by Randy Moffat
The rest of them looked at him thoughtfully with the big ‘should’ hanging in the air between them. The others exchanged glances as if waiting for one of the others to jump in with either an intelligent remark or a smart remark, but in the end they said nothing for two full minutes, just leaning tiredly against the wall drinking beer. Murray held out for a minute and thirty seconds waiting patiently for their arguments, then slumped to one side, rested his head on a folded arm and went fast to sleep like a sailor off watch. The rest stared at him dully and with a mental or actual shrug followed suit and started snoring themselves.
People’s Liberation Army units patrolled the streets of Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and the surrounding towns and villages in a show of force intended to reassure the public and suppress Hú supporters. They were doing it ostentatiously in the city of Guangzhou as well. Guangzhou looked good on government paper, but it ownership was actually very much up in the air since the situation in the surrounding Guangzhou military district was not in the least decided. Several key military units in the district had gone over to Hú while almost as many remained loyal to the CCP. The units had slowly over a ten day period extricated themselves into separate armed camps. By tacit agreement the movements left Lau units concentrated in the east and Hú units roughly in the Northwest. During the cautious centrifuging the units moved warily, but manfully refrained from shooting at each other. Popping caps at personnel wearing the same uniform was a mental barrier on a par with ‘dog doesn’t bite bitch’ inside the military culture. In their hearts everyone was hoping the other side would see the light and simply ramble over one day to their own side of the line. Inside the city limits tensions were even higher though and Guangzhou city proper could still ultimately go either way though Lau’s army still clearly held the upper hand within the city for the time being. Both sides were very interested in clinching its final possession though. Guangzhou was a lynchpin. With Guangzhou would go Hong Kong, not to mention Macao. Collectively the cities were a huge slice of Chinese mercantilism and whoever held the triangle they formed would hold the key to the South East coast of China.
Further north there was Shanghai. While Lau and Hú wrestled for the hearts and minds of the regular military forces across the nation, fifth column’s of Militia for Work members had been infiltrated boldly into the environs of Shanghai in large numbers and under orders seized critical infrastructure points. The loyal military had expected it though and reacted swiftly. The army ejected most organized militia groups in a few days, though a single radio station on the outskirts and many larger or important buildings in three districts along the west side of the city were still in their hands. It meant that dedicated channel surfers could hear them ranting away about the nastiness of Premier Lau and his running dogs on their AM radios during the morning commute and then switch stations only to hear Hú roundly condemned as a traitorous nasty little maladroit. That’s entertainment.
In addition, the Militia for Work had a bad habit of setting up their own roadblocks suddenly using pickups and delivery vans at random times and locations, then fading away when the military’s better armored and more heavily armed personnel carriers and tanks showed up to contest the spot, only to appear somewhere else later in the day to repeat the behavior. In the last three days the Militia had started collecting ‘tolls.’ That was a bad strategy. A public relations disaster really. A lot of commuters were getting pissed off. Lau was already in a position to hold onto what he had and let a rising tide of resentment at Militia interference in business as usual eventually allow him to take final and firm control of Shanghai over time. Business as usual runs bests when things are as usual.
Far north of Shanghai additional army units had also struck on behalf of Lau and the Chinese Communist Party. They had driven quickly into Weifang, Tianjin, Jinan and Yancheng in lightening movements to create and secure a corridor along the East coast of China and strategically isolate Hú’s people from sources of trade and money from the sea. Though the Air Force was firmly in hand, Lau realized early that the Navy was wavering. In response he dispatched army units to seize some key naval infrastructure and bases at Qingdao, Ningpo and even smaller locales like Xiaoping with some success. Lau’s army units brushed aside naval security elements and even stormed and captured several ships; though others, loaded hastily with Hú loyalists had escaped out into the south China sea or made their way to the south sea fleet headquarters at Zhanjiang which was beyond Lau’s reach at present.
