Valentine's Rising (Vampire Earth #4) - Page 9

New Columbia, March of the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: Risings. Widespread revolts in the Kurian Zone are rare, successful ones are exponentially rarer. While a number of the Freeholds of 2071 can trace their origins to uprisings against the New Order in the first decade of Kurian rule, since that turbulent period examples of large-scale rebellion hardly exist. The few exceptions succeeded only in cases of geographical isolation i.e. the Juneau Insurrection along the islands and coastline of southeastern Alaska and the more recent Jamaican revolt, or small populations on the fringes of the Freeholds who manage to hold out long enough for help to arrive: Quebec City, the Laramie Mountains, Las Cruces. Stacked against those few successes are the legendary slaughters at Charleston and the Carolina Coast, the Dallas Corridor, Cleveland, and Point Defiance between Mobile and Biloxi. Ten times that number as bloody, but not as famous because of the lack of surviving chronicles, could easily be named. Then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small actions, where individual groups of desperate sufferers on a city block or two, at a collective farm, or within a factory managed to wrestle the weapons out of their keepers' hands and go down fighting. Sadly, we know virtually none of these stories beyond a faded scribble of names on a wall or a brief radio transmission like a cry for help in a ghetto night.

Whether it's two men with pistols or twenty thousand with a city, the Kurians are masters of suppressing risings. Even if one Kurian principality falls, the six surrounding immediately invade, with the twin goals of preventing the revolutionary virus from spreading and claiming new feeding grounds for members of their own hierarchy. Quisling soldiers know there are brass rings and ten-year exemptions to be won in putting down revolts; their vengeance is all the more brutal when they see their comrades strung up or lying in piles against execution walls. The Reapers return in an orgy of feeding. The aftermath is shown through slide shows at New Universal Church lectures and becomes the subject of homilies about the futility and madness of violence.

But while the flame of revolt burns, it burns brightly, fed by the liberated energy of the human spirit. Now it takes the form of a green flare falling slowly toward the center of Little Rock.

By the time Valentine got to the bottom of the pole the flare had returned to earth. Its green glow pulsed from behind a pile of debris-flattened automobiles stacked like rusty pancakes.

"This is it, old horse. I'll see you on the other side."

"My platoon has a good sergeant. Let me come with you."

"I'll be able to do this a lot better if I know you're waiting at the station. Otherwise I'll spend the next two hours worrying about what's happening on that hill. Get out of here."

"Until we meet again, my David … in this world or the next." They clasped each other's forearms in the Grog handshake.

"Arou ng'nan," Valentine said. Every language has a form of "good luck," though the Grog form was a little more prosaic, hoping that spirit-fathers would intercede on one's side.

They trotted off in opposite directions. Valentine stayed clear of the road, tracing the route out to the edge of the Kurian Tower that he had walked while forming his plans. The foundation of the tower and the construction grounds around it were floodlit, and searchlights from strongpoints atop the first story probed the night.

Nail and five of his six Bears were crouching in the cover of a filled-in cellar. Valentine looked at the faces above the guns pointed at him. The Bears' Quisling uniforms lay in a pile that smelled of kerosene. The Bears didn't need black T-shirts or red sashes. They were in their battle gear, the savage-looking Bear melange of Reaper cloth, leather, combat vests, fur and Kevlar. Rain cradled a combat shotgun in chain-mail-backed leather gloves. Another Bear Valentine knew vaguely as Hack wore a massive girdle with Reaper teeth fitted into the leather. He held a machine pistol in one hand and one of Ahn-Kha's Quickwood spears in the other, its end decorated with eagle feathers like a Comanche war lance. Red, whose freckled face narrowed and ended in a jaw so sharp it looked like it could split logs, had Reaper scalps-at least Valentine hoped they were Reaper scalps- at his shoulder blades and elbows. More strings of black hair hung from the belt-fed machine gun so tied to his combat harness that it looked like part of him. Lost & Found had a shining cross over his heart and Brass, almost as wide as he was high, had painted his face so it resembled a skull. A red-eyed plastic snake head had been slipped over the mouth of his grenade launcher, and he'd wrapped the butt and grips with snakeskin and painted "The Fire Dragon" on the side of the support weapon.

"Where's Groschen?"

"He's got the Grog gun, forward. We like to have a good sniper ready when we go in."

