Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 3 of 17

Thousands of Japanese soldiers and sailors were killed in a strange attack en route way to a surprise invasion. They were thought dead to the man. But in times like these, not even death is guaranteed.

Then, the crew of Fast Freddie receive a new mission, one that puts them on a collision course with the deadliest of their enemies.

This is Part 3 of Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo. If you’d like to avoid spoilers, read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

Content warnings: violence, death, gore, animal violence, mild swearing, creeps.

The Dead Man.

SATURDAY MORNING, MAY 8, 1943
ABOARD IEJIMA
THE BERING SEA

//Translated from Japanese.//

Until the distress call from their sister ship, Hamobai, had come in, Seaman Second Class Gima Goro’s highest hope was to become the ship’s head of maintenance.

He never thought he would become a cannibal.

“This is Commander Matsuoka Taiki of the Hamobai, mayday, mayday!” the radio screamed while he was cleaning the bridge’s front windscreens. The crew scrambled to stations, shoving Gima out of the way.

“Hamobai, what is your condition?” fleet command demanded over the air. The seconds before Matsuoka responded felt like an eternity to Gima.

The radio squawked and screamed, chopping Matsuoka's words into nonsense.

“Tor... oka...” was all that got through before the transmission cut off completely.

“Toroka,” Gima repeated. He felt the strength of the sharp-edged syllables as he spoke them aloud.

umors filtered from the bridge down into the lower decks after the distress call came in, and the fleet went to alert. As they had been ordered, the blanket of radio silence fell over the convoy.

Iejima bustled with activity. Sailors and gunners were running everywhere, eager for battle. Gima was no fighter, his duties under combat conditions were to contain leaks, both water and fuel, and to secure bulkheads. Just once he would have loved to feel the shuddering roar of Iejima's main cannons after he had pulled the trigger, to see his shot scatter men and metal like autumn leaves.

With no combat responsibilities, he was left to his own devices. He hardly slept, clutching his father’s old knife to his chest, and when he woke he woke with one word on his lips:

“Toroka.”

It was seven the next morning when the first blasts broke the morning silence. Gima could feel the shudder of the main guns from his post deep in the ship's steel bowels. He pressed his ear against cold metal. He had never been in true combat, but in all the drills they had run, Iejima had taken on a rhythm of her own. The booms and lulls of the escort ship firing and reloading, gunning the engines then slamming them into reverse, the pounding of a hundred men rushing back and forth.

Battle was like a diesel-powered heartbeat.

Gima grinned and waited. He’d thought it the Americans, sending an armada to defend their frozen islands. He listened expectantly for the guns to fire again, but they stayed quiet. The halting tempo of the battle disappointed him. He sat forward, ready for his section chief to burst in with inconsequential orders.

The deck rumbled beneath his feet. It was deep and warbling, an angry sound that shook the tissues within Gima's organs. It wasn't the recoil of Iejima's cannons, nor an impact upon the ship above him. This reverberation had coursed through the ocean itself. He pressed his head back against the bulkhead, hard enough to squeeze the blood out of his ear.

A deep, distant explosion gently rattled Iejima, followed quickly by a second and third. Had his ear not been pressed against the ship's outer skin, he wouldn't have heard them at all.

The cannons above his head remained silent, but Iejima's depth charge launchers thumped to life. He heard muffled splashes, then half a moment later the bubble-popping blasts of underwater explosions.

The Americans must have been using submarines, he realized. That meant that the trio of distant blasts he had heard moments before were three of the transports Iejima and her sister ships had been escorting. Each transport carried munitions and one-and-one-half thousand soldiers. Almost five thousand men were dead: pop, pop, pop. So many, and so quiet that he had almost missed them.

Gima slumped away from the bulkhead. A jet of cold water slammed him across the room, soaking him through.

The bulkhead he had been pressed against just a few seconds earlier peeled away like a tuna can lid. A massive black spike raked through the thick steel hull, shearing it open with ease. Had he not moved, it would have taken his head with it.

Gima stared. The shock of the icy Bering had left him speechless, though words could not have encompassed what he was seeing. Metal groaned around him and gravity shifted. The wall he had been pressed against became his floor, and the rush of freezing water stopped. Morning sun glowed through the rent below the waterline. Iejima was rolling.

