Hong Kong

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ma Chao was a fighter pilot in the air force of the People’s Liberation Army. Based at Hong Kong’s new international airport at Chek Lap Kok on Lantau Island, across the runway from the main passenger terminal, his squadron was equipped with Shengyang J-11 fighters, a Chinese license-built version of the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, one of the world’s premier fighters.

Major Ma’s squadron came to Hong Kong in 1997 upon the departure of the British. For Ma Chao and his fellow pilots, the move to Hong Kong had been cultural shock of the first magnitude. They had been stationed at a typical base several hundred miles up the coast, across the strait from Taiwan. Ma Chao had grown up in Beijing and attended the military academy, where he was selected for flight training.

His first operational posting was to the squadron where he still served, almost twenty years later. When he first reported the squadron was equipped with the Chinese-made version of the Russian MiG-19, called the F-6.

The F-6 was the perfect plane for the Chinese air force. It was a simple, robust, swept-wing day fighter, easy to maintain and operate, adequately armed with three 30-millimeter cannon and two air-to-air heat-seeking missiles. Although the fuel capacity was relatively limited, as it was in all 1950s-era Soviet designs, the plane’s single engine was powerful enough to give it supersonic speed.

Ma had loved the plane, which was a delight to fly. Unfortunately he didn’t get to fly it often. The fuel and maintenance budget allowed each pilot to fly no more than two or three times a month, and then only in excellent weather. Fearful that the undertrained pilots might crash if they tried to fly aggressively, the generals insisted that the planes be flown as near to the center of their performance envelopes as possible. These doctrine limitations were universal throughout the air force.

Although the Chinese licensed the Su-27 design from the Russians for manufacture in order to upgrade the capabilities of their air force, the set-in-stone training limitations did not change. Ma and his fellow fighter pilots were strictly forbidden to perform aerobatic maneuvers or stress the airplanes in any way that might increase the risk of losing the plane. Consequently, their fortnightly training flights consisted of a straightforward climb to altitude, followed by a straight and level intercept under the control of a ground-based radar operator — a ground-controlled intercept, or GCI — then a return to base.

Ma Chao had spent his adult life with this system, never questioning it. The revelation occurred in Hong Kong a month after he arrived. One evening a woman he had come to know showed him a videotape of an Su-27 aerobatic performance at a Paris air show years before. Ma was astounded by the airplane’s capabilities, which had been there all the time, waiting for the pilot with the courage to utilize them.

It seemed that all the assumptions upon which Ma Chao’s life was based were equally suspect. Ma Chao soon discovered that Hong Kong, with its high-tech, high-rise, high-rent hustle and bustle and diversity, was as close to paradise as he would ever get. Every trip away from the squadron spaces was sensory overload, a cultural adventure that Ma and his friends found extraordinarily fascinating.

When he was finally approached by members of Wu Tai Kwong’s Scarlet Team, he was an easy recruit. From the cockpit of an Su-27 he could see the future. Wu Tai Kwong was absolutely right: The great city of Hong Kong that Ma Chao flew over every two weeks was the future of the Chinese people; the rice paddies and poverty of the mainland were the past.

This June night Ma Chao was in the barracks preparing for bed when his cell phone rang. The cell phone was one of the wonders of the new age — Ma hadn’t even known such things existed until he came to Hong Kong. This one was very special and could not be purchased commercially. This phone handled normal cellular telephonic communications well enough, but it also received covert wide bandwidth messages that were broadcast over commercial television signals. Since the WB signals degraded normal television reception slightly, this technology was never going to be approved for commercial use.

Tonight the message was a single line of traditional Chinese poetry. Ma Chao knew precisely what the code meant: Tomorrow!

Sonny Wong also knew what the message meant when he heard it. The senior leadership of the Scarlet Team had decided that the cause was more important than Wu Tai Kwong.

Sonny was certain that would be the decision, but it was nice to see events work out as he had predicted they would.

