Pow!

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.

    I took the tenth shell from the old man, but my plan changed before I could send it on its way. I'd been aiming at Lao Lan's imported Lexus. The car was parked in front of a modest building; Lao Lan was sleeping in the back seat, his driver in the front. I planned for the shell to crash through the windshield and blow up in Lao Lan's lap. Even if it turned out to be a peace projectile, its inertia alone would make a nasty mess of Lao Lan's belly, and his only hope for survival would be a complete stomach transplant. But just before I fired, the car started up, drove onto the highway and sped towards town. My first last-second plan change momentarily confused me but my desperation spawned a new one. With one hand I adjusted the direction of the mortar and with the other I dropped in the shell. The subsequent blast blew waves of heat into my face and, given all the powder inside, turned the tube red hot. It would have burnt the skin right off my hands if I hadn't been wearing gloves. The shell locked on to the speeding car and, I'll be damned, landed inches behind it as a sort of send-off for Lao Lan.

    The eleventh shell was slated for a longer journey. A peasant-turned-entrepreneur had opened a hot-spring mountain resort in a wooded area between the county seat and township