Hong Kong (34 page)

Americans and laiwanese were nivauiug. 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, iou must decide tor yourselt 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.

i ney were anucu wmi ________________

chine 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.

j. ncir pistois were in tneir 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 hirh 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."

l
ne crowd in ine ^.cimai i_»i:>iiiv_i

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

nun. 11 wouia De nours Derore tney arrived from JS-owloon, 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!
^-
v>oie asKea.

"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?"