The government had provided the opening; the Scarlet Team would lead the revolution of the Chinese people. Sonny Wong would collect fifty million dollars from Virgil Cole and ten million from Rip Buckingham, a nice comfortable fortune that he would keep in Switzerland. This pile would be his safety net, his rainy day money, to be used if the Communists proved too tough to crack.

Once he had the money, he would eliminate Wu, Virgil Cole, and Hu Chiang. With these three out of the way, he would be in position to take over the Scarlet Team.

Yes, indeed, thought Sonny Wong, if he played his cards correctly, he could conceivably wind up as the next ruler of China. Emperor Wong. President Wong. Premier Wong. Whatever.

Or he could sell the Scarlet Team to the Communists and retire rich, rich, rich… live on the French Riviera, play baccarat at Monte Carlo…

The loss of the restaurant this evening was an irritant, but only that.

He had dealt with brashness and disrespect before — and those fools were long gone. Jake Grafton was as good as dead: Sonny had already given the order.

Many of the students at the University of Hong Kong were not asleep this night. They were huddled together in apartments and bars all over the city. When the WB cell phones rang and they heard the coded message, a cheer went up.

Then they dispersed, went home to try to sleep a few hours and prepare for the day to come.

One of the people with a WB cell phone — made in California and smuggled in by China Bob Chan for Third Planet Communications — was Lieutenant Hubert Hawksley of the Hong Kong police. Hawksley had come to Hong Kong as a soldier in the British Army way back when and liked it so much he wangled a police job when his army enlistment was up.

Other British policemen left when Hong Kong was turned over to the Communists, but Hawksley stayed. Through the years he had enjoyed a fine income, very little of which came to him in his pay envelope. He found the oriental way of life congenial and thought he understood the Chinese. Try as he might, he could not imagine that the Communists would be less corrupt than the colonial British. That opinion proved to be prophetic.

One of Hubert Hawksley’s many professional acquaintances was Sonny Wong. Sonny had paid Hawksley quite a pile of money over the years. The thing about Sonny was that he was regular. Every month as regular as the post the money arrived. Cash.

One day a year or so ago Sonny had approached Hawksley at the floating restaurant, one of Hawksley’s hangouts. He had joined the policeman at the bar, torn up Hawksley’s tab, and ordered a beer himself.

“Are you hearing any rumors these days?” Sonny wanted to know when he finally got around to business.

“About what?”

“Sedition. Treason. Antirevolutionary goings-on.”

“All the time,” the policeman said genially. “The regime is vigilant. The secret police are on the job.”

“They pass intelligence to you?”

“Of course. We keep them informed, they keep us informed.”

“I was wondering if you might make me a copy of any information you receive along those lines. My friends and I would be willing to pay.”

“How much?” Hawksley asked sharply.

“Five thousand Hong Kong a month.”

“My risk is large,” Hawksley replied.

“Six, then.”

“Seven.”

Sonny paused to think that over. “Of course,” he said, ‘our long-standing arrangements would be unaffected.”

“Of course.”

“In addition to knowing what the state security people tell you, we would like to… shall we say… edit… any reports along these lines that the force passes to state security.”

“Ahhh…”

Hawksley ordered another glass of stout while he thought about whom he would have to bribe to make that happen. He explained the organizational reality to Wong, then tried to estimate what the responsible people would need in the way of money to help Wong out.

“They mustn’t know my name, of course,” Sonny muttered. “Some of them might take my money and whisper my name. That would be bad.”

“Not cricket,” Hawksley agreed.

They settled on a figure of twenty thousand Hong Kong, which had to be adjusted up a couple of thousand when one of the captains on the force proved to be greedier than Hawksley had estimated.

Since then Hawksley had learned a great deal about the Scarlet Team, and he had passed much of what he learned right back to Sonny. Various people had tried to betray Wu Tai Kwong, of course, and they had disappeared from Hong Kong, never to be seen again. A few people thought they could become police informants, one or two wanted to explain about sabotage plans.

At one point Hawksley knew so much he began to fear for his life. He wrote down what he knew, made a copy, then gave the copy to Sonny with a remark or two about the original.

Sonny had merely smiled, raised the money to twenty-five thousand a month.

