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 through, that the PLA won’t bother with it.”
“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 for 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.”
“You must trust me,” Wu told the nervous man, “as I trust you. We hold our lives in each other’s hands.”
Ironically, no one mentioned what Wu knew to be the worst aspect of the small, narrow tunnel: Any bullets fired in here would ricochet viciously. With its concrete sides and dearth of hiding places, this tunnel was a horrible place to fight.
Moving along, carrying two machine guns and a half dozen antitank rocket launchers, the rebels made good time. Still, Wu breathed easier when he felt the floor of the tunnel tilt upward and they began the climb to Kowloon.
They passed the southernmost subway station on Kowloon, Tsim Sha Tsui, and kept going. The next station was Jordan Road, and there they would stop. Beyond that was the station at the intersection of Nathan and Waterloo roads, Yau Ma Tei. Wu thought that PLA troops were somewhere between those two stations.
Twenty minutes after the barrage began, it was over. The rubble around the tunnel entrance was covered by a dense cloud of dirt and concrete particles, and there had been one casualty: a woman near the Tsim Sha Tsui East shopping development who went outside to watch and was hit by a sliver of flying metal. None of the other spectators was even scratched.
Breaking the silence following the barrage was the sound of running feet pounding the pavement. Four thousand troops of the People’s Liberation Army charged through the streets toward the tunnel as fast as they could run.
The Alvin York robot stood behind the curtain in the shoe shop where it had been placed. In its hands it held a water-cooled machine gun. Belt after belt of ammo was draped over its shoulders. All of its sensors were in operation at the moment, but only three were feeding data to the network: the UWB radar in its chest and the infrared sensor in its face, both of which looked through the curtain that obscured him and the glass of the shop window, and the audio sensor. The main York processing unit used data from all the Yorks to update the tactical situation. In addition, the net was receiving data from the ten reconnaissance bats that were still circling unseen over Kowloon and feeding real-time infrared video into the system.
All this information was displayed in two-and three-dimensional form on the master control monitors. Cole and the York technicians watched intently and waited. The waiting was growing more difficult by the second. Cole wanted to hit the troops after the leading edge of the assault was well past in the hope that the Yorks could disrupt the rear, which would panic the people in the lead.
“They are coming down Nathan and the Wylie-Chatham roads,” one technician said. “No doubt they will push down Austin, aiming for the tunnel.”
“We’ve got the Yorks positioned well enough,” Cole said. “They can’t win the battle for us, though they will help. We’re going to have to win it for ourselves.” He turned to the man at another p
anel and said, “Call the field commanders and tell them where the enemy is.”
Finally he touched the York operator on the shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “Do it.”
The operator slid the mouse over the Alvin York icon and clicked once.
Alvin reached out its left hand and tore the curtain down that hid it from people in the street. Only when the curtain was completely out of the way did it put its left hand back on the machine gun. Then it pulled the trigger, sweeping the gun back and forth, hosing bullets at the soldiers in the street, shattering window glass and knocking them down.
Alvin moved forward, right through the remains of the window to the street.
When it hit the sidewalk it turned north, away from the southern tip of the peninsula, and broke into a run. Alvin ran like a halfback. In seconds the York’s erratic, shifting pace was up to twenty miles per hour, a terrific dash against the bulk of the running soldiers, who were still flowing down the street toward it.
The York fired the machine gun as it ran, a shot for each target, its titanium claw working the gun so quickly that many of the soldiers thought the York was firing a continuous burst. In addition, the 5.56-millimeter weapon in the chest turret was engaging targets, different targets, in aimed single-shot rapid fire.
Several times the robot shot at soldiers that were too close to fall by the time it got to them, so it ran over them, hitting them like a speeding truck, causing their bodies to bounce away.
Here and there soldiers managed to fire shots at Alvin. A bounding York running erratically at twenty miles per hour along a totally dark street packed with humanity was an extremely difficult target, so most of the shots missed. The few full-metal-jacket bullets that hit the York spanged away after striking titanium or Kevlar.
Fred York’s nearest major threat was a machine gun nest in the third floor of a building on the corner of Nathan and Jordan roads. It left the apartment where it had been stationed and climbed the stairs to the roof of the building. In addition to the built-in weapon, Fred carried two antitank rocket launchers.
Children and householders stuck their heads out of their apartments to silently watch the robot pass, its machinery softly whining and the minigun barrel on the chest mount spinning ominously. Instinctively the civilians knew to say nothing, to make no noise, and to refrain from touching, but they could not resist the opportunity to see a York up close and personal.
Fred kept its legs flexed, so by bending its head it could get through the doors. When it straightened its head, the stalk on top dragged along the ceiling.
Once on the dark roof the robot moved quickly. It crossed the roof in three strides, saw that the next roof was only one story lower, and jumped.
An alley barred the way to the next building, which was two stories taller than the one the York unit was on. Without breaking stride Fred leaped the alley and went through a window of the taller building. Shards of glass cascaded to the street below.
Without electricity or the glow of city lights outside, the office building the York had leaped into was Stygian. This mattered not a whit to the York, which went through the nearest door and made its way along the hall, looking for the stairs.
Down the stairs, whining ever so gently, the hulking machine moved along the hallway toward the office suite that held the machine gun nest.
It found the people and the gun with its UWB radar. There were four men behind an office wall. One man was leaning out the window, looking at the street below, and the others were loading the gun. Fred detected the metallic sounds of the ammo belt being inserted in the gun and the chamber being charged.
“How thick is that wall?” Cole asked the operator who was monitoring Fred’s progress. Cole was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.
