Chapter 431: Convinced

When the first transport ship carrying canned food departed from Taijiang and arrived in the seas off Tianjin after a journey of a thousand li, the time had already reached late February.

Taiwan at this moment was enjoying the best climate of the year. The temperature was neither cold nor hot, mosquitoes and insects were scarce, the vegetation had just begun a new round of luxuriance, and all things were reviving, brimming with green vitality.

Yet the north, a thousand li away, was still shrouded under the gales and frost of the Little Ice Age. The entire northern land was a scene of desolation; the mountain wilds were frozen, the barren plains bleak and dreary, and wherever the eye fell, remnants of snow covered the ground.

"Ptooey"—a grass stem was spat down beside a tree.

The one committing this uncivilized act was Mei Fuxi, Vice Captain of Flying Tiger Battalion A Company.

Young Master Mei no longer had the image of a young gentleman he'd had at the start. Over a month of high-intensity cavalry training had washed away his impetuousness, replacing it with a rough, hardened fierceness.

Mei Fuxi at this moment, dressed in a green army greatcoat, was sitting squarely on a tree stump like a lord, his leather boots planted in the slushy snow underfoot, his back against a tree. In his left hand he held a large gray military water canteen, in his right he clutched a meat patty, lazily alternating between a mouthful of water and a mouthful of patty.

Mei Fuxi's group was not large, numbering only eleven men in total, with twenty-two horses. Their current position was in the Hebei Plain, within a branch range of the Yan Mountains north of Tangshan.

The vast and majestic Yan Mountain system stretches eight hundred li from west to east, extending from Zhangjiakou in the north all the way to Shanhai Pass beside Bohai Bay. Since ancient times, it has been a crucial barrier for the Central Plains regimes to defend against the nomadic tribes of the north.

Going north from Jinwei City for one hundred fifty li, one reaches the southernmost detached remnant vein of the Yan Mountains. This remnant vein, counting from north of Tangshan, has a north-south width of roughly fifty li.

Between this branch range and the boundless mountain system of the Yan main range, there happens to be a flat corridor connecting Shanhai Pass and Beijing, which can allow large troops to pass through.

The cities and passes along this corridor, including Jizhou, Zunhua, Qian'an, Luanzhou, Santunying, and Xifengkou, are all strategic locations of vital importance, each heavily featured in the annals of history.

Now it was already late February of 1630, and the war situation across the entire Jingji Area had undergone a major shift.

Starting this month, the Eight Banners Army entrenched at the foot of Beijing began to turn around in succession. Huang Taiji personally led the elite troops, breaching the aforementioned towns and passes one by one, thereby guiding the main army back north.

The Eight Banners Army's need to thoroughly clear this corridor was born of necessity.

When they had previously entered the pass, the advance route of the Eight Banners' eastern and western armies had been to break through several passes on the Great Wall—Xifengkou, Longjing Pass, Da'an Pass—sending light troops into the interior, then opening up the two key nodes of Zunhua and Santunying, before pressing straight on toward Tongzhou and besieging Beijing.

Now, during the withdrawal, since the Banner troops had spent months plundering a vast amount of wealth, grain, and population in the Jingji Area, the army had become bloated and slow-moving. Huang Taiji therefore had to clear the entire rearward path to allow the slow-moving main force to pass through.

Thus, throughout the entire month of February, the corridor zone became packed with large numbers of Eight Banners troops, baggage trains, and captured Ming people.

At the same time, the Flying Tiger Battalion, having undergone a period of integration, saw its soldiers gradually push northward toward Tianjin as the entire unit's tactical skills improved and its confidence grew, extending its feelers into the area of the Yan Mountains' remnant veins.

The Flying Tiger Battalion's establishment was as follows: five hundred-man companies formed its basic structure. Each of these hundred-man detachments was further subdivided into one scout squad and nine ordinary cavalry squads.

The scout squad, called "Night Stalkers" among the Ming people, was usually led by the vice captain, who possessed superior tactical skills. The captain of each detachment, meanwhile, was filled by the more seasoned caravan guards.

These men had escorted caravans to Kouwai for years; they not only had a certain organizational ability but also knew how to assess the situation—perfectly suited to the higher-ups' current positioning of the Flying Tiger Battalion: playing a support role.

Mei Fuxi, a well-known "young hero" of Jinwei, had relied on his superb mounted skills from the very founding of this army to snag himself the position of vice captain.

He and the nine elite soldiers under him had undergone extremely rigorous training during this period. Because of their outstanding results, in this operation where the entire army advanced north into the Yan Mountains' remnant veins, the scout detachment subordinate to A Company took on the vanguard mission, appearing at the upper-left corner of the marching formation.

Just as Mei Fuxi, sitting in the winter-bare mixed woods, swallowed the last piece of his field ration, a faint "tap-tap" sound came from one side.

Without turning his head, Mei Fuxi knew a message had arrived.

What produced the "tap-tap" sound was an iron case wrapped in a patterned cloth cover. This gaudy iron case was carried on the back of a short, stocky special forces soldier, also dressed in patterned clothes.

The special forces soldiers, numbering only fifty in total, had been dispersed among the various cavalry squads to serve as supernumerary communications officers during the earlier training and reconnaissance phase. Thus, Mei Fuxi's scout squad, moving ahead of the main force, had naturally been assigned one.

This communications officer was none other than Chen Huoding, Chen Erye, a special forces soldier personally granted the military rank of Ensign by the National Scholar.

Chen Erye's official position at present was Captain of the Imperial Special Warfare Team, temporarily serving concurrently as the communications officer for Flying Tiger Battalion A Company.

Upon hearing the signal come through the backpack radio set, Chen Erye reached for the hand mic and earphone, then began muttering back and forth with the person on the other end of the signal.

