Hong Kong (46 page)

While the Graftons cleaned up in
Barbary Coast's
owner's stateroom,
China Rose
burned at the pier. No one came to fight the fire, although the crews of nearby ships gathered on deck to watch her burn.

Flames gradually spread throughout the ship. Finally the aftermost line securing her to the pier burned through, and wave action and the tide swung the stern well away from the pier.

When she sank an hour later in a welter of steam there wasn't a whole lot left. The black water of the harbor extinguished the last of the flames.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Cross-Harbor Tunnel was jammed when Rip Buckingham picked his way through it. People by the hundreds lounged against the wall and sat in the traffic lanes. Most were armed with weapons taken from the police barracks armory or soldiers who had surrendered in the afternoon, but there weren't enough weapons to go around.

Appointed officers were busy trying to organize the crowd into military units. To facilitate this process members of each unit were issued distinctive badges that attached to their clothes with Velcro. The plastic badges were in a variety of solid colors and simple shapes, such as circles, squares, triangles, and the like. The rebel organizers, Rip noted, stood in front of their groups and emphasized that everyone in the group must wear the group's badge, although they never told the volunteers why.

Rip knew. The badges allowed the York units to quickly recognize the wearer as a good guy, thereby freeing up York processing capability for other things.

The enemy would eventually catch on, of course, but by then the recognition patterns would have been routinely changed.

The tension in the air was palpable; it was impossible not to feel it. As Rip walked and listened to the excited conversations, which were echoed and magnified into an infinite chorus by the walls of the tunnel, the power of the moment almost overwhelmed him.

There was nothing these people could not do. They would pound at the rocks and shoals of the tyrant's forces like an angry sea and sweep them away, winning in the end, as inevitably as the spinning of the earth.

He reached the mouth of the tunnel and walked into the black night. The rebels had killed all electrical power in Kowloon. Looking north one could see the occasional glow of lantern light in a window, but that was all. The Kowloon skyline had completely disappeared. Members of the Scarlet Team were here at the mouth of the tunnel, working by flashlight with items on a long table.

Rip walked over for a closer look. Michael Gao was preparing a tiny radio-controlled airplane, a "bat," for flight. He held it in his hand, a black toylike thing with a wingspan of eight inches. With a two-bladed prop driven by a minuscule electric motor, the four-ounce bat could fly at about thirty miles per hour for several hours.

Gao nodded at a colleague in front of a control panel, who pushed a button, starting the bat's engine.

The controller waggled a stick; the ailerons, elevators, and rudder of the plane wriggled in sync. As Gao held the bat at arm's length, both men studied a monitor on the control panel.

Inside the bat was a miniature infrared television camera that continuously broadcast its signal. This signal gave the controller a real-time look at what lay beneath the bat. The signal was also processed by the York network, increasing the situation awareness of the York units.

When all was ready, Gao tossed the bat upward into the air at a thirty-degree angle. In seconds it disappeared into the darkness, and he reached for another one of the dozen that sat on the table.

"How close is the enemy?" Rip asked.

"They have a few scouts within a couple hundred yards," Gao told him, "but their combat units are about a mile back. They are building fortified positions in depth across the peninsula. We are trying to learn what is behind the leading edge of their forces. Are they or are they not going to attack us?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. The bats should tell us soon, then the brain trust will make some decisions."

"Okay."

"Have you heard? Wu Tai Kwong is back!"

Rip Buckingham hadn t heard. Keliet Hooded tnrougn mm. nis legs felt weak. He grinned and slapped Gao on the back.

"Did Sonny Wong release him?"

"No. He was rescued. I don't know much more than that. He landed in a helicopter moments ago."

"My mother-in-law is out there," Rip said, gesturing beyond the perimeter. "I am going to go find her."

"The PL A is out there, too. Do you want a weapon?"

"Have they started shooting civilians yet?"

"I don't know."

"I'll take my chances."

"Good luck," Michael Gao said, and held out his hand.

Rip Buckingham shook it, then walked away into the darkness.

"Losing the main monitor is no big deal," one of the controllers told Virgil Cole. "We'll just use another monitor for the primary display. I can't understand why she wasted a bullet on it."

Cole took a deep breath and exhaled carefully. He consciously tried to think like Jake Grafton. "She just wanted us to keep our heads down while she got the hell out of here, that's all."

"She might have caused real trouble if she'd taken the time to empty a clip into the CPU."

"And someone would have shot her," Cole muttered. "She ain't sacrificing any goddamn skin for the cause. Sonny Wong doesn't have enough money to buy that epidermis."

Wu Tai Kwong stood in the corner surrounded by his lieutenants, the Scarlet Team. He listened as they all tried to talk at once, smiled and said a few words now and then, then finally sent them back to their posts. Then he came over to Virgil Cole. A few minutes sufficed to tell the American of his adventures. The cuts on his arm had been stitched and bandaged, and he had been given an antibiotic for the infection. The stump of his finger seemed to be healing properly.

"We couldn't stop the revolution to turn Hong Kong upside down trying to find you," Cole explained.

Wu waved it away. "You did precisely the right thing, the same thing I would have done in your place."

"Your return saved me fifty million dollars."

"And 1 know you need the money," Wu said with a grin.

"Is Callie Grafton okay?"

"She is bruised but intact. Her spirit is unbroken. She is a warrior's wife. They wanted her to sign statements implicating you in many crimes, and she refused."