"Signal him to pull back. I'm aborting this."

Nail exchanged looks with another Bear. "But the green flare-"

"We're" still throwing the dice for Boxcars. We aren't going to hit the tower. I got an opportunity to throw a scare into Mu-Kur-Ri. He's protecting his precious aura with everything he's got. Going in there with some kind of surprise is one thing. Breaking down that door into the teeth of six or seven Reapers, and troops besides-I won't do it. In five more minutes there'll be troops from Pulaski Heights here. We'd have as much trouble getting out as going in."

"You're the boss," Nail said. He looked up and out of the basement and made a buzzing sound. "Damn, we're almost in spitting distance of that bas-Groschen's pulling back, he'll be here in two minutes."

"Very good, Lieutenant."

"Sir, you look like hell."

"I feel like it, Nail."

The men got to their feet, slinging their weapons. One gathered up the kerosene-soaked clothes.

"Why are you bringing those?" Valentine asked.

"A little ceremony," Nail said. "We'll save it for another day."

Groschen, now clean-shaven, returned to the basement, the long Grog gun over his shoulders. "The tower's off. Hope you aren't bleeding yet," Nail explained.

"No, suh."

"You may still get to do it tonight. They sounded the alarm over at the prison yard."

Valentine checked their line of retreat and led them out of the basement. When they were clear of the tower's sight-lines, Valentine gathered the Bears.

"Keep back about thirty feet. I like to be able to listen."

They cut through the Ruins, zigzagging around the graveyard of a civilization. They struck another field-phone line, strung on four-foot posts, and cut it. As they neared the road to the prison camp Valentine heard a mass of men moving away from the prison yard. Had they stormed it bloodlessly?

Lieutenant Zhao led his men up the road, away from the camp, in files at each side of the road. The men looked spooked. Valentine thought it best to call out from cover.

"Lieutenant Zhao. It's Valentine."

Zhao waved his right hand like he was wiping a table. The men crouched from the front of the lines and rolling backward, like rows of dominoes tumbling.

"Valentine who?" Zhao said. His hair was unkempt, his face was pitted from acne and he wore filthy glasses, but the only thing lacking in him as an officer was experience. Valentine had learned he was smart, hardworking and organized, which had led him to give him a company. But he'd evidently lost his head.

"Captain Valentine. Careful with the guns, men," Valentine said, stepping out from the rubble.

"Sir, did the Kurian go down?"

"I called it off. What happened at the camp?"

"The guard-tower had a machine gun for covering the yard," Zhao explained. "They slung it around and started shooting. Maybe they have night vision gear. We didn't go any farther. There's no cover for a hundred yards around the wire. I didn't want to risk those kind of casualties."

"Lieutenant, there's five hundred men in there, maybe more. Five hundred of our men, POWs. I want them back."

"I… I… I was using my judgment," Zhao said.

"I won't question it. Let's go have another look."

"We're going back?" a private said.

"If you were behind that wire, what would you want us to do?" Valentine said, looking at the objector. "Let's turn around, men. Who's in charge of your rear guard, Zhao?"

"Sergeant, umm … Franks is in charge of the tail of the column."

"I didn't say tail of the column. I said 'rearguard.""

Zhao looked at his feet, miserable.

"Let's turn it around, Lieutenant. I'll scout ahead with the Bears."

"Thank you, sir."

Valentine and the Bears doubled the column.

"Christ, I hate all these little generators," Nail said. The lights of the prison yard glowed beyond the tumble of shattered buildings.

"Do you?"

"Of course."

"Be glad for them. I mink Groschen is going to get his chance with that gun."

Time enough? Time enough ? Valentine wondered. Valentine had seen Kurian concentration camps by the dozens. This had to be one of the shabbiest he'd ever seen.

The camp was wired into sections of thirds, one-third for women, the center third for guards and the most crowded part for the male prisoners. A single tower stood over the central common yard-judging from the road ruts, trucks came to pick up and drop off prisoners. The fence, just a series of stout poles to hold concertina wire was not even double layered, or electrified, or topped with razor wire. At each corner of the camp, outside the wire, was a sandbagged guard post. Prisoner and guard alike lived under prefabricated roofs; the walls were nothing more than pieces of tent and tarp, though the guards' tents in the center had openings that served as windows. Valentine's nose picked up the smell of corn flour baking in the only complete structure in the place-a Quonset hut set in the guards' section.

