Empire of the Dragon Read online

  “S-2 intelligence my ass, those bastards have been wrong more times than right,” the co-pilot, Captain Everson Krensky, said as he released the control yoke and flexed his gloved fingers.

  “We’re going to have to sit this thing down into that sandstorm while we still have enough control to hop over a few of those sand dunes.”

  “Damn, I hate doing that,” Krensky said as he peered out of his window at the raging mass below them. “With those bomb bay doors jammed open, that thing just may detonate. Armed or un-armed.”

  “Better than getting our skin peeled off by that sand if we bailout. I’ll take my chances with ‘Slick Willy’.”

  Both men were silent as they listened to the drone of their remaining three engines. Number four was starting to backfire and the co-pilot adjusted the mix to that engine. It sputtered and then suddenly fell into sync with the other two. Krensky placed a thumb on his throat mic.

  “How you fellas doing back there?”

  “Still breathing in the forward spaces,” came the reply from the pressurized compartment behind the cabin.

  “We lost Jimmy about five minutes ago. Bled out on us.”

  Krensky lowered his head and then glanced at the Major. His eyes told the story after hearing the latest bad news from the rear pressurized compartments. Sergeant Jimmy Blackwell, a baseball player from Muncie, Indiana, had just recently joined the crew after his transfer from B-17’s. When the war in Europe had ended, instead of going home like he should have, he retrained in the remotely operated fifty caliber machine guns of the B-29 Superfortress, and then was transferred to the Army Air Corps Pacific command.

  Pierce shook his head and swallowed. That was crewman number four. The other three had died when a twenty-millimeter exploding round shattered the bombardier and radio stations, also taking out the forward operator’s radar powered station for the turret mounted upper fifty. Four of his men were now dead. His crew, the boys he had promised to get home at war’s end, were now gone.

  “Roger, hang tough men, we are about to sit ‘Slick Willy’ down, we may not have that long to dwell on what’s happened.” He knew they would have had a better chance jumping over Manchuria, and the Major gave the ten-man crew every opportunity to do so. They had chosen, to a man, to escape the Japanese occupied area of Manchuria, to take a chance over what they hoped was a sparsely populated area of Mongolia. Only after they had arrived did they find the desert area socked in by one of the worst sand storms in recorded history. Now they had no choice, they would ride ‘Slick Willy’ down to the desert’s floor. “Okay you bunch of cowpokes, keep your external oxygen supply ready, we could lose all pressure at any time. We’re starting our descent. It should be fun. Out.” He smiled at his copilot. “How’s that for putting a brave face on our rather dire situation?” Pierce asked with a wink at Krensky.

  The co-pilot cleared his throat as he placed the memory of the young baseball player from Muncie out of his thoughts for now. “Just like they taught in command school.” He then examined the remaining and still functioning gauges of the shaking and damaged B-29. “Try as I might, I cannot see a break in the weather anywhere down there, Skipper.”

  “The damn storm is reaching up for us!”

  The giant aircraft buffeted and rose to an altitude of thirty thousand feet before it seemingly hit the ceiling. The impact was like hitting a brick wall, straining the harnesses of all onboard. Before anyone could realize what was happening, all hell broke loose. The rivets between frame sixteen and seventeen separated from the bomber’s ribs and that was that. The air was immediately evacuated from the aircraft. The B-29 Superfortress started to shake violently.

  “All crew, go to external O-2!” Krensky tried to shout over his throat mic. He managed to secure his mask and then take the control yoke, so the major could squeeze his over his mouth and nose. The temperature inside the bomber went from a bearable thirty-two degrees to minus six in a split second.

  Behind the main cabin’s bulkhead, they heard a screeching, ripping sound and then all went dark as the last of the pressurized air escaped the aluminum aircraft. The control yoke was yanked out of both the pilot and co-pilot’s hands.

  “…gone, they’re…just ripped out of the plane…they’re just…,”

  The call came over their headphones, but whatever was meant by the frantic message went unheard as the B-29 started a death roll toward the storm below. Pierce knew that they had lost internal integrity of the giant Boeing plane. They had a hole ripped into her somewhere and the major had a sickening feeling it was the frame where the remainder of his crew had taken station for safety reasons. How many more of his young crew had he just lost?

  “We’re losing the starboard wing!” Krensky screamed as the vibration coursed through their entire beings.

  Before Pierce could respond, the starboard wing folded completely in on itself. The massive wing twisted and the force of their downward spiral sent the five-ton aluminum reinforced wing crashing into the side of the aircraft. The ‘Slick Willy’ started burning in its death plunge.

  The centrifugal forces made the control yoke spin and sent it back and forth enough that the motion became blinding. Then Pierce could feel the entirety of the large fuselage twist as it was corkscrewing downward. The major closed his eyes as the cabin started filling with debris and sand from the raging storm. This was how he and his crew would meet their end. No goodbyes, no job well done, no homecoming to family and friends. Their war ended here, and it ended now.

