Lao Lan's eyes snapped open. ‘Don't be afraid,’ he consoled her, ‘it's only Luo Xiaotong up to his old tricks.’
The fourth shell was aimed at Huachang's banquet room, a place with which I was very familiar. Lao Lan was hosting a banquet for every villager over the age of eighty. It was a generous act and possessed of immense publicity potential. The three reporters I'd met were busy with their cameras, filming the five old men and three old women. In the middle of the table sat an enormous cake with a line of red candles. A young woman lit them with a lighter and asked one of the old women to blow them out. Possessed of only two teeth, she tried her best to do so as the air whistled through the gaps in her gums. I held onto the fourth shell a bit longer, worried about hurting the old villagers, but this was no time to stop. I said a silent prayer for them and spoke to the shell, asking it to hit Lao Lan on the head! To kill him and no one else. The shell screamed out of the tube, streaked across the river, hovered briefly above the banquet room and then plummeted. You can probably guess what happened next, right? Right. It landed smack in the middle of the cake. Most of the candles were extinguished, all but two. Rich, buttery frosting flew into the old people's faces and covered the lenses of the cameras.
The fifth shell I aimed at the meat-cleansing workshop, the site of my greatest pride and deepest sorrow. The night shift was injecting water into some camels, each with a hose up its nose, making them look as strange as a clutch of witches. Lao Lan was giving the man who had usurped my position—Wan Xiaojiang—instructions; he was loud but not loud enough for me to hear what he was saying. The screech of the departing shell drowned out his words. Wan Xiaojiang, you little bastard, it was because of you that my sister and I had to leave our village. If anything, I hate you more than I hate Lao Lan, and if Heaven has eyes, then this shell has your name on it. I waited till I had calmed down a bit, then took several deep breaths and let the shell slip gently down the tube. It slipped out like a fat little boy who'd grown wings, flew towards its designated target, burst through the ceiling, landed in front of Wan Xiaojiang, smashed his right foot and then—POW! His bulging belly was carried away in the explosion but the rest of him was intact, like the quasi-magical handiwork of a master butcher.
Lao Lan was blown away by the blast and I blanked out. When I came to, the wretch had crawled out of the fouled water he'd landed in. Except for a muddy bottom, he was unmarked.
The desk of Township Head Hou was the target of the sixth shell. An envelope stuffed with RMB was shredded. It had been lying atop a sheet of reinforced glass under which the township head had placed photographs of him and several seductive transvestites—memories of his Thailand vacation. The glass was so hard it should have caused an explosion but didn't. Which meant that that particular shell was a peace projectile. What, you wonder, is that? I'll tell you. Some of the men who worked on this ammunition were anti-war. When their supervisors were not looking, they pissed into the shells. Though they gleamed on the outside, the powder inside was hopelessly wet, turning them mute on the day they left the armoury. There were many varieties of peace projectiles; this was but one. Another variety was stuffed with a dove instead of explosives, while yet another was filled with paper on which was written: Long live friendship between the peoples of China and Japan. This particular one was flattened like a pancake; the reinforced glass was shattered and the photographs of the township head were sucked into the flattened shell, as clear as ever, except in reverse.
Firing the seventh shell was agonizing for me because Lao Lan was standing in front of my mother's grave. I couldn't see his face in the moonlight, only the back of his head, like a glossy watermelon, and the long shadow he cast. The words on the headstone I'd personally placed at her tomb recognized me, and her image floated up in front of my eyes, as if she were standing in front of me, blocking my mortar with her body. ‘Move away, Mother,’ I said. She wouldn't. Her silent miserable stare felt like a dull knife sawing away on my heart. The old man, who was right beside me, said, ‘Go ahead, fire!’ Sure, why not? Mother was dead, after all, and the dead have nothing to fear from a mortar shell. I shut my eyes and dropped the shell into the tube. POW! It passed through her image and flew off weeping. When it landed, it blew her tomb into pieces so small they could be used as road paving.
Lao Lan sighed. ‘Luo Xiaotong, are you finished yet?’
Of course not! I slammed the eighth shell angrily into the tube, which was turned in the direction of the plant kitchen. The shells were beginning to fidget after the failure of seven of their brethren. This one turned a couple of somersaults in the air, which took it slightly off course. I'd intended for it to enter the kitchen through a skylight, because Lao Lan was sitting directly beneath it enjoying a bowl of bone soup, very popular at the time as a tonic for vitality, plus a good source of calcium. Nutritionists, who blew hot and cold over such things, had written newspaper articles and appeared on TV, urging people to eat plenty of calcium-rich bone soup. Truth is, Lao Lan was in no need of calcium, since his bones were harder than sandalwood. Huang Biao had cooked a pot of soup with horse-leg bones for him, spicing it up with coriander and muttony pepper to mask the gamey smell, even adding some essence of chicken. He stood there with his ladle while Lao Lan dug in, sweating so much that he had to remove his sweater and drape his loosened tie over his shoulder. I tried to wish the shell right into his bowl of soup or at least into the pot. Even if it didn't kill him, the hot soup would scald him raw. But that frisky shell went right into the brick chimney behind the kitchen and POW!—the chimney collapsed on top of the roof.
For the ninth shell, I took aim on Lao Lan's secret bedroom at the plant. A small room attached to his office, it was equipped with a king-sized bed whose new and prohibitively expensive linen was redolent with jasmine fragrance. The room lay behind a hidden door. Lao Lan had only to lightly press a button under his desk for a full-length mirror on the wall to slide open and reveal a door the same colour as the wall round it. After turning the key in the lock and opening the door, another button was pressed and the mirror slid back into place. Since I knew the location of the bedroom, I made my calculations, figuring in the resistance of moonlight and the shell's temperament to bring the probability of error down to zero and ensure that the projectile landed smack in the middle of the bed; if Lao Lan had company, then the woman had no one but herself to blame for becoming a love ghost. I held my breath, hefted the shell, which felt heavier than its eight predecessors, and then let it descend at its own pace. It slid out of the tube in a bright burst of light, soared to the very heights, then plummeted smoothly earthward. Nothing marked Lao Lan's secret room more clearly than the satellite dish he'd illegally installed. Silver-coloured and about the size of a large pot, it was highly reflective. And it was those reflections that temporarily blinded the shell's navigational system and sent it careening into the plant's dog pen, killing or maiming a dozen or more killer wolfhounds and blowing a hole in the barricade. The uninjured dogs froze for a moment before leaping through the opening as if waking from a dream, and I knew that a new threat to public safety had just been introduced in the area.