The guards' section was a frenzy of activity. The guards were piling up boxes and sandbags at either end of their Quonset; nervous men peered out from under their helmets, rifles ready. Zhao had thrown enough of a scare into them that they had abandoned the outer guard posts, but four men still remained in the tower. The machine gun that so frightened Zhao was positioned to cover the road.

"What do you think?" Valentine asked Nail, after having Zhao take his men and spread them out to the front of the camp. He watched another Bear, the quasi-giant Rain who'd bearded Martinez, heat the blade of his knife with an old liquid lighter, careful to keep well out of sight of the camp. Not that the men would have much night vision outside the brightly lit camp.

"Piss-poor layout, even for a temporary camp. Why do they still have all the lights on? It's like they want us to pick 'em off."

"Look at that," Rain said. "The poor bastards in there aren't waiting for us."

A trio of men were working at the concertina wire behind their tent in the tower's blind spot. Someone among the prisoners had been waiting for this moment; two men were working at widening the hole with pieces of wood as the first crawled through, cutting.

Valentine spoke: "Saves us the trouble. Nail, go back and tell Lieutenant Zhao to spread for skirmishing. Meet up with us there, at those concrete pilings that look like tree trunks. See them?"

"Sure, sir."

"Zhao should just demonstrate. It's not a real attack. I want them to shoot at the tower, once we start. If they kill them all the better. I just don't want that gun aimed at us. Oh, be sure to call out before you come up on them. They're nervous."

"Yes, sir," Nail said, disappearing into the darkness.

"Groschen, Rain, let's work our way around to the north side of the camp. Try and find something we can throw down on that wire."

By the time Nail caught up with them in a skeleton of reinforced concrete, the Bears had found an old metal fire door and pried it off its rusted hinges. It was a heavy, awkward burden, but Rain managed to get it up on his back.

"They're almost through the wire. What the hell are you doing?"

Nail looked up from the pile of TMCC uniforms he was lighting. "We're going Red, sir. It's a ritual. Haven't you ever seen Bears go into action before?"

"Not up close. The tower might see some of the light from that fire."

"Let 'em. Nothing makes the Quislings shit like Bearfire."

Valentine tried to keep his attention on the camp, but the little circle of Hunters going through their ritual distracted him. It was something out of another time and place, when men in animal skins nerved themselves for action through tribal custom.

They stared into the fire for a few minutes, sitting cross-legged and silently contemplating the blue-bottomed flames. First Nail began to sway; in a moment the others joined in, until they were moving in synch like seven metronomes, first right, then left, then right, all the while staring into the fire. When they were all moving in unison, exchanging grunts that meant nothing to Valentine, Nail rose onto his haunches and the others followed suit. Rain took out the knife he had sterilized, raised his Reaper-robe sleeve, and revealed a long line of little brown scars, hash marks running up to his triceps. He reached up with the blade and added another cut, parallel to all the others. He passed the blade to the next man, then sprinkled gunpowder out of a shell casing into the wound.

The knife traveled the circle, the men holding it out across to each other over the flames, until Valentine's own arm began to hurt in sympathy. The blade traveled from Rain, the one with the most scars, to Nail, and then to the others, each solemnly dusting the wound with the powder from their own shell casings. Valentine found himself wondering about hepatitis rates among the Bears.

When it was done Nail rose, a little drunkenly, and came up to Valentine.

"We're ready. They through the wire?" he said. Nail was enunciating a little thickly.

"Yes, men are starting to slip out. Someone's keeping them together at the edge of camp, though. Let's go meet them."

The Bears took up their assortment of weapons and the steel door. They ran, hunched over, up to the garnering point of the escapees.

"Someone's-" a tattered lookout said, before a Bear came from the shadows to clamp a hand over his mouth.

"Easy, men," Valentine said, holding out a hand as a couple of the prisoners took up rocks. "There's a Bear team here. Nice work on the wire. If you don't mind, we'd like to use it to get in. Who's in command, here?"

"I am. You've got a familiar voice, Bea-is that you, Valentine?" said Captain Beck, former commander of Foxtrot Company, and the officer who had Valentine drummed out of the Wolves.

"How's the arm, Captain?" was all Valentine could think to say. Beck had his right arm tucked into his shirt, Napoleon-style.