Still, Hubert Hawksley begin to think seriously about early retirement and a return to England. He mentioned these plans to Sonny one day, and Sonny tried to dissuade him.

“I know too much,” Hawksley told the gangster.

“Not at all. Anyone in your position is going to learn a great deal, and you are a reliable man. The next man might not be. Stay awhile, see this through. Earn all the money you can. Leave Hong Kong a wealthy man.”

He stayed, of course.

And now, in the wee hours of the morning, the WB cell phone given to him by a woman trying to avoid prosecution for theft squawked into life, waking Hawksley from a sound sleep. He knew the significance of the message. Afterward he lay awake in the darkness thinking about what was to come.

Today, he decided, was going to be an excellent day to call in sick.

All over China the special cell phones rang, stimulated by a WB signal piggybacking on the signals of every television station in the country, and all over China the owners of the cell phones listened with mixed emotions.

For some, the message was a signal for a mission that had to be accomplished on an agreed timetable. For others, the signal meant to wait a little while longer. For all, it was a message heralding the coming of a new day.

The single-sheet flyers were piled willy-nilly on street corners, in subway, store, and office building entrances, and in the entrances to the endless blocks of government-owned apartment buildings. The headline on the front page trumpeted: BANK RECORDS WIPED OUT IN MASSIVE COMPUTER FAILURE.

The story began:

A massive computer failure last night at the Hong Kong bank clearinghouse wiped out the computerized records of member banks, which are all the banks in Hong Kong. Sources say that the computerized account records of the borrowers and depositors of the affected banks have been destroyed and will have to be reconstructed from backup tapes where they exist, and by hand from written records, which all banks maintain, before the banks can again open for business. The task will take weeks.

It is common knowledge that various high government officials have demanded and received personal loans at ridiculously low interest rates from Hong Kong banks, which were the only banks affected by the clearinghouse computer failure.

The story continued, citing no sources but implying that the government had willfully destroyed the bank records to hide official corruption.

Very little of the story was true, a fact Rip Buckingham had pointed out to Wu weeks ago when he was asked to write it. “The government,” Wu said, “has told so many lies that people are ready to believe the worst. The goal is to put government officials on the defensive. The story in the flyer must create doubt in people’s minds.”

The story did more than that, though. It called for a general strike and a mass demonstration in the Central District today to protest the malfeasance of the government.

Lin Pe was up at first light. She had been rising at that hour ever since she could remember and saw no reason to change at this stage of her life. She used the early morning hours to work on her fortunes or the books of the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company, occasionally to correspond with friends. Every few weeks she had to sign all the company checks that her accountant had prepared, payroll and suppliers and utilities and the like. The checks were there on the table, but since the bank collapsed, it was ridiculous to sign them.

This morning she got out the fortune book and sat reading while she waited for a good idea to arrive. When inspiration was hard to find, as it often was, she would wait patiently. If she didn’t think about too many other things a good idea would show up eventually.

She had a lot on her mind these days: Wu, the frozen accounts at the Bank of the Orient, her daughter Sue Lin, Rip, whether she should sell the cookie company to Albert Cheung…

Sue Lin knocked, then came into the room carrying a flyer.

“Mother,” she said, “all the banks will be closed.”

Lin Pe read the story, then laid the flyer aside and sat looking out the window at the great city. “I can’t meet my payroll,” she said softly.

“Oh, no one will expect to be paid,” Sue Lin said dismissively. “Too much is happening.” She sat down facing her mother and told her about Wu’s kidnapping.

Old Lin Pe listened to everything her daughter had to say and asked no questions. When Sue Lin ran out of steam she sat silently looking at her mother, who rubbed her hands together, then smoothed her hair.

“Wong will kill him after he gets the money,” Lin Pe said finally.

“Maybe not,” Sue Lin said, unwilling to cross that bridge. She felt so helpless. “What can we do?”

Her mother sat staring at the wall, saying nothing.

As Jake Grafton walked the streets to the ferry landing in the hour after dawn, he had to thread his way around the citizens of Hong Kong, who were engrossed in the flyers that littered the streets and sidewalks.

