Translator: Sean88888 Editor: Elkassar1
Moan’s wife did not expect her men to be so easily beaten. After standing dazed for a few seconds, she suddenly screamed, but the scream turned out to be a disguise too. She quickly retrieved a pistol from under the counter and pointed it at Zi’s delicate face, about to pull the trigger.
That angered Zi. She pushed out with her palm, and half the counter burst into pieces. The launched bullet was nowhere to be found.
The fat woman rolled out from behind the counter like a meatball and knocked her head on the edge of a table. She remained motionless after that, apparently unconscious.
Party Ace searched the bar and actually found two kids upstairs. The kids looked at them with eyes full of hatred, like a bunch of wolf pups looking at human prey.
Sheyan had his principles. No matter how malicious their gazes were, the most he would do was laugh. Moan could not run from them anymore now that his wife and kids were in their hands.
But Sheyan had miscalculated this time. In any case, it wasn’t the first time he had miscalculated. His mistake was to predict Moan’s actions based on traditional Chinese concept.
99.9% of Chinese people would rush to the scene no matter the circumstances when they found out that their wives and children were held hostage. But Mr. Moan had as many as seven wives and more than 20 children. He regarded them as his assets, like his goat herd. Would a person risk their life for less than one sixth of their assets? It was obviously impossible.
That was where Sheyan’s reasoning had failed. After waiting for more than half an hour, they found that the people who came were not Moan and his underlings, but the local government troops who maintained the order in this place. They left without hesitation. They could have fought them, of course, but there was no point in doing so.
With no better option, Sheyan could only look for a place to browse the internet and make calls. Thanks to the base once again expanding in strength, they easily obtained another number they could call. An hour later, a fierce-looking man with a crew cut found them. He listened to their problem.
The man, nicknamed Scorpion, told them frankly that he couldn’t provoke the Zandala tribe of Benghazi. In fact, even the government forces that were stationed here dared not provoke the tribe and could only cooperate with them. Scorpion advised Party Ace to go home at once. He had the means to procure tickets for the earliest flight – not for free, of course.
Sheyan thought about it, but did not agree to Scorpion’s proposal. He asked Scorpion another question instead.
“Can you find Moan, then?”
Scorpion grinned and answered, “No problem at all.”
He also told them that he was willing to give them a 20% discount for the sake of the person who introduced him to them. Sheyan instead offered him three times the price with the condition that he finds Moan within two hours.
Scorpion seemed to be a very capable person. He immediately brought them into the military barracks in broad daylight, paying his way in with the money he had just gotten. Five minutes later, they set off driving the best off-road jeep in the barracks, a semi-old Dongfeng Warrior military jeep purchased from the Chinese military. Even on roads that were similar to tractor roads, the jeep still accelerated at a decent speed when it was put to the throttle.
The firepower on the jeep was also pretty impressive. An NSV heavy machine gun mounted on the jeep dragged behind it a long chain of bullets. The gun utilised the principle of gas-operated automation and had a unique machine offset locking mechanism. All firing points and bunkers within two kilometers were as frail as papers in front of it. Of course, the heavy machine gun was not cheap to use. It’s standard cartridges were BZ armour-piercing incendiary original rounds and BZT armour-piercing incendiary tracer rounds. According to Scorpion, each armour-piercing bullet cost five dollars and each BZT round cost eight dollars. It must be known that the NSV heavy machine gun fired at an astonishing rate of 700 to 800 rounds per minute!
“There are three possible places where Moan could be in right now,” Scorpion said while he grinned, exposing his snow-white teeth. “The brothel, the casino, or inside his own tribe. He’s probably heard by now that you’re looking for him, so he’s more likely to have returned to his tribe. But the other two places were along the way, so we can stop by them to check just to make sure. It won’t take too much time.”
***
They drove through crowded and backward streets with low, tattered buildings on both sides. There was simply no way the jeep could move fast here. It was no wonder that whenever people spoke of Africa, they would start from poverty and hunger. The poor suburban slums and simple dirt houses in the villages they saw were shocking.
Martuba had an airport, so it was already considered a relatively developed area. On the streets, the cigarette vendors actually broke open a 20-pack cigarette and sold them one by one. In the free market, cooking oil was sold by spoons. It was evident how low the purchasing power of the ordinary citizens here was.
