by Chuck Dixon
Back in basic, they taught him that the days of linear, old school combat were over. No marching to take an objective from the bad guy and holding it. The new battlefield was liquid and moveable with bad guys three-sixty, 24/7. His world now made counterinsurgency warfare seem so simple.
In the end, he decided that he needed the bracelet.
And, since he didn’t plan on dragging a rotting corpse along with him, he set about the work of freeing it from the dead man’s wrist.
43
The digging men spoke only in whispers now. They chipped at the earth foot by foot, lengthening the tunnel by the hour. The earth was loose and dry, allowing them to work soundlessly with spades. The carpenters sweated to keep up, hammering boards in place with mallet heads wrapped in layers of cloth. Through the soil above them came the muffled blare of horns and even voices. Their enemy, the mad followers of the second son of God, marched just over their heads.
Jimbo crouched in the bell-shaped chamber at the foot of the final stretch of the Devil’s Ass and drew with a splinter of wood in the loose soil. Chaz was by him. Wei looked on, trying to comprehend the drawings the Pima was making. Byrus slept against a wall of the tunnel, coolies stepping over him to carry baskets of dirt away.
“We could be in there tonight. By my measurements, anyway. It’s daytime, right?” Jimbo said, finishing his rough diagram showing the tunnel’s progress under the walls of Nanking and the palace of the East King within the walls of the inner fortress.
“Afternoon by my best guess.” Chaz shrugged.
“By the end of our watch we’ll be at the entry point,” Jimbo said. He held up five fingers then one to Wei. He pointed to his wrist then up the tunnel. Wei understood. Infiltration in six hours. Jimbo woke Byrus and sent him back up the tunnel to Lee Hammond with the message.
“Bullshit. I’m part of this team, or I’m not,” Bathsheba Jaffe said, the spray of freckles across her nose darkening as her rage stoked.
Boats and Shan geared up, ignoring the lovers’ spat that looked to turn lethal given the weaponry available.
“You are. But we need someone topside, babe,” Lee said, slipping a second bandolier of ammo over his shoulder.
“Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. You think I can’t deal with what’s ahead?” Bat said.
“I don’t even know what’s ahead,” Lee said.
“Even more reason to not be down by one gun,” she seethed, picking up her rifle and bandoliers.
“I worry about you, okay?”
“I never asked you to.”
“It’s going to get rough, babe. We’re going eyeball to eyeball.”
“And you think I can’t hack that? Do I have to kick your ass to prove that I can?”
Lee threw up his hands. Bat moved past him, delivering a shoulder check to force him out her way as she marched toward the pit. Boats grinned and winked at Lee as he and Shan followed the girl to war. Byrus trotted after them with an ax he’d picked up somewhere resting on his shoulder. He was anxious to lead them back to Jimbo at the head of the dig.
“You never should have stopped dating waitresses, brother,” Lee sighed to himself and picked up his rifle to bring up the rear.
Far up the Devil’s Ass, a rupture opened.
It began as a trickle of sludge that flooded the floor of the tunnel into a swampy mess. The leak came from the place where the counter-mine had broken through five days earlier. The trickle became a sudden storm of evil-smelling water spraying between the timbers that were hammered in place to shore up the break. The weight pressed on the barricade of gabions until it broke and gave way, loosing a violent torrent that swept up and down the tunnel in a noxious brown tide.
The Taipings had diverted their sewage to run down the counter-mine. The weight against the blockage built until the pressure pushed the plug free.
The scream of the coolies in the lowest part of the dig was cut short as the city’s wastewater flooded the tunnel to the ceiling. The current smashed them against the walls, killing them with blunt force rather than drowning. A mercy in its own way. The poisonous river tore away timbers as it flowed to find the lowest places in the excavation. It raced down the tunnel like a hose, sweeping laborers along with it, on its way to the leading point of the mine. As the passageway filled, the water surged upward toward the entrance. Coolies threw down their tools and their burdens and clambered over one another to escape the wave swiftly filling the tunnel.