Jake had tried to get some sleep on the couch in Tiger Cole’s office, but he had tossed and turned, unable to stop thinking about his wife. He had dropped off for a few minutes, only to have a nightmare about her, which woke him and left him unable to get back to sleep.

At one point Tommy Carmellini came in, wanting to tell him what he had heard on his listening devices. About the only thing worth reporting, according to Carmellini, was a call Kerry Kent got earlier in the evening. “She said yes, paused, yes again, paused, no, then another yes and hung up.”

“So?”

“I don’t know who called her, but it wasn’t a social friend.”

“Doesn’t sound like it,” Grafton agreed.

As the sun rose he had stood at Cole’s window watching the traffic on the street below and the people on the sidewalk reading the flyers.

Cole wasn’t there. He had gone out at some point. No doubt he is off leading the charge, Jake thought gloomily.

He couldn’t shake the thought that this mess was Cole’s fault.

If the bastard had minded his own business, stayed in California getting rich making magic technoshit for robots and the like, Callie would be safe and sound, not in danger of being murdered by a goddamn Asian gangster.

That thought made him angry. There would be plenty of time later for recriminations, but now was the time to figure out how to rescue Callie.

That’s the mission, Jake, and it’s high time you put the brain in high gear and got cracking.

He decided that he should go back to the hotel. If by chance Callie had been released, perhaps she would go there. The chances were small, but still…

“Goddamn it!” He had said the words aloud, then stood there grinding his teeth.

He needed a bath, a shave, and a change of clothes.

If Sonny Wong has any sense, someone will be waiting to ambush me as I walk out the front door of the consulate.

With that thought in mind, Grafton went out the back of the compound in a truck that had just delivered a load of fresh vegetables. When the truck stopped for a light two blocks down the street, Grafton raised the rear door and jumped down, then lowered the door and slapped it twice.

Now, walking through the streets, he was struck by the number of youngsters and the elderly out and about on a weekday morning. They weren’t the dressed-for-success business types who filled the Central District office towers during weekdays. These folks wore jeans and cotton pants and T-shirts. They carried backpacks and sacks of food.

The damn fools are going to the big demonstration!

Governor Sun Siu Ki read the news of the clearinghouse computer disaster in the flyer labeled The Truth as he dressed for the day. An aide had brought him one of the sheets.

“Is this true?” he demanded, waving the offending paper at the aide.

“Yes, sir. The director of the clearinghouse called us with the news at three this morning. The entire clearinghouse staff is working now to determine the extent of the damage.”

Sun was not the swiftest civil servant in Hong Kong, but he wasn’t stupid. “How did the writers of this flyer get the news so quickly, get it printed and onto the streets?”

“Sir, we do not know. These flyers were thrown out of trucks all over the S.A.R. as early as five A.M.”

“This computer failure the story speaks of, could it have been sabotage?”

“We do not know.”

“Find out,” Sun snapped. “Immediately,” he added and shooed the aide out.

The story was libel, of course. Well, probably libel.

Sure, there were grotesquely greedy men in government — there had been misfits and rogues in every government in every age since the world began. And of course some of these misfits might have twisted arms in the Hong Kong banking community. But to suppose that these people, if they did owe money to the local banks, would destroy the banks so they wouldn’t have to pay it back? The whole thing was preposterous, pure poppycock.

And even if the story were true, this rag should never have printed it. The sole purpose of such a story was to lower the people’s respect for the government and the men who made it function.

Mao would never have tolerated such disrespectful diatribes from anyone, Sun told himself primly, and certainly he should not.

Regardless of what the bureaucrats in Beijing thought, the time had come to take off the gloves with these people. Show them the government’s steel backbone and this type of libelous misbehavior will stop.

Sun was capable of applying the pressure, of crushing enemies of the state. He didn’t have many skills, but at least he had that one. He picked up the telephone on his desk and told his secretary to call General Tang.

