Chapter 154: Chaos in Shenyang (6)

There is just one thing: having transitioned so recently from the orderly pre-apocalyptic era, any faction that isn't genuinely looking out for the country and its people simply cannot pull this off. Once order completely collapses in the future, it will be hard to tell whether good people or bad people are muddying the waters.

With a wave of his hand, the special operations soldiers dispersed widely, rapidly crawling forward across the ground without kicking up a single speck of dust. Whenever a searchlight swept past, they froze in place. As they neared the vanguard, they slowed their pace. For the final two hundred meters, they crawled for nearly three hours, not infiltrating the rebel defense lines through a sparsely guarded spot until four o'clock in the morning.

The spies were also startled by the intense gunfire. After observing the situation, they hurriedly began crawling forward from a different direction—the only difference being that they were discovered just as they neared the front lines.

Before the enemy could open fire, the gray-haired American shouted at the top of his lungs, "I am an old friend of Mayor Wu, and I've come to join him!"

Mayor Wu had friends from all walks of life, and the fact that even a foreigner had come to defect greatly impressed his subordinates. Consequently, they were treated with courtesy and brought directly to Mayor Wu's side.

Upon seeing them, Mayor Wu demanded, "Why don't I recognize you?"

Before his voice had even faded, a dense array of black gun barrels aimed squarely at the three international spies.

Mayor Wu violently thrust his fist toward them and roared, "Bastards! How did I train you?! You are supposed to be friendly to foreign friends!"

The gray-haired American showed no panic. With a reserved, faint smile, he kept his mouth shut and smiled silently.

Mayor Wu's expression shifted drastically. Ordinarily, when facing his rank-and-file subordinates, he always maintained an erect posture and a stern expression, softening only occasionally into mild friendliness toward his direct underlings.

Now, however, his face bloomed with smiles, his eyes crinkled into mere slits, and he lowered his head, bowed his body, and greeted them deferentially, "You have come in person. It must have been a tiring journey."

Sidling up with one hand extended like a bellhop ushering a guest into a hotel, he spoke in a hurried, urgent tone, "Please, come inside and take a seat."

In the underground command center in Shenyang, Li Qiang gazed at the massive military electronic map. Qipan Mountain was marked with two concentric circles: the outer red ring represented the Special Committee's forces, while the inner black circle denoted the rebel Wu Nianfu.

Several arrows bypassed Shenyang and extended outward along the densest railway network in the entire country across Northeast China.

Benefiting from northern geological and weather conditions, the railways in the Northeast had suffered almost no damage in the months following the apocalypse. In contrast, many southern and mountainous railways had been washed out by swollen rivers and mudslides after the summer rainy season, and the Special Committee had received numerous reports concerning armored trains in this regard.

Li Qiang ordered that, aside from the half a million troops encircling Shenyang, the remaining nearly 2.4 million soldiers of the Northeast Expeditionary Army fan out in all directions along the northeastern railway network.

Using the north-south Harbin-Dalian Line and the east-west Binzhou and Binsui Lines as a "T"-shaped skeleton, they extended along more than seventy railway trunk lines and branch lines.

The major railway arteries in the Northeast included the Shenyang-Dandong Line, the Shenyang-Jilin Line, the Siping-Qiqihar Line, the Changchun-Tumen Line, the Harbin-Jiamusi Line, the Northern Binzhou Line, the Tongliao-Ranghulu Line, and lines leading to the forest regions such as the Nenjiang-Greater Khingan Line and the Yiling-Greater Khingan Line.

Among them, the Harbin-Dalian Line ran longitudinally through the entire Northeast, traversing the fertile Songliao Plain and connecting the three provincial capitals of Harbin, Changchun, and Shenyang with the seaport of Dalian, spanning a length of 946 kilometers.

The Binzhou Line started from Manzhouli in the west, passed through Hailar and Qiqihar in the middle, and reached Harbin, covering 956 kilometers.

The Binsui Line ran from Harbin through Mudanjiang to Suifenhe, measuring 381 kilometers.

The Binzhou and Binsui Lines connected with the Russian railway system at Manzhouli and Suifenhe respectively, serving as vital east-west transportation arteries in northern Northeast China.

In the blink of an eye, it was January 2016. Following several heavy snowfalls across the Northeast, heaven and earth became a vast expanse of white. Aside from a few trunk lines cleared for transportation, all other roads were buried under thick snowdrifts, making it impossible to distinguish roads from ditches. The climate had turned bitterly cold.

After minor initial contact with the Northeast Expeditionary Army, the zombies across the Northeast fled en masse into mountain ranges such as the Greater Khingan Mountains, Lesser Khingan Mountains, and Changbai Mountains. With rugged mountain trails frequently choked by drifts of snow as deep as a man, mechanized armed forces could not be deployed for clearance, and sending individual infantrymen would simply be feeding meals to the zombies.

Other zombie hordes fled across the border. The troops of the Northeast Expeditionary Army were currently stationed at the borders with Russia and North Korea; they had not blown up the bridges, and long before their arrival, many zombies had already fled across the bridges toward Russia.

According to reports from surviving border guards, the boundless hordes of zombies surged across the cross-river bridges for over half a month before finally thinning out. An estimated 20 to 30 million headed toward Russia, while another 10 to 20 million made their way to the Korean Peninsula.

This report filled Li Qiang with intermittent worry, yet he could not help feeling a malicious sense of schadenfreude. Damn those Russian bullies for seizing Chinese territory—staging atrocities like the Sixty-Four Villages Massacre in the modern era, and even now treating Chinese laborers and farmers like dirt. Well, you've got guts; use your abandoned, depopulated military bases to drive them back yourselves.

The South Koreans could also have a real blast. Given their already high population density, the influx of these Chinese zombie hordes—seasoned with rich combat experience—would certainly make things chaotic enough.

For the first time, Li Qiang felt that the zombie crisis, if handled properly, could actually have its benefits. When Li Fengyi learned of his inner thoughts, he remarked leisurely, "Misfortune may be a blessing in disguise, and blessing may lurk within misfortune!"

Li Qiang felt the saying was pitch-perfect.

Li Qiang urgently ordered the construction of comprehensive defensive fortifications along the entire Sino-Russian and Sino-North Korean borders. Blasting the bridges was useless; it was already the dead of winter in the north, cold enough to freeze dripping water into ice. All northern rivers were beginning to freeze over, especially in the Northeast, where numerous zombies were frozen solid right on the ice, frozen in aggressive postures unable to move, only to be picked off one by one by the soldiers.

When the Special Committee originally demanded the blockade of national transport arteries, it had also secretly instructed the surviving troops stationed at border ports to keep the main transport routes leading abroad unobstructed.

Reconnaissance posts and electronic surveillance equipment facing the border penetrated roughly 100 kilometers deep into Russian and North Korean territory. Several border cities in Russia and North Korea had already been wiped out by their own domestic zombie hordes combined with the swarms flooding over from China; no one interfered with the establishment of China's long-range early warning defense line.

None of China's neighboring countries matched its population density. If any nation dared to protest Chinese zombies crossing the border, they were welcome to round them up and escort them back themselves. If they expected the Chinese to round them up and return them, that was fine too—once they freed up their hands after a while, they would go lend a hand.

India, of course, possessed vast potential, but Li Qiang doubted the Indian zombie hordes would be enthusiastic about scaling the Himalayas to enter China.

The zombie hordes that fled into the mountain ranges remained a significant source of concern. By calculation, excluding those that escaped across the borders, approximately 70 to 80 million zombies had fled deep into the mountains.