When they arrived at the inner part of the city, Sheyan found that the whole city seemed to be built around several large-scale supermarket chains. Various restaurants, cinemas, gymnasiums and clothing stores surrounded the supermarkets. Moan’s casino and brothel were naturally built in this “central business district” too.
Sheyan was surprised to find that it was not easy at all to find a vacant parking spot in the huge parking lot here in the core area of the city.
He also caught glimpses of the great variety of goods sold in the supermarkets, but their prices seemed extraordinarily expensive. The posters on the walls showed the items currently on discount: a kilogram of peaches, USD $12; a plastic bowl, USD $8; even a rubber warm water bag cost USD $10. Yet the people inside were all shopping leisurely with their shopping carts piled full.
The poor were extremely poor; the rich were unbelievably rich. The absolute gap between the rich and the poor was, naturally, the root cause of the present civil war and turmoil.
There was no way they could enter the casino and the brothel peacefully, so they resorted to violence. Scorpion was pretty much just a bystander during the process. Sheyan knew that he was borrowing their strength to weaken Moan’s forces, with a view of replacing Moan, but Sheyan wasn’t that concerned. He did not care as long as Scorpion could find Moan within the time limit he promised. If he could not keep his promise though, he’s gonna get hurt real bad.
Having completed the sweep, the only result they got to show for it was that they were now quite sure that Moan had returned to his tribe. That was his den, his territory, where even a teenager could pose a threat to them. It didn’t matter that the finger which pulled the trigger belonged to a child, the bullet itself was still as lethal. Against ordinary people, that was.
The jeep raced across the plains of Africa. Since it had excellent cross-country performance, galloping directly on the grass was actually a better alternative to traveling on the crushed and bumpy dirt roads. Unlike most other vehicles, it did not have the problem of being bogged down by the mud.
After forty minutes of bumpy ride, a forest and a river appeared ahead of them, as well as a village that might as well be a refugee camp. The neatest buildings in this dilapidated place were the two watchtowers at the entrance of the village. They, of course, also served as machine gun towers.
Sheyan, who had already gotten impatient, straightaway pointed the NSV heavy machine gun at the watchtowers and poured $2,400 to $3,000 of bullets at them. Under normal circumstances, even permanent buildings with 5cm of reinforced concrete walls could not withstand the firepower of over 300 armour-piercing rounds, so the two wooden watchtowers naturally could not either. They were torn into pieces, and so were the sentries stationed on them.
The sudden attack did not cause the tribe to fall into disorder; after all, this was a place plagued by war. Their rich war experience enabled them to organise a counterattack in the shortest time possible. Everyone in the tribe instantly turned into soldiers, regardless of whether they were the men, elderly, women or children. After all, the bullets they fired were equally deadly.
However, the enemy they faced this time could never be defeated by bullets or gunpowder.
Fifteen minutes later, no more sounds of shooting could be heard. Even Scorpion’s face had turned blue. He was glad that he hadn’t put certain malicious thoughts in his mind into action. Otherwise, today would’ve been the day he died.
Ramtas silently dragged a man over. The man’s right hand had been hit by an armour-piercing bullet, so it was now crippled. The injury caused his dark skin to turn pale. He screamed and struggled and looked at Sheyan with furious eyes. Sheyan flashed him a faint smile.
“Mr. Moan? This is the first time we’ve met, but we’ve had a pleasant conversation over the phone before this. I apologise for the damage we’ve caused to you and your people.”
“Who are you? Are you that damn Yankee?” asked Moan in shock.
“That’s right, the damn Yankee who told you money that wouldn’t be a problem,” Sheyan replied with a smile. “I don’t know if you remember what I said before I bid you goodbye?”
Since Sheyan asked, Moan could only search his memory to recall the conversation. After a while, he finally mumbled, “You said I’ll be in huge trouble if I make you angry.”
“Bingo!” Sheyan nodded. “I always keep my words, while you….you took my money, but you didn’t fulfill your promise. So now you’re in huge trouble.”
Moan’s expression grew gloomy. He then shouted hysterically, “I’ll be in even bigger trouble if I offend the Zandala tribe from Benghazi! They’ll skin all of us alive!”
Sheyan’s face turn cold. “I don’t have time to waste on you. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, and there seems to be less than 400 people in your tribe. From this moment on, I’ll kill a person every ten seconds! You’ll go last. I’m going to make an exception to my principles today, because there seems to be only two kinds of people in this damn place: desperados and non-desperados!”