Iejima shook around him. The bulkhead wavered beneath him, as if on heavy seas. The hull screamed. Iejima had never been meant to support itself on its side. Gima could hear every bolt straining, and somewhere aft a series of bulkheads buckled catastrophically, the deafening fracture coursing through Gima’s organs and shaking the whole ship as each one built momentum to drag the next down with it.

A second later, the aft third of the ship splashed into the sea.

Gima scrambled to his feet. That wasn't right. Had he hit his head? Even if the aft end of the ship broke away, there would be no splash. It would simply gurgle and sink into the water. It had no height to fall from.

A shadow passed over the ragged opening above him, and hot air rushed through the tear. Gima threw his arm over his nose and mouth. Never had he encountered a smell so awful, and he had grown up cleaning the outhouses at a road house every summer. His eyes stung and he felt his hair falling out in wisps. It was sulfur and ammonia and rotting flesh and waste and bacteria.

What was the force that could destroy ships and poison men with the wind of its passage? Was that Toroka?

Gima had to know.

He scrambled up the former deck and through the ripped hull above. He ignored how the torn steel cut into his hands and hauled himself up and out of the ship.

Iejima's hull was smooth, not pitted by salt or marred by barnacles as so many other ships were. He stood and stared across the open sea, mesmerized by the sight before him.

The invasion fleet was in ruins. Smoke rose from debris fields in the water. Only six ships remained afloat, though none would ever sail again; they were all doomed by great rents in their hulls or hungry flame chewing through their superstructures. Gima could see fires burning and men struggling, though not so many as should have been.

The Bering looked alien to Gima: its waters churned as if boiling. Knife-edged shapes threshed the water, white bellies and red jaws flashed through the roiling surface. His heart clenched into a knot. He knew those shapes in his marrow.

Tens of thousands of sharks had descended upon the wrecked fleet, churning the sea with razor teeth and blood. Gima watched the ravenous school ram a life boat, knocking the men within overboard.

Iejima shuddered violently, throwing Gima to his knees. They both split against the steel, oozing red blood onto the gray hull. He crawled forward, toward what had been ‘up’ before the ship rolled, and reached the gunwale. He peered over, hoping to see the sea empty of sharks. Instead he found open air.

The escort ship was suspended thirty meters above the churning water. Iejima's aft section was slowly sinking into the pink froth. Men Gima recognized were getting torn to pieces far below.

He watched one struggling sailor disappear beneath the surface, surprise obvious on his face despite the distance. One-by-one the other survivors were pulled under. None rose back to the surface.

A hot, acrid wind blew on Gima's neck. The harsh chemicals and poisonous stink washed over him like molten lead. His body reacted without thought or hesitation: his vomit sprayed across Iejima’s bow, laced with red. He rolled onto his back, his head lolling over the rail.

Toroka towered over him.

Gima Goro was at a loss for words. He would want to describe what he saw as a god, but gods are only what men could understand them to be. He considered that Toroka could be a natural phenomenon, but the hierarchy of animals was ill-prepared to describe it. He never once thought that Toroka might be a product of men, for no man could hope to imagine such power, much less create it.

In the end, he knew Toroka simply was. To accept such a thing's existence was to confirm that humans, for all their creations and philosophies, were germs to the universe.

All these thoughts flashed through Gima Goro's mind as he laid on the side of Iejima, staring up at the titan that held his ship in the air as if it were nothing more than a dead kitten.

Gima could not tell how long he laid there, but when the ship finally fell, not even the sharks would touch him. Toroka descended into the sea, and its ravenous cohort followed, eager to scavenge its next slaughter.

The single lifeboat to survive the attack came upon Gima's body sometime that afternoon, clutching the salt-scoured deck of his shattered ship. An admiral and his personal chef hauled him aboard unconscious, cleaned and bandaged his wounds, then fed him fresh water, drop by drop, until he woke.

The two dozen other men aboard shivered and held their wounds. Seventeen invasion ships pocked the still sea, fractured, burning, and sinking.

While his fellow crewmen had scrambled for safety, panicking in the face of Toroka, Gima had been reborn. When he saw it, he knew his life would not be the same after, whether he survived or not. His father’s blade was the first step, the key to open that door. When they pulled him aboard the lifeboat, he was reborn a citizen of a new world, where old rules no longer mattered. They had not known it then, but he did.

