Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  “I want to see what’s there.”

  “We have been ordered to bomb—a first pass without bombing will merely wake up the rebels.”

  “When you are the pilot in command you can do it your way. Today we do it my way.”

  After he squashed the copilot, the pilot reminded his gunners to keep a sharp lookout. Alas, the Sian H-6 lacked a radar-warning receiver. The plane contained a single forward-firing 23-millimeter cannon and three twin 23-millimeter mounts: a remote on the top of the fuselage, one on the belly, and a manned mount in the tail. Only the tail turret was aimed by a fire-control radar.

  The bombers were three miles high when they flew across the city of Hong Kong and turned eastward, out to sea, still descending. No low clouds this morning, the pilot noted, visibility five or six miles. He and the bombardier stared down into the haze as the planes flew over the city.

  “I see the base,” said the bombardier on the intercom.

  “They should have sent fighters to escort us,” the copilot said nervously as he searched the wide, empty sky.

  “They did!” the tail gunner sang out. “At four o’clock, high.” ‘

  The pilot looked in the indicated direction with a sense of foreboding. The briefing officer had specifically said there would be no escorting fighters. Rumor had it that the fighter pilots were politically unreliable. A civil war, the pilot told himself, was mankind’s worst fear realized.

  “Shengyang J-11s. Two of them.” The tail gunner again.

  “Uh-oh,” said the copilot, who had also been told that the J-11 squadron at Hong Kong had joined the rebels. “What do we do now?”

  “Those fighters may be hostile,” the pilot told the tail gunner. “If they shoot a missile or line us up for a gunshot, be ready.”

  “Aye,” said the gunner, his voice rising in pitch. Like everyone in the bomber, he knew he had little chance of hitting an incoming missile with his gun. In fact, he had never been allowed to fire his gun with real ammunition.

  Ensuring he was out of 23-millimeter range, Major Ma Chow turned to get behind the four bombers, which were strung out in trail. His wingman stayed in a loose cruise formation, several hundred feet behind Ma and slightly above the plane; of Ma’s turn.

  Ma Chow was well aware of the fact that the bombers were defenseless against the two fighters, each of which was armed with four air-to-air missiles and one hundred and forty-nine 30-millimeter cannon shells. The fact that each plane was flown by a crew of his fellow countrymen also weighed heavily on him.

  “What do we do?” his wingman asked over the radio.

  “Let’s try the radio,” Ma Chow replied.

  “Think they know we’re back here?”

  “If they don’t, we’ll tell them.” The radios in Chinese warplanes could transmit and receive on only four frequencies, so it was a simple matter to try each of them.

  Making a long, slow, descending turn in smooth air, the bombers dropped to a thousand feet above the water before they began their run westward toward the army base. Once in level flight the four bombers descended still farther, until they were only four hundred feet above the water.

  Ma Chow locked up the trailing bomber with his radar and readied a missile.

  “Bomber lead over Kowloon, this is fighter lead, over.” The pilot and copilot of the H-6 heard the call in their headphones.

  “What do we do?” the copilot asked, panic evident in his voice. “If we talk to them the authorities will call it treason.”

  “Bomber lead, this is fighter lead. If any of the bombers open your bomb bay doors, we will shoot you down. Please acknowledge.”

  The bomber pilot didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He led the bombers around an island, then they straightened on course for the army base.

  They crossed the waterline at about two hundred fifty knots, four hundred feet high.

  There was no flak, of course, and no missiles. The planes flew in and out of splotchy sunshine over an immense, sprawling city. Ma Chow and the bomber pilots each wondered what the other would do as the tension ratcheted tighter and tighter.

  “Target one mile,” the bombardier of the lead bomber sang out on the ICS. He readied the bombsight so that he could designate his aim point as he passed over it; the sight would track that location mechanically and give him steering back to it.

  Crossing rooftops, racing along a few hundred feet up with the rising sun behind them and the buildings casting long shadows ahead, the string of planes thundered toward the army base. Automatically the pilot retarded the throttles slightly, causing the speed to bleed off still more.