Though these successes were encouraging, for a CCP man like Lau the situation was still intolerable. The old premier was currently hunched over a map table with a pair of Army generals in the ‘August 1st’ Building in Beijing that housed the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China. They were contemplating current plans for driving on and securing the city of Shenyang to northeast of the capital where Hú’s people were contesting control. Taking and holding Shenyang would bring the province of Liaoning to heel and remove much of the threat in Lau’s ‘rear.’ The plans looked good but some details still needed attention. An aide rushed up and removed any illusion he might have entertained of perfect success.
Hú military units of the Lanzhou Military district had just simultaneously occupied Hohhot in inner Mongolia and Datong due west of the Beijing after wide sweeps into the wastelands to conceal their true targets. Datong was only about three hundred Kilometers west of the capital. If properly motivated and armed they might reach the capital in a day or two. The capital city was his Schwerpunkt as far as Lau was concerned. The loss of his Beijing ‘center point’ would mean he had lost his credibility and eventually his struggle with Hú.
He had worry lines on his forehead as he began barking orders to interpose loyal units between Datong and Beijing.
At the same moment Lau’s personal demon Hú was leaning back in a torn chair with several strips of duct tape keeping its stuffing in. The chair was in a dilapidated building in Chongqing. He was not altogether free of worries himself. The wreck of a building he squatted in was his nominal headquarters right now, but he had to move every two days or so now to stay ahead of air strikes by the loyalist air force.
He did have time now and then though to indulge in a general sense of satisfaction. Even though Lau had surprised him by shifting his forces about so quickly and neutralizing the navy, Hú was not particularly worried. The navy had not been key to his plans. His paramilitary land forces were the ace up his sleeve.
His Militia members were already nominally in control of large swaths of countryside. They were flexing their muscles in lots of small villages and towns and that allowed him to interdict roads and supply lines to Lau’s army units. His Militia were especially evident in those smaller population centers that were providing supplies and support to his own military loyalists and denying them to the CCP. Because a lot of roads went through intermediate towns Lau’s more remote inland units were already running low in gas, beans and bullets as their convoys came under more and more light weapons fire from ambushes. Some loyalist People’s Army units were actually getting hungry now. Not only military units were affected though. In addition, travel through the country by civilians on roads was becoming increasingly difficult as his Militia intercepted their natural pathways along highways and byways. Tolls were established there too to feed Hú’s war chest. The price there of ‘tolls’ levied for free passage was rising in a fine show of capitalism.
Hú’s brow lowered for a moment. Lau had caught about twelve percent of Hú’s governmental friends and followers inside the capital city and they were under lock and key somewhere… if not dead. The highest ranking was the President of the Presidium whom Hú had relied on to support him once he took the capital. In retaliation Hú had organized Militia members in a coordinated surprise attack using their now armed units. They had struck back as a group last night, raiding, arresting and killing communist party functionaries across the country, including a handful of
lightly patrolled areas inside the capital city itself. Nothing significant was possible in Beijing, but it was just enough to create a symbolic victory which embarrassed the CCP and looked good on the Hú controlled and foreign news networks. The tangible results had also pleased him. His nationwide sweep had netted two state counselors, three ministers and 2300 lower level party personnel who were now his prisoners… or corpses. He was currently parading the still living captives in a steady stream across the video screens of those media outlets he controlled as well as video clips on social media and the net. The words “Graft and corruption” were prominent in the subtitles that always scrolled across the base of those screens. People hate other people caught guilty of graft. They prefer it if it’s them making the money instead.
As a personal indulgence, Hú had the Minister of Education, a long time political opponent dragged in with his elbows bound together. The man was crying and made to kneel in front of Hú by a pair of goons. Seeing the annoying intellectual on his knees as a supplicant before him had given Hú a secret erection. As the man fearfully rambled and blubbered for clemency Hú had impatiently punched a foot forward and kicked him in the chest, driving him onto his back. Then he literally walked over the man using his stomach like a doormat to leave him groaning on the floor as a thoughtlessly discarded piece of former humanity. A human Poo stick trapped in an eddy of history. Hú had gone straight to his quarters and masturbated furiously.
