Another One Bites The Dust
Are you hangin' on the edge of your seat?
Precisely 7:25 pm, The Day, 1971. Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province.
"Coffee's gone already," said Chou Bing-Weng, in the piss-yellow light of the guardhouse's sodium lamp. "Do we even have more coffee?"
The crowd of men at the tables gave an unintelligible mutter as they bent over their mahjong tiles. Bing-Weng sighed and opened the cupboards to mournfully tally their fast-depleting stock of crackers and oranges. He found a box of coffee beans and a crank grinder. "They could have given us a day's warning before sending you over; don't know how we're going to last tomorrow…"
"It's better than a hotel," said one of the newcomers.
"Don't tell me you asked to come here," said Bing-Weng as he hefted a kitchen knife, only half in jest.
Under the trees beside the prison, the Tonga's crew slumped and reclined and fidgeted from foot to foot. Captain Sparrow stamped around in tight figure-eights. The Colombians and Cambodians sat in a circle, polishing their machetes and speaking some pidgin of English, Spanish, and French, while a passel of ex-Marines and ex-sugarcane farmers swapped war stories. If they could be believed, the farmers had seen the most action.
Jules Norton, twenty-three years old and four years deserted from his American squad-mates since they came to Vietnam, was unwelcome among the Marines, and sat in a small circle with John Carpenter, a bankrupt distiller from Liberia; Zero Solaguren, a Biscayan college delinquent; Maxine and Paul, thugs from D.C.; Petey Becker, who had brought his acetylene cutter and had the mask slung backwards over his neck; and Zham Hiu, who had never done anyone wrong except by robbing them. Jules, Maxine, and Paul had been quietly trying to sing "Barbara Ann" for Hiu's benefit, and every twelfth note might hit a tolerable harmony.
It was Gung Ngau, watching the radio tower on the steep hill that loomed above the north-west of the prison, who saw the beacon atop the high steel frame wink out. He hissed for the others to join him at the edge of the woods, and they crept out of the dark and into the fading twilight. The exterior arc lamps hadn't turned on yet, so the prison walls cast a shadow over the overgrown lawn about its base.
A spike of pink flame burst on the dark side of the hill, and an instant later the crew heard the shuff of a rocket. Something shrieked overhead, the men held their breath, and then from the prison's north wall, they heard a thunderclap, and the ground pulsed. The guards in the prison gun-towers yelled in panic.
"Form ranks!" the Captain barked, and the crew—twenty-six all told—shuffled into rough lines, as the Captain and the ex-Marines dragged stragglers into position.
From inside the prison, they heard more yells, panicked bellows, shouted conversations. On the hill where the shot had come, a spotlight flicked on in a far-off clearing, revealing two fearsome tanks, poised with their turrets toward the prison. Against the dim flank of the darkening hill, the spot of light seemed to float, disembodied, an indefinable distance. The shouting crescendoed, until at a nod from the Captain, Gung Ngau picked up his bullhorn and demanded the prison's surrender.
Hiu translated quietly for anyone near enough to listen, watching the Captain fidget. "We have you all outgunned," Gung Nau announced."We have tanks and snipers ready to destroy you at will if you do not cooperate. We are standing at the East side of the prison, you Communist imbeciles."
A line of men quickly materialized on the East wall, and Gung Ngau and Captain Sparrow led the crude column fully into the open.
"Shoulder arms," said the Captain quietly, and two dozen automatics and wooden dummies lifted toward the top of the wall. The guards ducked.
"You will open the prison door," Gung Ngau continued. "Cooperate, and you will all be spared, and you can get back to your jobs, less a single prisoner. Resist, and we will cut our way in and overpower you, and the interior and guard towers will be shelled. Any vehicles that leave the prison tonight will also be shelled. You have two minutes."
Jules counted seconds on his fingers. At seventy-eight, the heavy steel door swung open, revealing a single white-faced guard in an olive green policeman's jacket, the stark white glory-blaze of arc lamps, a yard paved in crooked bricks. The prison ward squatted within, a windowless steel-roofed block of concrete with ventilation slits high on the walls and a barred gate leading to its central hall. In the near corner of the walls was another squat steel-roofed building, likely the guardhouse. The prison was a box within a box.
The men who had false rifles swung them back to their shoulders and drew their sidearms; fearing an ambush, an advance guard of gunmen and ex-rebels crept through the doorway with their rifles probing ahead like whiskers.
"Clear," announced Gung Ngau. "Come through—all of you."
Clear, Jules realized with tightening lungs when he had crossed under the cold heavy threshold that whispered of portcullises and murder-holes, was not clean, or friendly, or safe. A large cluster of guards stood outside the guardhouse, dangling their gun-belts over their heads and passing them to the Tonga gunmen before filing indoors at rifle-point.
Hiu, Gung Ngau, Petey with his cutting torch, Captain Sparrow, and half the macheteros approached the jail itself, the Captain gripping one of the policemen by the elbow and grinning down into his face like a feral terrier at a rat.
