Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  “Open the bank,” General Tang said in Chinese. “I order you to open the doors of the bank.”

  “The bank is ruined,” Saburo Genda told the soldier, his lips barely able to form the words. “Tokyo refuses to guarantee our borrowings of cash to pay the depositors.”

  Tang Ming tried to understand. Foreigners! “But this is a bank. You have much money in the vault. Give it to the people who want it, and when you run out, tell them they will have to come back another day.”

  “Then the riot will occur in our lobby.”

  “You must have money!” Tang gestured to the crowd. “What have you done with all of their money?”

  Genda had had it with this fool. “We loaned it out,” he said through clenched teeth. “That is the function of banks, to accept deposits and make loans.”

  Tang Ming stretched to his full height. He looked at Genda behind his great, polished desk, a whipped dog, and his two colonels and Genda’s secretary and the crowd beyond the window.

  “Come,” he murmured at the colonels and strode out.

  The tangible anger of the crowd made Jake Grafton uneasy. He sensed it was high time for him to be on his way, time to be out of this group of angry Asians who were working themselves up for a riot.

  Still he lingered. Curiosity kept him rooted.

  Although he spoke not a word of Chinese, he didn’t really need the language to read the emotions on people’s faces. A few people were openly crying, weeping silently as they rocked back and forth in sitting positions. Others were on cellular phones, presumably sharing their misfortune with family and friends.

  The number of wireless telephones in use by the crowd surprised Jake—China was definitely third or fourth world. There was money in Hong Kong, a lot of which had been invested in state-of-the-art technology. Still, most of the people in this square existed on a small fraction of the money that the average American family earned.

  As Jake sat there with two thousand American dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in his pocket that he could get cashed at any bank in town, the vast gulf between the comfortable, middle-class circumstances in which he had lived his life and the hand-to-mouth existence that so many hundreds of millions—billions—of people around the world accepted as their lot in life spread before him like the Grand Canyon.

  He was no bleeding heart, but he cared about people. Always had. He found people interesting, could imagine himself in their circumstances; this was one of the qualities that made him a leader, a good naval officer, and a decent human being.

  General Tang Ming climbed into a small van with public address system speakers mounted on the roof. Sitting in the passenger seat of the van holding a microphone, the general explained the facts as he understood them: The bank had loaned all the money it had and had no more to pay to the people in the crowd. It would not open its doors.

  Since waiting for an event that would not happen was futile, Tang ordered the crowd to disperse. The language he used was Mandarin Chinese, the dialect of northern China, of Beijing, and of most of the soldiers under his command. Unfortunately, it was not the language of the people in the crowd, most of whom spoke Cantonese or English.

  As General Tang harangued the crowd in the street outside the Bank of the Orient over a loud, tinny PA system in a language few understood, the crowd became more boisterous. Some people began shouting, others produced stones and bits of concrete from construction sites that they threw toward the bank windows. Several men nearest the main entrance to the bank pounded on the door with their fists, shouting, “Open up and pay us!”

  Others in the crowd, sensing approaching disaster, tried to leave the area by passing through the cordon of soldiers. Almost by reflex, the greatly outnumbered soldiers tried to hold the crowd back. They struck out with billy clubs and rifle butts. Inevitably the conflict panicked onlookers, many of whom gave in to their urge to flee all at the same time. Those in the center of the crowd began pushing those on the fringes toward the soldiers.

  A shot was fired. Then several shots.

  General Tang was still holding forth on the PA system from the passenger seat of the van when the first fully automatic burst was triggered into the crowd by a frightened soldier.

  People screamed. More shots were fired into the crowd, random insanity, then the soldiers were either trampled or ran before the fear-soaked mob trying to escape.

  A sergeant in one of the tanks on the edge of the park tried to aid the escape of his fellow soldiers, who ran past the tank in front of a wall of running civilians who were also desperate to escape. The sergeant opened fire at the civilians with a machine gun mounted on top of the main turret. The bullets cut down several dozen people before the gun jammed.

  In three minutes the sidewalk and street in front of the bank contained only dead, dying, and wounded people, many of them trampled. More than a hundred people lay on the pavement and grass and in the flowerbeds, some obviously dead, some bleeding and in shock.

  General Tang climbed out of the public address van and stood staring uncomprehendingly at the human wreckage. He hadn’t recognized the muffled pops as shots since the public address system was so loud, and he was initially pleased when the people he could see from the van began to move. Alas, by then the situation was out of control. Surprised by the panic evident among the civilians he could see through the van’s windshield, Tang stopped speaking and heard, for the first time, the shooting, the shouting, and the screaming.

  Staring now at the people lying in the otherwise empty street, he became aware that several officers were beside him, shouting questions.

  The thought that ran through the general’s head was that the crowd should not have run. It was their fault, really. He certainly hadn’t given orders for the soldiers to shoot.

  “Pick them up,” he said and gestured toward the dead and wounded. The officers beside him looked puzzled.

  “Pick them up,” General Tang repeated. “Take them to the hospital. Clear the street.”

