Chapter 49: Port Construction (Part 2)

"U.C. 0079, U.C. 0083, U.C. 0093, A.C. 0197 personnel—assemble at Green Beach for vehicle unloading."

At the crackle of the walkie-talkie, several specialty groups who had just stumbled down the pier rose groggily from the sand. The beach zones had been color-coded for efficiency: Red Beach served as the landing zone from Pier 1, Yellow Beach handled small watercraft, and Green Beach was reserved for barges and landing craft. After a full day aboard ship, their first steps on solid ground felt distinctly unsteady. They'd dropped their heavy packs at what was generously termed a "rest point"—in reality, nothing more than a folding table bearing a computer and ledger, with a board proclaiming "PERSONNEL REST POINT" in bold characters. Across the pebbly sand, similar signs marked future facilities: "TOILET," "FOOD/WATER STATION"—promises of amenities yet to materialize.

The group designations followed a simple logic: U.C. codes indicated large-vehicle licenses, while A.C. denoted construction-machinery certification. Qian Shuixie from North American Branch had repeatedly lobbied to join the Military Group, eager to defend the crossing regime with a rifle in hand. Instead, his declared expertise—driving large container trucks—had landed him squarely in U.C. 0079. Working among strangers dampened his spirits, though he soon discovered someone even more demoralized: Bai Yu, a military academy graduate trained in armored-vehicle command and weapons-engineering design, now reduced to driving a crawler tractor.

The Committee under Meng De had planned for rapid construction from the moment of landing. Before loading, they'd pre-sorted all materials so that supplies needed immediately were concentrated aboard the 1,500-ton self-propelled barge: vehicles, construction machinery, and essential infrastructure materials.

The flat-deck barge drew only 1.83 meters when fully loaded. Though it couldn't beach directly like a proper landing craft, it could approach far closer to shore than any large cargo vessel. Of course, even this shallow draft meant vehicles couldn't simply drive into the water—hence the floating dock installed here as Pier 2.

Self-propelled barges lacked both vehicle ramps and derricks, but the Engineering Group had anticipated this. Pier 2 came equipped with dedicated loading and unloading ramps.

"Alright, we're ready for vehicle unloading!" Bai Yu called out, having been designated temporary leader of the four groups. He delivered his safety briefing while trying to bolster morale. "Everyone wear life jackets. If there's any risk of going in, abandon the vehicle immediately—don't worry about it. You've all taken car ferries before, right? Same principle..."

The assembled workers exchanged skeptical glances. Same principle? Starting a vehicle on this swaying deck, navigating up a narrow ramp, then descending onto an equally unstable floating dock—this bore little resemblance to any ferry they'd ever boarded.

Sensing their hesitation, Bai Yu knew someone had to lead by example. He'd driven tanks during his military service, after all. Steeling himself, he shouted "Watch me!" and climbed into the cab of the Dongfanghong 1202 universal crawler tractor.

The engine's roar brought a measure of reassurance. The cab offered excellent visibility, and the 24V battery turned over fast and stable. In the military, he'd operated tanks, APCs, and every manner of engineering vehicle; boarding pontoons and ferry barges had been routine. But this floating dock and vehicle ramp were handmade knockoffs—their actual strength and load capacity known only to God.

He hesitated, watching the ramp sway over the blue water and the dock heave below. Then he engaged the engine. The ship shifted perceptibly beneath the tractor's weight. No time for second thoughts now—he fixed his eyes on Qian Shuixie waving the signal flag ahead. The tracks spun against the steel plate with a teeth-grinding screech, inching onto the ramp. The instant the tracks made contact, the floating dock began to drift and the ramp shifted sideways. Everyone froze. Zhuo Tianmin from the Engineering Group spotted the problem and sprinted over.

"What are you all staring at?! Pull the cables!"

Engineering had pre-installed four steel cables on the barge for precisely this purpose—to be hauled taut by hand during unloading, minimizing drift between ship and dock.

"Pull! Pull!" Under his relentless shouting, everyone seized the cables and heaved backward with all their strength. With tremendous effort, the tractor finally ground its way onto the floating dock.

After that first success, everything fell into rhythm. Two hours later, all the transmigrators' construction machinery stood ashore, lined up neatly on the beach:

• 2× Dongfanghong 1202 universal crawler tractors with excavator buckets and dozer blades
• 4× Dongfanghong 404Z1W front-loader/backhoe tractors (medium wheel tractors)
• 4× Dongfanghong 170V wheel tractors (small wheel tractors)
• 10× Changchai single-cylinder diesel dump trucks
• 1× Dongfanghong 18-ton wheel roller
• 1× 25-ton truck crane
• 2× towed concrete mixers
• 4× air compressors

Most of the construction machinery came from the Dongfanghong series out of Luoyang First Tractor Factory—a deliberate choice to simplify maintenance logistics.

