That was Trench all over. No praise, no big talk about golden futures—just benefits you could see and put in your pocket.
Now that was a proper mercenary commander!
Why would you talk to mercenaries about love of country, about faith and mission, about selfless sacrifice?
If mercenaries had patriotism and faith, they'd just go join a regular army, wouldn't they?
"I guarantee the mission gets done!"
Chen Ge took on the difficult assignment.
His eyesight was acknowledged by everyone; nobody would think twice about him spotting a drone at long range.
Ten thousand rubles came to roughly 140 dollars, but he didn't want to see any drones—not a single one. Go bomb someone else, please.
He had already witnessed two FPV kamikaze attacks today, and he had plainly felt how savage the Russo-Ukrainian battlefield was.
Bakhmut, forty kilometers to the northeast, was even more of a hell on earth. Even if he was a spider spirit with extraordinary power, against a swarm of drones he would die all the same.
"Mount up! We have to reach the designated assembly point before twelve!"
Trench patted Chen Ge's shoulder again, turned, and ordered them to move out.
They all climbed back aboard and the convoy rolled on. Rock took out a pack of Classic 1956, pulled out a cigarette and handed it to Chen Ge, then lit it for him with a BRIG Turbo camouflage lighter.
Chen Ge asked, puzzled, "Since when do you smoke these too?"
"Huaxia flue-cured tobacco is strong. Hits the spot!"
Rock lit one, took two deep drags, and passed the half pack to Piano beside him. It went from hand to hand, and everyone lit up except the two who didn't smoke.
Chen Ge tipped his head back and watched the sky, turning his head left, right, forward and back, serving as a human radar.
Leaning against the side of the truck bed was awkward, so Rock pulled the rucksacks apart in the middle and had Chen Ge sit in the center.
Chen Ge's mouth twitched a few times. He shifted over and leaned back comfortably against the rucksacks.
Nobody spoke, for fear of distracting Chen Ge.
After twenty minutes on the road, Chen Ge got a little bored and absentmindedly opened his waist pouch to get out some chewing gum. Everyone assumed he was reaching for his phone, and all of them fixed him with a look that said, Don't get distracted, I'm scared.
Chen Ge's scalp prickled. He badly wanted to say, Could you all not do that? I'm scared too!
Just then a sharp horn sounded behind them. A convoy overtook them and raced past.
Its truck bed had no canvas cover either, and it was packed with soldiers who did not look friendly.
Convict soldiers?
Rock flicked his cigarette butt away with a finger; it flew off and landed on the road. "These K-soldiers are meat shields," he said. "They don't last seven days on the battlefield."
K-soldier was the everyday term inside Wagner. K stood for Katorga, meaning penal laborer; they were also called Zeki—jailbirds.
Wagner's internal code names were K-kadr (K-cadre) and Project 42174. They never said punishment company or penal battalion—that was what outsiders called them.
The real penal battalions were the Russian army's Storm-Z units from April 2023.
K-soldiers were mixed into Wagner's brigade-level assault detachments, with no formations of their own. Put plainly, Wagner's veterans drove the K-soldiers ahead of them as expendable material.
These were the truly expendable ones—cannon fodder, meat shields, beasts of burden. Their lot could hardly be worse.
"Die on the battlefield and there's a death benefit that makes up for what you owe your family, and you become a hero. If it were you, what would you choose?"
Chen Ge flicked away his cigarette butt and went on: "There's a saying—fear is the instinct of every living thing, but courage is humanity's anthem. Don't look down on them. You could call them real men!"
At that, the whole truck bed went quiet. The men who had been muttering about the K-soldiers were struck dumb.
Thinking it over, Chen Ge was right. Judged as a personal choice, there was something in the K-soldiers' decision that deserved respect.
Many convicts knew they were cannon fodder and signed the contract anyway—not out of patriotism, but for that death benefit.
For a penniless convict to trade his life for a sum of money for his family—so his parents could see a doctor, his children could go to school—that took enormous courage.
Not everyone has the nerve to die!
Rock toyed with his lighter and smiled. "Sledgehammer, I agree with you. I once saw a video on TikTok—you Huaxia people aren't afraid to die. What's it called... 'shun-dao' spirit? All your lives you're waiting for one chance worth dying for. You all want your death to have a perfect final curtain, right?"
Chen Ge corrected him gravely: "It's xun-dao—the spirit of martyrdom, also called the spirit of dying for one's country. To give your life for your country is the highest form of death. It's a romance in the bones of every Huaxia man, the greatest glory!"
"Take these K-soldiers. They may be scum, and their reasons for signing up may not be pure, but you can't deny they're fighting for their country, blooming on the battlefield like fireworks. Isn't that a way of giving their lives a brilliant final curtain?"
