“Of course not. I'll tear his goddamn head off when he gets back. But that doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong. I brought him along because he'll do the right thing, not because he's a yes man.”
Unsure of that logic, I said, “They're not home free quite yet. Let's just hope none of the other PLA soldiers on either side of the bridge wake up and wonder what's going on.”
"One minute until the train arrives," Douglas warned, ignoring Volodya's earlier disobedience for the moment.
Volodya looked to the north, and, sure enough, the train's front light was visible in the darkness, approaching rapidly. "We're just saying our goodbyes, aren't we Jed?"
Before Jed could respond, a shot rang out and struck Jed in the abdomen. The SEAL fell to the track.
Volodya instinctively fell flat as well, taking cover as best he could.
And suddenly a dozen flashes of gunfire lit the southern end of the bridge, the unsilenced shots thundering through the humid night air.
"Govno!" The shock was enough to make Volodya lapse into Russian. He fired single shots back at the muzzle flashes in the night. "Priest, do you see them?"
Priest answered with an unsilenced shot of his own. He had quickly figured out that the best way to support Volodya and Jed on the bridge was to draw the PLA fire, and the best way to get their attention was to fire loud shots at them. A PLA soldier fell on the south side, a rifle bullet lodged in his heart. The Taiwanese commando poured fire on the PLA guards until they were forced to hit the dirt and take cover as well.
"Get out of there, Volodya, the train's coming and we have no idea how many soldiers are in that Chicom patrol." Douglas's order came in a low, calm voice.
With gunfire still pouring in, Volodya crawled over to Jed. With a sudden lunge, he stood up, the howling American slung over his back, and threw the American over the railing and off the far side of the bridge. A second later, the Russian threw himself over.
The train was only about fifty yards from the bridge by that point, barreling along at sixty miles per hour. Railways had been a beneficiary of Chinese stimulus spending for a generation, and the speed of the train was a testament to its engineering. But now that virtue was a liability.
Sparks shot from the train's undercarriage as the brakes engaged. The conductor had finally gotten the word that the bridge might not be safe. But it takes miles to slow a hundred-car freight train carrying 7,000 tons of cargo. Hurtling along with the kinetic energy of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier at cruising speed, the train barely seemed to slow as the brakes kicked in.
Jed's charges exploded when the train was thirty yards away from the central span. The explosion itself was unimpressive on its own, just a sudden percussion of gray dust tossed into the sky. More impressive was the derailment of the train.
When it reached the broken central span, the whole locomotive seemed to jump a few feet as it tumbled off the near side of the bridge where Volodya and Jed had been about two minutes before. The next five cars were also wrenched off the bridge. The third or fourth of these must have been crammed with grenades or bombs for planes, because the bridge suddenly erupted with a cataclysmic roar.
The foggy night sky turned briefly to day. The central spar, damaged by Jed's charges, vanished in a cloud of cement pieces thrown hundreds of yards downstream. The closest spars on either side were also jolted free of the rest of the bridge, though they only broke into a few large chunks.
Priest was knocked off his feet 200 yards from the blast and the camera mounted on his glasses was knocked offline. The squads of PLA soldiers on either end of the bridge had been killed by shrapnel that had seconds before been trusses, rails, support structure, and seven-thousand tons of train.
After perhaps fifteen seconds of speechlessness, Douglas said to Fei, "Pull up Volodya's camera." A blank screen.
Fei said, “Maybe Volodya's camera was also knocked offline by the blast.”
"Try Jed's." Nothing.
Douglas spoke into the radio, "Volodya, you daft bastard, are you alive?"
A pause.
A cough. "Yes, Comrade Colonel. That was one hell of a ride."
Douglas laughed with relief. "And how is Jed?"
"Not good. I just fished my American colleague out from the river. It was a miracle I found him at all given how damn murky this water is. He's passed out, unconscious. It could be blood loss from the gunshot. I don't think the explosion hurt him; I got us both fairly far downstream before the train detonated. No way I can swim him upstream. Priest, can you meet us in the van?"
Priest replied over the radio, "Yes. Lieutenant Fei, find us a good spot downstream for a pick-up. I'll get back to the van as quick as I can."
Forty minutes later, Priest pulled into a tiny seaside park right at the mouth of the river. Volodya emerged from a bush in the park carrying the still unconscious Jed. Once they were aboard, Priest drove off, leaving Quanzhou to the dozens of police cars, military vehicles, and ambulances that had responded to the bridge bombing. The Chinese homeland had officially become a new front in the Sino-American War.
Chapter 8
“You're just damn lucky you all made it out alive,” Douglas said to Volodya.
Priest, Volodya and Jed had driven four hours back to the small village near the Vietnamese border, arriving an hour after dawn. With the fishermen all heading to their boats, the children on their way to school and the women heading to market, we had to quickly figure out a way to get Jed inside the apartment without drawing attention.
We settled on the somewhat ridiculous solution of having Lian walk out to the van and give the unconscious Jed an expansive greeting as one would to a long lost friend, then walk him inside arm in arm. No Chinese ever seemed to discover our identity because of that farce, so either our subterfuge worked or, more likely, no one was paying attention at that particular moment.
"He's not going to make it," Dietrich said. He was the closest thing the team had to a medical expert because he had occasionally helped his father, a physician, in the hospital in his hometown. He rendered the judgment without emotion. "His liver is perforated and he's lost too much blood. What blood he still has is going septic because of that nasty river water. He's in very good shape and quite resilient, which is why he's still alive at the moment."
Remembering my preparations for the trip, I asked, "We packed a nano-medical kit, can't that repair the damage?"
Dietrich replied with a shake of his head. "That cleans the blood in the short-run and fixes the bones and tears, but he needs major suturing on his liver, the kind only a surgeon could do."
No one responded. Jed was a contractor for Colonel Douglas, not a friend of anyone there.
But he was ultimately my responsibility.
"And a surgeon could save him?"
Dietrich shrugged. "Maybe. But we don't have one of those and we can't just bring Jed to the hospital. They would figure out who he is and he will eventually have to explain what he's doing in China."
I thought out loud. "I can get us a doctor from Taiwan, but it would take a day."
Dietrich said, "That is too long. He has hours, not days."
Volodya, who had still not showered after his swim in the murky industrial water of the river, said, "Perhaps we're not thinking of all the available options."
I asked, “Such as?”
“Bring a surgeon here.”
“How?”
“Kidnap one.”
Douglas growled, "Not the time for jokes, lad."
"It's not a joke, sir. We're going to need medical help again someday. We can keep him here for the duration of the war."