Dragon in the Snow

by Forrest Dylan Bryant

  * * *

  High above and well to the stern of the Hangchow Baby, something sinister hovered. It had the form of a dragon, although much smaller than the one that had attacked the ship. And unlike its larger cousin, this one was made of metal: its wings were powered by a complex clockwork mechanism and kept beating ceaselessly by some unseen energy source at its heart.

  The thing had eyes, with intricate magnifying lenses hooked up to a powerful radio transmitter: a form of television. The image was broadcast instantaneously to a room in Shanghai, wherein sat Wo Then-Liang, the dread Black Dragon. He watched the battle through a curious set of opaque goggles that sat upon his nose, like ordinary spectacles crossed with tin cans. The ingenious device reproduced precisely what the clockwork dragon saw, in full color and in three dimensions — the Black Dragon felt as if he himself were flying above the water. It was a masterpiece of engineering that even Captain Owen Doyle could never have matched.

  From a distance, Wo Then-Liang looked impassive, disinterested, like a businessman watching the third act of an opera. But his insides boiled and his mind seethed. He could see the singing stone clearly. So close... he felt as if he could swoop right down and grab the stone from the little fool who held it. The mechanical dragon could, in fact, have done this for him, using the white fire to kill any who stood in the way. But something was wrong: the stone was no longer green. He saw it glowing a bright, icy blue against the darkness, and he knew he was powerless against it.

  How had they done it? How could these simple American peasants transmute a singing stone to blue aspect? It was inconceivable. In a hundred years they could not have done it: he himself had needed two decades to perfect the technique, and that was with a millennium of knowledge and an army of workers at his disposal. But the evidence was undeniable. The stone was blue, the aspect of reflection; it would repulse any attack, destroy any aggressor.

  In the dark waters below, the Black Dragon could see the flailing forms of his Shadow Order mercenaries, men who had failed him at his moment of triumph.

  He could, perhaps, have rescued them. But compassion was not a quality the Black Dragon possessed. Nor was mercy.

  Chapter XVIII

  ANOTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

  —

  “WOULD SOMEBODY CARE to tell me what the hell just happened?” Hank asked the question, but it could just as well have been any of them. The adventurers were gathered in the Hangchow Baby’s galley, seated on either side of a stained cafeteria-style table with the singing stone in the center. It glowed icy-blue, and in the relative silence of the room, they could hear that it was emitting a soft humming sound. That was new.

  “The dragon...” started Doyle uncertainly, “Did you see? It was made of stone. Like an enormous statue.”

  Professor Armbruster gave a start. “My dear Captain,” he said, more gently than usual, “That is quite impossible. Even you should know that. It flew. Its wings flapped and curled. What you suggest violates every law of physics...”

  “The Captain’s right,” said Sid. “This came off the wing when you shot it, Professor. I found it on the deck.”

  Sid placed a jagged lump of rock on the table. It landed with a solid-sounding thunk, but the sharp edges gave way and flattened out slightly as it rested on the table.

  The rock — it was unmistakably rock despite its plasticity — glowed green, but not in the same way the singing stone glowed. As the Professor looked, he could see that it was a compound mineral, mostly inert, but suffused with tiny specks of bright, sparkly green that glowed and pulsed. The specks, he reasoned, must be of the same mysterious material as the cylinder. Perhaps they somehow animated the rest of the rock, making it pliable and even overcoming the laws of gravity... No, it made no sense at all. But the only other possibility was mass hallucination, and the damage to the ship ruled out that theory. Armbruster settled for a simple “harumph.”

  “What I don’t get,” said Rosie, “is where all them spooks came from. One second they ain’t there, the next they are. What gives?”

  “There’s a question I can answer, miss,” replied Sonny. “I saw them jump from the dragon when it swung over the rear of the ship. It happened very quickly. They came right out of its belly.”

  Sid made the connection. “Say, that was no dragon,” he said. “It was an airplane. A troop carrier!” Hank and Rosie looked at him with pity.

  “Yes, of course!” added the Baroness. “That’s why its eyes worked just like the flamethrowers. They were guns. The same kind the Shadow Order carries.”