"Nerve damage. You back from Minnesota? What the hell's going on?"

"Long story, Captain. Gather the men here-"

"The women-"

"Please don't interrupt me, Captain. The team's going in for the women."

"Thank God for that. You wouldn't have a spare rifle or two, Lieutenant?"

Valentine didn't bother to correct him. "Nail?"

"We're light enough as is," Nail said. "Let us at those guards, we'll get you some guns, sir."

Beck nodded. "I like the sound of that. I'll take you into the men."

Valentine led the Bears through the wire, past an astonished line of men waiting their turn. "Keep it moving, men. There's going to be shooting, the more of you outside the wire the better."

"Gimme one o' them auto pistols an' I'll give-" one began.

"You'll get your chance soon enough, Corporal," Valentine said, looking at what was left of his uniform. "Move along, men."

They passed into a tent. The stench of the dark tent was palpable, a warm, cloying shroud enveloping them. The men didn't even have cots to lie on, there was just bedding on mats on the ground and some hammocks. "This and the barrack next to it are the only ones they can't see too well from the guards' hut." Beck said. "We were going to open some more holes in the wire from the outside so the others could get out."

The men gaped at the Bears.

"Do you have a signal system between the tents?"

"Yeah, we whistle," Beck said.

"Whistle them to keep their heads down, Captain, if you please."

"Johnson, do the 'watch out' tune. Alert for all barracks," Beck said. A rag-and-bone private let loose with three hacking coughs that could be heard a mile away and began a querulous whistling.

"Nail?" Valentine asked, looking through the tent flap. "What do you think?"

The guards were still piling sandbags around each end of the Quonset hut. Valentine could see a machine gun at the pile opposite the main gate, covering the back of the camp. Too late, guys, we're already in. The other Bears, at a signal from Nail, were opening window-sized gaps in the tenting.

"It's up to you, Lieutenant," Valentine said to Nail.

"They're worried about the prisoners storming the wire," Nail said. "We'll go in through the middle. Two grenades to each end of the hut. Hack, try and get yours behind the sandbags this time."

"Five seconds," Nail said, nodding to Valentine. The Bears pulled the pins on their grenades. He squatted, and motioned for Beck to get down. The men left in the tent fell to the floor. Two Bears threw, the others held the tent flaps open. Everyone covered their ears.

The cry of, "Grenade!" never came; the prison guards must have been some combination of inattentive and poorly trained. Just four explosions, less than a second apart.

"Blitz! Blitz! Blitz!" Nail shouted, tearing open the tent.

The Bears charged the wire. Rain went first. He threw himself at the wire like a breaching dolphin and crashed down on the concertina. He pivoted, holding the wire apart with gloved hand and boot as the other Bears stampeded over him. Valentine brought up the rear, pistol ready, but only smoke and pained cries came from behind the piled footlockers and sandbags. A severed arm had been flung into the wire-its fingers still moved. Groschen threw himself down in the space between the Quonset hut and the wire, his unwieldy Grog gun on a bipod and pointed at the tower. Hack covered the other end of the building. "Motherfucker!" Lost & Found shouted. He made a tight fist and drove his leather-gloved hand through the aluminum in the side of the hut. Brass stuck the Dragon's snake-head muzzle through as soon as Lost & Found pulled his bleeding hand out and the grenade launcher hissed as he swiveled the muzzle : fssssssh fssssssh fssssssh.

Groschen saw a shot and took it, but Valentine ignored the .50 caliber report and its effect.

The grenades roared within the hut, blowing ventilators off the arced roof. Rain got to his feet and grabbed the aluminum in his chain-mail gloves. He planted a foot against the wall. Muscles on his back strained and he peeled open the aluminum side of the hut.

Valentine heard scattered gunfire; Zhao's company was shooting at the tower. He upbraided himself for not giving strict orders to only shoot the tower. The soldiers might start firing at his Bears in the confusion.

Rain extracted himself from the wire and pulled his knife and hooked ax. He plunged into the smoke boiling out of his improvised door. The other Bears followed drawing blades, hatchets and, in Brass' case, a folding shovel.

Nail followed his men in, machine pistol held tight against his shoulder.

Groschen shot again. "That'll teach you to peek," he muttered as he chambered another round.

