In the reed marshes, blood-soaked mud clung to their trouser legs. Song Xuanyuan held his Mauser against the back of Liu Tiezhu’s head, the safety already off.
Forty-seven hours. His brother, who had carried him all the way from the Northeast through Japanese lines, had been missing for forty-seven hours. By the rules, if they could not wait another sixty minutes, no trial was needed: the bullet would be his verdict.
“Second Brother, I didn’t do anything.” Liu Tiezhu grinned, blood frothing between his teeth. “I only stole your watch. I wanted to send it home so my mother could see it.”
Song Xuanyuan’s finger curled around the trigger. In the distance, a Japanese gunboat’s searchlight swept over the tips of the reeds. Beneath the ferry crossing were 300 crates of detonators and 120 wounded soldiers. If the gunboat came ashore, the entire supply line would be exposed.
He had to decide within the time it took an incense stick to burn: kill his brother to protect the crossing, or let him go and gamble on that one-percent chance he was innocent.
But he was no ordinary member of the resistance squad. A special forces veteran’s instincts fixed on the gunshot wound in Liu Tiezhu’s left shoulder. The bullet’s angle was fifteen degrees off. It hadn’t come from a Japanese Type 38 rifle, but from a Nationalist Army Zhongzheng rifle.
Song Xuanyuan hoisted a dying puppet soldier prisoner onto a wild jujube tree and asked only three questions. The name the prisoner gave was lying on a stretcher just three meters away.
The real turncoat was Lin Mubai, the medic. He had traded morphine for Liu Tiezhu’s life, then traded Liu Tiezhu’s life for intelligence about the crossing. Meanwhile, Sato Keiko had already led the military police along the markers left by the puppet army and into the mountain hollow.
Tonight, Song Xuanyuan would make the traitor understand one thing: the resistance squad’s bullets never kill their own.
But the elite platoon, whose men had all been killed while drawing the enemy into a feint attack, would never hear those words.