  Blood was rushing to parts of the remaining crew’s bodies, where blood was never meant to go. Pierce felt his brain grow fuzzy as the B-29 spun out of control. He felt his stomach as it was sent back into his spine. His vision grew dim and he was grateful for that one mercy as the right wing of the giant, and once lethal, bomber separated and flew off into the sand storm. He knew through his fading consciousness that he and his men would never feel the impact of the ‘Slick Willy’ hitting the sands of the Gobi traveling faster than the speed of sound.

  His wife and son’s faces came unbidden to his dying brain as his eyes started to close. Then, in the briefest of moments before his brain shut down, Pierce saw the silvery haze, and that was when he knew his time was at hand. The spinning view and the forces working against him dulled his mind and he thought he was seeing the image and color of what death looked like. It was beautiful, it was terrifying. The silverish hue took over everything as his mind shut down.

  * * *

  The B-29 bomber known as ‘Slick Willy’, with the first atomic weapon, ‘The Thin Man’, vanished into the largest sandstorm in recorded history that night in 1945.

  Part I

  THE GATHERING STORM

  “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.”

  ~ JIMMY CARTER,

  December 10, 2002

  Chapter One

  The Mekong River,

  Udon Thani, Thailand

  The Vietnamese fishing village had survived along the banks of the Mekong River for centuries, as they fished for their living while watching for Thai drug lords from across the river, as they shipped their wares to nations that sought such destructive products. The small village had survived the wars of the ancient peoples of the land, and also the French colonialism incursion of the eighteenth century. Not until the war with America had they been affected much. Now their only concern was the political war with neighboring Thailand, and a concern for the growing power of their one-time ally, China, that worried them most. The war was over fishing rights and the way Thailand ignored the United Nations decree about over fishing the giant Mekong River far north of the small village and the drug trade that made many in Thailand very rich. Their daily catches dwindled more and more each year. The small village near the large city of Udon Thani was dying a slow death as their fortunes dwindled each day.

  Dai Mihn and
his family had fished these waters through war and peace for the past fifty of his sixty-five years, and he felt the pinch Thailand presented each and every day to the village’s livelihood.

  Dai scolded his grandson for being careless with their only fishing net, claiming a slow and steady pull would allow the net to be brought aboard their small boat far more efficiently than tugging. The grandson was always in a hurry, especially since the small village had gotten electrical power for the first time in its long history. Even when the war with the French and then the Americans raged along the Mekong in the fifties and sixties, they had been one of those backward villages that lived their lives without the electricity found even during the roughest of the war years by most towns and cities. Now the boy was in a hurry to play his video games that had so absorbed the youth in the village as to cause trouble with the elders. The old man shook his head in exasperation as the grandson continued to try and hurry the day’s catch aboard.

  “I said stop tugging at it. It will come easy with a steady pull,” the old man admonished.

  “Why don’t you try it!” the kid retorted. “It’s like I’m pulling in a whale here!”

  Dai did notice the net looked to be dragging heavier than normal. He knew his luck couldn’t be that good to have a haul of fish that big. With consternation etching his wrinkled features, Dai slid toward the front of the small boat to assist his grandson. Before he could grasp a side of the net, the boy yelped and then flew backward, nearly knocking him and his grandfather off the boat. The old man caught the boy and angrily pushed him back to a standing position.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?” he asked as he took in the young, frightened features of the youth.

  The boy took another step back from the net as he pointed again and again at the many times repaired fish catching tool. The old man again shook his head and then pulled on the net once more, as his grandson cowered against the gunwale of the old boat. One tug, two tugs, and then his own eyes widened as the body popped free of the net. He instinctively let go just as the boy had done. It wasn’t the first time in Dai’s life that he had netted a body. During the war years with the French and the Americans, it was almost a daily occurrence for someone from the village to pull a dead soldier from the brown waters of the Mekong. The arm was large as was the torso. Dai slapped his grandson along the side of his head.

  “Help me!’

  The boy moved and assisted the older man. Soon they had the body and net aboard. There, amongst the pile of small catfish, was a large body. It was a white man. Both fishermen untangled the net. The boy jumped back when one of the dead man’s arms swung out and touched his bare leg. He screamed and again fell back to the worn and weathered side of the boat.

  “With all of the violent video games you play, this shocks you?” Dai continued to unravel the dead man from his one and only net. “You act as an old woman, boy.” Dai finally had the task done and he examined the large man in his boat. He jumped back after he rolled the body over. He was white and had short cropped blonde hair.

  “Look at that,” the boy said as he noticed something on the upper arm of the shirtless body.

  As the grandfather leaned in for a closer look, he saw the small tattoo. He reached out and rubbed his thumb over the colorful marking. He had seen this tattoo once before, many years ago. They had recovered a crew of Americans from a downed helicopter that had crashed into the river during the war. They had rescued three United States navy men from the waters. One wore a small tattoo like the one he was looking at.

  “What is it?” the boy asked, regaining his courage to get a closer look.

  “A seal. We don’t have many of them here,” the old man joked. “He’s juggling a beachball.”

  “What does it mean?” the grandson asked as he had never even seen a picture of a real seal.

  “It used to mean that this was a very special soldier.”

