by Chuck Dixon
The mandarin was wailing like a child, mouth working wetly, pale hands waving like spasmodic doves.
The SEAL sighted over the barrel of the lever action, watching the spots of light from oil lamps stretching away to blackness. One after another, the lamps seemed to go out, their illumination snuffed. There were men coming toward them. The sound of feet splashing through mud, the glimmer of blades in the gloom.
Boats fired a round toward the first face he saw emerging out of the black. He advanced up the tunnel, jacking and firing as he went. The others followed. The air filled with smoke, and they walked through the haze, firing blind. The muzzle flashes from their weapons lanced out to create a crazed pattern of dark and light in which they could see men falling over one another before them.
Less an assault than a rout in reverse, the rebel attack petered out, leaving only the groaning wounded and silent dead. The tunnel rang with the sound of fighting, but no more rebels showed up. A Taiping, no older than twelve, cast his sword down and knelt in the guttering light, hands clasped together. He mewled at them, eyes searching, pleading. The men lowered their rifles.
The mandarin, his courage restored now that the threat had evaporated, strode forward, yapping orders. His bodyguards stood unmoving, eyes on the quivering boy. The mandarin snatched a rifle from one of them and marched down the tunnel to plant the point of the bayonet in the young rebel’s throat. The boy collapsed, seizing and gurgling as he drowned in his own blood. The mandarin turned, grinning back at the company. He jerked the blade free. Boats put a .44 through the man’s skull. The silly hat went flying up on a gout of blood and bone, the peacock feather twirling. The mandarin dropped as though legless into the wet mud. The SEAL jacked a new round and turned his eyes to the bodyguards.
“Do we have a problem?” he said.
The bodyguards provided an answer by rushing to the fallen mandarin and yanking the rings from his fingers.
40
A Vexing Inconvenience
Sir Neal Harnesh chose to wait in the back of his limo while his jet was fueled. Better to sit in the heated confines of the Mercedes stretch rather than in the garish architectural atrocity that served as the executive waiting area at Kyzylorda Airport near the capital of Khazakstan.
He was soul weary rather than physically fatigued. Weltschmerz. The Germans had a word for everything. Sir Neal had endured a dinner party the night before that seemed to last an eternity. He’d been seated between the Khazak dictator’s mistress, a former Miss Khazakstan—and a former president of the United States. He presumed he was positioned as a buffer between the famously lecherous former president and the shapely young supermodel. The dictator sat at the head of the table with his wife seated by him.
The whole event was ghastly, the food greasy, the champagne poor, the conversation tedious and the entertainment, frankly, appalling. But suffering through all of it was a sacrifice that Sir Neal was willing to make to secure mineral rights to a large portion of the country’s rich uranium fields. The American president was there to make certain that the deal went through. In exchange for a generous donation, two hundred million dollars through Canadian shell companies, to his library, foundation, and very private account in Cuba.
Sir Neal was annoyed at the waste of his valuable time. Time he would never get back. Though he realized with a wry smile, that last was not necessarily true for him.
There was a tap on the tinted window by his head. He tabbed the window key, and the pane slid down to allow in the frigid, dry air from without.
Augustus Martin, collar up against the cold, bowed to speak to his master through the narrow gap. Martin appeared to be a fit man in his mid-twenties but his eyes, cold and hard, betrayed that first impression. Today, his eyes were colder and harder than usual.
“We believe that we’ve found the device,” Martin said. “Device?”
“The property stolen from our facility in Nevada.”
Sir Neal came out of his ennui, his full attention on his supernumerary.
“Join me on the plane, Gus,” Sir Neal said and raised the window.
At thirty-five thousand feet over Russian airspace, Sir Neal and Gus Martin continued their conversation over drinks. The multi-billionaire enjoyed a Dom Perignon ’98 and his aide a room temperature lager.
“How was this done? Did you find the Taubers as well?” Sir Neal asked, accepting a warm towel from an attendant who made Miss Khazakstan look like a washerwoman.
