Day of Rebellion (9 page)

J
ack woke up with yelling in his ears. He sat bolt upright. People were rushing around everywhere. Angus was already on his feet.

“Get up!” He sounded agitated.

“What is it?” Jack stood up slowly.

“The Taiping – they’re here. There’s a big raiding party out in the valley. They’ve got motorised transport, big guns, there’s a whole bunch of them…”

A huge figure loomed in the doorway. Colonel Lai. He barked orders in Mandarin and then in English.

“We will leave a detachment here to delay them. The rest come now. Hurry!”

They raced to the bamboo and rope bridge – but it was already too late. The monastery complex was swarming with Taiping and the vanguard were making their way up the rocks opposite and over the bridge like a line of army ants.

“No good. This way!” Lai shouted, looking across at the
fast-advancing
rebels. “We will use the ladders on the other side of the rock to escape…”

Jack looked on as more and more Taiping charged onto the precipitous rope bridge. The first of them were now two-thirds of the way across the bridge and starting to shoot. Their fire was instantly returned by Lai’s men, stationed at the end of
the bridge, but they were massively outnumbered.

Lai seemed to be weighing up something in his head. Suddenly he withdrew a huge kampilan from his belt. He swung it high up into the air and rushed forward pushing past his soldiers. The blade glistened momentarily in the early dawn light and then he brought it crashing down on one of the rope suspension lines that held up the bridge. It snapped instantly and the whole bridge slewed to one side. He slashed down again on the opposite rope and it gave way. With the two main suspension ropes gone, all that was left was the bamboo walkway and it could not hold the weight of all the men. The bridge collapsed into the gorge taking a large contingent of the Taiping rebels with it.

“That gives us some time. Now we go to the ladders. Come.” Lai announced, turning away.

If Jack had thought the walkway up to the monastery was scary, the rope ladders which hung off the opposite side of the rocky outcrop were much worse. They looked as if they had not been used for years. Some rungs were rotten, and others were missing altogether. Jack tried to keep in mind one thing… if they held Lai’s weight, they would probably hold his. He took a deep breath and plunged over the lip of the rock working his way down the ladder as quickly as he could. Twenty minutes later they were all at the bottom. Jack looked up, but he could not see the top of the outcrop through the tree canopy above them. A further contingent of Lai’s men met them at the bottom, with horses, saddled and ready to go.

After two hours’ hard riding they arrived at an Imperial guard post.
A gate in the wire fence was opened and they passed through it. A rough track wound up a small hill, and as they crested the rise, Jack looked down on a low, wide valley. Below, he saw an Imperialist encampment fortified with a wooden stockade. At the centre of the stockade was a completely flat, bare patch of land, on top of which sat something quite extraordinary. Jack and Angus had seen an array of strange man-made technology on their journey so far, but out of all those strange sights, there was one sort of technology that had been missing. Aircraft. Jack suddenly realised that this was how they were to make the final leg of their journey to the Imperialist heartland, in the far to the north of China.

Looking down from their elevated position, Jack estimated that the structure must have measured two hundred metres from end to end. It was over thirty metres high. It looked like a huge cigar – with a stubby nose at the front and huge, elongated fins at the rear that tapered out from the main body. It was a massive airship – a Zeppelin – and it hovered just above the ground, tethered by cables that were secured to gantries on the landing area. Unlike the Zeppelins that Jack had seen in books and films, this one was highly decorated. It had a vast, scaly, golden dragon painted all along the side, with huge claws extending from its feet and fire bursting from its mouth. Jack counted five gondolas suspended beneath the airship. There was one quite near the front, two smaller ones mounted in parallel about halfway along and another two towards the rear. The first gondola was the largest, but they all had windows at the front of the cabins and propellers at the back. They looked tiny in comparison to the giant airship and Jack realised that, despite its gargantuan size,
the whole massive structure might carry only a handful of passengers. On the roof of the airship, quite near the front, Jack saw two figures standing next to two mounted guns. You’d need an incredible head for heights up there.

They pressed on across the valley floor towards the Zeppelin. One of the soldiers prodded Jack in the ribs and they pushed on towards the landing area.

Shu-fei turned to Jack and a smile crossed her lips as she saw Jack and Angus’s awe-struck expression.

“You like it, Jack? You like our ‘Sky Dragon’?”