Cole didn't understand. "Why did she refuse?"

"She thought she was protecting you, doing the honorable thing. She would not have signed to save her life." Wu Tai Kwong's head bobbed as he thought of Callie. "With a thousand like her I could conquer the world."

"Jake Grafton and Carmellini?"

"Bloody but still on their feet."

Cole passed a hand across his forehead, then moved on. He gestured toward the monitors. "We are intercepting PLA radio traffic. Beijing has approved the use of heavy artillery. Governor Sun wanted a barrage laid on the tunnel entrance. We think the PLA is now positioning the guns at the army base preparatory to a barrage. We have launched bats to see where the guns are and estimate when they might open fire, but the question is: Should we keep our forces in the Cross-Harbor Tunnel while the barrage is underway or move them out now?"

The two men studied the computer presentations of enemy positions and the locations of the York units, then referred to the map on the wall. They were joined by a half dozen of the key lieutenants, who listened silently to the discussion.

"The PLA will probably attack after the barrage," Wu said after he had looked at everything. "Let's get the people out of the tunnel and position them in front of the PLA strong points. If we can do it without the PLA learning of the movement, they will think we are in the tunnel entrance rubble when they attack."

The orders went out immediately on the WB cell phones, and the volunteers in the tunnel began walking forward, into Kowloon.

Wu continued to study the map. "The winner of this battle," he said, "will be the side that controls the subway tunnel."

Cole looked at Wu with raised eyebrows. "That's very perceptive. I couldn't agree more. Your colleagues have been arguing with me about it."

"What do they say?"

"That the tunnel is too narrow and dark to get many people that the PLA won't bother with it."
                                     
I

"It will be difficult, certainly, but it is key. Most of the PLA officers are good soldiers—they will think of the subway. That is why I want

them on our side."

Cole nodded vigorously. "We put a York in the tunnel at the Central Station. It's got four or five dozen men with it, which was about all that can follow efficiently. I was afraid to give them rocket-propelled grenades or antitank weapons for fear they might hit the York."

"You have done well, Cole," Wu said and bowed a millimeter. "I will go through the subway tunnel behind the York. I will have a WB cell phone, so keep me advised."

The artillery barrage, when it came an hour later, fell like Thor's hammer on the area around the entrance to the Cross-Harbor Tunnel, which was east of the Tsim Sha Tsui East reclamation project, a district of luxury hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and shopping complexes designed to profit from the tourist trade.

Nearby buildings absorbed direct hits from major-caliber shells, which began reducing them to rubble. Shells tore at concrete streets and abutments and gouged huge chunks from the levee. What the shells didn't do, however, was kill anyone. The rebels were no longer there.

Everyone in Kowloon heard the guns and felt the earth tremble from the impact of the shells. Windows rattled and broke, crockery fell from shelves, dust sifted from every nook and cranny.

Lin Pe was sitting in the entrance to an alleyway on Waterloo Road, a block west of the three-tank strong point at the Nathan Road intersection. Parked cars lined the side streets, including the one Lin Pe was on.

Ten minutes into the barrage a long column of troops marched south on Nathan Road and came to a halt behind the tank that sat in the intersection. The soldiers were eight abreast, all wearing steel helmets and carrying assault rifles and magazine containers.

The men stood nervously in line, peering about them in the darkness at the storefronts, looking up at the blank windows looking down on them, looking at each other and the tanks and the officers, who huddled

together tor a moment as they gestured and pointed at the buildings around them. The officers broke up their meeting in about a minute and began pulling squads of troops out of line and pointing to various buildings. The troops trailed off under NCOs. Then at least a hundred men peeled off and trooped down the steps into the Yau Ma Tei subway station, which was dark, without power.

Lin Pe removed her WB cell phone from her bag. When it synched up, she dialed the number she had memorized.

Whispering, she told the person who answered of the troops, where they were and what they were doing, how many she estimated there were. "They are going into the buildings, up on the rooftops, and down into the subway," she told the woman on the other end of the line.

Then she hung up.

An officer was staring at her.

She palmed the cell phone, pretended not to notice him.

He was wearing a pistol. Continuing to stare at her, he began toying with the holster flap as artillery shells rumbled overhead and the earth shook from their impact.

The man couldn't hold his feet still. All that dancing brought him a few steps closer, and he continued to toy with the holster. Now he pulled the pistol, took his eyes off her long enough to check it over.

When he looked again at Lin Pe, the officer still had the pistol in his hand. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind about something.

Would he search her? Shoot her?

She stood, turned to the nearest garbage can, took off the lid, and began rummaging through it as the artillery continued to pound.

Several minutes later she half turned so she could see him. His pistol was in his holster and he had his back to her as he talked to another officer.

Lin Pe bent over the next garbage can.

As the barrage hammered the entrance to the Cross-Harbor Tunnel, Bob York led Wu Tai Kwong and fifty other men through the subway tunnel under the strait. They had entered at the Central District Station; now they walked as quickly as they could given the unevenness of the rails and ties and the fact that the only light came from flashlights.

The third rail was not hot, which was a blessing since people occasionally stumbled against it. Wu had almost refused to let them use the flashlight, but with the York leading the way, no PLA soldier was going to surprise this little band.

The impact of the artillery shells could be felt rather than heard, a series of thuds that made the rails vibrate.

"What will we do if the electric power comes back on?" one soldier

asked Wu.

"We have it turned off. It will not come on."

"But if it does, a train might come through here."