Hong Kong

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At the Victoria ferry landing, people were streaming off the overloaded ferries from Kowloon and patronizing a small army of food vendors, who were selling fish and shark and rice cakes as fast as they could fry it. Not many children, considering. Here and there Jake Grafton saw people reading sheets of The Truth, sometimes three and four people huddled together looking at the same piece of paper. The people looked somber, grim, though perhaps it was just his imagination.

Not many people were interested in going to Kowloon, so there was no line. Jake went right aboard the ferry Star of the East.

As the boat approached Kowloon he could see the sea of humanity waiting to board the ferries to Victoria. With the subways out of service, this crowd was to be expected. The terminal was packed, with a large group of people outside on the street, waiting to get inside.

As soon as the boat tied up, Jake was off and walking at a brisk pace. Outside the terminal the crowd swallowed him. He thought about getting something to eat in McDonald’s, which was about fifty yards away, but it too was packed full, with people waiting to get into the place.

For the first time since he had arrived in Hong Kong the sheer mass of China threatened to overwhelm him. People everywhere, densely packed, all talking, breathing, shouting, pushing…

He made his way along Nathan Road and turned into the street that led by his hotel. Fewer people here, thank God.

The manager was in the lobby trying to calm a crowd of tourists from Germany. The common language was a heavily accented pidgin English.

So sorry, the manager explained, but the airlines had canceled all flights; daily bus tours of Hong Kong were canceled; trains to Canton, Shanghai, and Beijing were not running; telephone calls to Europe were not going through; credit cards could not be accepted for payment of bills; money-changing services at front desk temporarily suspended. So sorry. All problems temporary. Not to worry, all fixed soon. So sorry.

Behind Jake he heard an elderly British male voice say with more than a trace of satisfaction, “Bloody place is falling apart. Knew it would! Wasn’t like this in the old days, I can tell you.”

In the corner an American college student was trying to comfort his girlfriend. In the snippet he heard, Jake gathered that the girl was worried that her parents would be worried.

Jake waited until the manager made his escape from the unhappy Germans, then waylaid him. He told him his name, reminded him of the trashed room, wanted to know where his luggage was.

The manager signaled for a bellhop, then spoke to the uniformed man in Chinese.

Jake was escorted to the elevator and taken to the top floor of the building. They had laid out his and Callie’s luggage in a three-room suite, the best in the house, probably. The sitting room and bedroom both had balconies.

The crowd was so dense it intimidated Lin Pe, and she had lived in dense Chinese cities much of her life. There was an intensity, an anticipation, that seemed to energize the people.

She fought against the flow of people and managed to get aboard a ferry to Kowloon, as it turned out the last one, because the authorities demanded that the Star line stop carrying demonstrators to Victoria and forced the crews off the boats.

In Kowloon Lin Pe began walking. On Nathan Road she caught a bus and rode it north for several miles, then transferred to a bus going to Kam Shan, near Tolo Harbor. She got off the bus at Shatin and walked a quarter of a mile through town. Shatin was huge, with more than a half million people living there now. Lin Pe remembered when it was just a small town, not many years ago.

She stopped at a small corner grocery where she knew the proprietor. After the usual polite greetings, she found a seat on an empty orange crate under a sign advertising scribe services. The letter writer would not be here for hours, but people with little to do often passed the time by sitting here, so no one would say anything.

From her perch on the orange crate she could see the entrance to the main PLA base in the New Territories. Nothing much seemed to be happening on the base, which was good.

From her bag Lin Pe extracted her WB telephone. She turned it on, then called in and reported that she was in position. Then she turned the phone off to save the battery.

Jake Grafton took a shower, shaved, and put on clean clothes that fit; Cole’s were too large. He strapped the Smith & Wesson to his right ankle and put on the shoulder holster containing the Model 1911 Colt .45 automatic he had requisitioned from the marines at the consulate. Over this he donned a clean sports jacket. He put a hand grenade in each pocket. Just another happy tourist ready for a day of fun and games in good ol’ Hong Kong.

He checked with the hotel operator to see if he had any messages. Yes, a voice mail. He listened as the senior military adviser on the National Security staff told him that his mission was canceled, he could come home anytime.

He tried to return the call and got as far as the hotel operator. All lines overseas were out of service. So sorry.

So Tiger Cole and the Scarlet Team had isolated the place.

He turned on the television. Only one channel was still on the air — the others were showing test patterns or blank screens.

Oooh boy!

Jake Grafton went out on the bedroom balcony, which also overlooked the police station. Not many troops on the lawn. He could hear a helicopter circling overhead, though he couldn’t see it.

There was a division of troops in Hong Kong, Tiger said, China’s best… with tanks, artillery, and twelve thousand combat-ready soldiers.

