Chapter 217: The Firing Range

At dusk, the Count emerged from his study and ordered the coachman to harness the horses. He wanted to go for a stroll before dinner. He left wearing the same outfit as in the morning, but with the addition of a dark, hooded cloak. The carriage followed the seaside avenue, entered through the south gate of Manila, and exited through a gate on the other side of the castle. It sped along until it reached a mixed wood of banana and coconut trees next to a village, where it stopped. Weiss stepped out of the carriage and instructed the coachman to wait. He wrapped his cloak tightly around him, concealing a dagger, a telescope, and the CZ75 pistol that had been his constant companion throughout his mercenary career.

He passed through the mixed wood and then struggled through a dense thicket of leucaena, teak, and holly. Behind the thicket, a large bamboo forest had been completely felled, leaving only upturned bamboo roots on the ground, which opened up into a wide field. This must have been wasteland before, but now many of the waist-high wild plants had been cut down and lay on a carpet of tender grass and wildflowers. However, this natural carpet had clearly been damaged in many places. Much of the green grass was flattened beside deep ruts, and crushed petals were scattered about, as if the carpet had been torn, revealing the hempen backing.

Besides artillery carriages, Weiss couldn’t think of any other heavy vehicles that would deliberately come to this wasteland to drive over it repeatedly.

The ruts overlapped and crisscrossed, extending into a temporary road. The yellow-roofed, green-walled barracks he had seen earlier from the main road stood behind this road. With bamboo fences and thick thatched roofs of straw and banana leaves, these barracks were as simple as the farmhouses in the nearby village, only larger. They were no match for the sturdy stone barracks in Fort Santiago and had clearly been built in a hurry.

It was dinnertime, and the open area around the barracks was as noisy as a beehive. Short East Indian soldiers, dressed in shirts and baggy breeches, were all barefoot—the colony didn’t have enough shoes for its soldiers. They were ladling soup and stewed vegetables like taro from wooden barrels, eating either sitting or standing on the grass and by the roadside. Weiss adjusted the focus of his telescope and slowly scanned the area. A few spears leaned against the wall outside the main gate, but he didn’t see the cannons or other firearms he had expected. By the side of the path, two colorfully dressed Spanish sergeants stood drinking. A group of Tagalog children were also playing on the parade ground, running around the soldiers and the barracks. They must have been from the nearby village, hoping for some leftovers. A half-drunk Spanish sergeant kicked a child to the ground, and a burst of rough laughter immediately erupted.

At the end of the parade ground were several low hills. Through the telescope, they appeared strangely misshapen, riddled with craters. Some had wooden poles stuck in them, with red cloths that had been torn to shreds. One hill had already half-collapsed, with clods of earth and debris scattered far and wide. Weiss felt a thrill of excitement. The new artillery practice range on the outskirts of Manila must have a great deal to do with “Mr. Salamanca’s new toy.” As darkness fell, lamps were lit inside and outside the barracks. The soldiers, under the shouted orders of the sergeants, formed into small squares and began to practice drills. Weiss never saw them bring out any cannons. He put away his telescope and quietly slipped back through the thicket.

Relying on his morning’s impression, Rando found the village by the main road, which was close to the barracks and the training ground. He walked through the muddy paths between the farmhouses, escaping the encirclement of Tagalog village women enthusiastically selling taro, bananas, and home-brewed tuba wine. He beckoned to two children playing in the mud in front of a house and gave each of them a small biscuit. The effect was unexpected. After taking the biscuits, the two children disappeared in a flash. Five minutes later, he was surrounded by a dozen dirty children of various heights. Weiss questioned the children repeatedly in Spanish and his newly learned Tagalog dialect. The answers were to his satisfaction: a boy who looked the oldest said he had seen Spanish soldiers firing cannons on the training ground every morning. The cannons were short and thick, the boy said, gesturing with his mud-caked fingers, and “shone like new pesos.”

The former mercenary took out a string of “lead pieces”—the local daily currency, which were actually low-quality, privately minted coins like the sand-shelled coins of the Ming Dynasty. They were called copper coins, but actually contained almost no copper and were mainly lead. The Spanish and Dutch aptly called them “lead pieces.” They were not only thin and small, but also full of impurities, and would break if dropped on the ground.

Despite being such a debased currency, it was the most widely circulated small-denomination currency in Southeast Asia. Both the Spanish and the Dutch brought large quantities of silver, but for small-denomination currency, they relied entirely on Chinese copper coins. Silver pesos from New Spain were rarely seen in the market. Daily consumption and circulation, even among Europeans, were basically done with this low-quality currency.