The keys rattled in the guard's hand.
The gate swung open.
Hiu shouted for his grandmother, and the party disappeared from view.
"Well," said Maxine cheerily. Jules startled and gripped his M-16. "That went well."
Most of the Tongas now stood in three rough semicircles, guns facing out: one blocking the exterior door open, one facing the guardhouse door, blocking it closed, and the other standing at the prison ward's gate across the courtyard, peering into the dim hallway and listening to Hiu calling for his grandmother. Jules, Maxine, and Paul shared the exterior door with two squint-eyed Russian brothers on the run from their mob, watching the lamps swim in their eyes and the sky stain deeper and deeper blue. Dmitri the ex-MIG pilot was prowling the grounds, a gun in each hand, cigarette smoke puffing in the harsh lights as he breathed.
All was quiet in the guardhouse. Jules imagined the Chinese police inside whispering together, ripping wiring out of the walls to turn into flails, smashing the tables for clubs and shields, prying up floorboards to reveal a cache of Russian guns and shrapnel grenades. "There is no monster under the wardrobe," he whispered to himself.
"What?" asked Maxine. Her chunky Irish-German frame was awkwardly close to his throat. Her smile was friendly enough, but Jules could never help noticing her large yellowish teeth.
"Shakespeare," he muttered. He tromped forward to glance at the group at the guardhouse door, received a reassuring nod, and tromped back.
Dmitri disappeared around the back of the prison ward, and a gunshot echoed about the concrete canyon and down from the hills, catching itself on corners, twisting, turning, pealing like a bell.
Jules yelped. "Mitty!"
A birdsong-babble of Chinese muttered from behind the mass of the prison ward. The Tongas stared from the guardhouse, still shut around the guards they had corralled inside, to the open courtyard where the sounds came. From around the ward's corners, pistols opened fire on the men who stood at the guardhouse door.
"Run!" they bellowed, and they sprinted for the outer gate, one man crying out and staggering to the ground.
"Stop! Stop!" snarled one of the Russians at the door.
"Get Mitty!" shouted Jules.
The guardhouse Tongas slammed into the Russians, nearly bowling them all over, when the tallest of them, Stas, bear-hugged two Colombians and a Liberian, and roared, "Shoot the bitch dogs! Shoot them!" He unslung his automatic and sprayed half a clip past the corner of the prison that sat across from the guardhouse: a blare of muzzle-roar and the shriek of ricochets. They heard shouts of alarm from behind the building, then, distant, the crack of a rifle from the hill, and more shouts.
The Tongas readied their guns and faced the prison ward's corner.
"Let's hope the twins don't use the bazookas again while we're in here," said Maxine, and Jules glanced worriedly up at the hill where the false tanks watched. "Paulie, take Jules and go grab Mitty." She elbowed Paul, and he sneered at her reflexively. "Get. Go!"
On the hill, another rifle cracked, and Jules and Paul raced over the paving stones along the other side of the prison, rifles swinging heavily on their slings. Through the prison's window-slits, they heard Hiu and Gung Ngau shouting in Chinese, and the shrilling of panicked women, and then—pistol shots?
They scooted around the corner, and Paul tripped on something in olive nylon. A leg.
"F—!" Paul shouted, catching himself and staring down with wide eyes at Dmitri's bleeding form.
"F— yourself!" snapped Dmitri, without lifting his face from the stones.
Jules choked. "You're shot!"
"Drag me," Dmitri grunted.
"What?" said Paul, gaping down him, at the sluggish trail of red creeping out from under his old cropped flight-suit.
"My legs!" Dmitri snarled. "Drag me!"
Jules caught a glimpse of something at the prison ward's far corner: a head, no, five, five guards, pistols drawn. He jerked the trigger of his M-16 and sprayed the area, all his Corps weapons-training burned out from fear, the muzzle swinging wide and up of its own accord. The guards leapt away behind the bricks, and the clip was spent. He panted, bewildered.
Paul had rolled Mitty onto his back, drawing a bellow of pain that sang oddly in Jules' stinging ears. "Move him!" Paul grunted, and they laid hold of the sturdy nylon collar that was inside the flimsy blue uniform jacket, and dragged him, staggering and stumbling, backward over the courtyard.
"Door," mumbled Mitty, as they hurried for the exit, staring at the last corner of the ward and praying not to see the black squint eyes of pistols popping around it.
"Any second, any second," hissed Jules, more in prayer than logic. The gate and the rest of the raiding party were so far away.
"Door," said Mitty, lifting his chin from his chest. "The cell ward has back door. Guards!"
Poor Chou Bing-Weng. He may never taste coffee again.
You may have seen sodium lamps, the ghastly yellow monochrome bulbs, on the side of the freeway and in old tunnels. Hell uses sodium lamps for lighting when brimstone is not available; it adds to the atmosphere.
Thanks to A-Hard-Days-Night for the beta read!