  When the first shot was fired, a nervous Jake Grafton raked two old ladies from their perch on the retaining wall and shoved them onto the ground. Then he threw himself on top of them.

  He didn’t move until the shooting was completely over and most of the people on their feet had fled. Only then did he stand and look about him at the bodies, at people bleeding, at people like himself who had taken what cover they could find.

  He helped the two old women to their feet. Neither was hurt. They looked about them with wide, fearful eyes. Without a word they walked away, away from the bank and the soldiers and the gunshot victims.

  Jake Grafton lingered a moment, watching the soldiers check the people lying on the concrete. Then, with his hands in his pockets, he walked through the troops and along the street away from the square.

  The soldier who fired the first shot was from a fishing village on the northern Chinese coast. Eighteen years old, he had been in the army for nearly two years. He had been in Hong Kong for two weeks and two days—he was counting the days so he could accurately report to his family when he next sat down with a scribe to dictate a letter. His name was Ng Choy, and now he was crying.

  Sitting on the hard, clean, bloody pavement of the bank square, he couldn’t stop the tears. The body of the man he had shot was lying beside him. In his panic Ng had triggered a burst of seven shots, all of which hit this middle-aged man in the chest. By some fluke, after the man was shot his heart continued beating for almost half a minute, pumping a prodigious quantity of blood out the bullet holes. The sticky mess was congealing now and turning dark.

  Ng Choy didn’t understand any of it. He didn’t understand why he was here, what everyone had been shouting about, what the sergeant had wanted him to do, why this man had tried to wrestle him out of the way, and he didn’t understand why he had shot him.

  So he sat there, crying uncontrollably, while his fellow soldiers walked around him, carrying away the wounded and the dead.

  Finally two soldi
ers picked up the corpse beside Ng, leaving him on the cold pavement with his rifle and the pool of sticky blood.

  Rip Buckingham cradled the telephone automatically between his cheek and shoulder. “How many dead?” he asked the reporter on the line.

  “Fifteen, the soldiers say. One woman died as they loaded her into the ambulance. At least forty more were injured by bullets. I estimate a dozen or two were trampled—it will be impossible to get an accurate count of the injured.”

  “Get to the bank officials. Find out why they wouldn’t open the doors of the bank.”

  The story would be front-page news around the world, with a big, bold headline: 15 KILLED IN HONG KONG BY PLA TROOPS. The teaser under the main headline would read, Crowd at Japanese Bank Fired Upon.

  Ten minutes later Rip was told, “I talked to a cashier. The officers of the bank are in a meeting and unavailable. The bank is insolvent. Tokyo refused to loan it any more money.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. The Japanese are letting the bank fail. The word is Tokyo already poured twenty billion yen into it. Apparently that’s the limit.”

  This story is growing by leaps and bounds, Rip thought.

  He called a man he knew on a Japanese newspaper and asked for help. In twenty minutes the Tokyo newsman called back with confirmation from the Finance Ministry. The government of Japan had decided not to save the Bank of the Orient, a Japanese-owned bank headquartered in Hong Kong. After consultations with Finance Ministry officials, the Chinese authorities had elected not to intervene.

  Rip looked at his watch. There was still time. He grabbed a notebook and his sports coat and headed for the door.

  The army was cleaning up the mess in front of the Bank of the Orient, loading bodies in ambulances and the backs of army trucks. Rip stood watching for several minutes. There were few onlookers; the soldiers standing around didn’t seem in the mood for gawkers. Yet because he wasn’t Chinese, it was several minutes before the nearest soldier gestured for him to move on.

  Rip went to the office tower entrance of the bank building and showed his press pass to the security guard. It took some talking and several hundred Hong Kong dollars, but eventually he managed to get into the executive suite on the fourth floor.

  He explained to the receptionist that he wanted to talk to the president of the bank. He gave her his card: “Rip Buckingham, Managing Editor, China Post,” with the China Post lettering in the company’s trademarked style.

  The receptionist told him to take a seat.

  He looked at the art on the walls and at the magazines on the table. He really didn’t expect to see any bank officer. He thought it would be helpful to see the street in front of the bank again, see it knowing it was an important place, so he could visualize the scene the reporters were describing to him. And he had the time before deadline. So he was surprised when the receptionist appeared in the doorway and said, “Mr. Genda has a few minutes. Come this way, please.”

  Saburo Genda had a corner office. Through the window Rip caught a glimpse of the last army truck leaving. Except for a few police guards, the square was empty.

  Genda was slumped in a large stuffed chair beside the desk with his back to the square. He didn’t look up as Rip entered, didn’t pay any attention to him until the Australian was seated across from him. He had Rip’s card in his hand. He glanced at it.

  “So, Mr. Buckingham,” Genda said in accented English, “ask your questions.”

  The Japanese executive looked, Rip thought, like he had slept in his clothes. He had the fashionably gray hair, the dark power suit and tie, the trim waistline … and he looked exhausted, worn out.

  “What happened, Mr. Genda?”

  “They killed the bank.”

  “They? Who is they?” Rip asked as he wrote down the previous reply in shorthand.