Jake’s attention was drawn to the street in front of the hotel, eight stories below him. A convoy of trucks had pulled up alongside the hill and wall of the police station, and people were streaming from every truck.

In thirty seconds the street was a sea of people. A van-type truck was sitting at the main gate, the driver talking to the guard.

On the street the people were removing ladders from the trucks. My God! They were armed. Assault rifles, it looked like.

The ladders went against the wall, people swarmed up them.

As they reached the top of the wall, they got off the ladders, walked along the wall. There must be interior ladders or stairs, Jake thought.

The driver was out of the truck at the gate, holding a pistol on the guard. People ran by the truck into the compound.

Jake had a grandstand seat. In less than a minute, several hundred armed civilians were running through the compound.

Shots! He could hear shots! Some of the soldiers were shooting! And being shot at!

The reports rose into a ragged fusillade, then slowed to sporadic popping.

A dozen or so soldiers wearing green uniforms lay where they had fallen.

Now a convoy of trucks came streaming through the main gate.

In two minutes all the shooting stopped, even the occasional shot from inside the administration building. Several of the trucks were backed up to a loading dock, and a small human chain began passing weapons out of the building. As fast as one truck was loaded, it pulled out and another took its place.

Jake Grafton looked at his watch. The time was 8:33 A.M.

Welcome to the revolution!

He had to get to Victoria while he still could. Cole had said the Scarlet Team intended to confront the People’s Liberation Army with Sergeant Yorks. That would be the acid test. Either the Yorks could stand up to trained troops or the revolution would be over before lunch.

But all those people heading for the Central District — Grafton wondered if he had what it takes to sacrifice innocent people for the greater good. He thought of Callie and concluded that he didn’t.

The New China News Agency censor assigned to Jimmy Lee’s radio station listened to the Wu Tai Kwong cassette tape with a growing sense of horror. Jimmy Lee was sitting on a nearby stool near collapse — the producer had taken his place at the microphone. The tape sounded authentic. Any doubts the censor had were wiped away by the conviction in that taped voice… and the call for people to kill PLA soldiers who refused to surrender their arms.

The censor called his superior officer on the telephone, but no one answered. Too early. His superior wouldn’t come to work for another hour yet, and with the subway out, maybe not then. The man lived way up north in the New Territories.

The censor swallowed hard and telephoned City Hall.

He ended up with an aide to Governor Sun and began telling him of the tape and the upcoming battle in the streets.

Callie Grafton awoke stiff and sore from her beating the previous evening. Places on her face were blue and yellow, and one side of her face was severely swollen. Sometime during the night she stopped shivering… thankfully, but her ordeal had drained her.

Still, she was in better shape than she thought she would be. When those thugs were pounding on her she thought she might die.

She had awakened on and off during the night, waited fearfully for the men to return, to drag her off for another interrogation or session in the meat locker, but it didn’t happen.

Perhaps this morning.

She tried to recall everything she could remember about the Vietnam prisoners of war she had met or read about. The men she had known were ordinary men who had endured torture, starvation, and beatings for years and somehow survived. One looked at them expecting them to be different somehow — and no doubt they were on the inside — but the difference didn’t show in the facade they presented to the world. They looked ordinary in every respect.

Perhaps the lesson was that they were ordinary yet had somehow found extraordinary courage. Or maybe that courage is in all of us and we just don’t know it. Or need it.

I am as tough as those guys, she told herself, thinking of the POWs. She wanted to believe that even though she didn’t.

“He wants me to implicate Cole in murder,” she told Wu Tai Kwong.

He nodded.

“What does he want from you?”

“A confession that he can give to the Communists, one that he can use to justify a fat reward for my capture.”

“He will turn you over to the government?”

“I’ll be dead by then. He’ll give them my corpse and demand a huge reward. The confession will be the… how do you say it? The sauce upon the cake?”

“Icing on the cake.”

“Knowing Sonny,” Wu continued, “he has demanded money from everyone, Cole, the government, everyone. He keeps me alive so he can prove that I am alive, should that become necessary. Then he will kill me and sell my corpse.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“He cannot set me free. I have many friends. I will find him and kill him, no matter where on earth he goes to hide. He knows that. He will kill me.”

“Are you frightened?”

“Of what? Death?”

“Dying.”

“Yes.”

“But not of death?”

“I have achieved my dream. The revolution has begun. The regime is crumbling and the revolution will speed its collapse. Sonny Wong can do nothing to stop it. The government can fight, delaying the day of its doom, but it cannot prevent the inevitable.”

A terrible smile spread across the face of Wu Tai Kwong. “I have won,” he whispered. “I have undermined the levee — the sea will come in.”

