Ai Zhuo was a soldier from Henan who joined the Chu army after Li Laiheng conquered Pingfeng Village. Before he became a bandit, he was a member of the army, because in the twelfth year of Chongzhen, the Henan army owed eleven consecutive wages.
For many months, Aizhuo struggled to make a living, and was forced to become a bandit.
He was born in Ye Bu Su, so naturally he was not only very skilled, but also extremely vigilant and very careful in everything he did.
After Li Laiheng evacuated Luoyang, he did not just act as a boss and ignore Luoyang, but lurked a group of capable soldiers in Luoyang city.
Li Laiheng carefully selected a group of people from the Tiger Squad, refugees, and village soldiers who could speak Henan dialect or had an accent similar to Luoyang accent, and conducted emergency training for five or six days, teaching them some basic intelligence work skills.
Each person was given a special red silk sachet as a mark, and this team lurking in Luoyang called itself the "Red Team".
Aizhuo is the manager of the "red team".
Ai Zhuo actually didn't like the task Li Laiheng gave him. He thought that his martial arts skills were as good as any of the generals in the army, but now he was reduced to staying in teahouses, inns, and shops. He didn't know how much he missed.
A battle between armies and iron horses.
Recently, Fu Zonglong, the governor of Shaanxi Province, arrived in Luoyang with 7,000 elite cavalry. The situation in the city suddenly became tense. It is said that this governor Fu has an upright official and a very strict military governor. All the Henan officers and soldiers who had been wandering around in Luoyang were suddenly pulled away.
Return to the military camp.
The resting place of the red team of the Chuang Army was a tea shop bought by Aizhuo. Before that, dozens of officers and soldiers, ranging from dozens to as few as ten, were drinking tea and listening to operas in the tea shop every day. After Fu Zonglong arrived,
There were fewer and fewer officers and soldiers in the teahouse, but today there was not even one left.
The shopkeepers and waiters at the front desk of the tea shop are all ordinary people in Luoyang City, and they are not aware of the investigative activities carried out by the red team using the tea shop. On the contrary, the four or five entertainers who sing and tell stories in the tea shop are all Liu Jingting's disciples.
He also belongs to the red team and uses his connections in the world to collect intelligence for Li Laiheng on another line.
When Ai Zhuo returned to the backyard, a storyteller walked past him, tripped over the threshold, and suddenly fell into his arms. The two understood each other secretly, and exchanged information in an instant.
As soon as he returned to the backyard, Android took out the letter that the storyteller had just stuffed in from his sleeve.
He was not very literate and was considered semi-illiterate. But Li Laiheng attached great importance to literacy in the army long before the Chuang Army entered Henan. Although Aizhuo himself was not good at reading, he was forced to go to school after joining the Chuang Army.
Several literacy classes have improved my reading and writing skills.
After Aizhuo took up the position of managing the red team, although he longed for a confrontation on the frontal battlefield, he also knew that this hidden front was equally important. He devoted even more effort and energy, and at night he quietly took out Li Laiheng and
Fang Yiren specially made a "Literacy Manual" to read (in addition to the "Literacy Manual", Li Laiheng also came up with many ways to increase the number of literate people in the army, and even printed words on the backs of coats, armor and luggage, so that the soldiers could
During the march, I also stared at the backs of the people in front of me to learn).
He glanced at the new information sent by Liu Jingting's disciples and was shocked: Liu Jingting's group of storytellers were not only active in Luoyang, but also had spies in several important cities such as Lingbao, Ruzhou, and Kaifeng. They had confirmed that the governors of the three sides
The 7,000 fine cavalry brought by Fu Zonglong and Lintao General Niu Chenghu were only the first batch of Qin troops heading east.
It is said that Wang Qiaonian, the governor of Shaanxi, is training troops in Xi'an and has stationed thousands of troops in Tongguan. After Fu Zonglong understands the situation in Henan, the Qin army will definitely continue to increase troops in Henan.
Ai Zhuo knew that this was an extremely important piece of information, because everyone in the Chuang army thought that the official army would only have about 40,000 troops to suppress them. With the Chuang-Cao coalition's current strength of 20,000 to 30,000 troops, as long as they gave full play to their inside advantage,
, mobile warfare, defeating them one by one, and defeating the army is not difficult.
But if the intelligence is true, in addition to these seven thousand elite cavalry, the Qin army may have thousands more or even ten thousand or twenty thousand soldiers and horses, then the situation will be completely different.
"If the Generalissimo does not pay attention to this piece of information, the Chuang Army will be in danger of being destroyed!"
