All or Nothing (2)
Catapults flinging earth and sand could only smother the barbed wire as far as the second trench.
That was only natural. Gunpowder weapons outranged catapults by a wide margin, so the moment the Chagatai tried to push close enough for their engines to hit the third trench, they would become nothing more than live targets for the guns of Dali Fortress.
From the grim statistics bought with countless lives, the Chagatai had carefully measured the reach of both the rocket batteries and the cannons. The operation they now executed was the product of that hard-won knowledge.
Smash the first and second trenches, then hurl the entire army at full gallop toward the third. Absorb as little artillery fire as possible while racing flat-out to the wire, smother it, and drive straight for the gate with battering rams.
It was, in its way, a thoroughly manly plan—an all-or-nothing charge that simply endured the enemy’s firepower head-on and trusted in pure speed and will.
“Hiiiiiiyaaa—haaah!!”
“Urrrrrrrrraaaah—!!”
Howling at the top of their lungs, the charging horsemen carried great sandbags instead of lances. There would be no counter-charge. The cowardly Central Plains dogs cowering behind the walls had no stomach for riding out and crossing steel. So the plan was simple: ride in, hurl the sandbags onto the wire, fall back, and repeat until the entire barrier lay buried under sand.
But every plan, no matter how carefully laid, begins to unravel the moment the first blow lands.
Huiyeom’s face was ice-cold as he swept his baton.
“Fire.”
Thump-thump-thump-BOOM!!
Dabal-shingijeon rockets streaked down like falling stars, tearing men and horses apart and setting them alight. Clouds of yellow-green and ochre poison gas billowed up on every side, wrapping the living in death. Blood ran like rivers; screams rose into a howling gale.
Neither side stopped.
Adiya Khan had made up his mind. With ruthless cunning he had driven every potential rival and every half-hearted rebel into the front ranks, and now he flogged the army forward without mercy.
“Casualties are expected! Drive them harder!”
When a knot of horsemen burst straight through the yellow-green fog, even Wang Yangming, who had been directing the gunners from the wall, started in shock.
“What?!”
“Gas masks. They copied them.”
Huiyeom’s eyes narrowed as he coolly assessed the situation. Not every man of the Sakpungdae who had fought so brilliantly at Yeogang had come home. The Chagatai must have stripped the “marvelous masks that ward off Central Plains poison” from the dead, taken them apart, and quickly realized the contents were nothing more than charcoal and quicklime.
Their copies were crude—no rubber, no glass eyepieces, just hoods stuffed with charcoal and lime over the mouth. Gas leaked everywhere and the eyes remained unprotected. Still, crude protection was infinitely better than none. Even the horses wore the same bags over their heads. Mongol war-horses, trained to obey despite tunnel vision and labored breathing, carried their riders through the killing fog. Where once ten out of ten had died, four now broke free. That alone was enough to fill the cavalry with fresh courage.
“Hesitate and the fog will eat you! Charge while the bags still hold the poison at bay!”
The lead riders swerved past sheets of flame, punched through the gas wall, and flung their sandbags into the coiled barbed wire. The heavy sacks, still carrying the full momentum of the charge, smashed into the wire like cannonballs, driving it backward and crumpling it. Of course they could not sever the wire that had once stopped even heavy cavalry; the barrier was long, continuous, and elastic, absorbing shocks like a net. But the sandbags were never meant to cut. They snagged, tore, and hung, their weight dragging the wire flat to the ground. One wave of riders buried the coils; a second wave buried them deeper still. What remained was a low mound any Mongol horseman could laugh and leap over.
“Nothing left but the wall! Rideeeeee!!”
Watching from the battlements, Huiyeom clicked his tongue.
“Not bad.”
The Dabal-shingijeon continued to grind the enemy without mercy, yet each rocket covered only a modest area; the weapon demanded staggering quantities of ammunition. Against a massed army one inevitably fell back on the sheer lethality of chlorine gas. The enemy, curse them, had imitated gas masks and halved that lethality in a single stroke. Mustard gas, being slower to act, offered little stopping power in this kind of close-quarters brawl.
“Then how about this?”
At Huiyeom’s signal a fresh volley of modified shingijeon screamed through the air and plunged into the ground behind the third trench—exactly where the charging host was thundering in.
“Buried bombs!”
“Wheel! Wheel left and right!”
They had anticipated even this. The cavalry spun on a dime, peeling left and right in a brilliant evasive maneuver. The rockets slammed harmlessly into empty earth and the ground erupted in flame. Yet no amount of skill could completely escape the blast wave of Musinpo mines patterned after claymores.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!
“Gyaaaaaah!!”
“Hiiiiiiiihiiing!!!”
Brave soldiers were shredded into bloody rags. This time the Musinpo had not been loaded with gravel. Instead they spat caltrops and iron jacks—fragments lethal whether they struck or were stepped upon. The explosion scattered them in every direction, turning the ground itself into a death trap. Horses and men who had avoided the blast proper still screamed and fell as the spikes punched through hoof and boot.
“Walk on the corpses—they’re safe! Advance along the path your comrades have paved!”