Despite the fact that she was no longer cold, Callie Grafton shivered. “When the regime collapses, what will happen then?” she asked.

“The people will execute the Communists. That is inevitable. And fitting. That is the fate of all dynasties when they fall. The Communists will go like the others.”

Jake Grafton went out the main door of the hotel and turned right, headed for Nathan Road and the ferry landing. Two men who had been lounging against the wall followed him.

He glanced back just before he turned the corner — they were keeping their distance.

Rounding the corner, another man stepped away from the wall with a pistol in his hand. It must have been in his pocket.

Jake didn’t think, he merely reacted. He dove for the pistol, seizing it and wrenching it away from the man.

No doubt Grafton’s sudden appearance had startled the man, who must have thought that the sight of the weapon would freeze Grafton, make him stand still in the hope of not being shot. In any event, the American’s move was so unexpected that it succeeded.

Jake Grafton’s adrenaline was flowing nicely. With his assailant’s pistol in his left hand, he hit him with all his might in the throat and dropped the man to the sidewalk, gagging.

Now he ran, fighting the crowd, toward the waterfront.

Soldiers were spread across the pier in front of the ferry landing.

They ’ve stopped the ferries!

Jake veered right, toward the small basin beside the huge shopping mall for cruise ship passengers. In this basin small boats normally took on and discharged passengers for harbor tours.

There were a handful of tour boats tied to the pier, all of them sporting little blue-and-white awnings to keep off the sun and rain. Jake ran along the pier until he saw a man working on one. The engine was running, although the boat was still securely moored.

By now Jake had the pistol in his pocket that he had taken off the man in the street. He was going to have a nice collection of these things if he lived long enough.

He looked behind him. The people who had been following were apparently lost in the crowd, which filled most of the street.

He pulled out his wallet, took out a handful of bills, replaced the wallet in his hip pocket. He jumped down into the boat and waved the bills at the boatman, who was in his early thirties, with long hair that hung across his face.

The boatman said something in Chinese. Jake gestured toward Victoria. “Over there,” he said and offered the money again.

The boatman ignored the money. He pointed back toward the soldiers and shook his head.

Okay.

Jake looked at the boat’s controls as the boatman showered him with Chinese. The throttle was there, a wheel, a stick shift for a forward-reverse transmission… the boat was idling.

“Out. Get out!” Jake pulled the pistol just far enough from his pocket for the boatman to see it, then pointed toward the pier.

Frightened, the boatman went. As he did, Jake Grafton jammed the money he had offered into the man’s shirt pocket. Must be my genial expression, Jake thought as he ran forward to untie the rope on the pier bollard.

With it free, he made his way aft as quickly as he could. Where are the men who were following me? Did they lose me in the crowd?

That must be it. They’re probably searching frantically right this minute.

With the bow and stern lines loose, Jake scrambled back to the tiny cockpit and spun the wheel while he jammed the throttle forward. The boat surged ahead, caroming off the boat moored in front of it.

He didn’t waste time but headed for the entrance to the basin.

There, on the pier! The men who followed him from the hotel! They stood watching. Now one of them removed a cell phone from his pocket and made a call.

There was a nice breeze and a decent sea running in the strait, so the little tour boat began pitching the moment it cleared the mouth of the basin.

Some soldiers around the ferry terminal were shouting and gesturing at him, so Jake turned his boat to the northeast, away from Hong Kong Island. Those guys are itching to shoot someone, he thought and decided to get well out of rifle range before he turned south to cross the strait.

In the helicopter circling over the police station, Hu Chiang also looked at his watch. The assault on the police barracks had gone like clockwork, for which he was supremely grateful. Wu Tai Kwong was supposed to be in the left seat of this chopper running the show; the others had insisted that Hu Chiang take Wu’s place.

As he watched the trucks loading small arms at the police barracks, Hu Chiang wondered just where Wu was… and Sonny Wong. No one had seen Sonny in days.

He had almost refused to take Wu’s place as the tactical leader. Generalissimo Hu Chiang — the thing was ridiculous. If the choice had been his he would have declined. Yet he remembered what Wu had said, so long ago when the revolution was just a dream: ‘The cause must be bigger than we are, worth more than we are, or we are wasting our lives pursuing it.”

“We cannot make a Utopia, fix all that is wrong with human society,” he had told Wu.

“True, but we can build a civilization better than the one we have. To build for future generations is our duty, our obligation as thinking creatures.”

Duty. That was Wu’s take on life. He was doing his duty.

So Hu Chiang was in the chopper this morning, half queasy, trying to keep his wits about him as the faithful stormed the police barracks on the southern tip of the Kowloon peninsula.

