Chapter 19: You Scoundrel!

Song Heping, who considered himself a professional, quickly realized just how unprofessional he really was.

A few minutes later, when the Cook drove the vehicle into the underground parking garage beneath the terminal and brought it to a stop, Angel rose and slapped Song Heping across the face.

“You bastard!”

Staring at the furious Angel, Song Heping shouted his protest. “Me? A bastard? Me?! I—”

When he was about to demand for the third time how exactly he had been “a bastard” to this idiotic woman, he suddenly noticed a bright red lipstick mark on the front of his trousers.

For fuck’s sake…

This…

He was rendered speechless.

It was like getting mud on your trousers in a suspiciously unfortunate place: even if it was not shit, it certainly looked like it.

He had pressed in the wrong place just now, and as a result, everything had gone horribly wrong.

White Bear had been holding in his laughter so hard that he was practically suffering internal injuries. He kept giving Song Heping covert thumbs-ups, infuriating Song Heping so much that he wanted to kick him again in the still-swollen area beneath his jaw.

Fortunately, Angel finally regained her senses.

The incident had truly frightened her.

She took a pack of cigarettes from her travel bag and tried several times to light one, but could not get the lighter to work. In the end, White Bear went over and lit it for her.

The Cook came over to comfort her. “This is an underground parking garage. A rocket launcher can’t hit us down here. All we have to do is wait. I estimate the attackers will stop in ten minutes or so.”

Every American military air base had counter-battery radar.

The equipment was highly effective.

The moment a shell was fired, it could track its trajectory and use a computer to rapidly calculate the location of the enemy artillery position.

Once the artillery position had been found, the airborne troops and ICDC units at the airport would send ground and aerial teams to the area.

At the same time, the American artillery stationed at the airport would launch a fierce counterattack with M110A2 self-propelled howitzers and M777 howitzers.

That was the standard procedure for defending the large American base in Iligo against shelling.

However, the members of the resistance were veterans of countless battles, each of them as sly as a fox. They had suffered enough at the hands of the Americans to know when to strike and when to withdraw, and would never remain in place waiting to be killed. As a result, the American counterattacks were usually not worth a damn.

Not worth a damn though they might be, the Cook knew that this kind of bombardment would last no more than ten minutes.

If you survived those ten minutes without being blown up, it meant you were temporarily out of danger.

That was why he had driven the vehicle in here for shelter.

Angel, now temporarily safe, was furious. She drew deeply on her cigarette, paced in circles in front of the vehicle while smoothing back her hair, and began making phone calls one after another.

She had barely stepped off the plane before being greeted by a savage artillery barrage. It had driven her nearly to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Before coming, Angel had made some effort to understand the general situation in Iligo.

She had expected danger, but not danger on this scale.

As soon as the call connected, she entered full ranting mode.

“Oh, shit! I had just gotten off the plane! I hadn’t even made it off the tarmac when the shells started coming! Oh, damn it! The Coalition Command keeps telling everyone they’ve got everything under control here! Everything under control, my ass! This is Baghdad! Baghdad! They can’t even protect this place… Damn this war!”

Angel’s furious complaints echoed through the underground parking garage.

Song Heping had not expected the striking, elegant-looking major newspaper reporter to use the word “shit” in nearly every other sentence.

Sometimes a beautiful woman did not bear close inspection.

Perhaps that was the reason.

“Oh, Daddy!”

Angel stopped in her tracks. She suddenly turned around and looked warily in every direction, as if she had discovered some unspeakable filth lurking in a dark corner of the underground parking garage.

“It must be people from Langley! They’re trying to kill me!”

She suddenly screamed.

At that, Song Heping could not help giving her a sympathetic look.

The poor foreign woman had clearly been badly frightened.

She had already begun babbling.

“It has to be them!”

Angel spun around, her eyes falling on the Cook, Song Heping, and the others.

Song Heping hurriedly turned away and went over to inspect the Pathfinder off-road vehicle.

Although he had never been in love, he remembered a lesson he had learned as a child from Uncle Li, the pig farmer who lived next door:

A woman in the middle of a breakdown was no different from a sow that had just given birth. You did not go near either one.

Uncle Li was blind in one eye, and he was also a bachelor.

Song Heping had been too young at the time to understand why a lifelong bachelor could possess such profound insight.

Only after he grew older did he learn that Uncle Li had once had a wife, and that in his youth, when he had been strong and vigorous, he had enjoyed a glorious period of being able to perform seven times in one night.

Unfortunately, in his early years, he had been bitten on the genitals by a sow that had just given birth and was suffering from a violent, overprotective rage. The injury had left him impotent. Later, during one of the furious outbursts his wife directed at him because of his impotence, she accidentally smashed a mirror into the corner of his eye. Shards of glass pierced his eyeball, leaving him blind.

His wife was gone, his sow was gone, his eye was blind, and his manhood was gone…

Song Heping felt that even Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai would have been moved to comfort Uncle Li after hearing such a tragic story.

Fortunately, Uncle Li had later taken Song Heping as his godson. When Uncle Li died during Song Heping’s first year of middle school, Song Heping had donned mourning clothes and observed the funeral rites, ensuring that the old man did not leave the world without anyone to see him off.

Fortunately, after a few seconds of thought, Angel finally realized that the rocket attack had nothing to do with the people in front of her.

Especially the mercenary who had just pinned her down in a place where he absolutely should not have placed his hands in order to protect her.

He had thrown himself over her without hesitation.

If he had been the one who tipped off the attackers and arranged the whole thing, then he would have been the first person killed by the Katyusha rockets.

Once her suspicions had been dismissed, Angel continued venting her fury on the person at the other end of the phone.

“I’ll make those bastards regret it! They want me to stop investigating? That’s impossible! Just wait and see! I’ll expose every filthy thing they’ve done to the entire world…”

During the more than ten minutes everyone spent sheltering from the barrage in the parking garage, Song Heping witnessed firsthand how a major newspaper reporter from the Land of the Free could smoke a cigarette while cursing like a fishwife.

These days, no one was nobler than anyone else. Especially in a war zone, once the splendid robes of the aristocracy were lifted, they might already be crawling with unspeakable lice.

There was only one thing he found strange.

Was she not supposed to be a famous reporter from the Washington Post?

What was going on?

A few shells had reduced her to this state?

She seemed very different from the seasoned war correspondents he had encountered in the Green Zone, the hardened veterans from media organizations around the world.

Like mercenaries, some reporters were officially employed, while others were freelance journalists—lone ghosts wandering wherever the news took them.

When fighting broke out, they would even rush farther forward than the soldiers themselves in order to seize valuable firsthand news.

Clearly, Angel’s courage did not resemble that of a seasoned war correspondent.

But if she was not a war correspondent, what had she come here to do?

Write a travel diary?

“It looks like it’s over. We can go out now.”

The explosions outside seemed to have stopped.

Only then did the Cook remember the ICDC soldiers.

“Sang, go bring over the people from the civil defense unit. We’re leaving this place and heading back to the Green Zone!”