The overpowering stink of it reached Lee and the others as they made their way toward the rest of the team waiting somewhere ahead. The shrieks of panicked men echoed up the throat of the tunnel. Laborers, coated in reeking muck, clawed their way past. Behind them, the tunnel way grew dark as the river of sewage extinguished the oil lamps.
The team turned to follow the coolies to the light. Boats took Byrus by the arm and dragged him along. The little Macedonian, loyal unto death, was willing to swim the length of a tunnel of shit to reach the side of Jimmy Smalls.
The mine flooded to just shy of where it forked off the main tunnel. The putrid water swirled there, the way beyond filled to capacity. The battered bodies of coolies bobbed up to the surface to come to rest at the edge of the lapping brown surf.
“My God, could Jimbo and Chaz still be alive?” Bat said, heaving for breath after the frantic run into the open air of the pit.
“The dig angles up at their end. Maybe they got far enough to be above the highest level,” Lee said, dropping to sit on the dirt.
“What now?” Boats said.
“We go in with the soldiers when the wall comes down tomorrow,” Shan said, his eyes as hard as stones.
“You son of a bitch,” Boats said, stepping up to the other man, hands fisted into twin clubs. Shan stood his ground, regarding the huge SEAL without a change in expression.
“He’s right, sailor.” Lee sighed. “There’s nothing we can do for Jimbo and Chaz. We go on like they made it and link up at the treasure house.”
“That’s the brilliant plan?” Boats locked eyes with Shan but stepped back.
“No, it’s a clusterfuck. But like you Navy assholes say, better a bad plan...” Lee said.
“Then no plan at all,” Boats said and sank to sit by the Ranger.
Bat turned from them to hide the hot tears coursing twin paths through the dirt caked on her face.
44
Poison Tide
Where the tunnel angled up from below, the shallow pool of water had turned to a lake then boiled up the mine toward them. Coolies climbed upwards to escape the crush of water. Jimbo and Chaz pulled Wei along with them as the bell-shaped chamber filled to knee height and kept rising. They backed away, all eyes on the level of toxic sludge bubbling to pursue them. The coolies wailed in horror and pummeled one another to reach the highest point above the deluge.
Choi barked orders and battered at his terrified laborers with his fists. They settled down to scrabble silently up the slope of the mine. The Rangers and Wei followed, the sewage eddying at their heels. The current peaked then receded a few yards.
They were left with roughly fifty feet of dry tunnel above the high water mark. Close to a hundred men crammed into the confines of a tunnel too low for Jimbo or Chaz to stand and too narrow for them to hold their arms at full length to either side.
“Fuck. Fuck. Motherfucking fuck,” Chaz hissed.
“That sums it up nicely.” Jimbo was fighting down the grip of his phobia.
He wasn’t reassured when a section of tunnel ceiling collapsed into the water with a splash. Wei scrambled back, eyes darting wildly as if seeking a heretofore unseen exit from this hell.
“All right. Fuck it. Only way out is up,” Chaz said, slapping the back of Jimbo’s head. “Same plan but we dig our asses out now.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” The Pima was staring back at the pulsing surface of muck sealing the tunnel below.
“Now,” Chaz repeated. “We’re only going to have so much air. You feel that? In your ears? The fl
ood pushed air ahead of it. The pressure’s up in the tunnel. But it won’t be breathable forever.”
Jimbo could feel it, the sensation that his head was full like in a plane taking off on a rapid ascent. He followed Chaz forward with Wei behind them. They picked up shovels and joined the coolies who were hacking a way forward under Choi’s barked commands. Those without tools loaded baskets with fill using their bare hands. The baskets were handed along to be dumped into the flooded tunnel. They were extending the tunnel without increasing the interior space. The work proceeded at greater speed. The number of men was sufficient to fill baskets, hand the full loads back in a chain with another chain to return the empty baskets in an unbroken ring.
“Like moles,” Chaz grunted, loading a shovel and pitching it behind him.