“To answer your first question,” Martin said, “we turned up satellite photos of a weather anomaly at the mouth of the Yangtze. It was a curiously isolated lightning storm accompanied by a thick white fog occurring a few weeks ago.”
“It is the device. China? How the devil did they get there? How the devil did they get halfway across the world with an unregistered nuclear reactor?” Sir Neal sat forward in his chair, eager for details.
“Apparently, it’s aboard a ship, a cargo container ship leased from a global shipping company and registered in Egypt. The Ocean Raj. It’s how they got to China. It’s how they were able to reach the Mediterranean to interfere with the Judean operation,” Martin said, grateful for his master’s full attention. He was also pleased, for the moment, to have the upper hand. At least as far as information went.
“And why are they in Shanghai?”
“They’re moored offshore for now, but intelligence we gathered on the ground tells us that they have been anchored for nearly two months in a berth belonging to Fei-Tong Freightage. That’s a subsidiary of another company that ultimately is controlled by Jason Taan.”
“I’m not familiar with him.”
“One of the new Chinese billionaires. Some of your own shell companies had business with him in Malaysia a few years back, Sir Neal.”
“And the Taubers?”
“There have been two activations of the device two days apart. I think it’s safe to assume that one or more of the Taubers is aboard.”
“They remain at anchor?”
“We’re keeping an eye on them. No one on our watch list has left the ship. Just normal activity on board. As much as we can observe, anyway. They have the ship moored inside a shelter they constructed for the purpose of concealing their actions. There’s armed security. Private.”
Sir Neal watched the tops of clouds drift by below. His finger tapped the edge of his champagne goblet, causing the crystal to ring like a distant temple bell. He shifted his gaze to Gus Martin and spoke.
“I want the full itinerary of this container ship back to the first day of their lease. A full sweep based on what we find. Who do we have in Asia who can move immediately?”
“Franck is in Ho Chi Minh City. Quan is on Java.”
“Get them both. I want a team ready to board that ship on a moment’s notice. That ship is waiting for a reason. They have a team in the field somewhen. It will be there until the team has accomplished its objective. We strike while the field is open, catch them while their attention is focused elsewhere.”
“And the orders for Franck and Quan?”
“I want the Taubers taken alive, and everyone else eliminated.”
“Simple enough.”
“And I want Visvamitra put to work on this. Search for any further anomalies and changes occurring across the chronal spectrum in the Yangtze valley. Anything out of place. Any time and place where the timeline has been buggered about.”
“Yes, Sir Neal.”
“And the other operation? Where was that? Mexico?”
“In Baja, sir. That is ongoing. No word yet.”
“Perhaps you need to take a hand in that, Gus.”
“Consider it done. Consider it resolved,” Gus Martin said, wiping away a lager mustache from his upper lip with the corner of a damask napkin.
41
Over two hundred dead Taiping rebels and laborers were hauled from the tunnel.
Sappers crawled up into the counter-mine to pack it with rags and brambles that were lit with oil. The
burrow was angled sharply upward with only enough clearance for one man at a time. The resulting fire prevented a follow-up attack. The blaze created a draft drawing air down into the pit and up the tunnel and up the counter-mine like a flue, feeding the fire until it built to an inferno. At risk to their lives, sappers stoked the fire with fresh kindling. The support timbers of the approach to the counter-mine eventually burned through. They collapsed, bringing hundreds of tons of dirt down with them to extinguish the fire and block the counter-mine from further attacks.
Coolies closed the remaining gap with stacks of earth-filled baskets. Carpenters walled over the breach with timbers. Nothing was said of the unfortunate death of the mandarin, and his naked body was tossed into a mass grave on a slope above Dibai Castle along with rebels and coolies alike.
The outlaw excavation was now considered cursed. The coolies demanded higher wages. Shan suggested doubling their pay to two copper coins a day. The workforce returned, and the tunnel continued at twice the pace of the neighboring digs. The curse had the added benefit of keeping any more mandarins from snooping around. After all, this was the hole that swallowed one of their privileged class, never to be seen again.
