by Chuck Dixon
Men splashed through the water in curious columns. Dwayne squinted to see that each man had loops of something connected one to the other.
Ropes or chains. Slaves.
This was confirmed by the rough treatment at the hands of those who swung whips over their heads, the cracks of the leather loud enough to carry up to Dwayne’s position.
The men were too far away to see any indication of their race or nationality. But all appeared to be dark-skinned. Probably the same sort as the Asian Indians he found dead on the beach two hundred miles south. The slaves were set apart by their nakedness. Their masters wore loose-fitting clothing as faded by the sun as the sails of the big boat. The ones wielding the whips wore turbans or puggarees wound about their heads.
He never recalled reading about Arabs or Sikhs landing in the New World. Of course, he knew from his own experience that a lot of history was pure bullshit. Dwayne kept watching, wishing he had binoculars until the column of slaves was driven inland and out of his sight in trees that grew close to the beach. The rowing crews boarded their boats and rowed for the big ship.
There had to be a settlement of some kind farther inland; someplace they were taking the slaves to put them to work. Mines or farms or something like that. He’d work around east to avoid them. After dark, he’d be able to locate the settlement, if that’s what it was, by the glow of the cook fires. Then he’d find a canyon that skirted the area and follow that north.
His plan was to get deeper into what would one day be California then activate the bracelet to see if it would return him to The Now, well out of spatial reach of the hunters who were after him and Caroline. His only question was where to make the jump. Caroline had explained over and over again why she and her brother initially chose the desert to locate the Tauber Tube. There was little chance of manifesting into the side of a mountain or a structure. The open ocean made an even more suitable base for jumping. He’d have to find a place that he could reasonably rely on being wide open and free of obstructions before taking the leap.
The two boats drew in oars as they neared the larger vessel. Each drifted out of sight around the hull. With nothing else to see, Dwayne started to move back from his hide to start his hike inland.
Something huffed behind him. A shift of sand.
Dwayne rolled to his back and into a crouch, the needle gun leveled in his hands.
On the crest of a slope behind him, a mounted figure sat watching, the rising morning sun at its back. It was a man with copper-colored skin, his chest bare. He wore a jaguar skin girdled at the waist. Atop his head was a wooden headdress fashioned like the snarling head of a snake with long, tattered feathers rising from it. The man’s face was painted stark white with black circles drawn about his eyes, and he stared at Dwayne as though from the mouth of the fanged serpent. Across the pommel of his saddle rested a matchlock musket. In his clenched teeth, he held a smoking fuse. His mount stamped its feet and huffed through its nostrils once more.
An Aztec.
Sitting on a camel.
And, as Dwayne weighed his options, a score more of the mounted warriors topped the ridge behind the first.
62
A Wish Granted
The Ocean Raj cut across twenty-foot seas against a forty-knot wind. The sky and sea met in a purple convergence of angry clouds and angrier water. Rain was coming down in a mist but promising to build to a torrent any second.
Up on the bridge, Boats piloted them up each swell, and down into the troughs, the white caps stretched before them to the horizon. Geteye assisted him at the radar, watching for shoals in the unknown waters. From the glass-pane smooth seas of the Yangtze estuary, the Raj has materialized in the middle of monsoon weather.
Down in the forward hull, Jason Taan rocked sullenly on a mattress thrown on the deck for his comfort. Taan, and his bodyguards, as well as the security men tasked with watching over the crew of the ship, were confined together in a locked cargo container. He and his bodyguards had been easily overwhelmed by the returning Rangers in the moments of extreme physical discomfort created by their first experience with a mass manifestation field. The crew of the Raj had taken the rest of his men.
Lee stopped by one of the crew cabins where Shan sat on the edge of a bunk in the dark. He was still in the filthy uniform of a barbarian mercenary.
“Yo. Take a shower, bro. We’re having a pizza party in the chartroom,” Lee said.
“I am not in the mood for a party,” Shan said. “You have to eat.”
“I am not hungry.”
“Bullshit. I could eat the ass out of raw possum,” Lee said. Shan did not respond.
“You did the right thing. Though I don’t know why.”
“Repaying a debt. Is that enough explanation?”
“You mean me saving your life? You had a mission, Shan.”
“Not a mission. A job. Not the same,” Shan said.
“I get that. Debt paid, brother. Shower off that funk and come have some beers with us,” Lee said and departed.
Shan sat quietly in the dark, listening to the laughter and music echoing down the corridor from somewhere forward.
In the chartroom, the team wolfed down pizza chased by beer and listened to Morris Tauber’s update of their current situation. Parviz and Quebat joined them. The Iranians still looked stunned by the twin charges they pulled out of their mini-reactor. Enhancing their expressions of surprise was the fact that their hair still stood on end after the massive static field that had engulfed the entire ship. Even their eyebrows stood up rigid.
“I had Taan’s contractors build the ship shelter to my specifications even down to the materials used. They carped and moaned, but I was ready with a whole lot of technobabble,” Morris began once the boombox had been turned down.
“You mean bullshit,” Chaz snorted around a mouthful of pepperoni and sausage.