Valentine heard screams from within the Quonset hut. A Quisling, blood running from his eyes and ears, stumbled blindly out the back door. He hit the sandbags and went over head-down-feet-up like a teeter-totter changing balance. Hack put a single shot into his armpit.

"We surrender. Surrender," a voice from the tower yelled faintly across the yard.

A pained scream bounced off the corrugated walls of the hut. He noticed Captain Beck at his side. "Helluva Bear team you have, Valentine."

Valentine had no time for him. "Throw your guns outta there," he shouted at the tower, his voice dry and hoarse in the smoke and cold night air.

The machine gun and some rifles flew out of the tower. One discharged as it hit the ground.

"Stop shooting, we surrender," the invisible Quisling shouted.

"Idiots," Groschen said. He picked up his Grog gun, holding it with the aid of a sling. "Let's go get them."

Valentine looked to Beck. "Wait here, Captain," he said. He shuffled crabwise to the sandbags covering the front of the hut. He followed his gun muzzle over the side. Two bodies and a third guard, whimpering out his confusion, lay there. The man must have been in shock, otherwise he'd be screaming, judging from the absence of his foot.

The man's pain still triggered instincts not wholly lost.

"Groschen, help this man."

"Sure thing, sir." Groshen drew a palm-sized automatic from his vest and shot the man through the ear. It was carried out with the same smooth, careless motion that he might use to toss away a gum wrapper.

"That's not what I meant," Valentine sputtered.

"Sorry, sir, but it's just a Kurpee."

Who are you to judge ? Valentine had killed helpless men in anger, in desperation, in fear. He'd machine-gunned helpless sailors and murdered men in their sleep-and been giddy and sickened by the act. Maybe Groschen was better than Valentine after all; he didn't look like he'd enjoyed it.

"Coming out, Gross," Brass said from the doorway.

"Come ahead."

Brass came out, splattered with blood. "Even dozen. Rain's taking the heads now."

"You two, get the prisoners out of the tower. I'm going to see about getting the women out."

Groschen and Brass walked toward the tower, Groschen keeping his gun pointed up, holding it from the hip like a Haitian erotic fetish Valentine had seen in the Caribbean. He took one more look at the executed Quisling-he'd seen the man's face before, standing watch over prisoner labor. Whatever thoughts, ideas, dreams, or regrets had lived within that bloody head were forever lost.

Bullets flew. Shots from outside the camp made Brass and Groschen throw themselves to the ground. Valentine vaulted over the sandbag wall and landed on one of the splayed bodies.

"What the hell?" Nail said from the doorway.

"It's Zhao's company," Valentine said. "They're shooting at us."

"Fuck!" Lost & Found swore. For a man with "Born Again to Kill" written on his helmet, he had a distinctly unchristian way of expressing himself. Brass and Groschen both hollered "Cease fire" as best as they could with their faces planted in the common yard's dirt.

"Doesn't that hurt?" Valentine asked, looking at Lost & Found's swollen hand.

"It will tomorrow. Don't worry, sir. She'll heal up."

Valentine caught motion out of the corner of his eye; a figure ran out to the gate of the camp.

"What's that idiot doing?" Nail said.

Valentine peeped over the edge of the sandbags. Beck stood in the open, waving a white rag with his remaining active arm. "Hold your fire!"

"My former captain," Valentine said. "Never short of guts."

There was another shot from the darkness. Beck didn't even flinch. He kept shouting and signaling.

"Boy's wiring is definitely not grounded," Nail observed.

Fifteen minutes later some order had been restored to the camp, now darkened by the destruction of the generator. Zhao's men were in a screen around it, their guns pointed in a less dangerous direction while Valentine organized his prisoners. Some blocks away a building burned; Valentine guessed it to by Xray-Tango's headquarters.

A quick headcount gave him five hundred twenty-seven men and sixty women. All were in this particular camp because they had been captured in Southern Command uniforms. Beck explained the half-assembled nature of their accommodations in a few terse sentences.

"The expected us to just be here a couple days. Then they found work for us, the flood started-a few days turned into weeks. Men were scheduled to ship to Texas, women to Memphis, by rail or water, whichever opened up first."

"Solon owes his neighbors for the loan of troops," Valentine said.

"Yes. We're the only currency the Kurians accept. During our captivity, their investment accrued interest."

This last was with a jerk of the chin toward the women. About one in four were visibly pregnant. Fertility drugs in the feed, perhaps.