With this much equipment at their disposal, they could build not just a small temporary base but an entire new city.

Yet Mei Wan and Bing Feng, the two leads responsible for infrastructure, still felt somewhat at a loss. They had machinery, fuel, electricity—all the necessary power. The problem was raw materials.

The barge carried plenty of rebar and cement, but without sand or gravel, Engineering couldn't produce the most common and convenient modern building material: concrete. Traditional bricks remained an option, but where would they find them on this desolate beach? Ming-era Lingao County surely had brick kilns somewhere, but locating them would require reconnaissance missions they hadn't yet organized.

Some infrastructure, at least, could be improvised from available resources. Bing Feng's first assignment was constructing a cargo staging yard at Red Beach. As a temporary facility, it needed no surface hardening—just raised and compacted ground with proper drainage. From his years of construction-company experience, Bing Feng knew that work on this scale, with a crew of ten to twenty armed with shovels, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows, could be completed in a single morning. With full mechanization, they should perform even better.

And so the Transport Group transformed into a construction crew. Red Beach roared to life with machinery; vehicles bounced back and forth across the sand; dust billowed skyward. Word spread quickly that the staging yard was under construction, and the intense activity attracted the ever-present Ding Ding couple. The foreign woman proved remarkably bold—with beach temperatures hovering around 27 to 28 degrees Celsius, she wore a tight tank top and cutoff jeans, clambering everywhere to snap photographs. Her long, pale legs flashed before the workers; occasionally she would thrust out her round bottom to capture a better angle. Young and old alike on the work site felt their blood surge with obvious physiological reactions. After several near-accidents—dump trucks nearly striking pedestrians, excavators digging in wrong directions—Bing Feng reluctantly chased the couple away.

The staging-yard site sloped gently from south to north. Surveying revealed a gradient under 1:10—normally, such mild slopes required no stripping of topsoil before compaction, just clearing of large rocks and brush. But soil samples told a different story: the surface consisted almost entirely of loose sand and fine gravel with weak cohesion. They ended up deploying dozers to strip away all the sandy topsoil and gravel completely.

Given the slope, the foundation required a cut-and-fill approach. First, excavators dug a catchment ditch at the slope's highest point to collect rainwater, then drainage ditches along the east and west sides to channel runoff into the bay. The excavated soil became fill material for the lower sections.

Beneath the stripped surface, soil samples showed sandy composition—good permeability, stable when compacted. Bing Feng used all of it as foundation fill. Dump trucks hauled load after load to pour onto the foundation. Every twenty centimeters of fill received three passes from the roller before more material was added and the process repeated. Two rounds of this, and the work was essentially complete. Bing Feng had originally planned to top the entire site with crushed stone, but they lacked a rock crusher. Beach stones varied wildly in size and shape—too irregular for practical use—so they skipped that step. The finished staging yard sat slightly elevated, rectangular when viewed from above, with sloped sides and drainage ditches running below. On the side facing the bay, a simple road built to temporary-road standards connected the yard to the dock.

"With enough steel beams, we could put a roof over this yard," Bing Feng said with a note of regret. "For now, we can only cover it with tarps."

"We don't have corrugated metal for roofing anyway," Mei Wan pointed out.

"Wooden planks would work fine for a temporary structure—perfection isn't the goal here. What worries me is the cement from the barge. If rain gets to it, we might as well use it as foundation fill. Without cement, half of what we're planning becomes impossible."

"Speaking of wood—where is the lumber? We need it for the camp tower and latrines."

"We're organizing crews to unload the cargo tarps from the ship," said Dai Xie, the Planning Committee's Red Beach manager. "Priority is getting them ashore quickly to cover vulnerable cargo. As for lumber—we still don't have reliable stats on that..."

Wood was humanity's earliest and most widely used natural material, and the transmigrators had no intention of abandoning such an easily obtained, easily processed resource. From the outset, Personnel had assigned considerable labor to logging operations.

Many imagined tropical and subtropical Hainan as an island of swaying coconut palms and dense forests—some even assumed it was blanketed in rainforest. Reality proved far more complicated. Due to varying terrain, microclimates, and centuries of human exploitation, Hainan's vegetation had become remarkably diverse. By the 1950s, forest coverage had dwindled to just 12.8 percent, concentrated mainly in the central highlands around the Diaoluo Mountains, Jianfengling, and Bawangling. Though twenty-first-century Hainan had rebounded to 51.8 percent forest coverage, the gains came primarily from artificial plantations and secondary growth.

Lingao possessed a classic tropical monsoon climate with distinct wet and dry seasons. Natural vegetation consisted mainly of tropical savanna—never the vast forests of popular imagination. Moreover, centuries of settlement had stripped away any sizable natural woodlands; what secondary growth remained was of poor quality. When the transmigrators went looking for timber in seventeenth-century Lingao, this was the barren environment that awaited them.

(End of Chapter)