  Then they saw the people. A horde of people, an endless sea of humanity extending for miles completely surrounded the base.

  “Those must be the rebels,” the bombardier said disgustedly as the lead plane swept overhead. “They aren’t even armed.”

  “A few of them are,” the copilot offered.

  The pilot, also looking, said nothing. He had never seen so many people in one place at one time in his life.

  When they were past the base the pilot trimmed the nose a bit higher and pushed the power levers forward. With the two engines developing ninety-five percent r.p.m., he stabilized in a cruise climb. Passing three thousand feet, he said to the copilot, “I think it’s time we went home.”

  “They will shoot us for disobeying orders,” the copilot objected.

  “I saw no rebels, merely civilians.”

  “Those were the rebels,” the copilot said obstinately. He was something of a fool, the pilot thought.

  “You would bomb them, would you?”

  “I have a wife and son at Quangzou,” the copilot replied, naming the town near the airbase they left before dawn.

  “Life is full of shitty choices,” the pilot shot back. “Are you suicidal? If we open the bomb bay doors those fighters will swat us out of the sky.”

  Before the copilot could think of an answer to that verity, the tail gunner sang out on the ICS, “Number two has dropped his landing gear! He’s turning out of formation. And there goes number four! They must be going to land at Lantau.”

  There it is! the pilot told himself. Make up your mind.

  He retarded the throttles; with the nose in a climb attitude, the speed bled off sharply. Now he reached for the gear handle and moved it to die down position. As the hydraulics hummed and the gear extended, the pilot said to the copilot, “Better hope it’s a short war.”

  Three of the bombers dropped their landing gear and turned for the airfield at Lantau. Only one continued to climb away to the northeast. Ma Chow’s wingman went with the landing bombers while Ma Chow followed the one climbing out. As it passed twenty thousand feet he broke away.

  He did a large 360-degree turn while he watched the lone H-6 disappear into the haze. When it was completely gone, he checked his compass, then dropped the fighter’s nose.

  Down he went toward the city below, accelerating rapidly. In seconds the plane was supersonic. He kept the nose down, let it accelerate.

  Passing five thousand feet, Ma Chow engaged his afterburners. The airspeed slid past Mach two.

  The tail of the fighter was hidden by a moisture disk condensing in the supersonic shock wave as Ma Chow flew across the PLA base below a thousand feet. Then he lifted his fighter’s nose and rode his afterburner plumes straight up into the gauzy June morning.

  Wu Tai Kwong and the members of the Scarlet Team were standing outside the closed main gate in plain sight of the PLA troops behind the gate and perimeter fence and in the observation tower when the shock wave of the racing fighter hit them like an explosion. When the crowd realized what it was, they cheered lustily.

  Every person in the crowd looked up to watch the fighter disappear into the haze over their heads.

  Wu listened to the fading roar of the engines and glanced at the hands of his watch, which were creeping toward seven o’clock.

  At two minutes before the appointed hour, Wu nodded at Virgi
l Cole, who had a portable York control unit hanging from a strap around his neck. He used the unit to walk Alvin York forward and stop it next to Wu, who examined the robot with interest. This was the first time he had seen a York up close in the daylight.

  When the Scarlet Team had looked it over, they stood aside, giving the soldiers on the other side of the fence their first good look. Cole walked the York to the closed metal gate, stopping it just a few feet short.

  As the seconds ticked away, the crowd gradually fell silent. All that could be heard was the buzzing of the television helicopter overhead. Looking around, Cole tried to guess how many people were there. A quarter million, he thought, more or less. Most were unarmed, of course, but that was not the point. In human affairs numbers matter.

  At precisely seven o’clock, Wu Tai Kwong nodded at Cole and he clicked on an icon.

