Chapter 1051 Heading to Hangzhou
According to the official establishment of the Ming Dynasty, the garrison of Ningbo Prefecture was actually divided into four guards. However, among them, Ningbo Guards were stationed in Fucheng and rarely went out for operations. Most of the jurisdiction of Dinghai Guards was in the Zhoushan Islands. Due to the civilian armed forces in this area, The power has been dominant for nearly a century, and the official guard system has long existed in name only, but the official positions of several thousand households have been retained. On the one hand, the troops stationed in various guards in the government can share the free pay of Dinghai Guards, and on the other hand, On the one hand, this official position can also be sold to armed smugglers in the Zhoushan Islands to facilitate their daily operations.
The leaders of the Haisha Gang and the Zhoushan Boat Gang who were wiped out by Haihan last year actually had official positions that could be purchased with money, such as deputies such as Trial Thousand Households. It was said that only two to three thousand taels of silver could buy a year's authority. However, this kind of empty position can only scare ordinary people, but it has no deterrent effect on Haihan, a foreign armed force that does not obey the laws of the Ming Dynasty. But with the military official position as a cover, smugglers can carry out many activities that were originally invisible to the public.
For Haihan, the real military threats to him are mainly the two garrisons of Changguo Guard and Guanhai Guard. After occupying Zhoushan, the various bribery methods he used were also aimed at these two guards, but it was easy to ignore almost all of them. Dinghaiwei, which only exists in theory. At this time, Gong Shiqi took the initiative to mention it, and Gao Qiaonan finally remembered that Ningbo Prefecture did have such a garrison establishment that had been seriously neglected. If you are pretending to be a member of the Thousand Household Tribune in exchange for donating money under the rule of Dinghaiwei, as long as you don't take the initiative to show off in Dusi Yamen in Zhejiang, the possibility of being exposed is indeed low.
Gong Shiqi continued: "As for the murderous aura in you, it can also be easily explained. Among those who have been running smuggling business at sea all year round, which one is a good person? Armed sea merchants are merchants on the front and pirates on the back. The seamen of Zhoushan Islands Shang, no one has a clean foundation.”
Takahashi Minami thought it was indeed reasonable. As long as he had a suitable identity, his military qualities could be reasonably explained. Although this official position is empty, it is more than enough to cope with the checkpoints entering and leaving Hangzhou.
After the topic came to an end, the two continued to review the candidates. By the time the interviews with dozens of candidates were completed, it was already midnight. Takahashi Minami wanted to stay with Gong Shiqi for a late-night snack, but Gong Shiqi declined, saying that he still had many things to do tomorrow and had to go back early to rest. Just keep your spirits up.
The next day, personnel screening and other preparations continued simultaneously. The Ministry of Security must prepare relevant personal identification documents, clothing, medicines, tools, weapons and other personal belongings for this operation, as well as the most important command and liaison system for distribution arrangements to ensure that these personnel can maintain a unified pace of action during the Hangzhou operation. .
After the list of personnel participating in the operation is determined, the Ministry of Security will also invite practitioners from relevant industries to provide short-term training to these personnel. In Hao Wanqing's words, "Even if you are a driver, you have to look good." This puts forward higher requirements for the identity disguise of the participants. Of course, this requirement is not only to ensure the success probability of the operation, but also to provide better protection for the personal safety of the participants.
On June 2, the list of personnel participating in the operation was basically determined. The field team of the Ministry of Security will dispatch 15 people including Gong Shiqi, plus the three people who have been lurking in Hangzhou, for a total of 18 people. The military will dispatch 35 people, including Gao Qiaonan, ten of whom are from the special operations battalion, and the rest are from other troops. Except for Gao Qiaonan, all of them are from Zhejiang.
At this time, Gong Shiqi discovered that there was another obvious flaw in Gao Qiaonan, which was his accent. Although Gao Qiaonan has served in Haihan for many years and can speak fluent Chinese, he learned standard Haihan Mandarin, which is more inclined to the accent of the northern Central Plains area, and is still significantly different from the dialects of the Jiangsu and Zhejiang generations.
