Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [132]
Across the river, a naval gun fired a single booming round. Two Nationalist Chinese gunboats were moored in midstream. The shell landed in the store-yard of the ceramics works, throwing up a cloud of red dust. The sound of small arms fire came from the beaches of the river to the south, where a company of Kuomintang soldiers disembarked from a wooden lighter.
Its diesels thudding, an armoured junk motored up the canal below the railway embankment. Chinese officers in smart American uniforms and steel helmets stood on the bridge, scanning the town and its vegetable plots through binoculars. The nearer of the two gunboats fired a second shell, which exploded among the grey-tiled rooftops, sending up a shower of debris. Immediately there was a flurry of movement. Like ants escaping from a broken flower-pot, hundreds of Chinese ran from the narrow alleys into the surrounding fields. Over their heads they carried bed-rolls and bundles of clothing. They raced down the pathways between the vegetable plots. An old woman in black trousers and jacket waded waist-deep in a creek beside the road, shouting to her relatives who clambered down the bank.
The motorized junk sailed along the canal, its engines drumming like fists against the wooden hull. Jim could see clearly the fresh pleats in the uniforms of the senior Chinese officers, and their elegant American combat boots. Even the platoons of private soldiers on the deck below the bridge were lavishly equipped with weapons and radios. Parked across the midships of the junk was a black Chrysler limousine, the pennant of a Kuomintang general flying from its chromium mast.
The metal barbette of an automatic cannon was mounted in the bows of the junk. Without warning, the gunners opened fire at the town. The tracers soared over the heads of the fleeing villagers and burst against the roofs of the houses. At a signal from the bridge, the gunners swung the barrel, setting their sights on a small hamlet a few hundred yards to the west of the town. Already the first shells from the gunboats were landing on the dusty road beside the single-storey hovels. The company of Nationalist soldiers who had disembarked from the wooden lighter were now running across the paddies, hunting down the fleeing townspeople.
Then the first shell of the next salvo tripped off an immense explosion. The group of mud dwellings had vanished, sucked into the air by the boiling cloud of its own debris. The cache of detonating ammunition continued to erupt, throwing towers of smoke into the sky. On the road approaching the hamlet dozens of villagers lay among their bundles and bed-rolls, as if the inhabitants of this town had decided to spend the night sleeping in the fields.
Jim cupped his hands over his nose and mouth, trying to stop himself from shouting. He watched the plain of fire below him, the smoke-covered fields lit by the flashes of the naval guns and by the burning houses beside the ceramics factory. The kilns and chimneys glowed in the sunset as if the ancient ovens had been lit again, to be fuelled by the bodies of the villagers lying in their vegetable gardens. Jim listened to the engines of the motorized junk as it moved down the canal, an ugly heart bearing the beat of its death across China, while immaculate generals masked their eyes with binoculars, calculating their astronomy of guns.
‘Basie…’ The bandits were withdrawing from the railway line. Captain Soong and his coolies had climbed down the embankment and were returning to the trucks. ‘Basie, can we go back to Lunghua?’
‘Back to the camp?’ The cabin steward squinted through the dust falling from the air. He had been stunned by the concussion wave of the exploding ammunition store, and stared at the landscape below him as if waking from a dream. ‘You want to go back to the camp, Jim…?’
‘We ought