Chapter One: The War Zone
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“I am the wanderer who forever walks alone toward the distant horizon; you are my woman amid the boundless sea of humanity, on every cold night in a foreign land…”
An ancient Mercedes L-series truck crept cautiously along the highway outside Baghdad. Xu Wei’s “Hometown” echoed through the cab while the driver, A-Guan, gripped the steering wheel and howled along in a hoarse, duck-like voice, looking as exhilarated as a mating husky fresh from a night out in Wenzhou.
In the passenger seat, Song Heping was fiddling with a Beretta 92F pistol.
His partner, Old Yao, had shoved the gun into his hands before they left, telling him to use it for self-defense.
Most pistols were not particularly complicated.
He removed the magazine with ease and glanced at the rounds inside. After making sure there was no sand or other debris, he pulled back the slide to inspect the chamber and bolt, then reminded the driver, “A-Guan, this is a red zone. Don’t get so caught up in singing that you forget to watch the road. If you see anything suspicious, turn around and run…”
It was 9:20 a.m. on September 17, 2003, five months after the American military’s Operation Iraqi Freedom had ended.
Baghdad was a chaotic mess, both inside the capital and beyond it. The smoke of gunpowder hung everywhere in the air, tinged with the stench of blood. Every breath tasted of death.
Although the Americans had long since announced to the world that their military operation had ended in complete success, the gunfire in Baghdad had never stopped.
No matter how much the coalition spokesmen boasted that the situation in Iraq was now completely under control, they still could not stop the resistance groups from launching attacks of every conceivable kind.
Song Heping thought the bastards were talking out of their asses.
Forget the area around Baghdad—even the Green Zone established by the military within the city was not entirely safe. Every few days, unidentified mortar shells, and sometimes Katyusha rockets, came screaming down inside it.
Two days earlier, a Katyusha rocket had landed in front of a large tent in the Green Zone, blowing two unlucky soldiers who had been standing there chatting over cans of cola into pieces.
Song Heping had been nearby at the time. A severed hand, charred on the outside and tender inside, had landed right beside his foot. It was still smoking and giving off a strange yet familiar smell of roasted meat, making his stomach churn violently.
Though nowhere was safe anymore, today’s delivery had to be made.
The destination was Kadhimiya, in northern Baghdad. Kadhimiya lay in the unsafe zone outside the city, and reaching it meant crossing a large stretch of red territory.
Resistance groups were extremely active in the city. Small firefights occurred frequently, sometimes accompanied by IED attacks or suicide bombers blowing themselves up. Leaving the Green Zone meant a geometrically greater risk—and quite possibly death.
The reason the delivery absolutely had to be made was that the profit was outrageously high.
The cargo consisted of six 100-kilowatt generators, loaded onto two trucks, three generators per vehicle.
In a war zone, selling these things was more profitable than selling drugs.
Each generator cost only forty thousand yuan. The tribal tycoons in Kadhimiya were paying one hundred and twenty thousand apiece. The six generators would turn a two-hundred-and-forty-thousand-yuan investment into four hundred and eighty thousand. After deducting all sorts of miscellaneous expenses, Song Heping and Old Yao would each take home at least two hundred thousand.
Two hundred thousand yuan could solve a great many problems—especially for a pauper like Song Heping. It was nothing short of a fortune falling from the sky.
To complete this deal, Song Heping and Old Yao had wagered all the money in their shop.
More than two hundred thousand yuan—that was everything the two of them owned.
If they succeeded, they would go from riding a bicycle to driving a motorcycle.
If they failed, they would not even have a bicycle left.
He had just finished checking the pistol when he suddenly realized that A-Guan had stopped singing.
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“Why’d you stop?”
A-Guan looked somewhat tense. He glanced at the rearview mirror and cursed. “Damn it, today’s really not our day!”
“What happened?” Song Heping asked hurriedly.
“There’s an American convoy behind us.”
Song Heping quickly checked the rearview mirror and indeed saw the front of a Stryker armored personnel carrier.
