Chapter 1418 - The Firing Range

At dusk, His Lordship the Count emerged from his study and ordered the coachman to harness the carriage. He wished to take a stroll before dinner. He wore the same outfit from that morning, with only the addition of a dark hooded cloak draped over his shoulders. The carriage rolled along the coastal road, entered Manila through the south gate, passed out through another gate on the far side of the castle, and sped onward until it stopped beside a mixed grove of banana and coconut trees near a village.

Vince stepped out and instructed the coachman to wait. He drew the cloak tightly around himself. Concealed close to his body were a dagger, binoculars, and the CZ75 pistol that had never left his side throughout his entire mercenary career.

He made his way through the mixed grove, then struggled through a dense thicket of acacia, catalpa, and holly. Beyond the thicket, a large bamboo grove had been almost entirely cleared; only the uprooted bamboo roots remained, stretching out toward an open field. This had certainly been wasteland before, but now much of the waist-high vegetation had been cut down and lay across the carpet of tender grass and wildflowers. That natural carpet, however, had clearly suffered considerable damage—much of the grass lay trampled along deep rut marks, crushed flower petals scattered about, as if the pile had been stripped to reveal the burlap backing beneath. Apart from gun carriages, Vince could not imagine what other heavily loaded vehicles would come to this wasteland to roll back and forth.

These ruts crisscrossed, extending into a temporary lane. The ochre-roofed, green-walled barracks he had glimpsed from the main road stood behind it. Bamboo-fence walls topped with thick layers of straw and banana leaves—these structures were just as crude as the peasant huts in nearby villages, only larger. They were nothing compared to the solid stone barracks inside Fort Santiago and had clearly been thrown up in haste.

It was mealtime now, and the open ground around the barracks buzzed like a beehive. Short East Indian soldiers in shirts and baggy pantaloons were all barefoot—the colony did not have enough shoes for its men. They ladled soup and stewed vegetables like taro from wooden barrels and ate, standing or sitting, on the grass and along the lane. Vince adjusted the focus of his binoculars and slowly scanned the scene. Several spears leaned against the wall outside the gate; he did not see the cannons or firearms he had expected. Beside the lane, two gaudily dressed Spanish sergeants stood drinking. A group of Tagalog children played on the parade ground, circling around the soldiers and barracks—they must have come from the nearby village hoping to beg scraps. One of the half-drunk sergeants kicked a child into the mud, and a burst of crude laughter immediately erupted all around.

At the far end of the parade ground rose several low hills. Through his binoculars, they all presented strange, crooked shapes, pockmarked with craters. Some had wooden poles stuck in them, from which hung red cloth now shredded to ribbons. One had half-collapsed, with clods of earth and rubble scattered far and wide.

Vince felt a surge of excitement. This new artillery training ground established outside Manila must have a great deal to do with "Señor Salamanca's new toy."

Dusk was falling, and lamps were being lit inside and outside the barracks. At the sergeants' commands, the soldiers formed into small squares and began drilling formations. Vince never saw them bring out any cannons. He put away his binoculars and quietly worked his way back through the brush.

Relying on his impressions from that morning, Lando found the village beside the main road, very close to both the barracks and the training ground. He made his way through the muddy little paths between the huts, extricated himself from the circle of Tagalog village women enthusiastically hawking taro, bananas, and homemade tuba wine, and beckoned to two children playing in the mud in front of a house, handing each of them a small biscuit.

The results exceeded expectations. After accepting the biscuits, the two children vanished in the blink of an eye. Five minutes later, he was surrounded by more than a dozen children of various heights, all filthy from head to toe.

Vince asked the children over and over in Spanish and in the Tagalog phrases he had newly learned. The answers were very satisfying: the oldest-looking child said he had seen Spanish soldiers firing cannons on the training ground every morning. The cannons were both short and thick, the child said, spreading mud-caked fingers to gesticulate, and they "gleamed like brand-new pesos."

The former mercenary took out a string of "lead pieces"—the local everyday currency, actually cheap privately minted coins from the Great Ming, like the shaque guangpan and other inferior small cash. Called copper coins in name, they contained almost no copper; the main component was lead—the Spanish and Dutch quite aptly called them "lead pieces." Not only were they thin and small, but they were riddled with impurities and would shatter if dropped on the ground.

Base as these coins were, throughout Southeast Asia they were the most widely circulated small-denomination currency. Whether Spanish or Dutch, the Europeans brought large quantities of silver; for petty transactions in the colonies, they relied entirely on Chinese cash. In the markets, one rarely saw silver pesos from New Spain. For everyday consumption and trade, everyone—including Europeans—used this base currency.