"Death isn't the end—being forgotten is. When they die they can be buried in a military cemetery. The Russian people will respectfully call them fallen heroes, give them a thumbs-up and praise them as heroes. The mistakes they made will be overlooked, and later generations will remember them. In Huaxia we call that leaving your name in the history books, bringing glory to your ancestors, dying where you ought to die!"
"No Huaxia man can resist the temptation of a page of his own in the family genealogy!"
When Chen Ge finished, the others mulled it over for a while and felt their spirits rise on the spot. Their fear of stepping into Bakhmut, that mill of flesh and blood, thinned by almost half.
Lightbulb clapped his hands and said in admiration, "Yeah, dying for your country really is glorious. Dying for your country is the highest form of death in any country, among any people..."
"Suka blyat!! Drone!"
Chen Ge turned and swept the southeast with his eyes. He bellowed. The truck braked hard, and everyone jumped down, hurried but orderly, and ran out into the wasteland beside the road.
They were very fast. After all, every member of the Falcon Hunting Team was the elite of the elite, their military skills a match for top special forces.
In July of this year the Falcon Hunting Team had tangled with Delta Force in Syria and fought them to a draw; Chen Ge alone had blown up four Delta operators.
"Captain, southeast, two drones!"
Standing in the truck bed, Chen Ge pressed his thumb on the PTT on his shoulder and reported to Trench.
He carried an R-187-P1 soldier radio, with decent digital encryption and frequency hopping—gear reserved for the elite, far better than old relics like the Motorola XPR8600.
Hearing Chen Ge's report, Trench immediately ordered the four trucks behind them, carrying the rest of the Falcon Hunting Team, to halt. They jumped out and took cover.
A few hundred meters to the southeast, two FPVs came in at 120 kilometers an hour, their signature buzzing enough to make a man's heart lurch.
"Fire!!!"
At Deputy Captain Hailstone's command, dozens of rifles fired at once.
Chen Ge raised his rifle too, fired half a magazine, then swapped in a magazine wrapped in blue tape and fired single shots.
Bang, bang. Two 5.45×39mm 7N39 rounds hit the FPVs dead on. One exploded in midair; the other dropped into the grass and went still.
Copper-alloy jacketed, special-steel-cored 7N39 high-precision rounds—normally Chen Ge begrudged using them.
The air went quiet. Everyone released their triggers at once, faces showing astonishment, delight, and a touch of contempt—so much for Ukrainian drones.
Only Big Bear, standing next to Chen Ge, had seen it. Those two drones had definitely been brought down by Chen Ge, because when Chen Ge swapped in the magazine of high-precision rounds, he had been quietly watching him.
But he wouldn't say a word!
"Savings balance plus twenty thousand. I want dollars—nobody wants rubles, not even dogs!"
Chen Ge clicked on the safety and muttered this in Huaxia speech, then trotted toward the clump of Ukrainian feather grass ahead to retrieve the drone.
Hailstone shouted, "Sledgehammer, it's dangerous!"
"It's fine, it won't blow!"
Chen Ge answered without turning his head and pushed into the waist-high grass, where he found the drone.
It was a DIY racing quad, a 7-inch carbon-fiber X frame weighing about a kilogram, with an RKG-3M anti-tank grenade lashed to its belly with black zip ties.
The RKG-3M's arming sequence was a little unusual. You pull the safety pin and throw it; the safety lever falls away, a spring pops out a four-panel drogue chute that straightens the tail, and at the same time an inertial weight is flung out, releasing the flight safety.
The drogue chute turns the grenade head-down for a vertical fall, making sure it strikes armor at ninety degrees and maximizes penetration.
The Ukrainian military had removed the drogue chute when they strapped it to the drone, so the fuze was triggered by inertia—no delay, exploding on contact, with tremendous lethality.
Chen Ge picked up the drone. His spider sense gave no warning, which meant the grenade was safe and wouldn't explode.
He simply tore the grenade off and flung it into a dirt pit ahead.
Boom! The grenade blasted out a crater, sending sand, gravel and dirt flying.
Chen Ge carried the drone—only one arm and one propeller smashed by the bullet—back to the roadside and handed it to Trench.
"Captain, have our Falcon drone operator fix it up. It should still be usable."
Trench took the drone, turned it over a few times, and casually handed it to Chainsaw, the communications team leader beside him. Then he pulled a brown wallet from a pouch on his tactical vest and drew out four bills—large crimson and brownish-gold, with the Muravyov-Amursky Monument in Khabarovsk on the face and the Amur River bridge in Khabarovsk on the back—and handed them to Chen Ge.
Five-thousand-ruble notes. Twenty thousand in all!
Chen Ge was not the least bit polite; he reached out, took them, and stuffed them into his pocket.
"Thank you, Captain!"
"Good man. Keep it up!"
Trench gave Chen Ge a light punch on the chest, turned, and shouted, "Mount up! Move out!"
Chapter 6