It is definitely too late to start learning slowly. Fortunately, Gao Qiaonan has been in Zhoushan for a year and can understand most of the common Jiangsu and Zhejiang accents. There will not be any big problems in ordinary communication with others. After much deliberation, Gong Shiqi added another aspect to Gao Qiao Nan's character - he was born in Yongping Prefecture, Hebei Province. In this way, he found a more reasonable explanation for his northern accent. The Zhoushan Islands were originally a mixed place. Not only were people from all over the Ming Dynasty, but also Westerners from Far Eastern countries and even Europe. It was not unusual to be from North China.
The fifty-three people who have been selected are the core personnel directly involved in the operation, but they are not all the personnel to be invested in this operation. During the period, the crew members who sailed for them between Hangzhou and Zhoushan were also from the navy. In addition, The Ministry of Commerce and other relevant departments also have some personnel who need to participate in varying degrees at various stages of the action, and the number of personnel mobilized for this purpose is more than a hundred.
The group of people who will sneak into Hangzhou will be disguised as crew members, waiters, porters, wandering monks, businessmen, Ming officers, etc., and divided into multiple independent action teams. The personnel of the military and the Ministry of Security are also mixed according to the actual situation, and the personnel with these two identities are not completely distinguished.
The leading figures responsible for commanding and coordinating operations on the front line are Gong Shiqi and Gao Qiaonan. Gong Shiqi's pseudonym is Gong Qi, pretending to be a maritime merchant from the Lingnan area who comes to Hangzhou to purchase goods, while Gao Qiaonan's pseudonym is Qiao Nan, pretending to be a trial worker under Ningbo Fuding Haiwei, and his other identity is from Zhoushan Maritime merchants engaged in smuggling trade in the islands.
Both identities make it easier to appear in public with a group of servants without arousing suspicion. Among the more than fifty people who entered Hangzhou, half of them would be with them, ready to listen to their orders at any time.
Originally, Wang Tom also considered whether to allocate a set of radio stations to the operators and let them bring them into Hangzhou for use to facilitate communication with the base and transmit information. However, both Gao Qiaonan and Gong Shiqi actively rejected this somewhat risky arrangement. . When using existing radio stations, the antenna must be set up high, otherwise the transmission distance will be very limited, and it will be easily exposed when used in the densely populated city of Hangzhou. Not only will it not be effective, but it will easily cause you to get burned.
As for weapons, the Ministry of National Defense provided great support this time and issued revolver-type flash cap pistols to all personnel involved in the operation. This five-shot revolver is currently only issued to military officers above the company level. Although it still has many shortcomings in performance, it is still much more advanced than the single-shot muskets of this era. The firepower output level of several armed personnel equipped with such pistols at close range can be said to be no less than the rotational shooting tactics of an infantry platoon.
This time, Takahashi Minami also saw various special service equipment equipped by the field team of the Ministry of Security, including various drugs and poisons used for assassinations and kidnappings, syringes that can launch flying needles, barbed nets, and tools used to fly over walls and walls. Seven or eight large wooden boxes were packed here and there, including grapples, rope ladders, etc.
"With so many things, just these boxes of medicine are enough for you to kill half of the people in Hangzhou, right?" Gao Qiaonan looked at the equipment being packed and couldn't help but joked to Gong Shiqi. Gong Shiqi said with a smile: "It would be great if it was that easy. We don't have to bother Battalion Commander Gaoqiao to dispatch us. We can just load up a boatload of poison, run to the upper reaches of the Qiantang River and scatter it into the river, killing all the people in Hangzhou Prefecture." Once the time comes, wouldn’t it be nice to go into the city and take away the person you want to arrest?”
After the two of them finished speaking, they couldn't help but look at each other and smile. Before this, each of them had performed many arduous tasks, but this trip to Hangzhou was a brand new challenge for them. Although the risk of action is high, success or failure will have a greater impact on Haihan. Although there is currently no complete certainty of success, and many details need to be planned slowly after arriving in Hangzhou, these two people are determined people, and they will continue to work hard. After arriving at the mission, he made up his mind to make some achievements in Hangzhou, so that the northward strategy planned by the senior management could proceed smoothly.
After the candidates were determined, Gong Shiqi and Gao Qiaonan took these people for a week of special training on Zhoushan Island, mainly to practice some of the most basic tactics, and in the process, participants from different departments could interact with each other. Become familiar. Of course, during this period, everyone, including Gong Shiqi and Gao Qiaonan, changed their names to each other to avoid inadvertently exposing their flaws after going to Hangzhou.
