One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

He saw no species that were unfamiliar to the time period he called home. So, whenever he was, it was within the last ten thousand years.

  The way Dwayne Roenbach saw it, there were two ways ahead open to him.

  Travel through time or travel through space.

  Playing with the bracelet was dangerous for now. Activating it probably registered somewhere with the guys sent to find him and Caroline. Open a field, and they might be drawn right to him. Take a jump himself, and the bracelet might be programmed to take him back where he started and straight into their hands. He’d have to make some distance before trying it again.

  So, he’d make his initial move through space. His plan was to make it to the coast and march north up the thousand-mile-long peninsula of the Baja to the California border. That would allow him to jump forward to someplace more familiar. That is if he could figure out how to program the bracelet without a manual. Mostly, all he could do was get the tiny monitor field to light up with numbers and symbols that were unknown to him. Until he worked it out, he wasn’t willing to jump blind.

  The hike to San Diego would take a month if he made a steady thirty miles a day. It would be more since he’d need to hunt or fish and find sources of water. Food would not present a problem. The land was rich with game. He used the needle gun to bring down a pair of rabbits and a small doe on his way to the ocean.

  Water could be gathered from any springs or streams he found or, in a pinch, from the barrel cactus that dotted the dunes above the beach. The flask he picked off the hunter didn’t hold enough for long hikes. He fashioned a water bag by slashing a sleeve from the jacket he’d stripped off the dead man and tied either end with a boot lace. The fabric of the hunter’s uniform was watertight and made a decent makeshift CamelBak.

  Dwayne was used to living rough both from a childhood spent mostly outdoors and his Ranger training. The hike would be no hardship on him. But the isolation would wear thin. That and concern about what was happening back in The Now. His thoughts returned again and again to whether N’itha got away from the hunters if she reached Caroline ahead of them. He knew Caroline would know to run. But there was only so much N’itha could convey to her about the threat.

  He tried to put those thoughts aside and concentrate on his current situation. He was no help to Caroline and Stephen if he made decisions out of desperation. As pressing as time seemed to be on him, he knew it was an illusion, an irrelevancy. The bracelet that hung about his neck on a length of bootlace made time his bitch. But still a fickle bitch. If he could only figure out how to operate it.

  He walked down to the water’s edge and put the sun off his left shoulder and set off north along the hard sand. Dwayne drew his focus down to the long way ahead and whether or not to have fish or fowl for dinner.

  51

  The List

  The temblor rocked the treasure house of the East King.

  The floor shifted, and the walls shimmied as the concussive wave swept from the blast point across the underbelly of Nanking. Chaz leapt clear of a stack of heavy chests caving in and bursting, sending an avalanche of gold coins to the floor. In other places around the room, cabinets collapsed. Tall stacks of dishware and shelves of porcelain crashed and shattered on the tile floor.

  The rhythmic hammering on the doors paused while the tremor subsided. Then the pounding resumed its insistent tattoo.

  “That means it’s noon,” Jimbo called from somewhere in the recesses of the chamber.

  “Roger that!” Chaz responded and took his place again behind a barricade built of opium casks.

  He manned the bunker they’d constructed to cover the pair of bronze doors. The doors were fortified with the weight of cartloads of statues, heavy furniture, and chests of coins. The load was pressing the doors closed even as the frame began to give away at the hinges. The relentless pounding of a pair of rams rang against the bronze. They’d been doing so for hours. First one boomed and then the other without interruption. The brass-bound crossbar was creaking with the strain. The soldiers would make it through. It was only a matter of time until the doorway filled with spear points and muskets.

  Chaz stood, eyes locked on the door through a haze of falling dust. He had all three rifles fully loaded and arrayed before him. The palace guard would get through, but he’d make sure it was damned expensive for them.