He considered and prepared and kept that blade hidden under his clothes for weeks.

The hardest part of waiting was listening to the admiral give orders as they drifted, even as he grew hungrier and hungrier, as if the ranks and orders of men mattered anymore.

They drifted for weeks, their emergency supplies dwindling. The choices when the fish stopped biting and the last tin ran empty were supposed to have been hard. Men died each day, which made the choices easier.

One day, even the dead were gone. When he finally made up his mind to eat again, the first man Gima killed was the admiral.

He could take the man’s orders no longer. What were orders when even the ighest men were little more than fleas on the backside of the world? Gima made the first cut to silence the admiral.

Once the blood was flowing, no one else knew what do except help. When they ate with him, they joined Gima in the new world. With one cut, he became their guide. They would walk in a world he’d accepted weeks before.

Before Toroka, Gima Goro had been nothing. Suddenly, when all were men were equally minuscule, he became the balance between life and death.

The admiral lasted four days. Gima's shipmates had descended on the bleeding flag officer like dogs. They threw his clothes and organs into the sea and cracked his bones for marrow. When there was nothing left but scraps and shards, the fish got those as well.

Three days later, Gima chose again. This time, it was the chef. The man was not permeated with spices as Gima had hoped, but he filled Gima's stomach just the same.

Gima killed six more men after the cook. He had meant to kill five, but a gunner slipped from his grasp as the final blow fell, and his body tumbled overboard. The sea dragged him away before Gima could pull him back.

The gunner's replacement put up an even greater fight, but Gima managed to keep him aboard after he stabbed him.

When the current had finally deposited their lifeboat on the desolate island, he began to eat the dead again. The sea had deposited hundreds of bodies on the island's shores, giving him his choice of flesh.

On the island, he continued his reign as guide and proselytizer. His truth made him a king of shattered ships, drowned men, and screaming birds for all that mattered.

Aboard Iejima, Gima Goro had mopped. He had carried cargo and polished the main guns. He had been beaten by his superiors and ignored by his equals.

Whoever his followers had once been, they forgot. Names and ranks meant little and less. They made themselves at home in his new kingdom, huddling under a makeshift shelter and building their fires from scraps.

Every night he scraped the blade across his palm, squatting before their beach fire. He would watch the meat cooking over it, a brined thigh or skewered arm.

His men looked at each other nervously. Perhaps they thought they might overpower him, perhaps not. It did not matter to Gima. Only one thing mattered.

“Toroka,” he would whisper.

He knew that he was nothing. His death wouldn’t cause the world to pause. Only Toroka meant anything anymore.

The others still dared to think that their lives had puspose. They had put forth wild theories at first, reaching out to science and history and religion for an explanation, but none of their claims were right.

He had seen Toroka, he had looked into its eyes, tasted it breath. Its presence had burned his hair and skin, blistered his lungs, and peeled his skin.

“Toroka.” Gima’s voice was not one he recognized. His teeth were yellow and loose. The man he had been was dead.

No one else had seen Toroka like he had. The answers he had found were not thing he could explain to small men who clung so desperately to the way things had been before.

The truth about Toroka would only confuse and frighten them. Neither gods nor men had anything to do with it. Gima knew what he had seen, even if the words to explain it did not exist.

What he knew, what he’d witnessed, was that Toroka was simply power. It existed on a different level than anything they could define, and its existence made everything else obsolete.

The Zero Hunter.

THURSDAY EVENING, JULY 8, 1943
F.A.S. BASE “FREDDIE”
BDENIE ISLAND

“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” Oakley muttered from behind a tattered newspaper. The letters she had already devoured were stacked on her lap. Hercules collapsed in a chair on the other side of the briefing room. Everyone else was already set up with their mail.

Supply day was something of a communal holiday for all six officials, one of the few times they would all be together without arguments breaking out. Hercules nodded to Oxford. His wing man understood and accepted his unspoken apology.

“Anything good?” Hercules asked Oakley. She poked her nose over the top of the page.

“The Hammett's Arabian dropped twins in April,” she said. “Both healthy! They're going to pull blue ribbons, both of 'em, I guarantee it.”

“Anything more... far-reaching?” Hercules asked.

“They have another article about this Billy Club Bandit,” she said, flipping to page two. “Looks like he was spotted in Kansas of all places, raising a big stink.”