  Alvin York stepped forward, seized the gate, and tore it from its hinges. The robot threw the gate off to one side, then walked through the opening with its head scanning and minigun barrel spinning. Behind it walked the Scarlet Team, and behind them, all the people in the world.

  The waiting soldiers threw down their rifles and stood aside. Alvin York and the Scarlet Team walked on by.

  The Scarlet Team was not around when the crowd found Governor Sun hiding in a storage closet in a barracks. They dragged him outside and stripped him naked.

  By the time Wu and Cole fought their way through the packed humanity, it was too late for Sun. The crowd used their fingernails to rip the flesh from his bones, then they pulled his limbs from their sockets and wrenched them from his body. He screamed some, then succumbed. Even if Wu could have reached Sun’s person, it is doubtful that anyone could have stopped the mob.

  The blood riot was captured by the television camera a few hundred feet overhead. Fortunately the human wave that swarmed over the base was fairly well-behaved and Wu’s armed men were able to prevent wholesale looting of the military stores.

  By noon the crowd had thinned considerably, and by midafternoon Wu’s lieutenants began herding civilians off the base so they could see what was left.

  Wu and Cole departed soon after Sun’s death. They had much to accomplish and very little time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jake and Callie Grafton went to bed in the consul general’s suite in the U.S. consulate while the rebels were fighting the PLA in Kowloon. After the television chopper brought them back to the consulate from the Barbary Coast, Jake merely nodded at the marines at the gate, who snapped him smart salutes, and walked through. He informed the consulate duty officer that he was expecting a call from Washington, which was an untruth of a low order of magnitude.

  The duty officer was juggling telephones as he tried to coordinate the efforts of the staff, which was trying desperately to keep Washington informed of the progress of the battle in Kowloon as they learned of it. The duty officer muttered “Yessir” at Jake, who wandered off with Callie in hand. When the duty officer was out of sight, Jake made a beeline for Cole’s bedroom.

  They were under the covers with glasses of champagne on the nightstand ten minutes after they locked the door.

  “I have a serious question to ask and I want a serious answer,” Callie said.

  Jake sipped champagne and wriggled his toes under the silk sheets. Silk sheets! God, how these billionaires lived! “Sure,” he said, to humor her.

  “Okay, here goes: If you were asked, would you accept an appointment as an officer in the Free Chinese Navy?”

  “Have you been mulling that for the last two days?”

  “I just wondered. What’s your answer?”

  “Hell, no. They might not make me an admiral. I’m not going to join anybody’s navy unless they make me an admiral.”

  “What if they offer to make you an admiral?”

  “I’d have to think about it.”

  “Really?”

  “No. I’m pulling your leg. Turn out the lights and let’s snuggle.”

  “I’m too sore to make love,” she said.

  “And I’m too tired. Turn out the lights, lover, and let’s pretend until we collapse.”

  She reached and got the lights. “Do you mean it? If Wu Tai Kwong asks, you’ll say no?”

  “He won’t ask, but if he does, I’ll say what an honor it is to be asked, blah blah blah, but unfortunately blah blah blah.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “You and I are hitting the road the first chance we get. We are going back to the land of Coke and hot dogs as fast as we can get there.”

  “Level with me, Jake.”

  “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought about how he should say it. “If you hadn’t been kidnapped, I wouldn’t have had to kill those guys tonight. I’m not blaming you; I just don’t want to have to fight this fight. This is a Chinese civil war—it’s their problem. I’m willing to fight for my country and my family, and that’s it. Sure, those guys tonight got what they had coming, but I’m not God, don’t want His job. If we go home we’re out of it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” She did understand, and she felt relieved.

  “I was damned worried about you, Callie. Staring at the spectre of life without you was not pleasant. Maybe it’s posttraumatic shock—I don’t want you out of my sight, not for the foreseeable future.”

  “I was pretty worried, too,” she whispered. “I kept thinking there was something I should be doing to get out, and I finally calmed down when I realized you’d come for me if you could. Jake Grafton was my ticket out.”

  “You’re one tough broad, Callie Grafton.”

