Chapter 42 The Railway Station
Liang Hong is also shooting frantically. The newly acquired rifle is really a rare good gun, and the feeling of accuracy is like holding your own old sniper.
Crazy catharsis, one life after another was like target paper in his eyes, until he heard the shouts of his companions around him. Looking around, Fang Cai's slaughter actually made the biochemical warriors who rarely had mood swings feel excited, and it was difficult to suppress the pleasure of killing in their bloodshot eyes.
Did I just do that? He suddenly realized that this was not a target, but a slaughter of lives, and lives that had basically lost the ability to resist. A voice in the back of his head said that these bio-warriors should not be turned into bloodthirsty killing machines, let alone made these bio-warriors even bloodier. But immediately another voice retorted: pedantic! There is still a fight here, and being soft-hearted is trampling on the lives of oneself and one's comrades.
The argument of the two voices seemed to tear his head to pieces, Liang Hong felt that his head was swollen and painful, and waved his hand to stop his subordinates who wanted to continue to mend guns one by one. There is no need for too many senseless killings.
Chomba lies on his stomach on the icy streets, as if life has just gone through the worlds of earth and hell. When he heard those howls, he felt that he was waiting for the judgment of the devil, but fortunately the leader of the devil was still human, and he returned to the earth.
At the Kimberley train station, which was only five or six hundred meters from the scene of the firefight, the stationmaster Smith hid behind a second-floor window and witnessed the brutal massacre that had just taken place.
"Quick, send the report, there is a firefight in Kimberley, and it will be captured."
He rushed down the stairs and broke into the telegraph room on the first floor, yelling at the messenger hidden under the bed. Liang Hong and the others cut off the line from the Kimberley Telegraph Office to the outside world, but they did not know that the railway telegraph was a separate line.
The frightened dispatcher crawled out from under the bed, manipulated the machine, and began to call Cape Town, which was 800 kilometers away.
In this era, there were two kinds of telegraphs: manual and automatic, and the manual telegraph was made by a person to press the electric key to form a signal, and the receiving end listened to and copied the newspaper. The sender of an automatic telegraph machine uses a special drill machine to chisel the message to be sent into a punched paper tape and then sends it out with a fast machine.
The Kimberley railway station still uses manual transmission and reception, and the dispatcher is an experienced veteran who can translate the message on the spot.
At this time, Liang Hong and his people were also running to the train station, carrying the looted property and ammunition. If you evacuate in a carriage all the way, it is easy to be found, or even caught up by the pursuers on the train. So, he also aimed at the railway, intending to grab the next train and drive away.
In the distance, he saw the lights on the first floor of the train station, and then the telescope appeared in the window of the dispatcher. He was already very expert at playing with the transmitter, and immediately judged that it was sending a telegram, and immediately picked up his rifle and aimed it at the window to shoot.
When the bullets were fired, he was quite remorseful, and this operation exposed a lot of problems, most of which were due to intelligence. The spies created by Bond's system do not know the current situation in South Africa, for example, they can't imagine that South African companies will have a transshipment vault, they can't imagine that Rhodes will have soldiers stationed in his home, and they can't imagine that there are telegraph lines at the railway station in front of them.
Before the shot, the dispatcher had already sent half of the message: there was an exchange of fire in Kimberley. Before the code behind it could be struck, the bullet shot through the glass and hit the torso, and the murderous dummite directly smashed the internal organs on one side. I was shot, and this was the last set of codes in the life of the dispatcher.
Stationmaster Smith watched in amazement as the dispatcher fell, and then saw a caravan of horses coming galloping outside the window.
There were not many guards at the small railway station in the colony, and the symbolic two policemen did not know where to hide for a long time.
"What are the contents of the telegrams that have been sent?"
Liang Hong asked the stationmaster Smith, twice in English and Dutch, but received no answer, and the stationmaster footnoted the silence with a hostile gaze.
The transmitter was smashed to shreds, and Liang Hong turned around to look for the running train, he didn't have time to spend here.
"Boss, what about this person?"
The questioner was Hora, the title of head was limited to the special forces, and the little guy was pointing a pistol at Smith's head.
"Whatever"
I didn't look back, and I answered very casually. It can really be casual, it's quite hateful but not threatening, Liang Hong has no heart to spend on him. It doesn't matter if you tie them up, take them up, beat them up, or even kill them if you resist.
As soon as he stepped out of the room, he heard a gunshot behind him and looked back into the room. The diminutive Hora was proudly raising the Mauser pistol in her hand and shaking.
"Kill another white demon!"
Hearing this, Liang Hong almost fell on his heels. He knows that Hora hates white people, but it's a little scary to kill white people. He didn't even know if he had done something wrong to let this little guy pick up a gun.
At 6:50 a.m., the train held hostage by the special detachment departed south, and the white train driver and the black stoker were forced to operate at gunpoint. The steam locomotive had only five carriages in front of it, loaded with munitions, horses, and wagons.
At seven o'clock in the morning, far away in Rhodes, Cape Town, I saw a telegram that had been sent urgently:
There was an exchange of fire in the Kimberley, and I was shot.
The newspaper was white, but he read between the lines the blood.
"Rubbish", he was cursing the guys who stayed in that city.
The defeat of the newly sent expeditionary force by the indigenous Africans made him once again the laughing stock of white society. Fortunately, at the end of April, the Americans attracted the public's attention with more fiery actions, and the Spanish-American War broke out.
"Send a telegram to Warrenton and tell them to send someone to the Kimberley right away to find out what's going on there."
He instructed the steward that Warrenton, a small town north of the Kimberley, was also under the jurisdiction of the South African Company. The Kimberley is where he made his fortune, and he must not allow chaos to arise there. When he came to South Africa to join his eldest brother who was a farmer, he was just in time for Kimberley to discover diamonds and dig his first pot of gold there. It was also in the Kimberley that he had what would become the glorious De Beers Diamond Mining Company, which made his first 100,000 pounds, a million pounds. From his humble beginnings in Kimberley, he established the South African Gold Mining Company and the South African Company with colonial concessions.
But now, he's struggling. Politically reliant on the support of the British Liberal Party, his key business partner, Lionelro Schild, was the father-in-law of former Liberal Prime Minister Rosbury. But after Rosebury's departure in 1895, he was doomed. The Jameson Expeditionary Force lost official British support and suffered a crushing defeat. For a time, he and Britain became the laughing stock of the whole world, and in order to shirk responsibility, the Conservative Party-run Whitehall removed him from the post of prime minister of the Cape colony, and then many political allies also left him. The Boers had come to regard him as a mortal enemy, and the Afrikan Association, which had supported his election as Prime Minister of the Cape, had no prospect of reconciliation with him. Although he retained the charter of the South African company, the interests of the South African company were being eroded by the British government.