  At the rear of the treasure room, Jimbo found a collection of books and scrolls. Wei lit oil lamps to create enough illumination to read by. Shelves groaned under leather-bound volumes trimmed in gilt. Latticed cabinets were packed with scrolls of vellum and parchment tied with silk. There were further cases stuffed with literature in countless languages. Jimbo realized that he was looking at a priceless library. He also realized that few, if any, of these works would survive the sacking of the city. The illiterate peasant army that would soon stream in through the breach in the wall would carry away only what they knew to be of value. These books and scrolls would be trampled underfoot by looters or, more likely, burned to ashes.

  After hours of pulling down books and scrolls, Jimbo decided that the ivory reliquary was not among the volumes in the library. If the scroll of the great Khan was here, then why wasn’t it among the other literary valuables?

  “Where would you hide Genghis Khan’s diary?” Jimbo said to Wei, who only blinked at him.

  There was no sophisticated system of sorting applied to the treasure chamber beyond the obvious. Dishes with dishes, coins with coins, dolls with dolls, clocks with clocks, and on and on. Probably the duty of eunuchs who saw the riches as dross to be stacked and counted and inventoried.

  An inventory.

  The Manchus’ madness for recording data and deep bureaucracy would be shared by the Taipings. The whole bloodthirsty rebellion was inspired by a failed civil servant. It was a culturally shared obsession, the irresistible urge to record the significant and the trivial in writing. Somewhere in this room, there would have to be a list of the items in the collection.

  Jimbo searched his mind for anything that seemed out of place. Any anomaly in the room they’d systematically searched in the hours they’d been here.

  The Pima set off into the gloom between the glittering aisles.

  Wei followed, running to keep the Ranger in sight.

  A simple wooden podium sat against a wall. Its enameled surface was scored and scratched. A humble writing desk set among the extravagances of the royal treasures. Atop the desk rested a large open book bound in rough leather with thousands of pages within. A pot of ink sat in a well encrusted with dried ink. Brushes of varying sizes lay in a sill at the bottom of the angled top. The open pages were covered in neat rows of characters.

  “What is this? Is this an inventory? A list?” Jimbo said, handing the open book to Wei.

  Wei studied the open pages before leafing through the book, eyes dancing over the lines of script and numbers. He looked up to Jimbo, nodding.

  “Find the scroll! Find. The. Scroll. Read this!” Jimbo said, stabbing a finger on a page of the book. Wei winced in annoyance and pulled the book away with a muttered string of abuse in his own language.

  “And read fast,” Jimbo said. His eyes turned upward. Somewhere in the darkness above, he heard the sounds of feet running across the roof.

  52

  A Mortal Wound

  The broad breach in the wall filled from side to side with ranks of musketeers standing five deep. They trained their weapons on the columns of men charging the base of the mountain of rubble. Looking down their barrels, they rested the front sights on attackers clawing over the heaped corpses of the first failed assault. A cry went up followed by the sounding of a horn.

  The first two rows of muskets exploded at once. The musketeers handed back spent weapons to accept loaded ones brought forward from the rows behind.

  On the heap of broken stone below, lead, and stone balls ripped through the attackers, dropping hundreds of them in a single blow. They fell, dead or dying, only to be clambered over by thei
r fellows coming up behind. Though covered in armor, these were still peasants, shock troops, impelled forward by a discipline thrashed into them. It was not only the threat of punishment that gave them courage. These were men whose entire lives could be changed with the possession of one gold coin. The dreams of the riches contained within Nanking had driven them mad with avarice.

  Those dreams died with the next hail of fire from above. The armor was useless against the firearms blasting away above. Balls punched through layers of lacquered bamboo as though through slices of bread. Hundreds fell to join the hill of the dead. Still more rushed over them, crawling over the slain like beasts, pushed from behind by more and more soldiers anxious to reach the promises that lay beyond the break in the wall.