From this seat a few hundred feet up he could see much of Hong Kong harbor, which was dotted with dozens of moored ships from all over the earth and squadrons of lighters and fishing boats. He could see the airport at Lantau, the Kowloon docks and warehouses, the endless high-rises full of people with hopes and dreams of a better life, the office towers of Victoria’s Central District, and the spine of Hong Kong Island beyond.

The most interesting portion of the view was to the north, toward mainland China, hidden this morning in the June haze. Hong Kong was but a first step, then the revolution must go north, with or without Wu Tai Kwong or Hu Chiang …

The radio sputtered again. The leader of the barracks assault was checking in. “Mission completed,” he said, so proud he almost couldn’t get the words out.

“Roger,” Hu Chiang replied and directed the chopper pilot to circle over the entrance to the highway tunnel under the strait.

The army had it blocked off this morning, of course. Forty or so troops were visible, a truck, and… a tank!

Yep. There it sat, right in front of the harbor tunnel entrance, squat and massive and ominous.

Hu Chiang picked up the mike and began talking.

Another helicopter, this one belonging to the PLA, was circling over Victoria’s Central District and the southern tip of Kowloon. General Tang was in the passenger seat. He had had the chopper pick him up at City Hall and was now looking the situation over.

He had certainly not expected the crowds that he saw coming toward Victoria’s Central District from the west and east. Connaught Road was crammed with people, as were Harcourt Road and Queensway, an endless stream of people coming from the Western District, Wanchai, and Happy Valley, all headed toward Central.

He had his troops deployed in the heart of the Central District and around City Hall, with his headquarters in the square in front of the Bank of the Orient.

The troops there seemed to be properly positioned, but the size of the crowds stunned Tang. This massive outpouring of people in defiance of the government he had not expected. It was almost as if… as if the people expected to swallow the troops.

For the first time, General Tang wondered if Sun Siu Ki or the party leaders in Beijing understood what was happening in Hong Kong.

A cry for help from the Kowloon police barracks snapped General Tang back to unpleasant reality. He motioned to the pilot of the helicopter, who swung out over the strait and flew toward the southern tip of Kowloon.

The pilot pointed out another chopper to General Tang, who had trouble seeing it at first.

“A television station helicopter,” the pilot said over the intercom. “I have seen it many times before. They must be taking pictures for the television.”

That, of course, was the last thing that General Tang wanted. Television pictures of this mass outpouring of anti-government sentiment would shake the regime to its foundations. The people in Beijing had no idea, none at all!

Tang waved angrily at the television helicopter. The pilot looked directly at him, then looked away.

“Can you talk to that pilot?” Tang demanded.

“Yes.” The army pilot changed the channels on the radio and called the helicopter.

Hu Chiang didn’t hear the army pilot’s call because he was talking on a different frequency to the squad leader in charge of the trucks carrying the weapons from the police barracks. These trucks had to get through the tunnel to Victoria, so the tank and army troops were going to have to be neutralized. Hu’s pilot heard the call, though, and told Hu about it on the intercom.

“Trouble,” the television station pilot said. “If we ignore him too long, he will have everyone in the world shooting at us.”

“Let’s do it to him first,” Hu said and pointed west toward the harbor as he spoke into the microphone on his headset. The pilot took the TV chopper in the indicated direction.

Tang forgot about the civilian helicopter when he got a glimpse of the police barracks and the uniformed bodies still sprawled upon the lawn, which had been used as a campground. Tang knew corpses when he saw them, and those men looked real dead.

He saw the trucks, which must be loading the weapons Tang knew were stored in the barracks.

He directed his pilot eastward.

The streets of Kowloon were packed with cars. With the tunnel to Victoria closed, there was no place for the Hong Kong Island traffic to go, so a massive traffic jam was the result. Traffic in the city was always bad, yet today it was impossible. People had abandoned the cars in gridlocked intersections. The weapons thieves were fools to assault the police barracks with the streets impassible.

They certainly weren’t going to make a fast getaway in all this traffic. His order to close the tunnel, he thought with a bit of pride, may have proved their undoing.

He again spoke to the pilot, who took him east a half mile until the machine was over the entrance to the harbor tunnel.

The troops were where they were supposed to be, the tank was there … They just needed to be told that there were armed criminals in the vicinity… to be ready!

He consulted the printed frequency list his staff had given him this morning, then dialed the radio to the proper channel. He keyed the mike and began speaking. When he did so he naturally looked down at the people he was talking to, the soldiers surrounding the tank.

He was three words into his message when the tank exploded.

The explosion was not a massive fireball: but a cloud of smoke that jetted from the side of the thing, then seemed to envelop it.