  “It’s crazy to tell you this: I knew you’d come. I could feel your presence.” She was going to say more, but he lowered his mouth on hers and the thought got lost somewhere.

  It turned out he wasn’t too tired and she wasn’t too sore.

  Afterward, as they lay back-to-back, she remarked, “That’s the first time I ever took a bath in a whorehouse,” but her husband didn’t respond. He was already asleep.

  An hour later the telephone rang. After he grappled with the thing, Jake managed to get it up to his ear.

  “Grafton.”

  “That call you were expecting from the states is on line two, sir. Before you answer it … we just received a flash message appointing you the American chargé d’affaires in Hong Kong. Orders are coming via satellite now—tomorrow afternoon the American and British navies are bringing a half dozen ships to evacuate non-Chinese citizens who wish to leave.”

  Jake took a few seconds to digest all that, then said, “Who is on line two?”

  “The Secretary of State, sir.”

  “Thanks.” Jake sat up in bed, turned on the light, then pushed the button for line two.

  He gave Callie the news while he dressed.

  “Oh, Jake, I wanted to go home, too.”

  “It’ll be a few weeks, at least, the Secretary said. The main thing is to get out the non-Chinese people who want to leave.”

  “Will that be many people?”

  “Who knows?” he said as he strapped on the ankle holster. “The real question is what the Communists will do. I assume the rebels will leave Hong Kong soon. Maybe the Communists will try to retake the city. Maybe they’ll sail their navy down here and assault the place. I don’t know and neither does anyone in Washington. On the other hand, if the Chinese try something big the recon satellites will pick it up and Washington will give us a warning—a few hours, anyway—for whatever that’s worth.” He reached for the shoulder holster, decided he didn’t want to wear the heavy Colt, then changed his mind and put it on.

  “Some of the Americans won’t leave,” Callie said. “And you know that a lot of the British and Australians will refuse to go. This is their home.”

  “They stay at their own risk. They’re betting Wu Tai Kwong and Tiger Cole can protect them. In my opinion, that isn’t a very good bet.”

  He
bent over and kissed her. “Get some sleep. If I’m going to be responsible for the way the consulate staff performs, I’d better find out what they’re up to.”

  “I’m not leaving this city without you,” she told him as he started out the door.

  Jake grinned at her. “I didn’t figure you would.”

  Callie didn’t think she could get back to sleep, but she was so exhausted she soon drifted off.

  The sun was up and Jake Grafton was drinking coffee at Tiger Cole’s desk in the consul general’s office when the rebels walked into the army base. He was on the satellite telephone to the State Department when the television showed Governor Sun Siu Ki being torn to pieces by the mob.

  The power was on throughout the city, so everyone in Hong Kong who wasn’t in the streets got to watch the rebels’ final victory.

  When the conversation with Washington was over, Jake Grafton went to the window and pulled back the drapes so that the morning sun shone full in the office. He was standing at the window looking out when he heard a voice at the door. Tommy Carmellini, sporting a bandage on his head.

  “Just the man I wanted to see. Come in and drink a cup of coffee.”

  “I hear you’re now the head hoo-ha around here.”

  “Yep. You’re still working for me.”

  “I dunno, Admiral, if I’m up to it. Another night like the last one and I’ll be a hospital case.”

  “Thanks, Tommy, for everything. You saved my wife’s life when you figured out that Kent was up to her eyeballs in this mess.”

  Carmellini was still there when Callie came in.

  “Did you get some sleep?” she asked her husband.

  “No.”

  He kissed her and held her awhile before he told her that the rebels had won in Hong Kong. The city was theirs. “At least for a little while,” he added under his breath.

  The three of them were eating breakfast when the secretary buzzed and announced Cole.

  He breezed in, dirty and tired and elated.

  “We’ve won the first campaign,” he told them.

  “Congratulations.”

  “And congratulations to you,” he said to Jake. “The secretary said you are now the charge d’affaires.”