  “Okay, I give up,” said Hank, shaking his head. “A bunch of spooks came after us in a crop duster made of solid rock, shot up the place, an’ we fought ’em off. Fine. But none o’ dat explains what the hell the Prof did wit dat dingus. We all saw it. It was like some kind of crazy blue cannon.”

  The Professor was staring at the darkly sparkling hunk of dragon-stone. An idea was taking shape.

  “Just a moment,” he said. “I think I have it. Consider: the flamethrowers are just as strange and impenetrable as the cylinder. We couldn’t even crack one open in my lab two weeks ago. And they have similar decorations. It seems likely the weapons and the cylinder have a common origin, yes?”

  Everyone agreed with that.

  “Right. Now observe: this rock appears to contain flecks of the same material that’s in the cylinder. The flecks are green, as the cylinder was until we used the fluorospectrocitor.” He paused to pass the rock around the table.

  “So here’s a hypothesis: The glowing stone is an energy source. When it’s green, it functions like a battery, storing up a tremendous amount of raw power. So much power it can produce the disintegrating fire, or even lift a stone dragon off the ground. But you have to know how to tap it. I bet if we could open up a flamethrower we’d find a piece of the same green stone inside.”

  “So when the singing stone is green, it’s a battery. Very well. And when it’s blue, my dear Professor?”

  “When it’s blue, it’s like an electrical transformer. It augments and reflects the energy released by the green stones.” The Professor could see he was losing them.

  “Look,” he continued, “The dragon, which was full of the green stone, fired upon me when I held the cylinder, and the cylinder reflected the energy, even more powerfully, right back at the source. The same with that assassin: he shot me, but the stone absorbed the hit, then sent the energy right back at him.”

  Captain Doyle’s eyes were wide. “Then the fluorospectrocitor...” He paused a moment, considered, then forged ahead. “The fluorospectrocitor did exactly what it was designed to do. It excited the stone’s molecules, and they rearranged themselves.”

  “And now we have a defense,” said Sid.

  “But is it enough?” asked the Baroness. “Nothing we saw in America suggested that these people had flying stone dragons. What else is waiting for us in Shanghai?”

  * * *

  At sunrise, nine days after the adventurers left San Francisco, the captain of the Hangchow Baby awoke them by banging loudly on their cabin doors, shouting, “Get up! You go now! Time to get off boat! Get up!”

  But when the bleary-eyed travelers stepped onto the deck, they were not in Shanghai. The Chinese coast still lay far off the port bow, the outskirts of the Yangtze Delta visible as a yellow-gray smudge upon the blue water. The city was still far from view.

  “This as far as you go,” ordered the sailor, surrounded by four of his biggest, surliest men. He pointed to a lifeboat hanging over the ship’s side. “You row rest of the way.” The Baroness began to argue, but he would not be dissuaded.

  And so the little boat was cast off. As the Hangchow Baby chugged away, two large banners fashioned from bed sheets were draped over the deck railings. In huge Chinese and English lettering, they read “NO AMERICANS ABOARD.”

  As it happened, this change in circumstances was a stroke of good luck. A passing fisherman picked up the castaways a few hours later, bring
ing them into Shanghai Harbor unobserved and unmolested. One lone customs agent noticed the group of Americans disembarking on the wharf, but a glimpse at the special diplomatic stamps in their passports was enough to send him scurrying out of their way, bowing apologetically. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the harbor, nearly two dozen sword-wielding members of the Shadow Order were on hand to greet the Hangchow Baby. And most of them couldn’t read.

  Chapter XIX

  SHANGHAI UNDERGROUND

  —

  THE LICENSE HANGING in the rear of his taxicab read “SOLOMON A. HAMPTON — 32884.” The ‘A’ stood for Achilles, but nobody else knew that. And nobody had called him Solomon since he was three years old.

  In 1934, Sonny Hampton was forty-seven. He had been driving the cab for about five years. There weren’t very many black cabbies around, not even in New York, but he was doing all right.