As if it were hit by a wire-guided antitank weapon, General Tang thought, then realized that was exactly what had happened.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a streak of fire in the air, not large. Before he could react a loud, metallic bang shook the chopper, followed by a severe vibration, then a slew to the right.

“We’ve been hit,” the pilot shouted over the intercom. He wrestled with the cyclic and collective, trying to gain control, even as the helicopter spun faster and faster to the right and began falling.

Michael Gao was a thirty-six-year-old security analyst with a finance degree from Harvard. He worked for one of the large American mutual funds that regularly invested in the Hong Kong market… when he was working. Just now he was engaged in high treason against the government of a sovereign nation. Dress it up any way you like, he thought wryly, shooting down an army helicopter with a Strella missile is going to be difficult to explain away in court. Ditto popping a tank.

He had wrestled with these issues a thousand times in the past year and always came back to the fact that he personally wanted the Communists out of power in China. He believed it would be better for everyone, including himself, if some form of democratic government were installed in Beijing. And he believed the conversion worth a major national convulsion. That being the case, it logically followed that he should personally commit himself to making it happen. So he had.

No going back now, he told himself as the helo completed the last few revolutions of its out-of-control spiral and smashed onto the top of a gravel dike around the tunnel entrance.

The chopper didn’t explode or burn. After the dust from the impact settled, just a wisp of smoke rose from the crumpled wreckage. No one emerged from the cockpit — no doubt the crew was dead or dying.

No one rushed to their aid.

Michael Gao realized with a start that he was hearing the popping of small arms. He looked down from the top of the building where he stood and watched his friends snipe at the troops around the smoking hulk of the tank.

With a gut-wrenching certainty, Michael Gao knew that if there had been any men in the tank, they too were now dead. The armor-piercing sabot he had fired raised the temperature of the metals it penetrated so high that the materials forming the tank’s interior would spontaneously ignite and cook the crew, if by some miracle they survived the initial concussion and thermal shock.

The soldiers near the tunnel entrance were lying in the street or trying to find cover. Bursts of automatic rifle fire created sparks where the bullets ricocheted off concrete and little puffs where they impacted. This was ridiculous! The rebels didn’t have time for this.

Gao leaned over the edge of the roof, shouted to the man who was on the roof of the lower building across the street, the one facing the tunnel entrance. “Use the loudspeaker!”

The man picked up the microphone. “PLA soldiers! Lay down your arms. You are surrounded. We will kill you all unless you lay down your arms and surrender.”

One by one, the demoralized soldiers threw their assault rifles on the street and raised their arms in the air.

When the general’s helicopter went down, Hu Chiang told his pilot to circle back over the tunnel entrance. He arrived in time to see the last of the soldiers guarding the tunnel throw down their arms.

The problem was the cars and trucks that filled the streets from curb to curb… and the tank that smoldered in the tunnel entrance. In their planning sessions the rebels had anticipated both problems. They had two solutions, both painted yellow and made by Caterpillar. They were on flatbed trucks parked in the rubble of a building being demolished. Now they came clanking onto the street with their blades down.

Vehicles that couldn’t move were bulldozed out of the way. Trucks were pushed up onto sidewalks, cars were stacked one atop the other. All this was accomplished in a bedlam of people running, screaming, protesting, begging the armed rebels not to ruin their cars… all to no avail. The bulldozers pushed and shoved and made a way, and soon the first truck carrying weapons taken from the police barracks armory was waiting near the tunnel entrance. The truck was covered with armed rebels hanging on every available protuberance.

One of the bulldozers backed up to the tank, and a cable was hooked to the thing. Then the dozer began pulling, dragging the tank out of the way.

When it was clear, the other bulldozer raised its blade and led the trucks into the tunnel.

Governor Sun’s secretary thought the New China News Agency weenie on the telephone was some kind of flake. This story of Jimmy Lee falling apart, worried about committing treason… Jimmy Lee? The top one percent of the top one percent of cool?

He put the radio censor on hold and told his colleague at the next desk, “Another nut case. This one wants to talk to the governor.”

“The governor will refuse.”

“I know.”

“He will be angry you asked.”

“What should I do? Perhaps the man is telling the truth.”

The man at the next desk surrendered. “Tell the governor. Let him make the decision.”

At Lantau Airport Ma Chao and his fellow fighter pilots were directed to don their flight gear and wait in the ready room, which they did. Apparently during the wee hours of the night Beijing had ordered a full alert.

Unfortunately, no amplifying orders had been received over the military radio communications net. The telephone system was down, silencing the faxes and computers. An old Bruce Lee movie was playing on the television.

The ready room was abuzz with speculation. Everyone seemed to have an opinion — the more outlandish, the louder the proud possessor proclaimed it. They argued, wondered, gestured, and guessed. The Americans and Taiwanese were invading. The Japanese had declared war. There had been a coup in Beijing.