So pleased was he by the results of last night that he intended to strike again tonight. He had ordered his militia units to step up disrupting Lau’s operations across the country 24x7 with three more major joint Militia and Hú loyal Army joint attacks in advanced stages of planning.
In addition, he controlled three full military districts and good piece of a fourth. Essentially half the country and something just under half of its army were his.
His spin doctors were ramping up too. They were counteracting state media organs efficiently and with increasing confidence. The message was militarily consistent. Selling him as the only true hero of China. Damning Lau roundly for general evil and predictably leveling constant charges of graft and corruption. Thematically it was clear enough. Hú the pure. Lau the crook. Any irony was lost on Hú in the depths of his utter narcissism. Even without an overblown ego though, simple cold pure logic gave him plenty of cause for complacency.
Militarily, politically and sociologically things seemed to be in a state of rough balance between Lau and Hú just now. It was enough because Hú had a secret weapon in the works.
Hú tended to skip about lightheartedly of late because of that secret. Only he knew that his people already had the lever in the works that would tip the situation utterly in his favor. With all the military ground operations going on everywhere Hú knew in his heart that no one was really watching space. Lau had simply overlooked that all four space operations centers at Wenchang, Jiuwuan, Xichang and Taiyuan were still behind Hú’s military lines and firmly in his hands. Space right now was totally his.
There were two parts to his space plan.
Part one was that his loyal astronauts and ground personnel were preparing for the clandestine seizure of most Chinese transmission satellites in just a few days time. Soon Hú would control all the broadcast media in China, that still worked. Much of the government’s voice would go still while Hú’s voice would suddenly be amplified.
He smiled with a clandestine tingle that he did not bother to suppress. There was also part two in his space plans. Masked by the chaos of warfare and this general period of force parity stalemate, Colonel Sho’s operation hung there, a Class III lever that had now taken on greater importance and would soon become elevated to become a Class I. It would become a lever big enough to move the world once and for all in Hú’s direction.
Hú could almost taste it.
Four trucks, six cars and two motorcycles left the Hongkou district bound south and west. In times of peace they would have picked up the S4 Hujin Expressway to cross the river, but there were combined army and police road blocks on all the major roads between them and their objective in the Songjiang district. The army and loyal police were stretched thin though, there was still fighting in the western outskirts of the city. The motorcycles had been dispatched at first light and begun methodically wending through back roads and a maze of increasingly bad neighborhoods as scouts. It worked. One of the bike riders discovered that the Songwei North Road over the Laungpu river had no roadblock on it from either side of the conflict. Using radio sparingly, the TESS team convoy followed the bikes without major incident until they crossed to the south side of the river and back tracked eastward into the industrial area of Songjiang where Hú’s people were holding Jeeter. Because of the slowness of traffic on the back roads they did not arrive until early afternoon. They were behind schedule.
The area was poor. Its inhabitants natural allies of the Militia for Work message. The Militia and Hú’s police pals felt little danger inside their building. Every beggar and every child in the neighborhood adjacent was on the payroll and provided alert look-outs for Hú personnel. The kids alone would report soldiers instantly for a reward of a few yuan.
