246: Chapter 247 Thunderous Rescue! The Shadow of Nuclear War Dissipates

"Rumble—!"

Late the next night, over Kabul Valley.

The deafening roar of heavy turbofan engines ripped through the thick night sky.

Dozens of military strategic transport planes, marked with prominent red stars, forcibly landed on this scorched earth flattened by artillery fire.

The rear cargo doors slammed down with a boom.

Tens of thousands of heavily armed vanguard troops from China surged out like a black torrent breaking through a dam.

Without any unnecessary commands, they immediately took full control of the heart of the ruins with the toughest tactical posture.

"Move! Get the heavy engineering machinery up there! Clear the rubble!"

Accompanied by the screeching sound of metal tracks grinding, a dozen military heavy excavators and obstacle-clearing vehicles that had just been air-dropped began to operate frantically.

The massive steel mechanical arms were like a giant's palms.

They brutally pried open and crushed rockfalls weighing several tons, digging and breaking through towards the depths of the cave.

Pulling the camera back.

The entire hilltop, blasted into flat ground, was already surrounded impenetrable by this moment.

The U.S. Army's M1A2 main battle tank clusters, Turkey's armored vehicle arrays, and countless heavy units from various nations were layered one after another, tightly guarding every high point and blind spot of Kabul Valley.

This border no-man's-land, once a place of chaos and endless slaughter, had been violently cleansed and, overnight, became the most heavily armed and untouchable "absolute safe zone" on this planet.

However, even while being part of this terrifying lineup capable of flattening a medium-sized country, the tens of thousands of coalition troops on-site dared not even breathe loudly.

The surroundings were so oppressive that only the roar of the engineering machinery digging into the ground remained.

Commanders from all sides stared intensely at the underground cave being dug open piece by piece. Their fingers clutched their communicators, and not a single party dared to be the first to issue even half a word of a withdrawal order.

Everyone knew it as clearly as a mirror. Before the engineering troops dug through the rock layer, truly saw the young Eastern man named Shen Du, and confirmed that he was a "living person" who could still breathe, the Sword of Damocles, capable of instantly triggering World War III, remained hanging tightly over the heads of the entire world.

This suffocating, deathly oppressive feeling was by no means because these tens of thousands of heavy troops were too cautious. Rather, it was because behind this scorched earth, the military storm brewing had reached a level of terror that completely exceeded the limits of human rational endurance.

Shifting focus away from Kabul Valley. Across the heart of the Eurasian continent, spanning thousands of kilometers, China's follow-up force of hundreds of thousands of heavy field troops, which made one's scalp tingle, did not pause for even a single second due to the stalemate at the front line.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!" Amidst the yellow sand sweeping across the sky, an endless torrent of armor and arrays of missile launch vehicles were forcibly taking over and crushing the narrow strategic corridor between Afghanistan and Iran with a terrifying, high-speed momentum.

Those local warlords and militants who had fought tooth and nail for years on this land for faith or territory, fearing not even death, were terrified to their very core upon witnessing these steel behemoths that represented the highest war will of a great power.

Even their ongoing life-or-death firefights were instantly put on hold. All armed factions, as if they had encountered some kind of natural disaster, fled frantically into the depths of the Gobi Desert on both sides, sparing no effort to make way and avoid danger.

No one dared to court disaster at this moment. Even taking an extra glance, they feared being treated as a hostile target and crushed into pulp.

Not just on land, the entire ocean of Earth had also become a powder keg ready to be ignited at any moment.

This was a rare scene in human history. The five most powerful permanent members of the Security Council on this planet, along with over a hundred countries possessing some degree of armed forces, were all forcibly dragged into this "rescue operation" that would decide the fate of humanity!

In the bottomless Arabian Sea, more than a dozen strategic nuclear submarines, carrying doomsday nuclear deterrents, had silently surfaced to the critical depth for launch.

The Mediterranean, the Gulf of Guinea, the Persian Gulf... all strategic waters across the entire Earth were now completely packed with various types of warships from all over the world.

Radars were fully active, and missiles were loaded. The air was thick with the nauseating smell of gunpowder and the tension of imminent conflict.

If any low-level officer from any party's force were to press the wrong button due to a trembling hand, or even just a minor accidental discharge, this World War III, capable of sweeping across the globe and incinerating human civilization, would be triggered in a tenth of a second.

"Clang—Boom!" Accompanied by the final, multi-ton load-bearing rock being brutally pried open by the hydraulic mechanical arm.

A dozen blinding beams of high-intensity tactical flashlights instantly sliced through the suffocating darkness deep within the cave.

"Target found! Medics, move in immediately!"

Several special forces soldiers wearing heavy bulletproof armor rushed into the ruins like arrows off a string. When they saw the three figures in the corner, completely buried under thick gray dust, everyone's breath caught in their throats.

Shen Du was carefully carried out of the rubble by two special forces soldiers. More than a dozen hours of mental strain and dehydration had caused his muscles to pass the stage of cramping and enter a state of complete physiological rigidity.

When the medic tried to take the empty MP5 submachine gun from his hand, he found that Shen Du's white knuckles were as if welded to the grip, and they had to be pried open one by one with force.

There was no unnecessary questioning. The medical team immediately injected high-concentration glucose into his veins and then securely fastened him onto a tactical stretcher.

"Target identity confirmed! Tachycardia, vital signs extremely weak, but—confirmed alive!"