Ma Chao and his friends sat silently, taking it in, saying little. They thought they knew what was happening, but without explanations or verification from headquarters, they couldn’t be certain. Nor was there a need for immediate action.

Patience was needed, and Ma Chao had plenty. Like all the pilots, he was wearing a sidearm. He had the flap unbuttoned so he could get it out and into action quickly.

As he listened to the fantastic scenarios that were being paraded before the group as quickly as they were concocted, he thought about the commanding officer and his department heads, all Communists, all loyal to the regime, as far as Ma Chao knew.

When the crunch came Ma Chao and his three fellow conspirators were going to have to take charge, and that probably meant they would have to shoot some of the senior men. Ma Chao sat in the ready room wondering if he could do it.

He had assured Wu Tai Kwong that he could. “I am a soldier,” he said. “I have the personal courage to do what must be done.”

“You could shoot men you have served with for many years?”

“I do not know,” he finally replied, truthfully.

“Ah, my friend, on men like you the revolution will succeed or fail. You must use your best judgment, but you must not surrender. You must face unpleasant reality and do what the situation requires of you.”

He had nodded, knowing the truth of Wu’s words.

Wu always told the truth. All of it, never just a piece, and he never sugarcoated it. You got bald reality from him.

“Chinese pilots are poorly trained,” Wu told him and explained how Western air forces trained their pilots. “You Chinese pilots fly straight and level, relying on the ground controller to find the enemy and steer you to him. What if the ground controller is off the air, or the enemy refuses to fly straight and level, waiting for you to assassinate him? What then? Could you improvise?”

Ma Chao did not answer. He thought about the question but refused to state a mere opinion.

“When the revolution begins,” Wu said, “you will have to weigh the situation and make the best decision you can, then go forward confidently, aggressively, believing in yourself. There will be no one to give you orders. You must decide for yourself what needs to be done, then do it. What we require of you is the courage to believe in yourself.”

Ma Chow thought about that courage now as he sat in the ready room waiting for the earth to turn.

Governor Sun’s secretary found that his boss was tied up with an engineer who was trying to explain the difficulty with the subway doors. “The problem is in the computer,” the engineer explained.

“The computer opens and closes train doors?”

“Yes,” the engineer said, pleased that Sun was with him so far. “Something has gone wrong with the software. We must find the problem before we can fix it.”

“I thought you said the problem was power fluctuations?”

“Power fluxes caused the problem with the software.”

The secretary went back to the New China News Agency man he had on hold. “The governor is busy. Why don’t you tell me the message? I’ll write it down and give it to him when he has a moment.”

“This is very important,” the censor said. “The message is too important and too long to be written down.”

The secretary rolled his eyes. “I’ll have the governor call you. How is that?”

“I will await his call.” The censor dictated the telephone number at the radio station, then hung up.

The secretary threw the call-back slip into the governor’s in-basket.

The soldiers on duty at the Victoria end of the Cross-Harbor Tunnel heard echoes through the tunnel of the small battle in Kowloon. They also saw General Tang’s helicopter crash and assumed, correctly, that it had been shot down.

They waited in nervous dread for what might come next. There were only a dozen of them, a small squad, manning a police barricade in front of the tunnel entrance. They were young, the oldest a mere twenty-four, from rural villages far to the north. They had joined the army to escape the drudgery of the rice fields. Only four of them could read the most basic of the Chinese ideographs.

They were armed with old Kalashnikov assault rifles and one machine gun. When they heard the clanking of the bulldozer coming through the tunnel, they assumed it was the tank that they knew had been positioned at the Kowloon end.

Relieved, they relaxed and the sergeant in charge walked down the tunnel to meet the tank coming the other way. He went about fifty yards and waited.

When he realized he was looking at a bulldozer, and behind it trucks, the sergeant knew something was happening that no one had told him about. He turned and scampered back up the tunnel, shouting to his men.

Unsure of what to do, the men waited for direction.

The uncertainty ended as the bulldozer emerged from the tunnel. Two men atop the dozer opened fire on the soldiers standing about.

The other soldiers might have killed these two men and some of the men following the dozer on foot if they had been given a chance, but they weren’t. A machine gun atop a nearby building swept the tunnel entranceway with a long burst, sending the bullets back and forth, knocking the standing soldiers down like bowling pins.

The three-second burst was enough. Men emerging from the tunnel shot the survivors as the bulldozer rolled over two bodies. The trucks turned into the crowded streets and stopped. Men inside the truck beds began passing out assault rifles and ammunition to the crowd of young men and women who had been lounging there.