Therefore, Chinese sea merchants transported large quantities of this debased currency to various parts of Southeast Asia for huge profits. As the monsoon season approached, the exchange rate of pesos to “lead pieces” would fall all the way. When the first Chinese merchant ship sailed into port, the rate would even plummet. And when the monsoon season was about to end and the Chinese sea ships began to depart one by one, the price of lead pieces would rise again. In every European colony in Southeast Asia, there were merchants engaged in this kind of currency exchange speculation.

Facing a sea of greedy eyes, he announced that whoever could go to the training ground and pick up the copper and iron fragments left after the cannon firing would get a string of “lead pieces.” By the time he had said this twice, the children had scattered in all directions. Weiss thought this was a good deal. For a few hundred coins, he got a large pile of shrapnel. He had to buy a rattan basket in the village and hire two villagers to carry the basket of scrap metal to his carriage.

The locally hired servants were puzzled. The Count, contrary to his usual habits, ignored a sumptuous dinner of roast duck and sherry. Upon returning to his villa in Malate, he ordered Ji Mide to carry a basket of dark objects from the carriage to his second-floor study and then asked the kitchen to bring him coffee and a few chicken pies. Finally, Mimi, as instructed, brought in a candelabra with six Australian candles lit. The study door slammed shut behind her, a sign that the Count did not wish to be disturbed.

Weiss put on cotton gloves, spread a bedsheet on the floor, and laid out the metal fragments from the rattan basket, counting them one by one.

Many of the pieces the children had collected were genuine scrap iron: rusty, broken horseshoes, fallen horseshoe nails, iron cladding from axles, and lead bullets from muskets. These were all pushed aside. A small section of a tubular fragment interested him. It was made of brass and looked very much like the impact fuze on a mortar shell, but unfortunately, the rest of it was gone. The most valuable finds were the large fragments at the bottom of the basket. He found that he could almost piece together a complete conical shell from the fragments he picked out. Among all the fragments, the entire base of the shell was preserved. Weiss moved closer to the candle and examined it over and over. He was astonished to find that this pot-lid-sized circular metal piece was actually composed of a sandwich-like structure—a thick cast iron base with a copper plate of the same caliber cast onto it, and under the copper plate, a slightly smaller thin iron plate. In the candlelight, the edges of the copper plate clearly showed the marks of rifling. To find an expanding driving band structure on a 17th-century artillery shell was a real shock to Weiss. As a former member of the US Army, he was no stranger to the 4.2-inch chemical mortar shell, which had a similar design.

Weiss emptied the rattan basket and carefully inspected every item, hoping to find a complete fuze, but to no avail. He began to re-examine the shell fragments. The shell walls were very thick, and a lot of black powder residue adhered to them. But both the inner and outer surfaces were very smooth, perhaps machined on a lathe after casting. The fragments were of various sizes, but overall, the fragmentation rate of the shell was not too high. A particularly large fragment caught his attention. It was about a quarter of the size of a shell and thinner than the other explosive fragments. The curved part and the base had been blown off. On the inner wall near the base, two grape-shot-like projectiles were stuck. Weiss pried them off with tweezers. The projectiles were iron, about the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun shell, and had a very rough surface. He moved closer to the candelabra. The rough surface was a layer of a black, sticky, dense substance that gave off a slightly pungent smell near the candle flame, like a mixture of asphalt and tar. This mixture had glued the spherical iron balls to the shell wall, and perhaps by chance, the heat of the gunpowder had not completely melted it. He found more than thirty other iron balls in the pile of scrap iron. They were easily distinguishable from the lead bullets fired from muskets; they were all the size of 12-gauge shotgun shells and had more or less the same black mixture adhering to their surfaces.

Weiss pondered for a long time, then suddenly jumped up and threw open the door. “Mimi!” he shouted downstairs, and saw his intelligence officer and maid running up the stairs, holding up her skirt. “Get the secret ink and the codebook ready,” he whispered.

“Sir, the monsoon season is over,” Mimi reminded him. All the Chinese merchant ships in Manila harbor had already returned. Only one Fujian ship, not yet fully loaded, was left behind. It would be at least five months before it set sail again.

“I will send the letter with the São Bento.” The São Bento was only a small caravel, but it had made many trips between Macau and Manila. Weiss had recently been drinking with its Portuguese captain in a tavern and had learned that the ship was loaded with fresh sappanwood and Palawan bird’s nests and would be setting sail within the next two days.

“Don’t expect to sleep tonight. As long as the report gets to the Macau intelligence station, neither Jiang nor God can find fault with our work.”