Ai Zhuo was horrified, and he calculated with his fingers: the lower limit of the Baoding soldiers led by Baoding Governor Yang Wenyue and the general officer Hu Dawei was 10,000, and the upper limit was 20,000. The Henan soldiers led by Henan Governor Li Xianfeng, deputy general Chen Yongfu, and guerrilla Gao Qian were
Ten thousand (the Red Team has the most powerful intelligence on the Henan Army). The Henan Social Soldiers led by Henan Patrol Commander Gao Mingheng had a regiment of 5,000. Not counting the Qin Army, the official army had a strength of 25,000 to 3,000.
There are about 5,000 people.
As for the strength of the Qin army, He Renlong's troops were about 10,000 people. However, according to the investigation of the red team, He Renlong left many troops in Shaanxi and had no intention of actively suppressing the invaders, so he only sent them to Shaanxi.
He Zhen was counted as five thousand people.
So the bulk of it is the governor of the three sides, Fu Zonglong, and Lintao's commander-in-chief. Now they have brought 7,000 people to Luoyang. The intelligence collected by Liu Jingting's disciples is that there will be another 10,000 to 20,000 troops from Shaanxi entering Henan to fight.
In other words, the lower limit of the number of troops used by the official army for this encirclement and suppression campaign will be 47,000, while the upper limit of the number of troops may reach 67,000.
This far exceeded Li Zicheng's estimate of 40,000, and was far more than the nearly 30,000 troops who broke into Cao's joint camp.
Aizhuo put away the letter paper. The other members of the red team were dispersed in the city, pretending to be store clerks and waiters in restaurants to collect intelligence from the market. He thought that he should gather everyone as soon as possible, even at the risk of exposing the existence of the red team.
, this information must also be sent from Luoyang to Desheng Village as soon as possible.
He pulled out a waist knife from under the bed, tucked it under his coat, and put a large handful of gold leaves into his pocket. He wanted to summon the Red Team members first. But then suddenly other members of the Red Team hurried to the backyard of the tea shop.
, Ai Zhuo immediately felt a sense of uneasiness in his heart.
"What's going on? Such a panic! When the commander was training, didn't he tell us that when we were lurking in Luoyang, we should keep calm no matter what happened?"
The name of the member of the red team was Yan Xin, who was from Shaanzhou. He was half Henan and half Shaanxi. He was out of breath and shouted: "Guan... Guan team, something big happened!"
Aizhuo knew something was wrong, so he put his hand on the handle of the knife and whispered: "What happened?"
"I heard from some of the clerks we bribed that the government is about to send troops to capture Song Heji Trading Company. Now Fu Zonglong, the governor of the three sides, is about to close the city and search for the city. If we don't leave, it will be too late."
"Song Heji!?"
Aizhuo almost couldn't help shouting. Song Heji was not an intelligence stronghold developed by the Red Team, but something created by Song Xiance, a close aide of the Generalissimo. Song Xiance was a famous fortune teller in Henan.
He had a wide network of contacts. Before Li Zicheng conquered Luoyang, Song Xiance had already developed some intelligence bases in Luoyang City under the name of Song Heji Company. Their efficiency was no worse than that of the red team.
But after Fu Zonglong arrived in Henan, he immediately strengthened his control over the other party. He changed the loose atmosphere of the Li Xianfeng period in the past and cracked down hard. Of course, bold rebels like Song Heji Company could not escape Fu Zonglong's grasp.
The red team's work style was much lower-key than Song Xiance's men, so they were not captured together with Song Heji. However, Ai Zhuo also knew that if Fu Zonglong wanted to make a big move in Luoyang City, the identities of the red team members would be under strict investigation.
There will inevitably be loopholes, and if one thread is caught, the entire red team will inevitably be implicated.
"Hateful! Song Chaozi claims that Zhang Liang and Chen Ping are reincarnated, why are his hands and feet so unclean!"
Ai Zhuo slammed the table. He knew there was no way. There were only a dozen people in the red team in the city. How could they be an opponent of tens of thousands of officers and soldiers? The most important thing now was to transfer all the intelligence and red team personnel before closing the city.
go out.
He glanced at the backyard of the tea shop, ordered his subordinates to lead the horses with strict wages, and asked: "Fortunately, we have been prepared. We bought many horses from Luoyang Station with heavy bribes. How many fast horses can we use right now?
match?"
Ai Zhuo's subordinate Yan Xin immediately replied: "There are still more than 20 fast horses. If one person has two horses and gallops at starry night, he will definitely be able to break through the siege and escape back to the control area of the Chu army. But Song Heji's side
…We really don’t have many horses to be ridden by Song Hutchison’s people, and the government troops are about to send troops to Song Hutchison’s store to get people, so we don’t have time to save them.”