  Sonny had a system. Some drivers just wandered around, like fishermen hoping for a nibble: sometimes they hooked a big one; sometimes they went home poor. Other guys stuck to one sure-fire location, like Grand Central or Madison Square Garden, but from there they might be asked to drive anywhere in the city, and more often than not there would be no return fare waiting at the other end. Sonny thought guys like that lacked vision. Not him. He had a system.

  Sonny maintained a regular route, running between the string of jazz clubs on West Fifty-Second Street and the musical hotspots of Harlem: the Savoy, the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn. Sonny knew that patrons leaving one club would almost always head straight to another, so he kept up a steady stream of fares by shuttling between the two districts, almost like a ferry service. Sonny became a favorite of Harlem’s mobsters and musicians alike: it’s said that when Duke Ellington needed a cab, he would actually call up the dispatcher to request Sonny by name.

  Sonny first met the Baroness Angelica de Rothburg outside the Cotton Club, where Cab Calloway’s band was in residence. It was well past midnight. The Baroness was with a very rich, very drunk young man named Charlie, who sported a black top hat, a slightly askew white tie and a pair of red, roving eyes. They asked to go to Fifty-Second Street, as Sonny figured they would.

  In the back seat of the cab, Charlie got fresh with his gorgeous companion, and then became aggressive, pawing at her with unsuppressed lust. By then Sonny had seen enough. He stomped on the brake, stopping the cab with a sudden lurch, removed Charlie by force, and abandoned him on a notorious Harlem corner known as “Pimp’s Walk.” The young man was arrested not long afterwards, in an incident that made the society pages of the papers and caused great embarrassment to his famously conservative family.

  In the morning, the Baroness took a page from Duke Ellington’s playbook and called the taxi dispatcher, asking for Solomon A. Hampton, 32884. She offered Sonny a job. They’d been nearly inseparable ever since: socialite and chauffeur, impulsive adventuress and gallant protector.

  * * *

  Sonny put his background to immediate use in Shanghai, where the first order of business was getting seven people plus their unique luggage away from the docks without attracting enemy attention. The Baroness was hovering at the curb looking for a taxi when Sonny stopped her.

  “Let me handle this, Miss Angelica,” he said. “I may not know Chinese, but I speak the international language of the hired driver.” He let several cabs pass, appraising and rejecting them with a trained eye. Rickshaw pullers offered their services and were ignored. Finally Sonny spotted a hack to his liking and called it to the curb with a single, lightning-quick hand gesture.

  The cab had an English name — Efficient Hire Car Service — and an eager-looking young driver who saw the large group of foreigners, the bags piled up on the curbside and the stunning dame in the center of it all and smelled a big tip. Sonny approached the driver and leaned in close.

  “We require accommodation,” he said. “Someplace quiet.”

  “Can do!” piped the driver. “I know ritzy hotel, just right for high-class Americans. See and be seen, yeah?”

  “No...” Sonny reached under his collar and showed the driver a black-and-silver medallion he wore around his neck as a good-luck charm. On it were stamped the words “Public Hack Driver — 32884 — New York City.” The Chinese cabbie’s eyes grew wide with admiration. He looked back at Sonny as if he were a movie star.

  “Someplace quiet,” Sonny repeated. “Not seen by anybody.” He put a finger to his lips and then made a descending, palm-down gesture. The cabbie understood: they were looking for a hideout.

  The young driver’s name was Chou, but he preferred Joe. It soon came to light that he was obsessed with all things American, and to have the honor of transporting a real New York cabbie was like being granted an audience with the Pope. After flagging down a trusted colleague to help carry the overflow of passengers and luggage, Joe insisted that Sonny — he called him “Mister Solomon” — sit up front and tell him all about driving in Manhattan. Sid, Rosie and the Baroness squeezed into the back.

  * * *

  Often called the “Paris of the Orient,” Shanghai is the fifth-largest city in the world: its population of three and a half million is surpassed only by London, New York, Tokyo and Berlin. Sid and Rosie had spent their entire lives in the ceaseless bustle of New York, but even they were not prepared for the wonder that is Shanghai. They goggled at the city as it went past, too enthralled to speak. Sid looked as if his brain might overheat: he was in a pulp-fiction writer’s paradise.