“I understand he is one of ours,” Oxford interjected, peering over some academic journal.

“Not a chance!” Blue sputtered.

“Also, most reports name him 'the Billy Club Bastard,'” Hercules added.

“Not in the Shackelford-Callahan Star they don't,” Oakley corrected. “We don't print anything so crude. We're perfectly happy with our horse and tractor stories, thank you. Besides, all you boys talk about is far-reaching. Bad news and war stories. That's why I get my pa send me this.”

“Two-month-old farm news from the gut of Texas,” Blue chuckled. “I run my own ranch and that's too much even for me.”

“I bet a minute away from sheep, even here, is a vacation for you,” Hercules said.

“Hush up, Boxer, he misses 'em,” Oakley said.

“Only in mutton season,” Blue answered. “But I am ready to get back to them. The missus has enough to bother over with three ankle biters underfoot without having to mind a flock of two hundred woolies.”

“Three squirts?” Hercules asked. “How long was I doing laundry?”

“Just got the news. She had him a month back. Look at that face.” Blue handed Hercules a small photo. The little boy already had his father's shock of red hair.

“A son? Congratulations, Paul,” Hercules said. Blue could not help but grin.

“Paul Andreas Pabst, Junior. My first boy.”

“That makes you Senior,” Hercules said.

“Sure does,” said Blue.

“Interesting thing about titles,” Hercules quipped. “Dubashi here had to got to university for six years to get 'esquire,' all you had to do for 'senior' was find an understanding woman.”

Even Oxford cracked a smile at that one. He rarely let his dour, scholarly facade slip while reading his Quarterly Journal of Economics. Even so far from campus he kept an eye on his fellow professors' works.

“You got some correspondence too, Chen,” Saltchuck said. He handed Hercules a single envelope and a wrapped package as long as his forearm.

The Canadian chief's mail was untouched. Instead, he was pushing through a pile of B.E.A.A. intelligence reports as thick as a Bible.

Plumber had kicked back to Saltchuck's right. The big Samoan was passed out in his straw chair with Lobster draped across his shoulders like a white mink shawl. The fat cat snored louder than her owner. Plumber's mail had already been opened and perused and was spread out on the floor around him.

Hercules took a seat next to Oakley and set down his mail.

The delicate white envelope was addressed in a flowing script and postmarked from London. It was from his father, addressed to a brigade in the British Army stationed in Burma. The Office used the fictional brigade as cover for their operatives, or at least for those that they had not been declared K.I.A. for security reasons.

Hercules' father had sent him his latest playbill from London, this time an underground production of Romeo and Juliet. In his old age, Hercules' father had begun to consider himself something of a thespian, and sure enough, there he was, third billed: 'Oliver Tuck as Capulet.' His father had organized the production, a wholly candle-lit performance moving from bomb shelter to bomb shelter in the blitz-ravaged city. His self-assigned contribution to the war effort was raising the morale of a terrorized populace.

Hercules' father had autographed the playbill, but had sent no other message. Oliver had not taken his son's decision to remain in China with his mother well, but he always wanted to show Hercules that he wasn't forgotten. The old actor was no longer the raucous youth that had ran club shows by night and had taken to the streets of Shanghai with the Five Knives Gang by day.

Hercules sighed and put the playbill aside. He had never known his father as a wild man. Instead, he remembered the singer who had taught him to play piano, the man who insisted his son read Shakespeare even as Hercules begged to learn wushu. The man who named his son after a Greek hero despite having a Chinese mother and a Brit for a father.

He could also remember the summer of 1928, when he was nine, when he let his father leave for England without him.

For all the pain Hercules caused his father by choosing his mother over him, he only had four years with her before the Japanese bombed the city and she sent him to the Shaolin temple.

The wrapped parcel had been forwarded from the Bureau for East Asian Affairs headquarters in Bombay. Hercules tore the brown paper open. The glint of metal within froze him in his seat.

He knew that steel.

He unwrapped it slowly then, fold-by-fold. The package opened like a paper flower.

Five knives stared up at him, their blades nicked from constant battles yet still sharp as razors. He lifted the largest, one of a pair of butterfly daggers, slowly, letting the light glint off its razored edge.

The officials watched him in silence. Those that had flown alongside Hercules for long enough had heard the stories, they knew the weapons as well as he.