“Yeah, a lot of that too,” Morris continued, beaming. “Essentially, I had them construct an enormous Tauber Tube, one with the capacity to take the whole ship with it.”
“And you knew that would work,” Bat said.
“Theoretically,” Morris said, face reddening.
The Rangers howled at that. Morris reddened further and went on, “I was desperate. I knew as I’m sure you did that Taan was never going to let us go after he got what he wanted. I had to make a move that he wasn’t looking for. In any case, it worked.”
“So, now we can just jump back to The Now when we get clear of the China coast, right?” Jimbo said.
“Not really. We need a manifestation field created at our destination to do that. One large enough to take the ship and us in it.”
“But you can still send personnel down the Tube?” Lee said. “Sure. But that would mean abandoning the Raj and the reactor. It would be our last trip,” Morris said.
“There has to be another way around this,” Bat said.
“The man didn’t have time to worry about Step Two. He was only thinking about getting us clear of Taan,” Chaz said.
“Hey, everyone’s forgetting the big question,” Jimbo said. “When the hell are we?”
A speaker on the wall piped up with a voice shouting. It was Boats calling down from the bridge. He wasn’t making any sense at all. What emerged from the speaker was more a series of whoops and laughter.
They made their way to the bridge where Geteye was alone at the wheel. He nodded forward. A shape in yellow, barely seen through the spray swept glass, was dancing in the downpour along the open deck. It was Boats in a slicker, clinging to the rail and howling like a Viking in heat.
“Shit yeah! Shit yeah!” the big SEAL said, pointing off the bow at the rising sea.
There, in a wall of a green swelling before them, dimly seen through the verdant translucence, a massive shape glided to starboard out of the path of the ship. The Raj climbed the roller to the top and began the descent to the trough. Lee and Jimbo joined Boats out on the heaving weather deck. They fought for footing and clutched
the rail to remain upright.
“There! There! That’s what I’m talking about!” Boats shouted, stabbing a finger at the water beyond the bow.
In the trough below them, a torpedo-shaped object splashed out of a wall of water with an explosion of white spray. A flash of teeth and a long body with a pebbled hide. A pronounced fence of triangular fins ran down its spine. It vanished into the next swell, its whipping tail creating an eruption of foam.
“Sixty feet if it’s an inch! I saw it in one of Mo’s books!” Boats shouted.
“What the fuck is it?” Lee called through the shrieking wind.
“Mosasaur! A fucking dinosaur, bro!” Boats said, turning with them, his face open with childlike delight.
Afterword
The bloodiest civil war in human history, a conflict second only to the Second World War for total fatalities, began when Hong Xiuquan failed the exams to become a civil servant in the Qing Dynasty. His poor marks resulted in what could only be a total mental breakdown, during which he lay in a catatonic state for weeks. During this period, he had vivid hallucinations in which he visited the afterlife and was informed by God Himself that Hong was the second son of God and little brother to Jesus Christ.
With the help of a brother and other family members, Hong traveled the northern provinces of China, spreading a gospel that was a twisted mix of the Christian gospel and his own mythology inspired by his imagined journeys to Heaven. As hard as it is to believe, Hong was able to create a large following of acolytes and finally an army to help spread his ideology from city to city. The Heavenly King was able to swiftly engulf large areas and turned his evangelism to open rebellion against the emperor as well as the Confucian philosophy that provided the reigning school of thought informing everything from the law to manners and education.
The Qing emperor and his mandarins were slow to act against the rising tide of rebellion. Partly because of sheer disbelief and denial that anyone could successfully defy their centuries-long hold on China. Another factor was the off-again-on-again wars with foreign interlopers, chiefly Britain and France. China was a huge market for a new commodity called opium. European exporters found China to be a consumer base too lucrative to resist and lobbied their respective governments to provide protection for their merchants to keep trade routes open. This led to years of warfare along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers that would flare up and die away on an almost seasonal basis until the British army and navy under Generals Hope Grant and Lord Elgin took Peking and forced an infant emperor and his regents to flee.
The mandarins were forced to agree to trade deals that would allow the addictive substance to be sold freely throughout China. These struggles with foreign devils proved to be a near-lethal distraction that allowed the cancer of the Taiping ideology to metastasize.
For fifteen years, war raged over China. The Imperial army met its match in the fanatical Taipings who learned the art of war quickly. The Taiping armies were well trained, armed and led by capable generals who could lay successful sieges of Qing cities as well as beating the emperor’s troops in the field.
I make mention of the Ever Victorious Army. This was one of many mercenary forces employed by the Manchus to blunt the threat of the rebels. The most successful of these was the EVA, founded by the American adventurer Frederic Ward. Ward’s army was composed of a foreign legion of Europeans and Asians. He was a creative and reckless leader who had tremendous success against the armies of the Heavenly King despite being often outnumbered by as many as ten-to-one. He was paid a generous monthly stipend by the mandarins with bonuses for each city that he retook from the rebels. Dubbed the “White Devil” by the Chinese, Ward’s bold and fearless style inspired his men to incredible feats of daring and not a few military miracles. But it was his insistence on leading from the front that ended his life at the foot of the walls about Cixi at the age of thirty-one.