Murray was smart though. What the local lookouts might overlook reporting was a group of totally lost asshole tourists. While the trucks and motorcycles stayed in motion, the bulk of the team had crammed primarily into the cars. They were made inconspicuous by wearing their ultra top secret uniform of recently purchased aloha shirts. Each man on the TESS team further lurked behind the invisibility screen of a city guide book. They all dutifully pressed their noses periodically into the book and made a show of reading earnestly and pointing out the windows now and then. Several of the Taiwanese mercs were playing along; their assigned stage persona was to be tour guides from some seedy tourist company while the rest did their level best to look just like bored local drivers paid to stifle yawns while steering the marks around. It was a genius cover. Any local could easily imagine and sympathize instantly with the scam implied. A simple game of fleece the foreigner. They would drag the idiot strangers about in a district with little or no historical significance, charge the going rate for the services at actual tourist locales, while saving all the government fees and taxes that were normally associated with attending the standard tourist destinations. With practice even the drivers turned out to be good actors. They managed to look thoroughly uninterested as they napped casually on the parked cars hoods to make damn sure their tires and engines remained attached to them. They projected an aura of merely being patient Shanghai drivers who tolerating the tedium while awaiting the legendarily high tips typically paid by foreigners at the end of the trip. Out of the cars the ‘guides’ remained simply energetic as they walked animatedly along with the tourists and did their share of oozing enthusiasm. They kept pointing excitedly about and talking authoritatively about the colorful history of the district that they made up on the spot—revealing among other things the astonishing fact that Songjiang had once hosted the Chief Astrologer of the Han Dynasty, the home of the little known Chinese inventor of Electricity who had sold his secret to Marco Polo in 1872 for forty six dollars American and the top secret location of a noodle factory that had poisoned the Princess Qingyuan during the time of the ten kingdoms. Local grifters and children smelled small change and thronged towards the obviously foreign red-haired billionaires who wandered about looking lost and holding desperately onto their wallets while flinging loose change about in a vain effort to shake off the parasites. All the while their intense interest in the local sights was easing them closer to the run down strip mall that lay along one side of the Hú building. This planned osmosis meant they ultimately congregated from several directions into the vicinity of the shops at a meandering pace, taking copious pictures and finally beginning to loudly ask for brunch so that their ‘guides’ could haggle with neighborhood folk about the best spot in vocal but badly accented dialect that got overlook
ed in the excitement of potential profits. Three restaurateurs in the mall area felt their adrenaline climb at the sight of opportunity knocking in Polynesian wear. They quickly crushed their most intrusive cockroaches, kicked the mice from sight under counters and rushed out to loudly extol the relative virtues of their suddenly splendid eateries; visions of four stars in a tourist guidebook dancing in their heads.
The TESS team’s trucks arrived about then after circling about in slowly shrinking racetracks through the early afternoon. Two pulled up and parked haphazardly at each end of the alley simultaneously. The huge and thoroughly bored security guy standing at the steel door down the alley had heard the tourist commotion near the mall and had long since wandered down to see what all the excitement was about. One truck pulled up right beside him. The high door on the driver’s compartment flung open catching him hard in the face and he collapsed into the dirt as if hit by a truck, which he had. Instantly, the passenger leaned out his own window and using a silenced weapon fired three times to shatter the rather antique camera mounted over the door and blind any watchers inside. By then two men were already racing up the alley from the opposite end and nearly got showered with bits of the camera as it exploded. One made a back while the other jumped, placed a foot on his partner’s spine and sprang up to seize the cross bar on the stumpy telephone pole opposite the building entrance whose lower cross bar was only eight or nine feet off the ground. Wrapping his legs around the pole proper he tugged his insulated gauntlets firmly back onto his fingers. He leaned back and placed heavy cable cutters on the high tension line that drooped over the alley to their target building and snipped it off cleanly at the pole. The cable flopped to the ground next to the door like a flaccid penis, depriving the target building of external power. The “thunk” of the guard’s head hitting the dirt had also been the signal to the Brutus team and they had instantly used their guide books to slap people away from their persons. They continued their new found cruelty to kick aside their coveys of pickpockets and those grade-schoolers who did not shrink back. Free of human leeches they sprinted to the back of truck number two. Using highly practiced motions they dropped the gate and reaching in to extract weapons in practiced motions. In a martial ballet they were shrugging body armor on even as they headed without a break for the unguarded and now blinded steel door. The sleepy men snoozing on the cars came equally magically alive, reached inside their own vehicles, pulled out weapons and fired three rounds each carefully into the air at several locations in the streets around the mall. The echoes of those shots blended and reverberated off the buildings from all directions.