Free Deadly Wands by Brent Reilly Page A

Boy Wonder limped across the bloody arena
towards the Khan. With a smile that barely fit on his face, the boy
rubbed his thumb and fingers together in the universal sign of
money.
    With that simple gesture, Genghis realized
the enormity of his mistake: he pissed off one hundred powerful
families, let thousands of his best quads die for nothing, lost a
thousand gold tons to a potential rival, and a disastrous amount of
coin just disappeared from the local economy. He didn’t fix the
problem -- he multiplied it!
    Never before had the Great Khan felt his grip
on power slip so far, so fast. But he couldn’t kill the boy until
after he competed in the Olympics. Then he’d quash him for
good.
    A messenger on his personal communications
staff flew in and whispered urgently to his head of security, who
waved him through.
    “There’s a run on the bank,” the messenger
whispered into the Khan’s ear as if this information wouldn’t soon
headline news reports.
    Genghis didn’t understand. “What bank?”
    “Your bank.” Meaning the Bank of Mongolia.
“Thousands of Mongols are withdrawing their money.” This had never
happened before. Sheer panic made his own people doubt his
solvency. The most powerful man in the world got up to fix this.
“There’s something else. Somebody bet against the market.”
    Genghis built the world’s biggest, richest,
and most stable economy with the world’s first, largest, and most
sophisticated stock market. Other commerce centers had them, but
the Peking Stock Market traded more wealth than the world’s other
markets combined. Gamblers frequently bet against companies in
crisis, sometimes as a prelude to taking them over, but no one had
ever bet against the entire stock market before. Who could possibly
have the wealth, the balls, and the desire to do that?
    Something made Genghis turn around, and there
stood that damn kid studying him. It was as if the boy could read
his mind. It looked like the champion was challenging him. A child
against Genghis Khan.
    The realization that this punk crippled his
beloved stock market started a fury that his wife feared would
never end. Genghis flew to the main bank branch to tell the scared
crowd that he’d refill the bank vaults with money from the capital
right after he officiated over the opening of the Olympics.
    Then he’d teach the punk a lesson.
     

CHAPTER 10
     
    William planned it carefully. The Siberians
told them the location of every enemy unit in their way. A few days
before the Olympics started, one hundred ten thousand Americans
surprised the military units, clearing a wide path to the Mongolia
capital.
    William shocked the world by sacking
Karakorum, slaughtering its residents, and taking everything of
value. The city received tribute for three centuries, so the
warehouse section was actually larger than the rest of the city
combined. The Bank of Mongolia vault alone took up an entire block.
The thousand horse-drawn wagons that William earlier sent to a
nearby ranch joined thousands of others from the capital, and soon
stretched several kilometers.
    Given his family history, William made sure
they didn’t burn the air-sealed wand-storage facility. The million
wand sets he found there would soon arm a million Americans and
Free Europeans.
    While the slowest division moved the heavily
loaded wagons east to the coast, where William had cargo ships
waiting, the rest of the near-marathoners transported the gold and
precious jewels on their backs. They went one day east, dropped
their packs, returned the next day, loaded up, then flew east again
in the morning. Ten thousand half-marathoners from the fleet took
the loot the rest of the way. The marathoners continued attacking
Mongol units south to give the wagons the month they’d need to
travel within one day’s flight of the ships.
    Many rich Mongols owned estates near
Karakorum. Mongolia always had more horses than people. After
looting those mansions, the Americans used those