"Don't let the expectants fool you," a woman who introduced herself as Lieutenant Colonel Kessey said, when Valentine waked over to the crowd of women wrapping up their belongings in bundles. "Most have combat experience." Kessey had an eyepatch and some burn tissue across her scalp, but put up a hard-nosed front as she organized her rescued women. "The guards used us like their common harem. They used to laugh and say we should thank them- pregnancy keeps you off work detail, saves you from the Last Dance."

"Can't say that I blame them," Valentine said.

She lowered her voice. "All the women get the lecture in basic. Rape Survival Strategy, given by women who've been there and made it back. I used to joke about it. "In case of capture, break his balls." Not so easy when there are six of them."

"How many can walk as far as the river?" Valentine asked.

"All of them, sir," Kessey said. "We have litters, just in-"

A scream from the Quonset hut cut her off. It was followed by another.

"Excuse me, would you?" Valentine said, hurrying off to investigate. Shouts blended in with the screams.

It was what he dreaded. The two guards captured in the tower had been strung up by their heels inside the hut. One had blood pouring down his body. Amid the bustle of Beck's prisoners grabbing weapons and anything else remotely useful, some of the vengeful prisoners had taken matters into their own hands. Two women, thin and hollow-eyed, stood in a circle of hooting men. Both had knives; one held the wounded guard's severed genitals before the other's eyes. Some of the male prisoners were tying together the legs of another man with a bloody wound in his leg, ready to string him to the ceiling fixture when the castrated man died.

"Stop that!" Valentine shouted. "Lieutenant Nail!"

Nail sat on an overturned desk, smoking a captured cigarette as he watched the show. "You want to interfere with those hellcats, you go right ahead," Nail said.

"Nail, you're relieved. Sergeant Rain!"

"You'll just have to relieve me too, sir," Rain said.

Valentine went over to the woman with the bloody knife. She'd already opened the trousers of the next man, who was babbling for mercy. Valentine took one look at his red, contorted face and held out his hand to the woman. "You there, hand it over."

She tried to give him her bloody trophy, with a smile. Valentine felt sickened, the way some go faint at the sight of another person's blood but can calmly hold a bandage over a pulsing wound of their own. Not many months ago he'd been the one mutilating corpses. He lifted his hand to push the slimy object down, out of sight of the others-

She flinched at the gesture, flinched with the fear in her eyes of someone who had been hit before, many times. Valentine felt a hard hand on his arm.

"Mister Bear," the other woman said. She had wide-set round eyes set beneath short white hair and a hard line of a jaw. "Yolanda has to wear a diaper all the time now. These men gang-raped her. They said her ass was too tight. So they took a knife and cut it so it'd open wider. That man bleeding to death, he had the blade, and this other piece of shit helped hold her down."

"Wasn't me, sir," the inverted man said. "We surrendered proper n'all."

Valentine looked into the haunted eyes of the woman who had stayed his arm, and then to Yolanda's face. He studied the profile; her darkly beautiful features reminded him of his mother's in another time and place.

"It's justice, sir," Nail said.

"No. It's not justice. It's vengeance." He looked down at the flushed face of the guard. "You decided to live like a savage, soldier. For that you get to die like one. Nail, I'm going to go out and talk to Lieutenant Zhao. I'll be back in fifteen minutes. I want this camp ready to move then."

As Valentine walked out, he heard Yolanda's friend address the strung-up man. "Fifteen minutes. Boy, you're getting off easy."

They left the camp with one of Zhao's platoons in front of, and one behind, the liberated prisoners. The third platoon walked to either side of the files. Some of Zhao's men had already managed to lose their red-tape sashes. Beyond the column, in the darkness that matched Valentine's mood, Nail and his Bears reconnoitered.

Valentine walked beside Zhao. The lieutenant had made a hash of things, and Valentine's anger could easily give way to what Zulu Company's Sergeant Patel used to call a "two-boot stomp" dressing-down. It might let Valentine blow off steam, but whether it would do the rattled Zhao any good depended on the resilience of the man. Dawn was still hours away, but already the Quislings were reorganizing. Here and there in the dark, isolated snipers were taking potshots at the column. So far all the shots were misses, but they were unsettling-especially to the unarmed prisoners.

"Sir, the company hasn't had enough time together," Zhao explained. "It's not like all these men have combat experience. Some were militia called up durin