  “We have them in our video games. I think they’re called Special Forces. It’s confusing sometimes, the Americans have so many different soldiers in those games, it’s hard to keep them straight.”

  “In the old days I think it was a navy soldier, I don’t know if it means that now.”

  “Look, he’s been shot three times,” the boy ventured.

  “Yes, the Americans seem to always be getting into trouble over here. I don’t know why they don’t just stay home.”

  “What do we do, throw him back?”

  The old man straightened and looked around. “We have enough fouling the river. No, we have to get the body to the police at Dienmei. They’ll know what to do.”

  The boy was happy to wash his hands of the body. He made his way to the back of the boat to start the small Yamaha motor when the hand took hold of his ankle. He screamed. This time it was a manly expression of pure terror. He fell back as the Grandfather saw the body move as the hand released the boy’s ankle.

  “He’s still alive,” he said as he kneeled down and checked the large man for a pulse. “Not by much, but he’s still breathing.”

  Suddenly the same hand grasped the old man by his worn shirt front. Dai leaned in close as the blonde giant was mumbling something. The grandfather peeled the man’s strong fingers from his shirt and then gestured for the boy to start the motor. Dai went forward after removing his shirt and placing it under the unconscious man’s head.

  “What did he say?” the boy shouted over the noise of the motor.

  “My English is bad these days.”

  “Well, what did it sound like?” the grandson persisted.

  “Something about someone named Jack. And Colonel. I don’t know.”

  * * *

  As the boat sped toward the local constabulary, the man awoke several times. The same word was said time and time again in his fevered state.

  “Jack!”

  * * *

  Gobi Desert, Mongolia,

  Present Day

  The day had dawned bright and the weather was mild for early March. The sky was the bluest any member of the American team had ever witnessed. The Gobi was turning out to be a far more hospitable place than they had been warned about.

  The mood inside the camp was not very jovial as the American, Australian, and Chinese teams of geologists spoke around the morning breakfast table inside the main tent. The joint expedition, sanctioned by both the Mongolian internal government and the powers-that-be in Beijing, had had nothing but failure since arriving in the Gobi two weeks before. The iron ore found in the region wasn’t as abundant as the American claim had placed it. Coupled with the fact that the deep bed of copper wasn’t as plentiful as first thought, meant the expedition to find the resources was not going to go a long way in assisting the Chinese government in regaining their feet after the devastating alien attack on their capital of Beijing during the short but costly confrontations of a year past. The spoils of both finds would have been split between the Mongolian government and the Chinese superpower to their south. The Americans, who had forwarded the satellite information about the possibility of a large ore strike in Mongolia, were there with the Australians, who were there as a goodwill gesture for Anglo-Asian cooperation after the short-lived war with the Grays.

  The American team was led by fifteen professors and students from the University of Wisconsin and Temple University out of Philadelphia. With their meager samples in secured cases, the group was preparing to leave the Gobi in the good hands of their colleagues from China and Australia. After the larger American and Chinese teams left, there would only be six geologists left in camp as they checked the last of the survey grids. The small group had said goodbye to the bulk of the field mission team at dawn that morning. The remainder, five Americans, one Australian and one Chinese rep sat despondent inside one of the last tents to be struck.

  “Looks like our compatriot from Beijing isn’t too fond of the breakfast you made them, Louie,” said an American professor as he stood up to shovel more scrambled eggs onto his plastic plate.
r />   “I think it’s the sausage, mate,” the Australian said as he brutally chomped down on the link he had in his mouth.

  “Hey, we like sausage, it’s just that the many times you Americans and Aussies eat the stuff, every breakfast as I remember, your arteries will clog up long before us rice-eating Asians.”

  “You Chinese are always so serious, Lee,” said Professor James Anderson, from Temple University. “I mean, after the war with those little Gray bastards it seems like you folks would have started living for today, rather than tomorrow.”

  The professor could see that the subject of the devastating Gray attack on the Chinese nation still affected the young professor of Geology, James Lee Hong, of Beijing University, very deeply.

  “Sorry Lee, old man, still a sore subject. Didn’t mean anything by it,” the Australian said as he knew the joke would have gone over better if they had come up with better results on the mineral dig.

  Professor Lee smiled, and then handed his half-empty plate of rice and chicken over to the Aussie cook and nodded that he would take a link of sausage.

  “You are right to a point, Professor, we do have to start living. After all, we never know what’s right around the corner.” He smiled and nodded as three sausage links were plopped over his chicken and rice.

  “Next time I’ll bring some Kangaroo sausage, that will really prove your manhood!” the large Aussie professor snorted.

  As the group laughed and ate, a lone figure stood up and placed her empty plate on her stool and made her way outside.

  “Where are you heading, Tiny?” the professor from Temple University asked the small woman whom it took all of thirty seconds to nickname after meeting the rest three weeks before.

  She turned and held out a plastic bag. “Time to find a secluded sand dune somewhere,” she said as the other faces turned away. One of the dimmest aspects of expeditionary work was where and when to go to a private place for comfort while doing the business of the human body. “You’ll excuse me, the Kangaroo sausage remark has bidden me to take my leave.”