared in the flesh down one side of his face, forcing him to stagger back. He shook blood from his eyes and worked the rifle, the hexagon barrel glowing red like a poker. The press of men in the tunnel was growing. Wave after wave leaped their own dead to get at the pair of barbarians. More and more ball and shot flew from the mass of fanatical Taipings.
Jimbo, Chaz, and the little Macedonian dropped back as they emptied their rifles at the rising tide of attackers. They reached a place where the tunnel curved just before joining the mother tunnel that led back to the floor of the pit. Chaz tore off his tunic to wrap around the steaming barrel of his rifle. He gripped it to use as a club. Jimbo crouched, his knife in one fist, his revolver held like a club in the other. Byrus’ face was twisted in a wicked grin, his gladius held ready in one hand, a mallet in the other.
“Looks like God gets the last laugh, Cochise. I don’t see any hoochie-mama blackjack dealers here.” Chaz laughed as the tunnel before them filled with shrieking men and flashing blades.
Jimbo didn’t hear Chaz, only the beat of his heart, steady and slow as a war drum.
39
The Impasse
Swordsmen rushed up the tunnel in a constant pulse. The attackers came two and three at a time with more of their number crushing in behind.
There was no room to swing his rifle. Chaz held it to his shoulder, driving the brass butt plate like a piston into skulls or turning it to parry the blades of swords. Jimbo drove men to the ground with blows from the butt of the big revolver. He slashed at exposed arms and leg with the blade of his Bowie. Byrus crouched between the Rangers, stabbing out with the point of his sword, bringing the mallet down on the heads of the fallen.
They fought for breath in the furnace heat created by the massed, struggling bodies in the cramped space. Their advantage was size and reach. The attackers were smaller men, picked for size to allow them to worm through the tunnels of counter-mines. They made up for their size with sheer ferocity. Their eyes were wide with opiates or adrenaline or animal fury or all three.
The Rangers and the pit fighter were backed to the neck of the curve. A heap of flesh was before them with more men clambering over the fallen to get at the three barbarians blocking their way to the surface. The impasse of the dead slowed the assault for only a heartbeat.
“Reload your rifle, bro!” Jimbo shouted. “We’ll slow them down!”
Chaz backed away, reluctantly, to recharge the magazine tubes of his rifle. His hands were slippery with sweat. The butt of the rifle was caked with blood and hair. Jimbo and Byrus rushed to meet the next surge of swordsmen. The attack staggered as the Pima and the pit-fighter carved their way forward buying Chaz time to bring his rifle to bear.
The thud of boots on the floor planks in the tunnel behind him made Chaz turn. A voice called a cadence in Chinese, growing louder. The rifle loaded now and held to his hip, and the Ranger braced for a new assault from a second breach at their backs.
Men came around the turn in the tunnel, long rifles with gleaming bayonets affixed. They wore deep blue uniforms, trimmed in red under black lacquered bamboo chest plates and red conical hats. An officer called time. He was in a red turban and armor painted in gold, a straight bladed sword in his fist. The character for the Qing dynasty was painted on his chest in white.
Imperial troops. The fleeing coolies had sounded the alarm.
Chaz pressed back against the wall of the burrow to allow the troops to pass.
“Jimmy! Clear the range!” Chaz bawled.
The emperor’s soldiers, in response to the officer’s yipped orders, formed triple ranks in the narrow confines of the tunnel. The front rank threw themselves prone to the mud. The second dropped to a knee; the third stood upright.
Downrange, the attack seized up at the sight of the rifle barrels trained their way. Jimbo shoved Byrus to the ground and dropped on top of him a half-second before the combined firepower o
f the three ranks exploded to fill the tunnel with light and sound.
The Taipings dropped in heaps under the first fusillade. The crush behind them swarmed forward to meet a second dose of lead that slashed them down like wheat before a scythe. All momentum was lost as the tide of attackers halted then receded back toward the breach until they stalled against the clutch of their comrades still pouring down from the counter-mine.
The imperial officer shrieked an order, and, to a man, the riflemen charged down the tunnel for the Taiping wretches. They went to work on the attackers with bayonet points. Sinking the long triangular blades into ribs and guts, twisting, pulling, and spearing out again. They worked silently but for the roaring of their officer urging them on. The attackers’ cries of defiance and threats turned to shrieks of pain and terror as the hacking wicket of blades drew blood and pierced flesh with mechanical efficiency. The combat moved farther down the tunnel, driven by the emperor’s troops in a ghastly peristalsis that left a bloody carpet of dead and dying rebels.
Jimbo, bruised by the boot soles of his rescuers, rose from the muck. He pulled Byrus up with him. The little Macedonian, painted over with mud, was grinning and nodding. He was bleeding from a deep cut across the back of one hand but otherwise unharmed.
Chaz approached, holding out Jimbo’s rifle.
“Boats is still waiting on us,” Chaz said. Blood ran from the splinters embedded in his face and neck.
They trotted after the imperials, leaping and scrambling over the tunnel floor covered from wall to wall with the slain.
At the excavation end of the tunnel, the mandarin was quailing in fear.
Boats and Wei joined the mandarin’s bodyguards to aim rifles into the dark. Choi stood behind with his gang of laborers, each armed with tools and ready to fight with their backs to the wall. Coolies had come fleeing down to the dig site ahead of the sounds of gunfire up the tunnel.
