Deadly Wands (55 page)

"Several hours later we found a larger force
with patrols airborne. We sliced up two patrols, dumped all our
bombs on their camp, then blasted the survivors. Again we ate their
food. After that the groups got smaller, and we found most of them
on the ground. It was like hunting cattle.

"Spoiled by super-quads, I forgot just how
little good most quads are. No wonder Genghis left them behind.
They’re only useful attacking in large numbers over short
distances. Most were too tired to even fly over the horizon.
Pathetic!"

"What happens now?" Princess asked.

"The survivors of this division will tell the
other divisions. They cannot continue their journey without first
removing the Red Baron. This is the value of being a boogeyman.”
They laughed. “So each division will leave a battalion to clear
airspace around the logistical train, but the rest will come south
to kill me. These are not marathoners, so those flying patrols will
soon exhaust themselves.

“How about I draw them to the Himalayas while
the rest of you kill the battalions they left behind? Follow their
patrols to hit the main units while they sleep.”

The next day, Billy showed himself to the
next closest division, so they could tell the others. He played cat
and mouse with them, causing a few hundred casualties, but really
he was just killing time and Mongols until his next battalion got
here.

As he evaded their small, slow fireballs, it
occurred to Billy that they could kill him easily if these pathetic
fliers had just one super-quad. He had to let them get close to
pull them southeast, so just one large, fast fireball could have
swallowed him whole.

Because they moved from cloud to cloud like a
ninja using shadows, Billy didn’t even see his guys until they
struck the division from behind. His second battalion was more than
a match for several thousand tired mediocre quads. Slow units are
no match against fast ones, so the battle grew ever more one-sided.
If they had just a few more hours of daylight, Team Red would have
destroyed them all.

Billy had this battalion take their bombs and
look for the next closest enemy camp. They found them around
midnight, coming south just as Billy predicted, and bombed them
good. The super-quads shot them up until they stopped coming out to
fight.

Now Billy feared the other divisions wouldn’t
come because of what happened to the first ones, so he sent this
battalion to harass the baggage train while he alone lured the
enemy to the Himalayas. Soon he had the remains of five divisions
afraid of a skinny boy with deadly wands.

Instead of terrifying them, Billy exaggerated
his thigh wound so they’d chase him. Before he tore them down; now
he wanted them over-confident as they approached the Indus
River.

At the Himalayas, thousands of air bandits
searched for gold. He had dropped plenty of shiny coins when he
flew over this slope on his way out of India, so they had reason to
believe in buried treasure.

A Mongol patrol found the bandits, who
promptly attacked. The survivors went back for more Mongols, who
attracted more bandits. Both sides fed quads down a hole in the
sky. Just watching a battle without any use of tactics gave Billy a
headache. He wanted them both to lose and, surprisingly, they
did.

The ability to fly in formation won the day
for the Mongols, but Team Red wiped them out that night.

Fifty thousand down, fifty thousand to
go.

CHAPTER 72

Billy now commanded six battalions of
super-quads, fourteen marathoners, and ten near-marathoners. They
faced fifty weak quad battalions and three hundred thousand
two-wanders. Billy looked for doubt in their faces, but his
commanders assumed they’d triumph like they always did. Even Midis
never turned so much into gold.

At least they didn’t have to confront fifty
quad battalions at the same time. Twenty battalions flew ahead in
an arrow formation, while ten protected their rear. Leaving just
twenty babysitting the supply wagons.

Billy hid the high-altitude quads in the
Victory Pass. At 7500 meters in altitude, it was too high for the
Mongols to breathe. The rest concealed themselves in a nearby
forest. Billy watched several patrols fly high over them and waited
until one inspected the trees. Then he sliced that squad up and led
the near-marathoners bombers to battle.

He expected to be seen, and was surprised how
close they got, given how slow they flew, weighted down with
bombs.