Adiya Khan’s order was so cold it bordered on the inhuman, yet the soldiers obeyed, picking their way across the bodies of the fallen to avoid the spikes.
The distance had closed dramatically. Now the Chagatai were inside the effective range of rockets and heavy guns. Soldiers lugging tree-trunk battering rams charged the gate. The wheeled rams that cavalry had once dragged had either been wrecked or could not cross the obstacles, so the men simply carried the timber itself. Their unbreakable will, climbing over the corpses of their own comrades, was terrible and almost majestic.
“But that is all it is.”
Huiyeom raised a hand with icy calm.
“Spirit alone has never won a battle.”
On the walls of Dali the waiting musketeers leveled their weapons. Two thousand flintlock muskets sold to the Dali garrison, five hundred Dreyse needle-guns in the hands of Dokwadae and Sakpungdae disguised as ordinary Dang-chong, and a handful of Gatling guns that Sakpungdae detachments, acting on Huiyeom’s secret orders, had carried outside the walls. All of them opened fire at once in a storm of fire and steel.
Bang! Bang-bang! Rat-tat-tat-tat!!
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!!
Brrrrrrrrrt! Brrrrrrt!
The Dali garrison’s attempt to mimic Oda Nobunaga’s three-rank volley fire was clumsy, yet a continuous curtain of lead still reaped lives. By comparison the aimed fire of Dokwadae and Sakpungdae was nearly sniper-precise. One might call it the true heritage of a clan that had perfected the hidden weapon. Without scopes, using only iron sights, they exchanged one bullet for one life with such cold efficiency that even Simo Häyhä, the White Death of the Winter War, might have blushed to watch them work.
And while the Yunnan commanders, eyes fixed on the walls, saw nothing, Sakpungdae gunners on the outer flanks of the battlefield performed miracles no one would ever witness. A man would crank the Gatling handle until a hundred rounds spat out in the time of a single breath, then instantly relocate to a fresh, safe position. In those few seconds the barrel cooled and a new belt was fed. Soldiers locked in their death-run toward the walls were helplessly raked by a rain of bullets whose origin they never even saw.
Meanwhile the wall itself came under assault.
—Thud! Thud!
The battering ram began to hammer the gate. A few surviving catapults, defying the storm of fire, lobbed rocks and pots of flaming oil onto the battlements. Musketeers screamed as they were crushed or set alight, dancing like living torches before toppling from the walls. The catapults did not enjoy their success for long. The Dabal-shingijeon, unable to engage the close-in enemy, vented their fury on every remaining engine; nothing was left but splinters and ash.
Adiya Khan stared at the gate with bloodshot eyes.
“Just a little more! Push just a little harder!”
If the gate fell and his men poured inside, the enemy’s guns would be useless. Then numbers and cavalry superiority would smash everything.
Huiyeom saw it too. He glanced sideways and gave a single nod. Wang Yangming swept a red banner in reply.
Below the walls, people who had been waiting for that signal sprang into motion. They were not soldiers. They were refugees from Yeogang who had volunteered for revenge against the barbarians who had trampled their homeland. The moment Wang Yangming’s flag moved, they acted.
“Now! Work the bellows!”
“All together—one, two!”
Whump! Whump! Whump! Whump!
They stomped the prepared bellows with all their strength. The blast of air raced through ox-gut hoses into heavy wooden barrels built to withstand pressure. Beside each barrel, Dokwadae operatives who had been standing ready pulled thick, helmet-like hoods over their heads and seized long, pole-like nozzles. To modern eyes they would have looked like firefighters in crude asbestos suits.
“Pour the oil!”
At the garrison commander’s shout, musketeers on the wall heaved cauldrons of boiling oil through the murder holes. The scalding liquid cascaded down the stone and deep-fried every Chagatai soldier who had been trying to force an entry. Traditional siege defense—nothing surprising. The attackers therefore crowded toward the gate to escape the oil.
In the chaos and the life-or-death tension they failed to notice that the oil now pouring down was no longer hot, that it gave off a sharp, pungent stench, and that its color was dark and cloudy.
—CRACK!
A tremendous impact, the sound of timber snapping, and the gate finally burst open.
Adiya Khan rose in his stirrups and roared with excitement.
“The gate is open! Go! Go in and slaughter them!”
Everyone knew that an open gate almost certainly meant a trap, and that the first men through would die. It did not matter. Men would fill the trap; momentum would smash the ambush. The soldiers who hurled themselves into the fortress, morale soaring to the heavens, feared nothing. Even if Zhang Fei himself had stood there blocking Changban Bridge, they would not have stopped.
What they had never imagined was the sight that greeted them: bulky figures from head to toe in grotesque leather armor, water still dripping from their hoods, holding strange tools.
For a single frozen heartbeat the lead soldiers could only think, What the hell is that?
It was the last thought any of them ever had.
“Hello.”
Seok Sang-jun of the Sacheondang Dokwadae leveled the ignition lance in his hands. The warrior waiting beside the solvent barrel flipped the connecting handle from locked to open.
—FWAAAAAAAAASH!!