The work of digging went on. The Devil’s Ass cleft deeper into the heart of the hillside.
The next three days brought the tunnel under the foundations of the northern wall. For a stretch of forty feet, the ceiling of the burrow was enormous base stones on a bed of gravel and flaking lime mortar. The digging went faster since no bracing was needed. They were above the groundwater line as well.
Now the tunnel would angle upward at a ten percent gradient on a straight line two degrees off true north. That would bring them to within striking distance of their target with an easy vertical dig to the surface that could be accomplished in one night of work.
“We come up before dawn on the 19th. The histories all agree that the imperials blow their main tunnel at noon on that day,” Jimbo told the others back at their camp in the stockade—absent Wei and Boats doing their spell in the dig. The team was sharing boiled mystery meat and rice. Byrus confirmed that it was horse. He’d eaten his share in the past.
“It gives us time to find the storehouse, get in and locate the prize,” Lee said. “We find a place to hole up until the wall blows and the Imperials come in to loot the shit out of the place. We mix in with the melee and find our way out.”
“Then back to the sea and we’re home,” Chaz said. “You almost make it sound easy,” Bat said.
“What could go wrong?” Lee said. All but Shan laughed.
“We’re getting close. I think we need to double the number of us at the point of the spear. Overlapping watches so there’s always a minimum of four guns in the tunnel. We don’t want to get this close and lose the dig to another breach,” Lee said, and everyone nodded.
“You know we’ve been lucky so far. There’s so much chaos here that no one’s paying attention to us,” Bat said. “But do I have to tell you that it all changes when that wall comes down. This army will go feral for a few days. Their generals will allow that.”
“What’s that mean to us?” Chaz said.
“You really need to read more history,” Jimbo said. “When we won a fight, we got some downtime to sleep, write emails, and catch up on Halo. But for these guys, it’s going to be party time medieval style. Rape. Looting. Murder. Mad Max.”
“And evening scores,” Bat said. “We’re barbarians to them. You guys have been focused on the dig. I’ve been up here the whole time. This place is fucked up.”
“What?” Chaz said.
Bat cleared her throat and spat a wad of gristle into the fire. “Yesterday? The coolies and soldiers were worked up like it was spring break. They left the stockade to go down to the edge of the river. Banging gongs and tooting horns and like that. I followed along. I wish I hadn’t. They had all these people locked up in a big iron cage up on a boat dock. Women and kids too. A hundred, maybe. I didn’t notice at first, but the cage was on wheels that ran on wooden rails. The banks are mobbed with lookie-loos. Soldiers, workers, whores. Some asshole in black stands on the back of a cart and reads off a list from a scroll. Then coolies run forward out of the mob and begin pushing the cage down the tracks and down the ramp at the end into the water. The people inside are mashed against the bars as the water comes up around them. I saw a woman trying to get her baby through the bars. They were both crushed by the others before the water covered the whole cage. You could still hear them all screaming through the water.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Chaz said for them all.
“And the crowd didn’t make a sound except to bang those fucking gongs,” Bat said. “They just stood smiling until the last bubbles broke the surface. Then they went back to their posts, and their tools like nothing happened. They ran out a team of oxen and hooked them up to ropes tied to the cage. I didn’t stay to watch the cage pulled out of the water. So, all’s I’m saying is that someone’s idea of fun might be killing some Yankees. We’d better watch our asses until we’re back on the Raj.”
“And after that,” Lee said, meeting Shan’s indifferent gaze.
42
Worlds Apart
Caroline drove through rain that streaked the windshield like dirty tears. The barren desertscape of San Felipe stretched like a tabletop before her, gray sky meeting gray earth.
The seat beside her was empty. She glanced at it again and again, praying to see Dwayne there.