Lone sentries hiding in clouds sounded the
alarm when they were just five minutes out, and others quickly
echoed it. The mountain pass went from east-to-west, and an enemy
battalion each occupied the northern and southern rim.

Billy watched the rapid reaction battalion
rise to position themselves to attack him and could almost hear
their glee in having such a fat target. Although Billy couldn’t see
him at this distance, their general almost certainly popped up to
personally assess the threat, and broke up a reserve battalion into
one hundred squads to fan out to find other threats. The general
was probably laughing at the sight of a bunch of weighted down
Indians flying low and slow in broad daylight with no cover.

As the rapid reaction battalion moved above
and behind them, three more enemy battalions confronted them head
on. Four coming after him, two on the mountaintop, and two flying
patrols -- that left just twelve on the ground guarding the
wagons.

Excellent! This attack would not have worked
if the enemy had another fifty thousand quads.

While the Mongols focused on this faint, his
best super-quads slew the sentries and patrols above the
battleground and through this hole Team Red dived at maximum speed.
As soon as an alert sentry shrieked a warning, Billy did his primal
scream and flashed his fiery wands to keep their attention on him a
little longer. His near-marathoners turned and flew straight up to
form a wall to fire broadsides at the battalion diving at them from
behind.

The other three Mongol battalions rushed to
attack, oblivious to Team Red diving behind them. The super-quads
fired as soon as they got within range, then retained their
relative positions because they could hit the enemy, but the enemy
could not hit them. The three battalions had three options: a mass
attack into those firing at them, turn on the bombers led by the
Red Baron, or flee. And if all three made the same choice, they’d
have been better off. Instead, each made a different choice. The
battalion that rushed the super-quads died first; the battalion
that turned their backs to the super-quads to attack Billy’s
bombers died next; and those who fled lived several minutes
longer.

The battalion diving at the near-marathoners
from behind could only shoot with their front quads, while Indians
formed their wall at an angle so they could all fire back, despite
the bombs on their backs. The Mongols should have rose in an arc to
fall like a blanket so they could all shoot at the same time -- and
even then, target only the highest enemies. Instead, a thousand
Indians shot up one hundred Mongols at a time, ten times over, as
they got within range.

Good thing, too, since Billy had already left
them.

The Americans flew out of their bunkers to
attack the two battalions on the mountaintop while his high
altitude unit dove to bomb the quads in the pass eating lunch.
Within the pass, the Mongols had no idea what was happening. As he
hoped, Prince and Princess killed the general before he could sound
the general alarm. Soldiers obey commands. The general didn’t send
for them, so they continued eating. Until too late.

Which is why Billy attacked at lunch time,
with the bulk of the logistical train stuck in the pass.

His near-marathoners raced to drop their
bombs in the pass and joined the Americans, super-quads, and high
altitude quads blasting the Mongols on top. The enemy had nowhere
to go. Hence the efficacy of corralling them in the Torugart Pass.
Taking the high ground turned the battle into a rout.

Billy was not used to out-numbering the
enemy. The super-quads pursued the enemy fleeing east and
marathoners attacked those fleeing west. Now all he needed to worry
about were the Mongols in the vanguard, those in the rear, and
those flying distant patrols.

The super-quads had almost ran out of targets
fleeing east when Billy saw a shadow on the horizon. He led his
team away, diving behind the mountain to get out of sight before
rising sharply into the closest clouds.

The vanguard has broken up their twenty
battalions into groups of four thousand. Billy’s six thousand
super-quads raced to get behind the first group unseen. Billy
chased the enemy as they dove. Billy estimated his unit would
arrive a little too late, so he screamed at the Mongols.

Warned, the Americans rose straight up to get
out of the angle of attack. This forced the Mongols to rise
sharply, which fatally slowed them. With a gesture from Billy’s
flaming wands, Team Red spread out to attack with swords. Those
closest slowed to let the rest of the team catch up -- something
the Mongols attacking his near-marathoners should have done
earlier. Almost as one, they got within range to slice up four
thousand Mongols from behind.