Like the American armored vehicles commonly seen around Baghdad, this Stryker had been fitted with slat armor. Sandbags had been stuffed between the slats, and several logs as thick as bowls had been lashed across them. The whole thing looked vaguely cyberpunk.
In fact, this sort of modification was extremely common on the Iraqi battlefield—a homespun, do-it-yourself method of protecting against shaped-charge weapons.
The slats, sandbags, and logs offered a certain degree of protection when the vehicle was hit, particularly against RPG warheads. As long as the warhead was not a tandem-charge type, one hit was usually not a serious problem.
That was why this crude method was so important for a thin-skinned vehicle like the Stryker, whose side and rear armor could not even stop rounds fired from a .50-caliber machine gun. Virtually every American Stryker had been modified this way.
“Let them pass us.” Song Heping immediately instructed A-Guan. “Don’t travel alongside those bastards.”
He then grabbed the radio and contacted the truck behind them, telling its driver, Fatty Tan, to slow down as well and let the American convoy go ahead.
Fatty Tan was cursing too, using profanity to conceal his panic.
Encountering coalition military vehicles on the roads of Iraq was absolutely no good. It was best to keep one’s distance and stay as far away from those unlucky bastards as possible, lest the convoy come under attack from local resistance forces and they be caught in the crossfire.
Although Iraq’s regular army had long since collapsed, a group of fanatical volunteers loyal to Saddam had organized themselves into suicide squads and launched resistance attacks everywhere. Ambushing coalition convoys was their usual tactic.
The attacks had become especially frequent lately. Song Heping did not know whether the anti-American forces had their own year-end performance quotas to meet, but ever since September began, he had seen blood-soaked coalition soldiers carried from rescue helicopters into hospitals every day in the Green Zone.
Song Heping straightened up and began surveying the area around the truck.
The highway ran between moderately steep hillsides densely covered with yellow-brown brick-and-concrete buildings. It looked as though someone had casually scattered a huge pile of building blocks across the slopes—chaotic, cramped, and densely packed.
More than three hundred meters away, atop the slope to the left of the highway, a tall minaret stood alone, coldly watching the traffic pass below.
The minaret actually housed a large bell and loudspeakers. At the appointed hours, the bell would toll and prayers would be recited. Upon hearing the call, believers would immediately find a place to kneel and pray, no matter where they were.
There were few pedestrians along either side of the highway. The only exception was a woman ahead on the right, walking alone in a black cloak that concealed her from head to toe.
A-Guan lightly pressed the brake, slowing the truck.
The Stryker convoy whooshed past them.
Song Heping counted quickly. There were five Strykers in the convoy, each roughly thirty meters apart—the standard formation for traveling on a highway.
When the fourth vehicle had passed, something suddenly happened.
Boom!
The unexpected explosion instantly stunned Song Heping inside the cab.
About a hundred meters ahead, the enormous mushroom cloud formed by the blast surged upward like a monster clawing its way out of the earth. Wrapped in dark-red flames, it effortlessly hurled the lead Stryker armored vehicle six or seven meters into the air.
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The sixteen-ton Stryker looked no sturdier than a paper toy beneath the tremendous force of the explosion.
“Holy shit—”
A-Guan’s eyes bulged nearly an inch, and his curse trembled with fear.
With one hand, Song Heping shoved the idiot—who was doing nothing but shrieking incoherently—down against the seat to avoid the shock wave that was about to arrive.
“Get down!”
The two of them had barely dropped onto the seats when they felt the truck shake violently.
Then they heard a second explosion.
Boom!
The windows of the Mercedes L-series truck, carrying more than twenty tons of cargo and vehicle, shattered all at once.
The second explosion had come from behind the convoy!
Every hair on Song Heping’s body stood on end.
Damn it! They were cutting off the head, blowing up the tail, and striking the middle!
A classic roadside ambush!
The middle…
A terrifying word flashed through his mind.
Boom!
Before he could react, the third explosion came.
It detonated not far from the truck.
The tremendous blast wave flipped the vehicle completely upside down, sending truck and occupants tumbling onto the roadside.
IED!
A terrifying military term flashed through Song Heping’s mind.
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A new book has been released. New and returning readers are welcome to add it to their collections!
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