Thus, Chinese maritime merchants made huge profits shipping this coinage to all parts of Southeast Asia. As the monsoon season approached, the exchange rate of pesos to lead pieces would fall steadily. When the first Chinese merchant ship sailed into port, there might even be a crash. And as the monsoon season drew to a close and Chinese ships began departing one by one, the value of the lead pieces would rise again. In every European colony throughout Southeast Asia, there were always merchants engaged in speculative currency exchange.

Facing a crowd of greedy eyes, Vince announced that whoever could bring back copper or iron fragments left by the cannon fire from the training ground would receive a string of lead pieces. Before he could finish saying it a second time, the children had scattered.

Vince thought it a good deal: a few hundred cash in exchange for a big heap of shrapnel. He had to buy a rattan basket in the village and hire two villagers to carry this basket of scrap metal to the carriage.

All the locally hired servants found it strange that His Lordship the Count was acting quite out of character that night, ignoring a sumptuous dinner of roast duck and sherry. Upon returning to the villa at Malate, he ordered Ji Mide to carry a basket of blackish objects from the carriage up to the second-floor study, then had the kitchen send up coffee and a few chicken-filled pies. Finally, Mimi brought in, as instructed, a candelabra with six Australian candles lit. The study door slammed shut behind her—a sign that the Count did not wish to be disturbed.

Vince put on cotton-gauze gloves, spread a bedsheet on the floor, took the metal fragments from the rattan basket, and laid them out one by one for inspection. Much of what the children had collected was genuine scrap iron—broken horseshoes, fallen horseshoe nails, iron plating from an axle, lead balls fired from muskets. All this rubbish he pushed aside.

One small tubular fragment intrigued him greatly: it was made of brass and looked very much like the impact fuse of a mortar shell, but unfortunately the rest was gone.

The most valuable finds were concentrated at the bottom of the basket—the larger fragments. He discovered he could almost piece together a complete conical shell from the fragments he had picked out. Among all the fragments, the entire base of the shell casing had been preserved. Vince brought it close to the candles and turned it over and over, examining it. He was startled to find that this round metal plate, about the size of a pot lid, was actually composed of a sandwich-like structure: a thick cast-iron shell base with a copper plate of the same diameter cast onto the bottom, and beneath the copper plate a slightly smaller thin iron plate. By candlelight, the edges of the copper plate clearly showed the marks left by rifling.

Discovering an expanding driving band structure on a seventeenth-century shell truly astonished Vince. As a former member of the U.S. Army, he was no stranger to the 4.2-inch chemical mortar shells with a similar design.

He turned the rattan basket upside down and carefully examined every item, hoping to find a complete fuse, but to no avail. He began re-examining the broken shell fragments. The shattered walls were all quite thick, with residue from burnt black powder adhering to them, but both inner and outer surfaces were very smooth—possibly machined on a lathe after casting. The fragments varied in size; overall, the fragmentation rate of the shell body was not particularly high.

One especially large fragment caught his attention—about a quarter of a shell—thinner than the other explosive fragments. Both the curved portion and the base section had been blown off. On the inner wall near the base, two grape-like pellets were stuck. Vince pried them off with tweezers. The pellets were iron, about the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun shell, with very rough surfaces. He moved closer to the candelabra. The rough surface was a layer of black, dense, adhesive-like substance that gave off a slightly pungent smell near the flame—like a mixture of asphalt and tar. This mixture had bonded the iron balls to the shell wall, or perhaps the heat of the powder had not completely melted it.

He found more than thirty iron balls in the pile of scrap-iron garbage. They were easy to distinguish from the lead balls fired by muskets: all were about the size of 12-gauge shotgun pellets, with more or less of the black mixture stuck to their surfaces.

Vince pondered for a long while, then suddenly jumped up and pulled open the door.

"Mimi!" he shouted down the stairs.

Seeing his intelligence officer and maid lift her skirt and run up the stairs, he said softly, "Go prepare the secret-writing ink and codebook."

"Sir, the monsoon season is over," Mimi reminded him. All the Chinese merchant ships in Manila harbor had already returned; only one Fujian ship that hadn't finished loading was stuck here, and it wouldn't set sail for at least another five months.

"I'll entrust the letter to the San Bento." The San Bento was only a small caravel, but it had already made multiple round trips between Macao and Manila. Not long ago, Vince had been drinking with its Portuguese captain in a tavern and learned that the ship was loaded with fresh sappanwood and Palawan bird's nests and would set sail within the next two days.

"Don't expect to sleep tonight. As long as the report can reach the Macao intelligence station, neither Jiang nor God Himself can find fault with our work."