Chapter Eighty-Eight: Fierce Battle at the Airport (Part Two)
The situation had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and Li Zixin could no longer sit still. The sound of gunfire drifted near and far, and now and then a thunderous blast rolled through the chaos. Everywhere was in utter disarray. Clad in a stern black warrior uniform, Li Zixin was already wearing a deeply troubled look. If not for the strange mask covering his face, anyone who had seen that ferocious expression might well have been haunted by nightmares for the rest of their lives.
“Get in here!” Li Zixin shouted in exasperation. His underlings were nothing but fools. Before the seat beneath them had even grown warm, the enemy had already come knocking, and a mere five men had thrown the whole place into turmoil.
Wu Hai came running over with blood all over his face, gasping for breath as he looked at this former comrade. In barely a month, the honest policeman of old was gone, replaced by a fickle demon inhabiting that familiar body.
“Boss, fall back,” he said urgently. “These guys are tough. The brothers can’t hold them off!”
“Bullshit!” Li Zixin erupted in fury. Behind the mask, his eyes burned with madness. “Old Wu, we still have the rocket launchers, don’t we? Get them all out here and blast those bastards to hell!”
Wu Hai’s face changed at once. He did not even call him boss anymore.
“Li, those things are being saved for the Crusher,” he said. “Every shot we fire is one fewer. Once they’re gone, we’ll be blind. And what if we use that stuff indoors and end up hitting our own men?”
The rocket launcher in question was the old anti-tank weapon commonly called an RPG in the movies. Its official name was the Type 69 40-millimeter rocket launcher, a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon developed in imitation of the Soviet RPG-7. It had a 40-millimeter launcher and fired oversized 85-millimeter rockets. Its ammunition included shaped-charge armor-piercing rounds and high-explosive fragmentation rounds, mainly intended for first- and second-generation main battle tanks. It had long since been replaced by the more advanced PF98. No one knew where Li Zixin and his men had dug up these aging weapons, probably from some militia reserve depot. Against modern tanks they were useless, but against the Crusher or ordinary people, they were still brutally effective.
“Why are you still worrying about that at a time like this?” Li Zixin snapped through gritted teeth. “They’ve already climbed all over my neck and taken a dump. If we don’t use them now, we’ll never need them again!”
Seeing Li Zixin lose his temper, Wu Hai did not dare argue. Thinking it over, he realized it made sense. If they could not even save their lives, what was there to say about the future? As for the lives of the men under them, those were worth nothing. Better to keep the mountain green and never fear running out of firewood. If the little brothers were gone, they could always recruit more later. First they had to get through this crisis.
With that thought, Wu Hai called over two of his men and ran toward the place where the rocket launchers were hidden.
“Wait!” Before Wu Hai had taken more than a few steps, Li Zixin called him back. “Send a few brothers to bring those hostages here. You grab the weapons and get back fast. I refuse to believe all these men still can’t handle those damn soldiers!”
Soon, the Black Warriors had gathered around Li Zixin. Their uniforms were all black, but the weapons in their hands were a jumble of different makes and models: Type 56 rifles, Type 81 rifles, and other castoffs discarded by the regular army and dumped on the militia reserve. Dozens of men were scattered loosely through the terminal. In the center hall, the half-dead hostages had been lined up and forced to kneel on the floor, while several heavily armed Black Warriors stood behind them, aiming the dark mouths of their guns at the hostages’ heads.
The small squad was still mopping up inside the hall and did not yet know that most of the Black Warriors had already assembled near the control tower. There were still a number of them putting up desperate resistance. With no communications, they still had not realized their boss had already abandoned them.
Today Zhao Qiang truly saw the squad’s strength with his own eyes. Against mindless zombies, their prowess might not have been fully apparent. But now, facing armed bandits with guns in hand and minds a thousand times sharper than zombies’, their combat power shone through at once.
What was mobile rapid fire? What was tactical coordination? The squad displayed everything Wei Tao had taught them to perfection. They were like a hedgehog constantly on the move: five men, five rifles, covering every side at once. No matter which angle a Black Warrior sprang from, he could not escape the squad members’ sharp eyes, and in an instant two bloody holes would be punched through his body.
The terminal was enormous, and searching it was no easier than dealing with a horde of zombies. Yet ammunition consumption remained pitifully low. More astonishing still, five men were facing enemies several times their number, and not a single one of them had been wounded.
The ease of the operation made Zhao Qiang feel a little overconfident. The enemy was nothing but a mob of armed rabble, and the guns in their hands were not even as good as fire-stirring sticks. Zhao Qiang began to agree with Cai Jiashu. These damned bastards were nothing but a waste of bullets.
The terminal was filled with the choking reek of gunpowder smoke. Corpses lay everywhere amid the ruins and devastation. Under Wei Tao’s training, the squad never took prisoners when facing armed enemies. The Black Warriors also had plenty of tricks up their sleeves, and from time to time a grenade with a smoking tail would come flying toward the squad.
Experienced veterans, when using stick grenades, would often wait a few seconds after pulling the fuse before throwing them, timing the release so the grenade would explode above the enemy’s head. The Type 67 stick grenade used a cast-iron body with 38 grams of TNT as its main charge, producing roughly seventy to one hundred and ten fragments. Its lethal radius was about seven meters, and its fragments could still maim at a range of eighty meters. When it burst in midair, there was no blind spot at all.
How could the Black Warriors possess such discipline? It was already good enough that they knew to pull the fuse before tossing the grenade. The moment they yanked the fuse, they hurriedly flung the grenade out, terrified it would go off in their own hands.
At first, whenever the squad saw a grenade trailing white smoke and spinning through the air toward them, they would shout, “Grenade!” and hit the deck in perfect unison, their movements astonishingly quick. But before Zhao Qiang even had time to react, Cai Jiashu would leap forward, scoop up the grenade, and toss it right back where it came from.
After this happened a few times, the Black Warriors no longer dared throw grenades. Zhao Qiang was so frustrated he could have exploded himself. Several grenades had landed in front of the other squad members, and he had hoped to grab one and throw it back for the fun of it, but in the end he never got so much as a hair. It itched at him like a cat scratching his heart. All he wanted was for those Black Warriors to cooperate a little and toss him a grenade so he could have some real action.
The squad only had five men, each one filling a crucial slot. Any single mistake could drag the entire team into a catastrophe from which there would be no return. So however anxious Zhao Qiang felt, he did not dare run about recklessly. His comrades had entrusted their backs to him, and he could not, on a whim, treat their lives as nothing.
Just as Zhao Qiang was getting worried, he caught sight from the corner of his eye of something dark in the distance, dragging a long white plume as it flew toward the squad. His heart leapt. Another grenade. This time no one was going to snatch it away from him!
The thought lasted only an instant in Zhao Qiang’s mind, and then he heard a teammate shout urgently:
“RPG!”