The special forces team had brought two types of tactical radios on this northern operation.

One was the VHF single-soldier radio. The VHF band's frequencies are relatively strong in terms of diffraction and ground-wave propagation, but their penetrating power through buildings is poor, making them perfectly suited for short-range individual communications in mountainous or field combat.

In the pristine electromagnetic environment of the seventeenth century, the individual communication range for special forces soldiers moving through the Yan Mountains could generally be maintained at around 10 kilometers.

The other type was a 120W digital shortwave radio.

This one was used as a command radio. Once the high-wattage radio's antenna was set up, it could even achieve effective communication within 1,000 kilometers. Even if the communication range was affected within the mountains, this type of radio could fully support the communication network requirements of the entire Flying Tiger Battalion.

What Chen Huoding had just received was an enemy situation report sent by Qian Tieshan, the Special Forces Commander, from ten kilometers away.

"Everyone up, move out." After the brief voice call ended, Chen Huoding turned his head and spoke a few words to Mei Fuxi, who immediately stood up and ordered the squad to break camp.

The other nine squad members, hearing this, hurriedly began to strike camp: quickly stuffing the last mouthful of field ration into their mouths, packing up the feed bags hanging from the horses' necks, fitting the horses with muzzles to prevent neighing, and finally stowing the dual-fuel alcohol-and-kerosene stove.

The detachment's current position had already penetrated from south to north through the Yan Mountains' remnant veins northwest of Tangshan. A little further north, and they would be able to see the plain corridor near Zunhua. Therefore, the squad had to be extremely cautious when camping at this time, making no cooking smoke or loud horse neighs—Eight Banners scouts could appear nearby at any moment.

After striking camp in two minutes, everyone in the detachment put on thick gray face masks, then swung up onto their horses. The point soldiers secured the binoculars hanging on their chests, and under Mei Fuxi's simple hand-signal commands, the group spread out into a search formation and began slowly threading their way through the mountain ranges.

The entire search formation was as follows: two point soldiers on the left and right were responsible for advancing along and observing the ridges on both sides. In the valley between the two mountains, another two cavalrymen were responsible for clearing the path ahead, while the remaining men, bringing the replacement warhorses, followed a li behind.

This search formation was a pattern the Flying Tiger Battalion currently used quite often. It originated from the teachings of some border army soldiers—the Flying Tiger Battalion had quite a few retired border troops and deserters, and these men were thoroughly familiar with cavalry tactics among the northern mountain ranges.

In this regard, the southern soldiers, including the Transmigrators, were all students. That is to say, during this month-plus of integration, not only had the local natives received training, but the special forces team from the south had likewise learned a great deal about seventeenth-century cavalry tactics and marching details.

This sort of thing was not in the special forces training syllabus brought from later generations.

Yet even so, not long after training began, the Ming natives, including Mei Fuxi, all obediently accepted the special forces team's command, and no one dared to make trouble anymore.

Because the vast chasm in technology, knowledge, and equipment between the Ming people and the special forces soldiers was not something a bit of battlefield experience could bridge.

At the very beginning, many of the Auxiliary Soldier comrades were, in truth, somewhat unconvinced in private by this group of patterned-clothes personal soldiers who claimed to be Regional Commander Cao's personal guard.

Because aside from the sharp firearms in their hands, this group's riding skills were actually nothing special, and they were unfamiliar with the northern lands. Although the special forces soldiers had undergone riding training in the south, it had only barely reached a passing grade, and the gap between them and these northern cavalrymen was still very large.

However, once field training began, the natives quickly discovered the other side's superior qualities.

First was that set of patterned clothes. Whether on the plain or in the mountains, a special forces soldier wearing the black-yellow-green three-color northern camouflage could easily shake off a Ming person's line of sight.

This situation was especially obvious during mountain confrontations: the Ming elite soldiers, known as Night Stalkers, were frequently ambushed by special forces soldiers springing out from the roadside; if the distance was even slightly far, the Ming people simply could not spot these people.

Mei Fuxi would never forget the terror he felt when an arm suddenly shot out from a shrub beside him and seized him by the throat.

After learning how formidable this set of patterned clothes was, no one dared to underestimate the thing anymore.

Next was marching.

A cavalry unit armed with binoculars, walkie-talkies, and radios quickly routed the side without such equipment in confrontations.

Mei Fuxi was the type who would rather die than believe in such heresy. However, when his hundred-man company was inexplicably surrounded and ambushed by the numerically inferior opposing side, and was judged to have lost three times within a single day, he was finally thoroughly convinced of his defeat.

Last was night raids.

The patterned-clothes soldiers' terrifying night raids were completely unanswerable by the Ming people. In the mountain ranges, once night fell, unless the Ming people all went without sleep, they would be eliminated one and all by the special forces soldiers—the sensation of a cold dagger's blunt edge lightly scraping across the throat made the men of Tianjin shiver uncontrollably.

By this point, the Ming people finally understood the terror of these opponents, the patterned-clothes soldiers who came and went like ghosts, bearing dharma artifacts like "Shadow Night Eyes" and "Thousand-Li Sound Transmission."

In the days that followed, as the Special Operations Team members' horsemanship improved, their long-trained tactical competence quickly surpassed that of the Ming People.

Whether in hand-to-hand combat, continuous forced-march cavalry warfare, or the most fundamental, Strength Test-demanding Tactical Maneuvers like day-and-night ambushes, the Natives soon felt the special soldiers' tenacity and fearsomeness amid their constant complaints — they gradually realized that even without firearms, if these fifty Southern Soldiers were Intending to slaughter all five hundred of them, it probably wouldn't take three days.

From that point on, the Auxiliary Soldiers of the Flying Tiger Battalion submitted.