“A few inches, I think. Typical commercial construction.”
“Have him shoot through it. If that doesn’t work, have him punch a hole in it and shoot through the hole.”
The robot’s minigun moved to slave itself to the aiming point, then fired. The soldier leaning out the window fell forward until he was lying across the sill.
Three more shots followed in less than a second. The other men around the machine gun fell to the floor.
“We’re going to need that gun,” Cole said. “Have Fred bring it along.”
“It won’t be able to maneuver very well carrying the launchers, the machine gun, and some ammo belts,” the operator objected.
“If it needs to move quickly, it can drop anything that hinders it.”
Dog and Easy York fought their way along the tops of the buildings toward the tank strongpoint at the Nathan-Waterloo roads intersection, one on each side of Nathan Road. On top of the buildings the fighting machines were at peak efficiency—there were no civilian spectators and no friendly soldiers, so everyone they saw they shot.
Running, leaping from roof to roof, scrambling up or down, shooting at—and hitting—every target that the sensors detected, the Yorks covered six blocks quickly.
Each York carried an antitank rocket, so when they were in range they stepped to the edge of the buildings and brought the launch tubes to firing position. The Yorks fired their rockets simultaneously.
Flames jetted from the open hatches of the tanks as the rockets penetrated the relatively thin upper deck armor and exploded inside.
The one tank that survived was half buried inside a corner store, with its gun punched through the store and pointing down Nathan Road. When the other two tanks were hit, the commander of this tank screamed at his driver, “Go, go, go!”
The driver popped the clutch and the tank leaped forward, collapsing the corner of the building that sheltered it. It accelerated across the sidewalk and bulled through a line of parked cars.
The tank crossed Nathan at an angle and rode up on the cars parked on the left side of the road, crushing them, as the driver struggled to turn the tank to the right to keep it in the road. The turn kept his left tread on top of the parked cars, which were squashed and ejected backward as the tread fought for purchase. PLA soldiers hiding in shop doorways and behind cars ran for their lives.
Into this bedlam the Yorks began tossing grenades. One of the grenades ignited fuel trickling from a crushed gasoline tank, and soon the car was burning in the street and casting an eerie glow on the storefronts and the wreckage.
Dog York was throwing its last grenade when it was hit in the back by two bursts of rifle bullets. It spun and found two PLA soldiers running toward it, shooting. They probably intended to push or throw it over the edge of the building, but they had no chance. With bullets bouncing off its torso, the robot leaped and grabbed each by the neck with its powerful titanium claws, killing them instantly. Then it tossed the bodies off the roof.
Easy and Dog descended the stairs in their respective buildings, hunting for PLA soldiers. There was a machine gun nest in a third-floor apartment of Easy’s building. It tore its way through walls, killed the soldiers, and picked up the gun. With ammo belts draped over its shoulders, the York unit went into the hallway and descended the stairs.
Someone dropped a grenade down the staircase. The thing exploded a few feet from Easy, showering it with shrapnel, but it kept going.
Out in the street it attacked the soldiers there with the machine gun and the few rounds remaining in the minigun. The tank was long gone, careening south on Nathan Road, leaving a trail of crushed and damaged vehicles in its wake.
Dog came out of a building on the other side and began working in tandem with Easy, killing every enemy soldier they detected.
One soldier huddled behind a car heard a running York coming at him and threw down his rifle. He stood with his hands in the air.
The Yorks ignored him.
Seeing this, more and more soldiers threw down their weapons and stood, almost two hundred of them.
The shooting stopped. The two Yorks came to a halt in the center of the intersection back-to-back, one holding a machine gun, their heads turning back a
nd forth, the barrels of their miniguns spinning silently.
In the control room, Virgil Cole looked the situation over, then ordered the operator to stop the spinning miniguns to save battery power.
The runaway tank tore south on Nathan Road, forcing the PLA soldiers in the street to scurry for cover or get run over. The panicked tank commander kept the hatch open so he could look up at the buildings, spot enemies with antitank weapons.
Alvin York, running north up the street, saw the tank coming and got between two parked vehicles, out of the way. As the tank passed, Alvin chased it.
The York was capable of a sustained pace of twenty miles per hour and even higher speeds in short, battery-draining bursts. Alvin used that speed now to catch the tank.
The tanker must have sensed the York coming, for he turned and looked back just as Alvin leaped onto the back of the machine and aimed the minigun at the tanker’s head. One shot in the head killed the man.
Alvin pulled the body from the hatch and threw it backward into the street.
Then the robot climbed up on the turret and descended into the tank.
The driver pulled a pistol and emptied it at Alvin. Bullets ricocheting inside the steel compartment killed the gunner, who slumped in his seat.
The out-of-control tank smashed over a line of cars, crossed a sidewalk, and buried itself inside a shop selling electronic gadgets. With the treads still spinning, the tank tore out the building’s supports, causing it to collapse.
Inside the tank Alvin York reached for the screaming driver and tore his head from his body.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Virgil Cole exclaimed as he witnessed the gruesome scene on the computer monitor, two miles away. “Couldn’t you just have the York shoot the guy?”
“He’s on full automatic, sir,” the controller responded. “The program is designed to allow him to conserve as much ammunition as possible.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Cole said, then turned away so he wouldn’t have to look.
The Bob York robot saw the PLA soldiers advancing south in the subway tunnel toward the Jordan Road station and opened fire. It was standing in total darkness, partially hidden behind a pillar between the two train tracks. Wu had his men on the platforms on each side where they could not be hit by ricocheting bullets.
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