Tang came to City Hall by car to confer with Sun. The two of them ate a hurried breakfast of rice and fish at Sun’s desk while they waited for a call to Beijing to be returned. An aide came in and told them that the subway trains refused to operate this morning. “It is the doors,” the aide said. “The administrator of the system says the doors will not open on the trains.”

“Can’t they be opened manually?”

“Yes, but then they cannot be closed. The chief engineer blames the fluctuations in the power grid.”

When the minister in Beijing called, he was obviously distraught. “First Hong Kong, now the nation is under attack. We do not even know who the enemy is, and he is wounding us seriously.”

Sun didn’t have a clue what the minister was talking about. He made noises anyway.

The minister explained: “Several hours ago our ballistic missiles exploded in their silos, starting horrible fires that threaten to contaminate large areas. Last night the Hong Kong and Shanghai banking systems collapsed, the stock exchanges cannot open, the railroad dispatch computer refuses to come on-line, refineries all over the country have had to shut down to prevent dangerous conditions progressing to explosions and fires… and every air traffic control and GCI radar in the country is mysteriously broken. The nation is wide open to an aerial invasion, and we won’t know it is coming until enemy troops arrive at the gates.” His voice rose an octave here.

The minister paused to get himself under control. “Obviously the nation is under cyberattack. The telephone network has been used to sabotage critical computers. The premier has decreed that the telephone system be shut off on the hour, in ten minutes, until such time as the critical systems can be brought back on-line, our enemies identified and rendered harmless, and future attacks of this sort guarded against.”

Sun couldn’t believe his ears. He pushed the mute button on the speaker phone and asked General Tang, “What is a cyberattack?”

“Computers,” Tang replied.

The minister was still going on, about how Sun should notify Beijing immediately of any change in the situation in Hong Kong, and then he hung up, leaving Sun staring at the little telephone speaker on his desk, quite unable to grasp the import of what he had just heard.

“They are turning off the telephone system?” he asked General Tang.

“So he said.”

“The Taiwanese,” Sun said bitterly. “I have argued for years that China must bring those rascals to heel. Events will prove me right.”

“I suspect the Japanese,” General Tang shot back. “They are our natural enemies.”

They finished eating in silence, each man deep in his own thoughts.

When they pushed the plates back, they discussed the situation. They were on dangerous ground and they knew it. The nation under cyberattack from unknown enemies, the power of the government being tested here in Hong Kong…

The right course of action was unclear. Still, they were the men who would have to answer to Beijing for inaction as well as action.

When he had heard Tang out, Sun issued his orders. “Today many unhappy people will congregate in the Central District. They will once again attempt to embarrass the government.” The British legacy was still causing problems, Sun thought sourly. “That challenge to the government’s mandate to rule is, in my judgment, our most important problem. Put your troops in the downtown and refuse to let the demonstrators in.”

“The subway problems will keep people from coming into the Central District,” Tang remarked. He assumed that most of the city’s citizens would want to demonstrate against the government, an assumption that Sun didn’t challenge.

“The time has come to be firm,” Sun declared. “We must show the people the steel of our resolve. Show them the might of the state they hold in such contempt.”

Lest there be a misunderstanding, Sun added darkly, “I abhor the useless effusion of blood, but if we do not hold our ground now, that failure will cost more blood.”

“We will give the order to disperse, then enforce it.”

“We must tell the people,” Sun told the general. “Go from here to the television studio. Stand in front of the camera and tell the people to stay home. Tell them the nation is under attack, but we shall prevail because we have the resolve of a tiger.”

“Only one television station is still operating,” the senior aide informed them. “The others have had power outages or equipment failures.”

“All?” Sun demanded.

“Yes, sir. During the night they went off the air, one by one.”

“Sabotage,” said Tang. “Could this be related to the nuclear weapons disaster?”

“Impossible,” the governor opined. “Here in Hong Kong we are dealing with criminal hooligans.”

Had the brain trust in City Hall asked about the situation with the radio stations, they would have been more alarmed. Of Hong Kong’s dozens of stations, only one was still on the air. The morning DJ at this station atop Victoria Peak was a Hong Kong personality named Jimmy Lee, easily the most popular man on the south China coast.