The weapons of Five Knives Chen were laid out before Hercules. She had been the beautiful, merciless leader of the deadliest street gang in all of Shanghai, and his mother.

He still did not know how Oliver Tuck, an entertainer in one of her night clubs, had won her over, but that night was probably the last time the pair had agreed on anything.

He lifted the other butterfly dagger set the pair down on the table. Each of the broad blades was twelve inches long from point to pommel and heavy as a machete, perfect for slashing one's way through the jungle that was Shanghai's back streets. Their custom crossguards were spiked and as brutal as he remembered. His mother had worn these strapped to her back whenever she left the house. Despite never having had formal kung fu training, she had wielded these short swords like a bladed tornado.

He laid his mother's ice pick next to the butterfly daggers. Its needle point was scratched as much from picking locks as piercing bone. The lacquer on the handle had worn away from constant brandishing, leaving raw wood stained like rust.

Five Knives Chen had taken her fourth blade from the corpse of a Japanese assassin. The ninja had underestimated her. She’d shoved her ice pick through his forehead. His diamond-shaped kunai throwing knife had been her prize. Hercules was careful not to touch any of its edges. His mother had told him that old poisons had been drawn into the steel itself and that the knife would always be tainted.

Hercules took a deep breath and laid out the final blade. It seemed an innocent object, a tool more than a weapon. It had once been a simple fillet knife, but in the hands of his mother it became more.

No one who knew Five Knives Chen's real name was left alive to say it. Her parents had been killed over a debt, and the collector had sold her into the depths of a fish market, leaving her to gut tuna for fourteen hours a day. She emerged six years later and disemboweled that same loanshark with the very tool he had put into her hands. She had kept that knife on her hip for the rest of her life.

“What’s all that?” Oakley asked. She was the newest addition to Fast Freddie and had asked before Oxford could hush her.

Her voice broke Hercules free of his trance.

“They were my mother's,” was all he wanted to say. The warble in his voice and a subtle head-shake from Oxford made Oakley sit back and rebury herself in her newspaper.

Hercules took a breath and bundled the blades back up. He propped his elbows on the table and cradled his head in his palms. If someone intended Hercules to get a headache with the gift, they had succeeded.

There was a folded piece of paper on the floor between his boots, where it had tumbled out when he’d opened the package. He stretched down and retrieved it.

It was written in practiced calligraphy on a sheet of rice paper, using the name the temple had given him when they’d taken him in. Only Master Wong Fei-Song still used that name. Hercules translated his note to English from Mandarin:

“Soaring Stone, these were recovered during a raid on the Nanjing occupiers. I trust you will wield them with restraint and wisdom.”

Hercules stared at his mother’s blades, considering their history. Five Knives Chen had been an infamous killer known throughout the worst places in China. Her knives were neither known for restraint nor wisdom. Horror and cruelty were imbued in them as surely as if they had been folded into the steel.

Saltchuck made a show of shuffling his intel reports, coughing and wiggling his waxed mustache, making as much noise as possible while doing so. Hercules was grateful for the distraction and took advantage of it.

“What's happening off-island, Saltchuck?” he asked.

“Well, Boxer,” the chief started, then reconsidered. He flipped through his reports again, then paused again to make sure he got the words right. “Bombay is congratulating us on wiping out a reinforcement fleet headed to Alaska and is eagerly awaiting our report. So, kudos to us.”

“That's something I'd remember doing,” Blue said. He tucked the photo of his newborn son into his breast pocket.

“What are they talking about?” Oakley asked.

“Seems that the flotsam of a dozen heavy troop transports and their escorts was spotted in the north Pacific about a month ago. The Pacific Oceanic bureau back-tracked it to the western Bering and cross-referenced it with HYDRA radio intercepts. There are nineteen I.J.N. ships unaccounted for: seven Etorofu-class Kaibōkan escorts and twelve heavy transports. That makes almost nineteen-thousand men.”

“In the Bering?” Oakley asked.

“That is men enough to set up a stronghold in North America,” Oxford observed.

“Cataloging says they were determined to establish a forward attack base capable of hitting cities from Canada to California. They wanted to cut off the American navy and take the North Pacific fisheries,” Saltchuck added. “You can see why Bombay is eager to learn more about our success against them.”

“What makes them think it was us? Fast Johnnie, Fast King, and Fast Sugar are closer to the Bering, why isn't Bombay asking them?” Hercules asked.