  Shanghai is really three cities occupying one space. Opened to the world’s powers after the infamous Opium Wars, modern Shanghai is composed of the British and American-dominated International Settlement, the posh French Concession and the Chinese-controlled territory of Greater Shanghai. Ruled by multiple governments, defended by multiple armies, Shanghai is a confused tangle of languages, laws and lore: a gaudy jewel that shines differently from every vantage point.

  The metropolis contains the very best and very worst of both East and West. It is a smugglers’ haven where some of the most notorious gangsters are also high-ranking police officials. It’s a jumble of modern skyscrapers and tumbledown shacks, where millionaires in evening clothes escort women in brightly colored silks to ballrooms and opera houses, passing side-by-side with beaten-down men pulling rickshaws from dawn to dusk like dumb beasts. Above all, Shanghai is a colorful, crazy, cosmopolitan kaleidoscope that delights the senses even as it baffles the mind.

  Rosie gasped as the taxi passed the morning “bird parade” on the Thibet Road, a combination showcase and marketplace where bird lovers from throughout the city display and sell their brightly plumed treasures. Sid practically jumped out of his seat as they passed an armored limousine, complete with a turret manned by two Tommy-gun toting bodyguards. Even the Baroness joined in the excitement, gazing longingly at the endless stream of stores along Nanking Road and Bubbling Well Road: from grand emporiums where one could acquire the latest Paris fashions to small boutiques stuffed with exotic whatnots and notions from all across Asia.

  Shanghai maintains a booming import-export business in virtually any commodity you can name, including human beings. In addition to the steady flow of peasants from the countryside who come to the city to work as laborers, sailors and prostitutes, Shanghai has absorbed a constant influx of refugees from wars foreign and domestic: thirty thousand Russians came after the Great War, fleeing the Communist revolution, and then China’s own Communists arrived to fight the Kuomintang. Jews immigrated by the thousands to escape the spreading terror in Europe, while Chinese came to evade the Japanese aggression in Manchuria. But that violence now threatened to spread to Shanghai itself, perhaps within the year.

  As a result of all this human traffic, Shanghai boasted more “safe houses” than any city in the world. If a man wished to disappear underground, this was the place.

  * * *

  “Joe” the cabbie abandoned the main thoroughfares of the city’s Chinese sector and began navigating a maze of sm
aller streets. He eventually stopped at one of the city’s countless rows of “lane houses”: small alleyways flanked by close-packed flats. The lane house compounds were practically neighborhoods unto themselves, self-contained and anonymous. The man who owned this particular lane, Joe knew, catered especially to groups who wished to lie low for a time. He had rented his little houses to Communist cells, Green Gang fugitives, foreign refugees... anybody who needed them. He asked no questions and kept his rates reasonable.

  After a quick negotiation, the adventurers were shown to a surprisingly immaculate house, almost like a hotel, that the owner kept available for his better-heeled clients. It was an ideal base of operations. Joe was hired for the duration as driver and guide, and he continued to pepper Sonny with questions about life in New York as he helped bring in the luggage, his speech laced with bits of Shanghai pidgin and modern slang.

  “Mister Solomon, is it b’long true that trains run on stilts in New York? Lotsa swell lookin’ dames there, yeah? Lotsa movie stars too. You ever find a piece diamond necklace in the back seat? I saw that in a movie once.”

  “No, I never found a diamond necklace,” replied Sonny, “but I did find my true calling one night. And that’s worth even more.”

  * * *

  The group voted to stick to the plan they’d outlined aboard the Shanghai Clipper: Hank and Sonny would go sleuthing at the waterfront, Sid and Rosie would join the Baroness in her search for anyone who might know what happened to her father. But Professor Armbruster and Captain Doyle, readmitted to the fold after the battle with the dragon, had a new mission: they would take their freshly-acquired stone samples to a laboratory for further analysis and consult with some local geology experts. With this three-pronged attack, someone was bound to find some answers.

  It was also three times more likely that they would be found by the Shadow Order, or by the unseen hand behind them, and killed.

  It was a chance they had to take.