Like rats, Jimbo thought, chopping at the loose soil with feverish energy.
The others climbed the ladders to the surface and made their way back to camp to wash the literal shit storm from their uniforms. Boats remained behind at the mouth of the pit to watch the preparations going on there.
Bullock carts loaded with barrels of gunpowder were drawn up to the opening. Coolies dampened the ground before the pit with bucket after bucket of river water to prevent the possibility of sparks. A path of damp straw was spread under the feet of the laborers hauling the barrels from the carts toward the bed of the lift. Each load was secured tightly with wet ropes before being swung out over the pit and lowered, slow and careful, on squealing block and tackle lines.
On the pit floor, more coolies unloaded the barrels and made their way into the entrances of two tunnels. Ten carts were unloaded this way, and the explosives carted into the depths and along the half miles to where they would be bedded in a big chamber scooped out beneath the foundations of the north wall.
Boats, a keen judge of all that goes boom, estimated that each of those holes was loaded with ten tons of black powder. Enough to create an instantaneous sinkhole and bring down the walls and ramparts above the twin blast points. The entire painfully slow process took until well after dark. All was done under constant hectoring from mandarins dressed in their party best. But the orders were delivered in hushed voices as if any loud utterance would release the fury of the massive amount of powder they’d stuffed down the tunnels. Even the ever-present gongs and bugles were silent.
Following the powder came more bullock carts stacked with bales of straw. The bales were lowered and hauled down the mines to pack the powder-packed chambers full to the ceiling. The straw would burn and ignite the powder. A trail of powder down the walking planks of the tunnels would serve as a fuse.
Boats grew bored with this part of the preparations and made his way back to the tents. Lee and Shan were stripped down to undies, oiling and cleaning their weapons and leather. Byrus was bringing a fresh razor edge to his sword with a whetstone. A pair of hired coolies were pressing the moisture from their uniforms, fresh from a washtub of boiling water. Boats assumed that Bat was doing the same in the concealment of their tent.
Soldiers gathered to watch the strange company at their ablutions. They pointed and remarked on the tattoos displayed on Lee Hammond’s scarred hide. A rattlesnake was inked on his right arm, coiled up from just above his wrist, wrapping around the corded muscles to end in a gaping mouth of dripping fangs on his shoulder. On his left arm, a dagger through a grinning skull. An American flag unfurling across his biceps. His chest was emblazoned with a Celtic cross and on his back a pair of crossed M4 rifles with a scroll reading, Rangers Lead The Way across a map of Iraq.
“They’re working up to the big blow tomorrow,” Boats said, stripping out of his own filthy uniform, showing off the spread-winged eagle and anchor under the thick mat of red hair on his chest.
“Right on schedule like the history books say,” Lee said, pulling an oiled patch of cloth up the barrel of his rifle.
“We’re going in with the mob?” Boats said, handing off his clothes to a coolie who bowed and grinned.
“We’ll let the first and second waves take the lead for once,” Lee said. “Fong’s paper on the battle says the Taipings put up stiff resistance through the afternoon. We have no dog in this fight. We stay clear of any contact. We’re here for one thing.”
“But we must beat the looters to the prize,” Shan said.
Lee turned to Shan with some heat. “Thanks for the input, Captain Obvious. But Jimbo and Chaz will be there waiting for us.”
“How can you be certain of this?” Shan sniffed.
“Because I’ve seen them in tighter spots than this. That one-eyed Indian and that hardcore, stone cold brother aren’t going to drown in some shithole in this shithole country and this shithole war,” Lee said slamming the ramrod home in his rifle.
“Zim not dead. Byrus will not let him die,” Byrus said between clenched teeth, emphasizing his words with strokes of the stone along the blade of his gladius.
“And that’s the last word on that,” Lee said and stood to walk to the tent.
45
Going Downtown
Within the walls of Nanking, a peasant family was awakened from fitful sleep by an unknown hissing sound.
