Termination Shock

The Barracks

Another advantage of being supported by the Indian military was having access to Indian military intelligence. Sometimes this could mean having satellite imagery piped into augmented-reality glasses, but in other cases it was as old as the Bhagavad Gita: for example, talking to the caretaker about sneaky ways to get into the building.

For a couple of decades around the turn of the century, the barracks had been little used. During that time the army had hired a local guy, a Tibetan, to go up there every so often and look after the place. Major Raju had found that guy, and that guy had supplied the information that there was a coal hole. Most people nowadays would identify it as a manhole and would guess that it led down to a sewer or electrical vault. This thing had been set into the pavement right next to an otherwise featureless stone wall on the down-valley side of the barracks so that coal could be dumped from a truck down a chute into a sub-cellar that contained the boiler. The last of the coal had been burned twenty years ago, and the boiler long since devolved into a pile of rust. If the Chinese volunteers had any sources of heat at all, it must be from propane they’d brought with them.

One of the reasons Laks had gone up to the top of the ridge and peered down on the barracks through binoculars had been to look—without being too obvious about it—at this coal hole, which was easily visible. Even though temperatures rarely got above freezing, the warmth of the sun on that side of the building melted the snow and exposed the manhole cover.

The Chinese squatters had barricaded and fortified anything on the ground floor that looked like a door or window, but they’d done nothing at all about the coal hole. It was of smaller diameter than an ordinary municipal manhole. Laks could not have fit through it. But Gurkhas could.

They had to wait a day because of fresh snow. In the meantime, Raju provided Laks with the one new item he needed. This involved dispatching a jet helicopter to a shop in Kashmir, four hundred kilometers away, but was considered worth the expenditure of fuel.

That night the School’s Gurkhas—who were normally rock throwers, but not today—came up the valley under cover of darkness. Following in their wake were the irregulars. The moon had come out after the snowstorm and was illuminating the western slope like a blue spotlight, so any attempt to come down from the ridge would have been obvious.

Indeed the School’s stick-fighting contingent made use of that by mounting a fake attack (Major Raju, a walking thesaurus of military jargon, called it a “demonstration”) shortly before the sun was due to rise over the opposite ridgeline. Laks stayed behind, prone on a sleeping bag just behind the ridge crest, watching his red-turbaned fighters descending through the fresh powder on snowshoes. They did that slowly, awkwardly, and obviously. But the fact that they were doing it in the hour before dawn, on the last campaigning day of the year (more snow was expected tomorrow, followed by more snow), made it look a hell of a lot like an attack to the Chinese sentries peering up at them through binoculars, as well as to various drones that soon took to the air.

Halfway down the stick fighters “got bogged down” and “encountered unexpected delays” due to “even deeper than expected snow,” ruining their ostensible plan. Namely, to coordinate an attack with a breakout attempt by the beleaguered garrison on the top floor of the barracks. Those people went ahead and launched their attack anyway. This went absolutely nowhere, but in combination with the looming threat of Big Fish’s School, apparently convinced Lan Lu that it was the real deal.

But who knew, really? Laks couldn’t guess what was in Lan Lu’s mind. All he knew was what he could see. And what he saw was the Gurkhas stealing through the shadows around the barracks—which seemed deeper and darker now, in partial daylight, than by the light of the moon—right up to the building’s blank stone wall, where they were invisible to the occupants. In short order they had pulled up the iron lid of the coal hole and disappeared into it. Half a dozen of them, one after the other like fish on the same line. After which—a beautiful detail—the last of them pulled the manhole cover back into place above him.

There was nothing to see now for a minute and so Laks shifted focus to his stick fighters and verified that they had miraculously worked free of the unexpected difficulties.

Somewhere on the Internet there must be feeds from Chinese webcams on the ground floor of the barracks. These would no doubt make for entertaining viewing later. But the next event that Laks could actually see was his squad of irregulars, spearheaded by Sam and Jay, sprinting across the parking lot toward a side door. Which must mean that the Gurkhas had achieved their next objective, which was to climb up out of the boiler room and, by surprise if possible, violence if necessary, get to that door and open it.

So the raid—in the kabaddi sense of that term—was now on. The raiders had crossed the line into the enemy side and were tagging as many as they could before time expired. Which would probably be as soon as the Blue Herons got a grip on the situation and counterattacked in earnest.

The hardest part of the planning phase had been to get Sam and Jay to wrap their heads around the concept of tactical retreat. Apparently that just wasn’t in the soccer hooligan DNA. Laks had been forced to reach centuries into the past and mention some of the battles in which Sikh cavalry had used the tactic with success. As soon as Sam and Jay had got it through their heads that they were permitted to go on fighting after the tactic had succeeded in drawing the enemy into the open, they grudgingly warmed to the idea.