Lee was funny, irreverent, crazy, with it, and cool, a combination that delighted the young people and brought smiles to the faces of everyone else. Listening to Jimmy Lee was always a breath of fresh air.

Jimmy Lee wasn’t himself this morning, though. The man was constitutionally unable to keep a secret — it wasn’t in him. Everything he knew eventually slipped out, usually when he least wanted it to. Normally this trait didn’t do him any harm since his off-kilter personality was his stock-in-trade. For the past two weeks, though, Jimmy Lee had been the possessor of a huge secret, one that had grown heavier with each passing day.

He had joked so much about Wu Tai Kwong, the phantom political criminal, that Wu had concluded Lee could be an ally. So one morning one of Wu’s lieutenants was waiting when Lee finished his morning show.

At first Lee didn’t believe the man knew Wu Tai Kwong, as he said he did, but the man’s serious demeanor and his anti-Communist sentiments assuaged his doubts. The man returned to the station for private conversations week after week for months. Lee finally realized that the man wasn’t a government agent and that he indeed knew Wu Tai Kwong.

Eventually the man enlisted Lee to become a spokesman of the revolution. Two weeks ago he was told about the upcoming battle of Hong Kong, presented with a cell phone, and told about the message that he would receive on the designated day.

Jimmy Lee had not told a soul this fantastic secret, which was a remarkable testament to the supreme effort he was making to control himself. He had thought deeply about it for two weeks, brooded upon it, had nightmares about it. The reality was that the revolutionaries wanted him to commit treason… when the telephone rang.

Treason! If the revolution failed, Jimmy Lee’s life would be forfeit. The government would hunt him down and execute him publicly.

This morning Lee was almost incoherent on the air. He played songs but babbled nonsense when he had to speak. He had never been able to resist food, was almost a hundred pounds overweight, yet this morning he was unable to eat. Sweating profusely, nauseated, able to talk only in monosyllables, he was questioned by his producer… and he told everything.

The producer refused to believe Lee. He was unaware that this was the last radio station on the air in Hong Kong. He knew nothing about the disasters in the stock market, the airport, the subways… none of that had been published by the government, which like all Communist governments was loath to admit or discuss problems.

Lee talked on. He produced the cell phone. He told about meeting a friend of Wu Tai Kwong’s, told about how the army would be confronted today, about the explanations he was to make over the radio… and then he produced the cassette.

The producer put the cassette into a player and listened to a minute or two of it while Jimmy Lee hyperventilated.

The male voice on the cassette was as calm and confident as a human can be, calling for people to rally behind the freedom fighters, obey the revolutionary leaders, and kill PLA soldiers who refused to surrender.

The producer turned off the cassette player and sat chewing his fingernails while he considered what he should do. The first thing, he decided, was to let the New China News Agency censor listen to this tape. The man worked for the government, knew how things worked. He would know what to do about the tape.

Lin Pe was not thinking of resolve, although she had as much as the governor and then some. She was thinking of the strange ways human lives are twisted by chance, or fate, call it what you will.

She dressed in her newest clothes, brushed her hair, made herself look as nice as she could. In her purse she put her notebook — so she could write down any fortunes that crossed her mind in the course of the day — two rice cakes, and a bottle of water. She ensured the house key was already in the purse, then went to find her daughter, who was giving the maids their daily instructions. The television was on — General Tang was telling people to stay home.

When Sue Lin finished with the maids, she told her mother, “Rip wanted us both to stay home today. He said the streets will be dangerous, there may be shooting.” Her mother would respect Rip’s opinion, Sue Lin knew, more than she would her daughter’s, for her mother had not lost her lifetime habit of deference to men.

“I think the rebellion will begin today,” the old lady said calmly. “Today is the beginning of the end for the Communists.”

“Richard Buckingham is paying the money today, Mother. Wu Tai Kwong will probably be home this evening.”

Lin Pe merely nodded. Then she went out the door and along the street toward the tram, which would take her down the mountain to the Central District.

The matter was quite simple, really. Her son thought this struggle was worth his life. That being the case, it was worth hers, too.