Chapter One Thousand Nine Hundred Twenty
31st July 1969
Wuhan, China
The South had staged a mass uprising against the rule of Beijing late in the prior year. General Pan Yong’s advice to the Generalissimo had been to allow him to go down there and crush it before the cancerous sedition spread, which regrettably had not happened. Secretly, Pan also had a personal motive in that it was his rival turned nemesis, General Sun Li-jen who had emerged as the Commander of the Southern rebels. Throughout his entire career Pan had labored in the shadow of Sun, and he relished the thought of proving forever that he was the greater man. Instead, Chiang Kai-shek had ordered Pan to guard and maintain order in the capital. This was much to his great frustration as the National Army suffered a series of embarrassing reverses over the prior winter. Then when spring came, the Generalissimo had finally relented and sent Pan south at the head of an Army numbering almost a million men.
Thirty-one years earlier, during the Japanese War, a part of what would later come to be the far wider Pacific War, a series of battles had been fought around Wuhan. The result had been an unlikely strategic victory by the Chinese Army that had bought them time to reposition their supplies and forces in a way that enabled them to continue the war for the following seven years. Pan Yong had started his career in that battle as a Captain leading an Infantry Company and had swiftly rose in rank after that. So, as the Rebel Army had moved north intelligence had swiftly ascertained that the most likely route crossing the Yangtze River would take them through Wuhan. For Pan the symmetry was too much to be ignored. The same place that had been the site of his personal beginning becoming where his greatest triumph would occur being the neat bookends of his career, it seemed ordained by the Heavens. He would return to Beijing in victory and began anew, right after he finished disposing of a particular Generalissimo who had clearly outlived his usefulness.
Potsdam
Manny had little use for pistols. He couldn’t recall which Western film it had been, but there was a line about how they were only good for shooting people and snakes, either tended to cause trouble. Over his short career, that had been Manny’s experience. Still though, he had been told that as a Lieutenant in the First Foot he needed to qualify with a pistol. He had put it off for as long as he could, but here he was at the indoor shooting range today wasting an afternoon that could have been spent in a thousand other, far more productive ways.
That was also why Manny had been issued with a Mauser-Seidel P67 pistol. It was the latest iteration of the breach locking version of the HS with the rotating barrel, all so it could be chambered in 9mm Parabellum. The only real change that had been made in recent years was that it had been modified to accept the double-stack magazines that were now standard for the entire military. Like most other Officers who said that they had no need for pistols, Manny had been given it because most of those who actually cared to have a pistol preferred something else, but the M-S P67, like all other versions of the HS series looked nice, especially when it never had to be removed from the holster.
Loading into the magazine into the pistol, Manny pulled the slide back, thumbed off the safety and fired sixteen shots at the target ten meters away, shredding the center of the paper target. He did that with two more magazines in quick succession with the additional target posters at fifteen and twenty meters.
“There” Manny said knowing that he had got a qualifying score even if he didn’t care what it was. “You get that.”
The Range Officer gave him an annoyed look as he wrote down the score. “Yes” He replied, “But it doesn’t matter Lieutenant, you are among the group is slated to take the practical shooting course at the Signals School in Anhalt next week as of yesterday morning.”
“Is that a joke?” Manny asked.
“Hardly” The Range Officer said, “But you just got a bit of practice in, didn’t you?”
“And if I had done this last week?” Manny asked.
“You wouldn’t be looking forward to a field trip to Halle.”
Manny tried to hide his annoyance at that. He had not wanted to waste a couple hours. Now he was looking forward to having to spend a couple days standing around at the Signals School taking the course and as a Lieutenant he would be expected to set an example. That meant that he would be the first one to endure whatever tortures the Noncommissioned Officers who devised it had cooked up. Manny knew full well that those were the exact circumstances where he would need to defer to them and fully expected them to take advantage of every second of it.
That was why he was grumbling as he walked back towards the Administration Services building to file his latest range score. It being the Potsdam barracks, there were reminders everywhere that they were in the middle of a fairly large city. Even so he was a bit surprised when a wall a steel raced past the end of the alley he was walking down and he found himself engulfed in a cloud of diesel exhaust as the roar of the Panzer filled the air. Looking around the corner, Manny saw a Leopard driving towards a Transporter. Suse was standing in the Commander’s Cupola with a big grin on her face, she waved when she saw Manny standing there. He was wondering exactly what she was doing here and what was going on with the Panzer.