So that was what happened next. In kabaddi terms, the raiders had done all the tagging they were ever going to do and now desperately had to get back to the safe side of the line. So out of the barracks door they spilled, some just sprinting in a reasonably convincing pantomime of blind panic, others fighting a rearguard action to keep the doorway clear.

People in combat obeyed instincts. The chase instinct was overwhelmingly powerful. In the School’s wake came the Flock, spilling out into the open. The only member of the Blue Herons who wasn’t in a retaliatory frenzy was Lan Lu himself, recognizable at a distance because his stick was a sort of cobalt blue with golden tips. Other members of the Flock had red or black ones according to seniority.

Laks stood up on the snowboard that Major Raju had procured for him and launched himself down the slope. His great stick, made of Kevlar laminate in a rocket factory outside of Delhi and maculated with corporate logos, made a fine balance pole. His turbaned gatka warriors, now most of the way to the bottom, had been warned over their earbuds. They looked up to see where he was coming down and cleared a gap in their line for him. They used their sticks to wave him toward it like the guys at the airport.

This was a pretty good board on pretty good powder—certainly an improvement on anything Laks had enjoyed at the crowded and waterlogged ski areas just outside of Vancouver. By agreement, Major Raju had procured a used board from a secondhand shop in Kashmir, and they’d scuffed it up a bit to make it look more ragtag, optics-wise.

Lan Lu certainly didn’t see it coming. Or if he did he didn’t understand how fast Laks was traveling. Not a winter sports aficionado, apparently. Anyway Laks was on him before he could get his guard up. Laks cut the Blue Heron’s legs out from under him as he schussed by, then banked into a hard U-turn on the flat and came back around toward his fallen foe. He pulled up well short, though, to give himself a few moments to kick out of his hard plastic boots—not a good fit with light-footed gatka movements. As he was doing this he had a clear view past Lan Lu and back up the western slope, now in brilliant red sunlight—all the sunrises lately had been glorious—to check on the progress of the School. They were almost down, to the point where some members of the Flock were wheeling to meet them.

Toward Lan Lu he trudged in his stocking feet through knee-deep snow. The Blue Heron was up, dusting snow off his long changshan robe. Good. No broken legs. Keeping an eye on Laks, he looked around until he saw where his blue-and-gold stick had fallen, then picked that up. Looking past Laks he held up a hand to stop three Blue Herons who had been rushing to their master’s defense. With his eyes he drew their attention to the barracks. Indian defenders from the upper stories were now emerging from it to close the jaws of the trap.

Then Lan Lu raised his stick and faced off against Laks and settled into the stately guard position that Laks had admired in so many YouTube videos.

Because of what happened afterward, Laks didn’t get to watch Pippa’s supercut of the fight until much, much later. But it was certainly his impression until close to the end that he was getting his ass handed to him. There was a reason Lan Lu had been at the top of the leaderboard for most of this year. Laks had been so focused on his opponent’s close quarters techniques that he wasn’t ready for the standoff fight that actually ensued. They never seemed to close to within two meters of each other. Lan Lu wasn’t using stick technique at all. He was using spear technique. This turned out to work damned well. He had a way of making his stick flex around Lak’s defenses and tag him in the ribs or the side of the head. Which was confusing and upsetting, because you don’t expect to get hit in the side, or sometimes even in the back, by an opponent who is six feet away and in front of you.

But the weakness of all spear technique was what happened when you got close—too close for the spear’s head to be of any use. Laks remembered Sam’s first fight against the Bonking Head at Pangong Tso when he had just barreled in, absorbing damage until he was inside the other guy’s preferred range. Laks finally managed to do that. He even put his big steel kara to use blocking, then deflecting a strike. Which brought him in range of the feared nerve center strikes of Lan Lu’s kung fu; but unbeknownst to Lan Lu it brought Lan Lu in range of the short powerful strikes that Laks had grafted on to traditional gatka. Lan Lu got in one terrific shot behind the angle of Laks’s jaw that nearly felled him and left the whole side of his face numb. But Laks fell toward Lan Lu, rather than away from him, which probably saved the day. For out of that collision Laks was able to emerge with a series of punches, using the last six inches of his stick as a force multiplier, that drove Lan Lu back shouting with pain and surprise and toppled him into the snow. He held up a hand. The fight was over. Big Fish had won. Money was changing hands in Vegas. Territory was about to change hands up here.