Jack wondered if he was the only one who knew that although the mighty structure before them appeared to be an invincible behemoth – in reality it was fragile and vulnerable.

The guards around the encampment were nervous, judging by the speed with which final preparations were being made. They knew that the Taiping would not be far behind.

In a moment, Jack was being hurried up a small stepladder into the front gondola. His breathing quickened. The command gondola was split into two sections. There was a command bridge at the front with windows, and a cabin behind it which was accessed by an open metal walkway, with guns fitted at each side. They were led to the rear cabin and told to sit on the ground at the very back amongst some boxes of supplies. Behind his head Jack heard a loud mechanical thumping as one of the engines shuddered into life. There was shouting from the bridge and then he felt a lurch in his stomach.

They were going up.

T
hey had been travelling for over two hours and Angus wasn’t feeling too great. Jack was giving him a potted history of airships.

“I think Zeppelins like this were used in the First World War by the Germans to drop bombs on London… and there’s something else.”

“I can tell this isn’t going to make me feel any better…”

“Probably not,” Jack continued undaunted. “They get their buoyancy through using gas inside the huge balloon bit up there.” Jack jerked his thumb at the ceiling. “Helium was the ideal gas, I don’t know what this one uses, but the German Zeppelins used hydrogen. Trouble was, hydrogen is flammable… it explodes…”

“Great…”

“I saw a film on YouTube of the
Hindenburg
– the biggest Zeppelin ever built – when it came in to land in New Jersey, just before the Second World War. It caught fire… you should have seen it,.” Jack made a gesture with his hands. “Boom! In less than a minute the whole thing was completely burned to bits. This one looks identical.”

“So basically we’re trapped inside a gigantic bomb. Any useful suggestions as to how we get off?”

“Only the obvious one, but I checked it an hour ago.”

Nevertheless, Jack reached into his undervest and pulled out the time phone. He was so used to it being dormant that it took him by complete surprise when he saw the telltale yellow light burning brightly.

“A time signal!”

“At last. Let’s do it.”

But they were not quick enough. Bullets suddenly ripped into the thin metal skin of the gondola and whipped past their noses, creating a matching pattern of holes on the opposite side as they exited. It was a miracle that neither Jack nor Angus was hit. Jack dropped the time phone in surprise and it spun into corner of the cabin.

Angus leaped forward to try and retrieve it.

They heard screaming orders and clattering feet. Suddenly, there was a staccato ripping sound – like tearing Velcro – as one of the onboard machine guns opened up. From the forward area, they heard the sound of shattering glass and before Angus could recover the time phone, Colonel Lai crashed through the door. His face was badly cut.

“Taiping air attack! We need your help. Follow me.”

Lai led them onto the open metal gantry between the front and rear cabins of the forward gondola. The cold air stopped Jack in his tracks. It was like stepping into a freezer. Directly ahead, an airman was swinging the mounted machine gun in an arc from bow to aft along the starboard axis, straining to spot the next incoming Taiping aircraft. Behind him, a second airman lay slumped over the railing of the gantry next to his gun which was at a useless angle.

Jack looked down over the metal gantry. The last time they had crossed between the two gondolas, the Zeppelin had been hovering only a metre from the ground. Now they were a thousand metres up in the sky and there was nothing between Jack’s feet and the abyss except a centimetre of latticed metal. Jack froze. Lai pushed him forward.

“Go!” he commanded.

Jack closed his eyes and stepped forward, with Angus following quickly behind him. They approached the body of the airman who had been hit in the first attack and was now slumped over the railing. Lai conducted a cursory inspection of the unfortunate man. He was still breathing – but only just. A pool of blood was spreading across his back – caused by the exit wound from a bullet. Lai grunted, then grabbed the man by his legs and bundled him up and over the gantry railing, tossing him over the side as if he was a sack of potatoes.

“Too much weight,” Lai said and ushered Jack forward into the front cabin of the command gondola. The place was a mess. The front windows had been shattered and shards of glass lay everywhere. There were three bodies on the floor.

Lai pointed at Angus. “You help here… Shu-fei will show you what to do,” he said, then pointed at Jack. “You come with me – we go up.”

Lai pointed to a ladder inside the command gondola and began to climb. For a big man, he was surprisingly nimble. At the top of the ladder he flipped open a hatch in the gondola’s roof. Jack followed nervously.

“We’re going up into the hull.”