The highest commander on the front line grabbed the high-power, full-band communicator on his chest. Using all his strength, he roared towards the war zone, which was tightly sealed off by heavy troops, and even towards all the military networks of various nations that were frantically monitoring the situation:

"Target safe! Repeat! Target alive!"

These eight short words were like a heavy hammer, directly shattering the ice shell looming over the Earth that was on the verge of exploding.

Fifteen minutes later. Under the lock of the highest-level multi-national air defense firepower network, and with the close escort of dozens of Chinese armed helicopters, the engines of the military strategic transport plane carrying Shen Du erupted with a deafening roar, and the nose of the plane pulled up sharply, piercing straight into the sky.

At the very moment the transport plane's landing gear fully retracted and it leveled off into the flight path returning home, the entire world's nerve, stretched to the point of snapping, finally gave a crisp "snap" of relaxation.

China's hundreds of thousands of armored torrents spanning the Middle East strategic corridor hit their brakes in unison the very second the order was received. The earth-shaking roar of the tracks ceased abruptly, and the heavy units stopped maneuvering on the spot and began to slowly pull back their defensive lines.

Inside the underground bunker of White House on the other side of the ocean, the people in power collapsed onto their leather seats like puddles of mud, exhausted. He didn't even have time to wipe his sweat and immediately issued ten urgent orders to the State Department. He forced all available senior diplomatic envoys onto private planes, flying them to various parts of the globe to initiate emergency mediation talks.

The clouds of war that had almost dragged the entire human civilization into the abyss of nuclear explosion finally began to disperse rapidly as the military transport plane took off.

Just as the nuclear alert hanging over all of humanity was lifted, the vast and cold-blooded intelligence machines of the world immediately turned their guns in the same second.

A global reverse investigation unfolded in a brutal and appalling manner. Spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas, an airtight hunting net was completely drawn tight in just one night.

All covert lines, capital flows, and top-secret communications had nowhere to hide under the bottomless intelligence sharing and violent dismantling by multi-national intelligence agencies.

The sequence of events was quickly stripped bare and laid out, blood and all, before the highest levels of the multi-national leadership.

The fuse that triggered this crisis, which nearly destroyed all of humanity, was merely a few small financial cliques whose interests in the semiconductor field had been damaged. To protect their crumbling monopoly, they took the risk.

They secretly colluded and used heavy bribes to buy off multiple powerful families and dignitaries within China, European old-money groups, Middle Eastern royalty, and North American political elites. They attempted to use mercenaries in the lawless zone to pull chestnuts from the fire, intending to keep Shen Du in Kabul Valley forever.

However, what awaited these masterminds was not a long international court trial, nor was it a decent political compromise. On the very night the truth was uncovered, these financial groups and arrogant, ancient families, who had once stood high above and believed they could manipulate world affairs at will, were met with physical annihilation, executed jointly by multiple nations with no mercy whatsoever.

Special assassinations, "accidental" explosions at estates, collective "suicides" of core members... overnight, these behemoths involved, along with their wealth and bloodlines, were completely wiped clean from this world.

This was not because the high-level leadership of the great powers had lost their minds. Rather, it was because they had to use this extreme, bloody reshuffling to defend that bottom line which could not be crossed.

The time had already reached 2014; war in this era was no longer the child's play of the past, where conventional weapons were used to attack each other in trenches. Once great powers completely tore off their masks and unleashed a global war, there would be no winners or losers. The only outcome would be a global nuclear carpet bombing.

In this era possessing weapons capable of destroying the Earth dozens of times over, no one could possibly survive that destruction by luck.

This thunderous global reckoning declared a cruel truth to all the ambitious schemers hiding in the dark: human peace was never built on the compromise and mercy of civilization, but was nailed firmly under the deterrence of absolute military force!

Ten thousand meters above, air currents tore through the clouds. The military strategic transport plane was crossing the ocean at a speed that broke the sound barrier. Along the route, the highest-level multi-national air defense networks, which were usually heavily guarded and never allowed any foreign military aircraft to approach, were now wide open, as if welcoming a king.

Outside the window, the accompanying fighter formations were making their final handover. The U.S. F-22 Raptor fighter fleet drew a sharp tactical arc at the edge of the high seas, roaring as they turned back. Ahead, meeting them, was a formation of Chinese heavy fighter jets with dazzling red stars printed on their wings.

More than a dozen hours later, China, Shanghai. Blaring sirens completely took over the traffic hub of this first metropolis of the Far East. The elevated highway from the military airport straight to the city center was completely cleared.

Dozens of black bulletproof SUVs with special military license plates and armed to the teeth moved like a torrent of steel. They tightly protected a heavy medical ambulance in the very center, ignoring traffic lights all the way, speeding forward.

It was only until the convoy steadily drove into the internal garage of the Shanghai Military Hospital, whose defense level was comparable to a military fortress, that this thrilling cross-continental relay finally came to an end.

Shen Du was still in a deep, exhausted sleep. He was quickly and steadily transferred by the medical team into a sterile mobile isolation chamber. Surrounded by several heavily armed internal guards and top military doctors, he was pushed straight into the special intensive care unit in the deepest part of the hospital.

"Click." As the heavy, specially-made ward door was gently closed, all the clamor and crisis were completely shut outside.

In the corridor, Honorary Vice President Yan Feng and Shen Hong, who had already finished treating his gunshot wound, stood like two door gods, leaning quietly against the cold wall.

Honorary Vice President Yan Feng lowered his head to light a cigarette, took a deep drag, and then turned to look at the window at the end of the corridor: "This operation was a bit too intense!"