  Concentrated fire erupted from the tops of towers either side of the break. Carronades swept the attackers with chain shot and stone shot. Jingals boomed. Muskets cracked. The forward momentum of the assault faltered and stumbled and stopped entirely when the third volley blasted a storm of balls into the massed peasants. Men were dismembered and beheaded under the merciless fusillade. A single stone ball from a jingal ripped a coolie nearly in half, continuing on through the unfortunate’s divided torso to take the leg from a bannerman. A near-continuous fire rained down on the attackers as they ran, rolled, and slid downward to escape the hell of flying death. Few made it clear of the devastating punishment, and soon the rocky slope, and the ground before it was empty of life.

  Cheers went up along the wall, and gongs sounded as the defenders gave voice to victory. The victory was short-lived. A whistling sound rose from somewhere above the pall of gun smoke that cloaked the walls in a gray fog. Some of the men along the breach looked up into the hazy sunlight in consternation. Others, more experienced soldiers, were already breaking rank to seek cover.

  Arrows by the thousands crashed down on the packed ranks of musketeers. They dropped down in the thousands with lethal force from the top of an arc hundreds of feet above. Shafts drove into upturned faces. They pierced cloth and armor and flesh. Some men fell with as many as six arrows embedded in them. They sounded like hail striking a rooftop.

  Thousands of Tartar bowmen raced to the bottom of the hill of ruins, loosing shafts as swiftly as they could nock and release a fresh arrow. Their ponies charged forward, controlled only by the knees of their riders, hands free to deliver their deadly torrent. Their blind volley fire was concentrated on the men blocking the breach. Calculating the arcs with expert skill, they sent shafts high into the sky to fall upon the defenders. As they neared the wall, they could see individual targets more clearly, tiny figures along the bottom of the break. The Tartars trained their eyes on these men, sending shafts upward and away on flat trajectories at chosen targets.

  The results were devastating. The full power of the mighty reflex bows sank shafts deep into the front ranks of musketeers before they could bring their weapons to bear. Such was the clout of the Tartar bows that some defenders were shot through, the arrows continuing on to wound men behind them. The ranks behind shrank back to escape the shafts ripping in among them.

  Even the continuous fire from the towers above failed to drive off the mounted bowmen. The mass of men and beasts below swirled at the foot of the hill beneath the tear in the wall like boiling water in a pot. Each man kept his mount in constant movement all the while keeping his arrows winging toward the massed men blocking the way into the city.

  Some of the Tartars broke from the throng to ride along the foot of the towers, galloping along the top of the glacis above the moat. These riders sent shafts flying up at the cannoneers and jingal crews atop the towers. The arrows clattered impotently against the battlements or glanced off the slopes of the heavy timber roofs. The shower served to cause musketeers to shrink from their gun ports until harangued back in place by shrieks and blows from battery officers.

  In one of the towers, a shaft stabbed through the eye of a soldier steadying the barrel of a jingal even as the man behind him pressed home the trigger. The end of the barrel swayed, and the ball crashed against the inner wall of the tower to carom around the interior with deadly results. A half dozen men were cut down in an instant by either the golf-ball sized round or flying flinders of stone. One man lay rolling and howling on the flagstone floor, clutching a spurting stump where the ball ripped his leg away at the knee.

  The Tartars kept peppering the defenders, driving all but the most courageous from the ramparts and creating a break within the breach. Some of them even urged their mounts to climb the steep face of the hillock of ruins to send shafts buzzing into the broken gap in the wall.

  From trenches dug close to the walls rose a wave of bannermen with fluttering streaming black flags. They were followed by a fresh mass of armored men approaching the wall at a rush. The defenders peeped through ports along the ramparts to witness a sea of spears closing toward the breach under cover of the lethal blizzard of arrows dropping all along the walls.

  Musketeers and gun crews fired down into the dense tide of attackers as fast as they could reload their weapons. The meaning of the black flags was understood by all. A universal signal that there would be no mercy for the vanquished, no quarter, and no prisoners. Nanking would be put to the flame and its every inhabitant to the sword or rope or worse. The crews fired in silent desperation, without pausing to aim, certain their charges would strike at their enemies so densely packed was the assault. Gaps were ripped in the ranks of the charging imperial troops only to be filled in at once, momentary eddies in the current.