Lai nodded his head upwards and Jack’s heart sank as he realised what the big man wanted him to do. Above the gondola, the ladder continued up into a second open hatch built directly into the bottom of the vast hull of the airship. Jack counted only six rungs between the hatch in the roof of the gondola and the hatch in the bottom of the hull. The only trouble was, these rungs were completely exposed. Despite the attack, the airship was continuing to move through the air, at maybe fifty miles an hour, Jack guessed. It was one thing to hold onto a ladder that was moving at that speed, but quite another to do it a thousand metres up in the sky whilst under attack from enemy aircraft. One slip on a rung and Jack knew he would bounce once on the roof of the hanging gondola and then plummet into the paddy fields of the Yangtze valley, just like the wretched gunner who had been tossed over the side seconds before.

“No wait. Keep climbing. Don’t look down,” Lai said helpfully.

Jack gritted his teeth and took his first step. His head popped up through the hatch and a stream of icy air hit him in the face. He tried to ignore the intense fear that caused his arms and legs to shake. With a supreme effort he pulled himself onto the next rung, and then the next. He knew he was moving too fast to be safe and he knew that he should place his hands and feet securely before pushing on up to the next rung, but fear drove him faster and faster up through the air until his head and then his body entered the hatch above and he hauled himself onto the metal walkway inside the bottom of the great hull of the airship. He slumped down, panting, adrenaline coursing through his veins. But his journey up through the airship had only just begun.
In a moment, Lai was beside him, dragging him to his feet.

Jack looked around. The metal ladder continued up vertically, about a further twenty metres, through the hull of the massive airship. Jack expected the inside of the airship to be a cavernous empty space – like some vast cigar filled with gas. But of course, that was not the case. The gas was contained in a number of huge cylindrical cells positioned up and down the inside of the airship.

Jack craned his neck. The next stage of their journey would take them up between two of the gas canisters and on through a third hatch that he could now see in the ceiling of the giant hull. He started to climb. In less than a minute he was there and climbing onto the roof of the Zeppelin with open sky all around.

The whole structure was surprisingly broad on top, though it tapered away on either side. It was like standing on the back of an oversized blue whale. Jack turned and immediately understood what Lai wanted him to do. Directly in front of him, was the gun platform he had seen from the ground before they boarded. On either side of the platform were two
medium-calibre
machine guns resting on tripods. It looked like they could be swivelled around and angled up or down, and there was something else. Lying on their sides under a heap of blankets were the two gunners. One was asleep and the other had his eyes open and was just staring into space – completely comatose. Black smoke drifted from a long pipe that lay next to him.

Jack could not quite believe what he was seeing. Here he was, a thousand metres up in the sky on the roof of a Chinese
Imperial war Zeppelin and in front of him were two elite airmen of the Imperial air force – both intoxicated by opium. At the sight of the two men Lai flew into a fit of rage. He reached down and hauled one of the men to his feet. But the man couldn’t stand and it took all Lai’s strength to haul him up onto one shoulder in an impressive fireman’s lift. Pumped up with anger, Lai staggered from the platform and dropped the gunner down onto the roof under his feet. The man groaned, unaware of what was happening to him. Lai dug the toe of his boot into the man’s side and rolled him once and then a second time until the curvature of the airship’s roof did the rest. The man slipped from the top of airship and plummeted earthwards. Without delay, Lai stepped back onto the platform and lifted the second gunner. This one didn’t even wake up as Lai administered the same punishment. Lai had now thrown three of his own crew off the airship. At this rate, there would be no one left.

Lai grabbed one of the machine guns, and started to move it up and around on its fixed tripod.

“You take the other one!” he shouted to Jack and pointed up into the sky.

Following the direction of his finger, Jack looked up and saw in the distance his first sight of the Taiping aircraft. They were biplanes – similar to those used in the First World War – crude contraptions, but deadly all the same. The planes hovered for a moment and then the first one swooped in for the attack. Coming in from the rear, the plane levelled out just above the spine of the airship, its wheels almost touching the skin. Lai wheeled the heavy machine gun around on its tripod. Jack watched, mesmerised as
the plane flew directly towards them along the spine of the airship. He had no idea what to do with his weapon and dropped onto the wooden platform just as the plane flew over their heads. It cleared them by only a few metres. He scrambled to his feet, only to see a second plane swoop in and repeat the manoeuvre. This time Lai was ready and he let rip with a long burst right into the front of the oncoming aircraft. It was point-blank range and Lai could not miss. Jack saw the pilot slump forward onto his controls. The plane dipped and again Jack dropped to the platform – convinced that the plane would crash straight into them. The wheels glanced off the roof of the airship and the plane bounced upwards, catching its undercarriage on the tripods that held the guns and plucking them free from the platform. The aircraft’s momentum was just sufficient to carry it clear of the nose of the airship before it spiralled earthwards.