By the time they finished them off, the next
four thousand showed up above and behind them, forcing them to flee
south. Billy hoped they would pursue him, but instead they joined
the main battle.

Billy couldn’t catch them in time, so he
positioned his guys for the next four thousand. Who took forever to
show up. But once they committed, Team Red flew out of cloud cover
to smash them, then engage the four thousand they missed.

But just a few minutes into this firefight,
Prince warned them of the next group. Billy shrieked the signal to
form up, but needed to give his guys time, so he popped up and
flashed his four flames -- one man staring down four thousand.

The enemy commander took his unit out of
their steep dive to consider his options as they fell in formation
at gravity speed. Every heartbeat felt like a victory. Billy could
almost read his mind. He didn’t want to fight the Red Baron but, at
the same time, thousands of comrades were fighting for their lives.
So the bastard did the right thing and ordered his formation to
form a square -- well, technically, four squares that looked like
one big square -- to fire a huge volley that would cover everything
near the Red Baron.

Billy respected it. The leader made the
correct tactical call. And he forced Billy to run like hell because
not even the Baron could dodge or shield himself from four thousand
fireballs. Looking west, Billy saw his super-quads still engaging
the enemy, with their backs to the four thousand.

So Billy didn’t see Prince, diving at maximum
speed, behead the unit commander. But he did see Princess lead the
five hundred Americans -- now formed up -- to shoot them from
behind. So Billy positioned himself below the four thousand to look
like an easy target. He spent a dangerous minute dodging thousands
of fireballs -- or mostly dodging most of them -- as the Americans
knocked them from the sky. Billy fell with them, to stay at their
maximum range, until he ran out of room at the bottom of the pass.
Now he raced west as his super-quads turned to attack what was left
of the four thousand.

Enough Mongols apparently survived to warn
the rest of the vanguard because no more groups attacked from the
east.

The Battle of the Pass was a victory worth
bragging about. Billy sent Zhu a propaganda video of him
documenting the destruction of the Khan’s follow up force, showing
a few hundred thousand dead in the pass, and thousands of smiling
Indians bathing in gold coins. To boost Chinese morale and deflate
the Mongols, Billy even lied and said the Indians freed the entire
subcontinent. Zhu naturally dropped thousands of copies to the
Khan’s troops when he bomb their armada. Losing his follow-up
forces and India (as far as he knew) made fighting deeper into
southern China futile. Genghis retreated that night and Zhu
declared China independent the next morning.

Some historians argued that this effectively
ended the world war. What they didn’t mention is that Genghis Khan
could have stopped it at any time by accepting William’s terms
after the Summer Slaughter.

They spent the afternoon finishing the enemy
wounded, aiding their own injured, and stripping the corpses. The
Mongols provided them food and tents. Billy posted plenty of
sentries, but didn’t expect any night raids because his faster
quads could chase them down. In the morning, they met at the scenic
Lake Chatyr-Kul to discuss their options.

The Mongols at Grandma’s end abandoned the
heavy supplies, including most of the gold, and fled to the
relative safety of the ten thousand quads guarding their rear. She
now had ten kilometers of wagons to protect. None of them liked the
idea of being anchored to one spot. They needed to get rid of them.
Fast. Without turning themselves into air mules.

Billy ran a proposal by his leaders. Since no
one objected, he sent for the two Indian cousins who looked like
twins, with their unit commanders.

“You still have family in northern
India?”

“Several thousand,” one of them answered. He
still couldn’t tell them apart.

“Who rules there now?” Billy asked.

“A greedy Mongol named Bekel. He has squeezed
the land, people, and businesses into dry carcasses. It shames us
since for centuries we were the most prosperous kingdom in
India.”

Billy caught them by surprise. “It’ll take
decades for the Republic of India to consolidate the entire
subcontinent.
You can make their job easier if you restore the kingdom that
Tamerlane took from you and turn it into a representative
democracy.”