“Forward Attack Squadrons J and K were wrapped up in support operations against Black Dragon Society operations on the Chinese mainland.”

“And Sugar?” Oakley asked. Saltchuck's face went blank.

“Their location was compromised,” he said. “The Black Dragons sent a squad of Kuragarigirudo after them.”

Oakley gasped. Oxford set his tea cup gently on the table. His hands were trembling.

“Are they...?” Oakley whispered. Saltchuck nodded. “All of them?”

“Of course all of them,” Hercules growled. “It was ninja, so it was all of them.”

“Turtle, Corgi, Golfer, Dart, Rabaul, and Oscar,” Saltchuck said. The officials around him could only look at the floor while he listed their deceased comrades' names. “They managed to destroy their files and planes before they, uh… But that’s all they managed.”

The six officials sat in shocked silence, letting the ceiling fan twist the ribbons of smoke rising from their abandoned pipes and cigarettes. Saltchuck tried reading the report aloud, as if it would give meaning to the murder of the three men and three women.

“After-action report says a typhoon washed some of their refuse out to sea where it was recovered by the Imperial Navy. I.J.N. oceanographers were able to backtrack it through prevailing currents and discovered the squadron. A distress call from Dart indicates that the Kuragarigirudo glided in in the early morning. It was all over inside an hour. She reported that they had successfully thermited their Lightnings and orders before she was cut off.”

Oakley turned away from the rest of them, trying her best not to cry in front of her wing men, though none of them would have blamed her. Saltchuck's sterile description of the massacre did little to calm any of them. Finally Oxford spoke up, eager to distract himself:

“Who was responsible for the Aleutian fleet, if not us, nor any of the other squadrons?”

“That's what we're waiting on Bombay to tell us,” Saltchuck replied. “But if there's someone out there on our side, I want to help. If it's something else, a storm, a diversion, a mutiny, a coup, I want to be ready.”

Saltchuck dropped the files onto the table and leaned forward on his blackened knuckles, taking time to look each of his officials in the eye.

“No matter what Bombay says, we're alone out here when the mess comes down,” he said. “And if we don't know what's happening up north, we're going to be the next Sugar, swallowed by this war without a chance to even dispute it.”

They all understood. Compared to how some Forward Attack Squadrons had gone, Sugar's quick death by ninja blade seemed almost tranquil. Whatever could take out an entire Japanese fleet without any clue would be worse. At least the Kuragarigirudo left lotus flowers with the corpses they made, not questions.

In the next room, an alarm buzzed. The radio hissed to life.

“Freddie,” a highly-motivated young man called, his voice crackling through the small speakers. Saltchuck dashed into the comm room and scooped up the mic, almost crashing into the radio equipment in the process. The transmission came in again:

“Freddie, this is Baptist, come in Freddie.”

“Baptist, this is Freddie,” Saltchuck answered. “Good to hear your voice, son.”

“Freddie, confirm,” the radio operator at HQ demanded, by the book like someone was watching over his shoulder.

Baptist had been assigned to Fast Freddie until a few months back, but his new post prevented him from being as familiar as anyone wanted. Saltchuck grumbled and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He struggled to find the right smudged scribble, spinning the note around and around as he searched for his Office ID number.

“Repeat request: Freddie, confirm,” Baptist said.

“Yeah, yeah, unbunch your britches, Baptist,” Saltchuck muttered.

“Repeat, Freddie?” Baptist asked. The chief almost dropped the mic. He recovered, then read off his sheet.

“Baptist, Freddie chief of deck here, ID number twenty-eight-zed-three, daily color green,” Saltchuck finally managed to say. He sighed and slumped against the wall and flashed his assembled team a thumbs-up. The radio remained silent for a long moment.

“ID confirmed, Freddie. Set radio to freq-skip pattern Kentucky-Bravo-six-six in ten seconds,” Baptist ordered. Saltchuck flipped through a code-book, found the correct frequency-skipping pattern and punched it into the radio. That code would set both the sender and listener on a pre-set pattern of variably-timed, pre-programmed frequency jumps. Unless someone had piggy-backed their wave booster buoy with an decrypted Office pattern book in hand, their conversation would stay private.