Lai, sprawled on the gun platform, jumped to his feet and looked despairingly at the mangled tripods which had been ripped from their housings.

“No guns,” he pointed into the distance, “But the planes are still coming…”

Lai looked on desperately as a third plane swooped in. This time it traced a line starboard of the airship, trying to determine the damage inflicted by the first attacks. Jack watched as Lai opened a large wooden case that was attached to the front of the platform. He pulled out a metal toolbox. Lai stepped off the platform and took a few paces forward across the roof of the airship. Then he heaved the toolbox up above his head, and turned to where the third biplane buzzed along the side of
the airship, just below where he stood. With a blood-curdling scream Lai hurled the toolbox out with both hands at the plane as it zipped past. Jack was stunned by how far the box travelled, and just for a second he caught a bemused expression on the pilot’s upturned face. In midflight, the metal box tipped open and its contents – screwdrivers, spanners and spare parts – sprayed out into the sky like a shrapnel burst from an artillery shell. The pilot spotted the oncoming rain of metal and tried to veer away, but he failed. The port wing of the biplane was stripped bare by the bombardment of metal and the immediate loss of purchase in one wing forced the plane to spin violently. A second later both wings snapped like balsa wood under a catastrophic increase in stress and the whole machine fell towards the ground in a mess of wood, wire and flapping canvas.

Lai wasn’t finished. He returned to the wooden case and pulled out a very large pistol – a flare gun. Deftly, he popped open the barrel and inserted a sizeable cartridge. Jack looked up as the first plane circled above, seemingly reluctant to re-enter the fray. Lai took aim and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud ‘pop’ as the flare gun discharged and Lai’s arms jerked with the gun’s recoil. A parabola of smoke arced across the sky towards the plane, missing it by a good fifty metres, and then continued on until, in the distance, it suddenly flashed into life as the phosphorous mixture lit up the sky. It was a wild and hopeless shot, but Lai was consumed with battle rage and would not stop.

“Another!” Lai fumbled in the cartridge belt, popped open the smoking barrel and inserted a second flare cartridge. This time he steadied the gun for a little longer and mentally
calibrated the angle, based on the trajectory of the previous shot. He fired. Jack watched as again the flare laid a smoky trail in a lazy arc towards the climbing plane. The flare climbed and climbed and then seemed to hang in the air, directly above the plane. Then it dropped and made perfect contact with the biplane’s fuselage – plopping into the cramped cockpit. There was an immediate commotion as the pilot realised what had happened. The plane veered this way and that as he struggled with the flare fizzing at his feet. Then, suddenly, there was a flash of light as the phosphorous ignited in a blue-white flash. The plane caught fire – and the flames were quickly fanned by the wind. In one minute all Jack could see was an orange fireball utterly consuming the plane. The pilot managed to struggle free of the cockpit but his foot seemed to be caught in some wire and his body flapped about like a rag doll in the slipstream of the falling aircraft. The plane finally collapsed in on itself.

“You can stay here and keep a lookout,” Lai commanded, still trying to catch his breath. “Any more planes – you use the speak machine.” Lai put a thumb and forefinger to his ear and mouth.

“What? There’s a phone…?” Jack said dumbfounded.

Lai gestured to the remains of the gun deck and sure enough there was a metal box with a crude, old-fashioned telephone wired into it.

“Understand? I am going down to check the rest of the ship and help the others. OK?”

“Yes,” Jack said, still dazed by the spectacle that he had just witnessed. In seconds, Lai had disappeared back down the hatch, leaving Jack alone high up on the roof of the Zeppelin.
Jack looked out into the sky, scanning the horizon in every direction. There were no more planes to be seen. The gun deck was a broken up mess – but the airship was, incredibly, still intact. Moreover, both he and the raging Colonel Lai were, quite astonishingly, alive.