Hao Wanqing and Qian Tiandun also took time to provide guidance at the training ground in the past few days. Although they will not go to the front line to command operations in person, their nervousness will not be much less tense than that of their subordinates who are about to go to Hangzhou.
On June 8, Zhoushan received a telegram from Sanya. The second batch of materials and personnel required for the northbound operation had been shipped from Sanya. This batch of supplies mainly includes various building materials and daily necessities, including cotton-padded jackets and quilts needed by those heading north to spend the winter in the Jiaodong Peninsula, as well as nearly 20 shiploads of clean coal and grain. Since the reconstruction of the Jiaodong Peninsula after the war was very slow and there was a shortage of various materials including food, more than half of the materials needed by the people going north had to be shipped from the south, and this situation would last for at least three to Five months later, after the troops heading north consolidated their control area and reorganized material production, the supply pressure was expected to be relieved to some extent.
As for the second batch of personnel rushing to Zhoushan, Zhejiang, in addition to the first battalion of new troops who came to replace the existing garrison, there were also non-military personnel who were to accompany the large army to the north, including civil affairs cadres, businessmen, doctors, and people from various industries. Professional craftsmen and so on. Although the number of these people is not large, they are an indispensable force for Haihan to establish a base in the north.
Most of this fleet are heavy-loaded cargo ships. They will also supply supplies and ship some materials and personnel in Hong Kong and Penghu on the way, so the speed of traveling north will not be too fast. According to the estimates of the Ministry of Shipping, at least in February It will take ten days to arrive in Zhoushan. However, once the fleet arrives in Zhoushan and settles down, it will basically be time for the large force to head north. Otherwise, with such a team of several thousand people piled up on Zhoushan Island, there would be no return on the huge daily expenses, which would definitely be a very uneconomical deal for Haihan.
This means that there are only about 20 days left for the joint action team to go to Hangzhou to complete the mission. If the operation does not go smoothly, the base in Zhoushan will probably become as crowded as a refugee camp this summer. If it is delayed for too long, the operation to the north will not even be implemented within the year. The executive committee in Sanya will not be able to understand the difficulties faced by the Zhejiang garrison. After military expenses, the responsibility for mission failure can only be placed on the military. Even military bosses such as Wang Tom, Qian Tiandun, and Shi Diwen would find it difficult to bear this result.
At this time, Tom Wang brought everyone some good news. He personally went to the local shipyard in Zhoushan as a supervisor and spent five days installing a radio on a ship that was about to be sent to Hangzhou. After the joint action team arrives in Hangzhou, the ship can dock at the dock in Hangzhou Bay and regularly report the status of Hangzhou City to Dinghai Port.
Of course, just installing the radio station didn't actually take that long. The construction period in the past few days was mainly spent on camouflaging the antenna. Wang Tom ordered the craftsmen to carve a groove on the mast, pull the antenna up along the groove, then mix wood chips with glue, fill the groove to fix the whip antenna, and then paint and polish the outside. After completion If you don't get close and touch it with your hands, it will be difficult to find the small hands and feet that have been moved on the mast.
Wang Tom spent another day debugging the invisible antenna with a standing wave table. In this way, the radio station can be hidden in the bottom cabin, and the communication staff uses a hand-cranked generator and a battery to replenish power, and it can operate 24 hours a day. It is possible to contact the Zhoushan base camp, and it is difficult for the outside world to discover the secrets of this spy ship. The ground wave signal emitted by the shortwave radio station on the ship can travel along the surface for about a thousand kilometers. Under normal weather conditions, there will be no problem in transmitting messages between Hangzhou and Zhoushan.
"The workmanship is good!" After Qian Tiandun and Shi Diwen went to the dock for inspection, they were full of praise for Wang Tom's transformation results.
Tom Wang himself is also quite satisfied with this work: "In the future, we can make similar spy ships wherever there are ships, and we no longer have to worry about the timeliness of information."
"You don't have to wait for the future, this operation will be of great use!" Qian Tiandun couldn't hide his excitement: "With this ship, we can get information feedback from Hangzhou City every day and issue information to frontline personnel. Order, this is much better than waiting nervously for news in Zhoushan.”
With various projects in preparation, the departure time of the joint action team has finally arrived. On June 12, a fleet of four ships left the port before the morning fog had dispersed and headed towards Hangzhou Bay.
(End of chapter)