Rick Renzi reclined in the back seat with N’itha, cushioning his cast with a rolled sleeping bag. Stephen was strapped into his car seat, sucking on the head of a Cookie Monster teether. His eyes studied the animated rivulets of rain dancing across the window by his head.
She’d known this day was coming. She knew with certainty that she would be separated from Dwayne at some point. She knew as sure as she knew anything that he would see her again. It would be January of 1871 on a snowy street in Paris. Yes, he would see her again. But she had already been there. That moment was in her past and in his future. For her, their last meeting was yesterday afternoon when he went to get them water.
Caroline drove a heel of a hand across her eyes to wipe them dry.
Dwayne found the pool right where he had been the day before. Or a million years ago or a century from now.
There were no signs of human habitation. No contrails trailing behind jets in the sky above. No litter on the ground. No footprint but his own. He saw no wildlife. The air was free of birds. There were biting horseflies, the only sign of life other than himself.
The pool lay among a tangle of gorse. It was shallower now. The water falling from above had not yet gouged the rock to the depth he remembered. What did that mean in geologic time? How many years did it take for erosion to create a wading pond from the inches-deep pan before him now? In the loose dirt around the edge of the pool were prints. The tiny hooves of deer? Pads of rabbits and larger animals. Predators. Coyotes, maybe.
He lay on his belly and drank the cool water. He stripped down to boxers and washed the blood from his shirt and jeans before laying them on a rock to dry.
His inventory consisted of the clothes on his back, the .45 Colt with three rounds left in the mag and one in the chamber, a revolver with five loads and the rifle he took off the guy he rode to this place on. He found a release on the body of the strange rifle that revealed a kind of canister drum containing what looked like thousands of needle-like projectiles. Ballistic speed, or greater than ballistic speed, darts.
Slipping on his boots, he hiked back to the hedge of greasewood where he’d left the body of the hunter.
The cloth uniform was a synthetic but felt like it breathed. The tunic and pants were reinforced at the elbows, chest, and knees with an extra layer of fabric that had a mesh feel to them. The clothes would fit him well enough—he was roughly the same size as the dead man. He pulled away the smashed eye gear and helmet to reveal the face of a man in his late twenties maybe. The man’s face was lo
cked in an eternal sneer. One eye was black with an eight-ball hemorrhage from Dwayne braining him with the butt of the Kalashnikov.
The dead man was of mixed race. High cheekbones with mocha latte skin fading gray now with death. His one eye was olive colored without an epicanthic fold. His military cut hair was raven black.
Unlike the uniform, the boots were a dead loss. They were more than a size too small for Dwayne. He pulled off the laces since they might be of some use later. The uniform stripped off; the dead man wore a black t-shirt and briefs of an unknown net-woven fabric and design. No manufacturing labels or markings.
The equipment belt held a canteen flask, penlight, clasp knife, flares, two more ammo canisters of the darts and some kind of wafer-thin device of blue metal. It looked like a smaller version of a smartphone, but Dwayne couldn’t find a way to power it up. There were no buttons or pads anywhere on its surface. There were absolutely no personal items anywhere on this guy. A tattoo high on his arm featured a running stick figure like one from a traffic sign. Beneath it was a row of stylized characters that could be letters or numbers.
He had the guy stripped naked but for one item. The bracelet.
Dwayne searched for a clasp or even a break in the surface and found nothing. He sat on the sand, sipping from the dead man’s canteen and tried to make up his mind about a number of things. The liquid in the canteen had a citrus taste and a touch of sweetness, dry like ginger ale.
His thoughts all came back to that ring of steel around the hunter’s wrist.
Should he destroy the bracelet? Could he destroy it? Or should he gear up and use it to zap himself somewhere else? He wasn’t sure how he’d set it to bring him when he was now, whenever it was. Using the device again might just zap him back into the arms of the assholes he’d just escaped from. Could they use it to track him? If that were true, wouldn’t they already be here? Or, given the vagaries of time travel, would they arrive here six months from now? Or the day before? Or arrived yesterday and were even now watching him from the surrounding rocks?