They had taken shelter in what was once a horse stable that housed mounts for the cavalry of the Shield King, one of the cohort of lower kings who served the Heavenly King, ruler of the Land of Eternal Peace. A mother, father, elderly grandmother, and seven children had taken a stall in the stables as their home when their own house burned to the round in the first weeks of the siege. There was room in the stables now—all the fine Arabian stallions of the elite mounted regiment known as God’s Vengeful Fury had been butchered and eaten months before as famine swept the city. Even the floors were clean, swept of every grain and stalk of straw to be ground to meal and used as filler in the loaves of bread parceled out as meager rations.
The youngest son was the first to waken after dreaming of a giant serpent with glowing eyes and poison breath. When he realized that the hissing sound of his dreams was real and very near, he roused the others. The father hushed the others and crept toward the susurrating sound coming from within one of the abandoned horse stalls. He paused, swiping a hand through the air before his face. The air was filling with a nauseating outhouse scent. The father gagged but kept on.
The hissing sound was dying away now. The father stood in stunned disbelief as a flagstone in the floor began to rise from its place all by itself. More amazed when a glow of muted light projected from beneath the shifting stone. When it was moved aside, a beam of light shot upward from a hole in the floor of the stall. He drew closer, then stepped back. The head of a mallet struck upward from the hole, widening it and unseating the flagstones around it. The hole collapsed, becoming a crater and the voices of men, cursing, rose from below. The father turned to run, to move his family to flee and to raise the alarm. A filthy hand gripped his sleeve. An arm slid around his throat from behind. He was thrown to the floor, a sandaled foot on his chest. Above him, a demon from hell, smeared dark with mud, raised a shovel to bring the blade down on his head.
The demon was tossed aside by the biggest man the father had ever seen. A man with skin as black as ebony. Near him was a second man with one eye covered by a leather patch. They exchanged words that the father could not understand. The black man gripped the father’s hand and pulled him to his feet before shoving him away. More men were emerging from the hole in the floor. Coolies, their nearly naked bodies caked with foul-smelling muck, eyes staring and mouths panting.
The black man shoved the father away once more. The father turned to find his family and flee, his only thought to get his loved ones far from this gate to Hell.
“I guess this is the only luck we’re gonna get tonight. Could have come up in the middle of a barracks,” Chaz said. He put a finger to his nose to press one and then the other nostril closed and blow out streams of muddy mucous.
Jimbo said nothing. He stood bent, hands on knees, and filled his lungs with clean air, p
ressure relieved to be free from the tomb of the tunnel. His inner ears crackled adjusting to the change in atmosphere.
Wei was forming up the coolies who were beginning to wander off toward the moonlight beyond the stable doors. He had a hushed exchange with Choi that ended with Wei making stay gestures with open palms.
“Good idea. These guys should stay out of sight,” Chaz said to the uncomprehending Wei. Chaz gave him a thumbs up, and Wei nodded with enthusiasm and returned the sign.
Jimbo raised his head from where he’d dunked it in a stone horse trough. He shook the water from his hair in a spray and stripped off his feces-encrusted tunic to toss it to the floor. He stood, leaning on the trough, eyes closed, mouth moving in silent thanks.
“Think you can find this place?” Chaz said after giving his friend a moment.
Jimbo turned and sat on the edge of the trough. He picked up his rifle, checked that the action and barrel were clear of mud then rose.
“How hard can it be? It’s a palace, right?” Jimbo sighed and rose to lead them into the night of the enemy city.
The Rangers had been on enough night ops behind enemy lines to know that skulking around drew more attention than boldly walking in plain sight. Wei fell in behind them, strolling as if he belonged there.
They walked steady and with purpose along a lane that Jimbo figured would take them to the concentric wall ringing the inner city where the big shots lived. The streets were dark, and the alleys black with shadow, probably from a shortage of lamp oil. There was no one on the streets and not even the sound of barking dogs. Jimbo surmised they’d all been eaten long ago.