  From within the city, a growing stream of arrows was launched into the sky in answer to the Tartar’s barrage. Mongol bowmen massed in the lane behind the breach and atop the ramparts in greater and greater numbers until the sky was shadowed by the intersecting arcs of shafts. An age-old rivalry between warriors of the steppe was being rekindled as Mongol and Tartar competed for targets.

  Armor bristling with broken shafts, the imperial troops surged up the hillock of ruins, a massive human battering ram. Officers in tall conical helmets urged them on into the maw with whirling bullwhips. They were over the crest and charging down the inner slope of the breach and into the teeth of massed muskets and field cannons. The first rows of spear and bannermen absorbed a horrific bombardment from grapeshot and ball and arrows. But the momentum of the massed attack would not be denied. The elite of General Sang pressed into the gap and beyond, splashed with the blood of their comrades, in a headlong tear for the line of guns arrayed before them. Behind the spearmen came rifle companies, at first firing at will and then forming ranks that blazed away in coordinated volleys. Both lines of fire, separated by less than fifty yards, chewed away at one another, fogging the area at the back of the breach with blinding smoke that made the opposing sides invisible to one another except for the spitting flames of their weaponry. The gunners and bowmen atop the walls and towers could no longer find targets in the dense haze.

  The imperials, with their faster loading bolt action rifles, gained supremacy. The firing ranks of the defenders withered in number and finally broke. With bayonets affixed, Sang’s troops charged into the last of the defenders before them. Wave after wave of soldiers and conscripts followed to spread through the streets into the city, defied only by a few steadfast fanatics. These were swiftly overrun. The bulk of the disheartened Taiping defenders were now in full rout. There was nowhere to run.

  Ladders were run up and leaned against sections of wall that had been abandoned in order to reinforce the area around the breach. Sappers swiftly scurried up the ladders one behind the other to infest the walls and towers where they set off gunpowder charges and set fires. Within moments the timber tower tops were ablaze, and the defenders on the ramparts found themselves locked in combat with swordsmen and axmen appearing blackened from the smoke and wailing like demons.

  The dam had burst, and the killing tide was flooding in. The emperor’s vengeance was upon Nanking.

  53

  The Dragon’s Mouth


  Full night had fallen.

  Lee Hammond gave the high sign, and the team moved out toward the city.

  Shan was all for going in before sunset. Lee shut him down and refused to discuss tactics any further.

  “There’s still heavy fighting in the streets. You really want to jump into a shitstorm like that? Be my guest, fucko,” Lee said before turning his back and entering the tent.

  “You’re never gonna convince him,” Boats cautioned Shan.

  Shan’s orders from Jason Taan were clear. Get the scroll at all and any costs. But he needed the cooperation and, more so, the guns of the Americans to reach the palace of the East King. He sat in the shade of the tent awning and watched the sun sink low in the smoky sky.

  Two towers were on fire when they approached. Burning roofs and ramparts created colossal torches to light the night. There were more fires from within the walls, rooftops ablaze. The flickering light of the fires and the cloying stink of sulfur formed the back-drop for the hellish scene the team found on the open no man’s land that lay between the walls of the city and the siege camp.

  The bodies of men were everywhere. Some lay where they’d died. Others, closer to the camp, expired where they’d managed to crawl from the range of the terrible enfilade coming off the walls. Soldiers and peasants littered the ground where their withdraw to safety stopped when their lives ended. Some were missing limbs, leaving snail trails of bloody ground behind them.

  Worse than the dead were the injured. They lay unheeded and unaided. No one looked their way or responded to their cries for help. Walking wounded limped past them without a glance. Peasants lumbered with loot back to the city of tents. Men carried carpets, furniture, and bolts of cloth past others beseeching them for mercy. One coolie struggled to haul a cart weighed down with a pile of copper pots. He growled at anyone who offered to help pull his load.