Saltchuck counted down the remaining seconds, then flipped the activation switch. A green light popped on, shifted yellow, then flipped to red. The radio cut out for a quarter-second, then jumped to a new channel. The light turned yellow, then green again. After a moment, the radio crackled.

“Saltchuck, can you hear?” a grumpy man growled through the receiver. Hercules knew the voice, they all did. It was the Bureau for East Asian Affairs' Operations Commander, Logistics, General Ma Gang-Hai. He was who got to pick which targets he wanted his weapons, including the Forward Attack Squadrons, to be pointed at.

Ma had been a plateau warlord for twenty years before the Japanese came, but he had adjusted to modern combat with the grace and speed of one of his stallions. Still, having the general speak directly to Saltchuck was odd: the Hui warlord almost never used the radio himself. Hercules almost laughed aloud imagining the giant bearded horseman yelling into the mic.

“Yes, General,” the chief answered.

“Stop making me wait, Canadian,” Ma growled. “What happened to the Alaskan fleet?”

“Sir, I'm not - !” Saltchuck was cut of when the green light flipped yellow. It turned red, and the frequencies changed. As soon as it was green again, he continued. “I'm not making you wait, sir. We had no idea about this fleet. That news just dropped here.”

“That is unacceptable!” Ma roared. “An invasion fleet sails past and you know nothing? I need better results than that.”

“What do you want us to do?” Saltchuck asked. They could practically hear how red Ma's face was getting.

“You will - ! What? What light? I do not care if - !” Ma's yelling was interrupted by the automatic frequency change. When the transmission resumed, Ma was cursing furiously at Baptist in his native Dungan.

“What's he saying?” Oakley asked Hercules.

“I can only catch about half of it,” Hercules said, squinting and straining to understand the general. Mandarin speakers can usually get the gist of Dungan, but Ma was spitting and kicking and cursing faster than Hercules could translate. “I think he is giving Baptist suggestions about alternative storage spaces for his radio.”

The crew snickered until Ma finally shouted back through the radio:

“Saltchuck!”

“Yes, sir?”

“I have authorized a recon flight of Chinese fighters into the southern Bering. You will rendezvous with them and investigate the wreckage. The specialist will dictate how you are to respond to your findings.”

“The specialist?” Saltchuck asked.

“There are many odd things happening, Saltchuck. I am sending an official familiar with the findings. She will make sure that this is not a trick, that there are not nineteen-thousand mobile Japanese commandos unaccounted for.”

“Yes, sir.”

The radio switched frequencies again, and when it came back, Baptist was back on the line.

“Freddie, do you have anything else to report or request?” he asked.

“We had a scrap with a trio of Zeke headhunters when we planted the wave booster buoy. We'll need extra twenty-mike-mike, fifty-cal, and Randall rockets to reflect that, plus a new buoy rocket, in the supply bomb,” Saltchuck said. “All other intel and mission progress is up to date.”

“Splashed three Zekes? I bet Boxer's head's so big he has to duck the fan,” Baptist chuckled, momentarily forgetting where he was.

“You sound good, son,” Saltchuck told him.

“I am feeling good,” Baptist replied. “The General told me that R and D is working on something for me. This chair is making - !”

Baptist was interrupted by the frequency change again. When the light switched back to green, his voice was all business once again.

“Acknowledged, Freddie, your supply manifest has been updated, will arrive with the specialist's DIVERT,” Baptist said. “Expect inbound, H minus one.”

“Acknowledged, Baptist.” Saltchuck replied. “And remember, we still got your locker packed for you when you're back on your...”

Saltchuck trailed off before he could say the words.

“Back on my horse,” Baptist replied. His voice cheerful, but a twang of futility and regret warped the projected optimism. “Thank you, and say 'hello' to Oxford for me. Tell him I hope his new gunner has his six half as good as I did. Baptist, out.”

The transmission cut off and the green light turned red and stayed that way. Hundreds of miles out to sea, their radio buoy exploded.

Saltchuck flicked the power switch on the radio and sat on the edge of the table, facing his team. Oakley, the gunner that had replaced Baptist, stared at the floor, grinding the toe of her cowboy boot in a divot. Oxford was gone, he'd left without saying a word. Saltchuck massaged his prematurely-wrinkled forehead for a moment before speaking.

“I'd hit the rack now, people,” he eventually advised. “You're in the sky once the specialist is ready to fly.”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.