At the biggest television station in Hong Kong the atmosphere was strictly business as usual when Wei Luk and three other rebels walked in. There were no guards in the lobby, armed or unarmed, and no guards in the reception area; just two potted palms and large photos of the station’s news stars. One of the stars was a man named Peter Po, who, like Wei Luk and his friends, had bet his life that communism could be successfully overthrown.

Wei Luk glanced at the smiling picture of Peter Po and then stepped over to the receptionist, a beautifully made-up young woman with an expensive coiffure and long, painted nails. She gave Wei and his friends a dazzlingly professional smile.

Their pistols were in their pockets, so they looked presentable enough. Wei Luk smiled, told the girl that he had an appointment with Peter Po.

“And these other gentlemen?”

“Them too.”

She picked up the phone, pushed a button, waited a bit, then asked his name. He gave it.

“At the end of the hallway take a right,” she told him after she had talked to Mr. Po, “then it’s the third door on the left.”

The girl pointed toward a green steel door with a small window. She unlocked it with a hidden button as Wei Luk pushed.

Po welcomed them into his office. He was wearing the television uniform, a suit and tie.

“I thought there was a guard,” Wei Luk said.

Peter Po nodded. “I told him today would be a good day to stay home sick, and he agreed.”

“Okay.”

Peter Po looked at his watch. “When do you think?”

“I don’t know. When the truck delivers weapons and more men, then and only then.”

Fortunately Governor Sun had not yet realized that the rebellion had begun, so no one at City Hall had sent police or troops to secure the one operating television station or shut it down. A rebel broadcast would cause them to cure this error as quickly as possible, however. Until an armed force could be resisted, the rebels thought it wise to hold their tongue.

Yet the rebels were now inside and the police and army were out. Peter Po had a script and knew how to run the equipment in the building so that the rebel leadership could talk to the people of Hong Kong.

Wei Luk’s orders were to ensure that the police and soldiers stayed out of the building, to the last man. “Fight until there are no bricks left stuck together,” Wu Tai Kwong had told him.

“Take your places,” Wei told his men now. He directed one of the men to go back to the lobby and sit with the receptionist.

“Let no one else through the door. Call when the truck arrives.”

The crowd in the Central District of Victoria chanted anti-government slogans, sang snatches of songs, surged along the streets carrying everyone with them, a giant human river.

The crowd came to a stop against the ring of PLA troops that surrounded the Bank of the Orient square. There were five hundred soldiers in the streets around the plaza, all armed with assault rifles and wearing riot-control shields and face masks. The trucks that had delivered them there were parked on the streets inside the military perimeter.

At the four corners of the plaza the officer in charge, Tang’s number two, Brigadier General Moon Hok, had ordered machine guns placed in nests built of sandbags. In the center of the plaza he had placed two tanks. Between them sat a command car bristling with radio aerials.

General Moon was in the command car when he learned that General Tang might have crashed. While the PLA was attempting to verify why their helicopter had ceased all transmissions, Moon got out of the vehicle and stood looking at the sea of soldiers in the square and the huge buildings that surrounded it.

From a military point of view, the position was not a good one. The buildings were man-made high points that would afford an enemy excellent positions from which to shoot down into the square, creating a killing zone.

He called a colonel over, told him to assign squads to search each of the buildings adjoining the square. The colonel walked away to make it happen.

As Moon Hok listened to the noise of the boisterous crowd echoing through the urban canyons and the radio noise emanating from the command car, he decided to use his troops to push the crowd back one block in all directions, thereby putting the buildings that faced the square within his perimeter. Tang had told him to bring no more than five hundred men this morning because the square wouldn’t physically hold any more; now he was contemplating holding nine blocks with the same five hundred men. They would be thin, very thin.

What if the crowd rioted, got completely out of control?

Could Tang be dead?

The noise of the crowd made the hair on the back of Moon Hok’s neck rise.

He got on the radio and called for another five hundred men to join him. It would be hours before they arrived from Kowloon, but better late than never.

When Virgil Cole designed the Sergeant York units, he realized that the volume of data flowing from the sensors would require that each unit be individually monitored. Since a network was only as good as the data its sensors fed into it, he didn’t trust a computer to make life-or-death decisions. The U.S. Army planners didn’t want people completely removed from the loop, either. Consequently, part of the York system was a mobile command and control trailer where the people who monitored each unit sat at individual stations. Here a mainframe computer checked the sensor data and suggested possible courses of action to the human operators.

The trailer had also been on the C-5 Galaxy that delivered the York units and was now parked in an alley three blocks from the Bank of the Orient. Despite the fact that power cables led to it from mobile power units parked nearby, the trailer was gaily painted with surprisingly good graphic art. A sign on the side proclaimed the trailer to be a mobile museum exhibiting the latest in computer technology, sponsored by a well-known philanthropic organization dedicated to the education of the world’s children.