  “The Finance Ministry. They seized our assets in Japan. They refused to let us draw on those assets for the cash we need to operate on a daily basis. The news leaked out, there was a run on the bank … We are out of business, insolvent. The bank has,” Genda took a deep breath and exhaled, “collapsed.” He raised his arms and let them fall to the arms of the chair. He looked at his hands as if he had never seen them before.

  “You are saying the Finance Ministry chose to put you out of business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “They said it was the bad real estate loans.”

  “But I thought they have known about those loans for years.”

  “They have.”

  “Then …”

  “Someone in Japan made a decision, Mr. Buckingham. I don’t know who or why. The decision was to make the bank fail.”

  “Make it fail? You mean allow it to fail.”

  “No, sir. When the Finance Ministry seized our Japanese assets, the Ministry forced the bank to close its doors. There was no way it could stay open. They took a course of action that made the failure of the bank inevitable.”

  Rip made a careful note of Genda’s exact words.

  “Mr. Genda, I have heard that the Bank of the Orient refused the Chinese government’s demands for low-interest loans. If the bank had made those loans, would it have failed today?”

  Genda tried mightily to keep a straight face. He started to answer the question, then thought better of it. He lowered his head. He seemed to be focused inward, no longer aware of Rip’s presence.

  Rip tried one more question, then rose and left the office. He pulled the door shut behind him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Tell me again about Tiger Cole,” Callie Grafton said to her husband. They were eating lunch on the balcony of their hotel room. Jake had related his adventure at the bank square this morning and the fact that Tommy Carmellini had dropped by for breakfast.

  “I remember you and Tiger flew a plane from the carrier into Cubi Point during the final months of the Vietnam War,” Callie said, “and I went to the Philippines to meet you. I remember meeting him at the airport when you showed me the plane before you left.”

  Jake nodded. He, too, remembered. “A few weeks after that we were shot down,” he said.

  “As I recall,” Callie said, “he was tall, silent, intense.”

  “That was Tiger. He never had much to say, but when he did, people listened.”

  She had been a junior translator at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong in those days. And now Tiger Cole was the consul general. Who would have guessed?

  “Tiger broke his back in the ejection,” Jake continued, recalling days he hadn’t thought about in years. “After we were rescued he spent a long time in the hospital, then they sent him to Pensacola for rehabilitation. He finally said to hell with it and pulled the plug. I think he went back to college in California, got a master’s in something or other, then got involved in the computer industry.”

  “I lost his address about ten years ago,” Callie explained. “He sent us Christmas cards, then we moved or he moved or whatever.”

  Jake Grafton chuckled. “Sometimes life deals you an ace. Last month Fortune magazine said he was in on the ground floor of three big high-tech start-ups.”

  “And now he’s the consul general,” Callie said distractedly. “Why do you want me to translate this tape?”

  Jake summarized his morning conversation with Carmellini while Callie finished her salad. “The tape may contain something worth knowing. China Bob was a rainmaker, a wheeler-dealer who played every angle he could find. Something on that tape might shed some light on what is happening in this town.”

  “You mean on what the Americans are doing to help make it happen?”

  “If they are.”

  “This CIA officer, Carmellini? Do you trust him?”

  “I met him last year in Cuba,” Jake explained. “He was working with a CIA officer who was subsequently killed. The dead officer told me Carmellini was a safecracker before the CIA recruited him.”

  “That doesn’t sound like anything I’d w
ant on my resume,” Callie shot back.

  “It may not take all kinds, but we sure as hell got all kinds.”

  “Are we going to do this tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever Carmellini shows up with a tape player.”

  “I certainly don’t want to sit around this hotel room all evening waiting for him.”

  “I didn’t say we should.”

  “Why don’t you call Tiger Cole, invite him to go to dinner with us?”

  “You think he’d go?” Jake asked dubiously.

  “For heaven’s sake, of course he’d go! Unless he has another commitment, then he’d probably want to set something up for tomorrow. Call him. Tell him you’re in town and want to have dinner. I always thought you saved his life after you two were shot down.”

  “That’s true,” Jake admitted. “But he’s the consul general and pretty busy and—”

  “You’re a two-star admiral in Uncle Sam’s navy, Jake Grafton. You can buy a drink anywhere on this planet.”

  Rip Buckingham was about ready to send the bank story to the makeup room when he received a telephone call from the governor’s office.

  “This is Governor Sun’s assistant, Mr. Buckingham. Your newspaper is running story about tragedy in front of Bank of Orient? This morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Governor Sun Siu Ki has issued statement. Statement go in story.”

  The aide’s English was almost impossible to follow, so Rip replied in Cantonese. “Read it to me,” he said, trying to keep the dejection out of his voice.

  “A crowd of justly outraged citizens gathered this morning at the Bank of the Orient to withdraw their money panicked when bank officials shamefully failed to open their doors,” said the aide, reading slowly. “In the rioting that followed, several people were killed by the gallant soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army while they were restoring order. The officials of the Bank of the Orient will be held responsible for this tragedy … .”