As referred to in my story, command of the Ever Victorious Army was taken over by Charles Gordon, later famous as “Chinese” Gordon, a legendary adventurer of the Victorian Age. He would meet his end at the siege of Khartoum in 1885. Gordon was a highly religious man who did not seek monetary gain or fame for his actions. At the close of hostilities in 1865 he refused a fortune in gold offered by the Manchu court as a bonus for his part in defeating the Taiping rebels. It was a staggering amount that would have made him one of the richest men in Britain. He did condemn the use of alcohol and is, in other ways, as I portray him here. If he seems casually racist or cruel, well, those were the accepted mindsets of the day for gentlemen at war with heathens. It’s not for me to pass judgment on the man. I only present him in as honest a way as I can without regard to the mores of our culture.
I wrote here that the EVA and Gordon were in the midst of disbanding and departing. The final fighting around Nanking, the ultimate blow to the followers of the Heavenly King and his followers, was left up to the emperor’s generals. In truth, at the time I portray here, Gordon would have been well on his way back to England but, bowing to my toy soldier fascination with history, I couldn’t resist including him.
Prince Kung, regent to the boy emperor, was also a real person and as nasty a piece of work (or worse) than I’ve presented here. Though he was probably not on as familiar terms with Charles Gordon as I present here. Manchu royalty were virtually unapproachable by anyone but their closest court members and certainly not by barbaric occidentals. Still, a villain is a villain, and Kung is one of history’s most bloody-minded bad guys. I couldn’t resist including him as a personification of the kind of leader who would spend the lives of his thralls with no more thought to their suffering than you or I might spare for the fowl winding up in a bucket of fried chicken.
As to the siege of Nanking, the weapons and methods (mining, countermining, siege artillery, rockets and the rest) are based on my research of the period. There’s little written about the fall of the city other than that a section of the outer wall was collapsed by a massive explosion detonated in a mine at the time and on the day I denoted. It is also true that the imperial troops and their conscripts surged into Nanking bringing on an appalling massacre. The finer details of the battle as presented are fanciful, my imagination at work. General Sang is also a creation of mine made from whole cloth, a compilation of several Manchu military leaders.
But some of the most unbelievable aspects of my story are actually factual. Hong Xiuquan did indeed die of some kind of gastrointestinal condition brought on by eating weeds that he insisted were manna from Heaven. And I have, if anything, downplayed the amount of sheer carnage that was commonplace during the Taiping civil war. The rivers would often become choked with the dead. Mountains of severed heads and miles-long heaps of the dead were an everyday event. And there are many witnesses to the fighting who have mentioned walking across battlefields literally carpeted with the dead so that it was impossible to make progress without stepping upon corpses.
The weapons that the team uses for this operation also only exist in my imagination. But the Henry repeating rifle had been around more than a decade at this point. Adding a second magazine tube to increase the round capacity would have been well within the technology of the period had anyone thought of it. But a capacity of ten rounds was pretty astonishing at the time. Hence Henry’s oft-repeated slogan, “Load on Sunday. Shoot all week.”
And cartridge-loading revolvers would have been rare but not unheard of in 1865. The army of the Manchus was armed with bolt-action rifles of the type that would not be standard issue to any army for another twenty years. Losing either of their made-up brand of weapons would not cause the kind of chronal pollution that regularly costs Morris Tauber a night’s sleep. The 1800s were awash in wild, experimental firearms produced in small numbers. The rifles and revolvers mentioned here would not be among the craziest weapons under patent in 1865.
The treasure vault of the East King is also something I dreamed up, but jaw-dropping collections of valuables were not unheard of in the China of t
he day. All of the lower kings of the Taiping court lived in sumptuous palaces packed with plunder from all over China, and they would certainly have put the artisans of their captured cities to work on more. There is no inventory of the East King’s hoard, but the descriptions I provided are within reason. The raiding of the emperor’s treasure houses by British soldiers, sailors and sepoys in 1860 are well documented by witnesses. The looting of the Forbidden City created a staggering transfer of wealth that would be hard to calculate by today’s rate of exchange. Even more shocking than the extent of the hoard was the destruction of irreplaceable artifacts destroyed by soldiers who had no idea of their value.
Genghis Khan’s autobiography is not an invention of mine either. The first khan did indeed dictate his amazing life story to a Chinese scholar so that his tale was recorded. It is not known if any existing copies of the biography are the original or the definitive version. And none of them included a map of any sort. We’ll learn more about the significance of that when the Rangers return.
Chuck Dixon April 4, 2016 AD
Bibliography
Just a few of the books that helped me recreate the world of the Taipings and Manchus.
God’s Chinese Son, by Jonathan D. Spencer. First edition. 1996, Norton.
A beautifully written and exhaustive history of the Taiping rebellion.
Gordon of Khartoum, by John H. Waller. First edition. 1988, Atheneum.
A marvelous biography of the legendary Victorian adventurer.
The Ever-Victorious Army, by Andrew Wilson Elibron. Classics series, 2005.
An eye-witness account, for the good portion, of the events of the Taiping uprising and its suppression. First published in 1868.