Cole had huddled with the Scarlet Team members this morning, telling them what he knew of other team efforts throughout China. He repeated the litany of woes that the minister in Beijing had recited to Governor Sun, ticking them off on his fingers. “The government is inundated with troubles this morning,” he said in summation. “The population is getting out of control in most of the major Chinese cities. Beijing is beginning to suspect that revolution is in the wind. When the people see how fragile the government’s control is, the rebellion will spread.”

“Wu Tai Kwong has done his work well,” someone commented.

“We must do ours equally well,” Cole shot back and went to check the sensor data feeds from each York unit. Six monitors were arranged in a row, all six labeled from left to right: Alvin, Bob, Charlie…

Kerry Kent stood beside him, comparing her handheld tactical controller with the main monitor.

Satisfied, she stood back, took a deep breath.

“Worried?” Cole asked.

“Only about Wu,” she replied. “This will go fine. You’ll see. You built good stuff.”

Cole waved the compliment away. “I won’t authorize a transfer of money to Wong’s account until Jake Grafton sees Wu and Callie Grafton in the flesh and calls me — they leave together when the Swiss have got the loot.”

“Does Wong know that?”

“I told him when he called earlier. The bastard threatened to hack off more fingers, but we have no choice. We must be tough, insist on fair dealing, or the son of a bitch will take the money and kill them, sure as shootin’.”

Kerry Kent took a deep breath. “When?”

“Tomorrow night is the earliest I could set up the wire transfer. We have to do it while the Swiss bank is open; they don’t stay late for anybody.”

The two-way radio had been busy all morning. Now the man monitoring it signaled to Cole. “The convoy has cleared the harbor tunnel.”

“Cleared the tunnel, aye,” Cole acknowledged.

He keyed the intercom mike on his headset. “The convoy has cleared the harbor tunnel. All units check in.”

The operator at each monitor sang out, “Alvin ready,” “Bob ready,” and so on, in order.

Kerry Kent took control. “We are ready, Mr. Cole.”

Since Kerry Kent was going to be fighting a revolution this morning and her boyfriend was a guest of Sonny Wong’s, this should be a good time to search Kent’s apartment, Tommy Carmellini thought. He used the stairs for this visit — the elevator was out of service — and picked the lock to get in.

He checked the small bathroom and closet to ensure that he was the only person there, then strolled slowly through the place taking inventory.

He had no idea what he was looking for. Kerry Kent, SIS double agent, revolutionary, anti-Communist warrior… maybe she had Mao’s little red book under her pillow. He picked up the pillow and looked.

Well, no book, but a businesslike little automatic. He picked it up, checked the caliber. 380. She didn’t use this on China Bob Chan.

The bed was as good a place as any to start. He put the pistol on the dresser, began stripping sheets. He examined the mattress inch by inch to see if it had a compartment for documents or the like. Apparently not. Nothing under the mattress, in the box springs, in the frame of the bed.

He piled the mess in the center of the bed and worked around it. Kerry’s dresser was next.

The sea breeze and swells running in the strait this morning distracted Jake Grafton for a moment and made him smile. The salty wind cooled the perspiration on his forehead and filled his nostrils with the pungent scent of the Pearl River, flowing from deep in China. The pitching, bucking little tour boat was a handful and forced him to think about how he was going to bring the boat into the pier on Hong Kong Island.

Just which pier he should use was a problem. Who were the men on the sidewalk? Who hired them? Whom did the man call on the cell phone? They were undoubtedly watching him now, waiting to see where he landed.

He wanted to go back to the consulate, avoid the disaster that was about to happen in the Central District. When the shooting started the crowd might stampede, killing hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. Cole, you damned fool, getting smack in the middle of someone else’s war!

The engine of the tour boat hummed sweetly. That was a lucky break. Thinking about possible observers, Jake took the boat in close to the shore and turned east. He motored along for five minutes before he found what he wanted, a low pier with empty cleats. Someone used this boat to make a living; Jake Grafton didn’t want to deprive him of it.

He brought the boat in smartly toward the pier. Although he didn’t own a boat, he had watched sailors handle small boats for years. With the prop engaged and the engine idling, he leaped onto the pier with a rope in his hand and dropped it over a cleat. Back onto the bucking boat as it kissed the tire hanging at the waterline, reverse the prop, let the bowline spring the boat in… When he had the boat tied up fore and aft, he killed the engine.

The rock-solid pier felt good under his feet. He walked off the pier thinking about the thugs in Kowloon, wondering if they had been working for Sonny Wong.