Hong Kong

by Stephen Coonts

  No!

  A robot! That is what it must be!

  One of the men whispered to Loo, tugged at his sleeve. “It has a weapon,” the man said.

  “Hey!” Loo Ping called, still walking forward, but slower.

  He halted ten feet from the thing and looked it over. The letter C was visible high on its shoulders. Its hands were claws, and they held a launch tube for a wire-guided antitank missile. Another launch tube lay on the floor.

  Now Loo realized the head was lowered a few degrees, so the eyes—they were really some kind of lenses—were looking right at him. One of them had a circular lens turret in front of it, and now the turret rotated, stopped with a click, then rotated again.

  Nervous, Loo took a few steps sideways.

  The head followed.

  For the first time Loo Ping noticed that a multibarreled weapon of some kind was mounted on the right side of the robot’s torso. Now the barrels began spinning, emitting a high-pitched whine, barely audible in this quiet room.

  Loo Ping tightened the grip on his rifle, glanced at his three troops. They were still there, although they looked like they were going to run.

  “Hey!” Loo Ping said again, facing the robot and moving the barrel of his rifle a little, so it pointed more at the robot. He searched for the safety with his right thumb.

  “The gun is pointed right at you,” the closest soldier whispered to Loo Ping. He was right. The spinning barrels of the weapon were pointed at Loo Ping’s chest. He took another step to the right. The barrels followed.

  “Ooooo …” he began, but he never completed the sound.

  The robot’s weapon fired, and Loo Ping felt the impact of the bullet as it hit him dead center in the heart. His blood pressure dropped to zero, and he was dead seconds after he hit the floor.

  The robot swung its weapon and fired one bullet at the nearest soldier, then the next, and the next. Four individual aimed shots in less than a second.

  The four empty cartridges ejected from the minigun’s breech rattled like hail against the window glass, then fell to the carpeted office floor while the barrels of the minigun freewheeled to a stop.

  The soldier Loo Ping had sent to search the basement walked through the door just as the minigun fired. As the reports echoed through the room, he dove back through the door and scrambled down the staircase.

  “Someone is escaping,” Kerry Kent said. She was watching the monitor intently, listening to Charlie York’s audio in her headset.

  “Let him go,” Cole said. “He’s no threat.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Four uneducated kids dead in a heartbeat. His mouth was watering badly, like he was going to puke.

  Charlie York turned back to the window. The turret on his right camera clicked to another lens, bringing the video of the plaza below into focus on Kent’s monitor.

  She checked with the other units. All okay, all ready.

  Jimmy Lee, the King of Cool, was still babbling incoherently about Wu Tai Kwong and treason and not wanting to be executed. Lee’s producer and the government censor stood wringing their hands.

  Governor Sun hadn’t called and in truth the producer doubted if he would. Still, Jimmy Lee was a celebrity of sorts, so he might.

  The censor tried to place a call to Beijing but the operator said the lines were down. “This is a government emergency,” the censor shouted, then wished he hadn’t. The possibility that Jimmy Lee had gone off his nut and was babbling nonsense crossed his mind for the first time. He wondered just how hard he should press to get though to someone important.

  He didn’t have to worry. The operator told him that government business or not, the telephone lines out of Hong Kong were still out of order.

  “Call army headquarters,” the producer suggested.

  “Why don’t we just broadcast the news?” the censor replied. “Everyone will hear. What better way is there to warn the authorities of the plot?”

  “What if Jimmy is crazy? Huh? Have you considered that? Maybe he’s on drugs. The fool has used them before, remember?”

  “All the telephone lines out of Hong Kong are down,” the censor retorted. “The banks are closed, the subway isn’t running, the airport is closed … . Jimmy says the rebels are attacking the computers. There is going to be an attack on the troops in the Bank of the Orient square. That sounds like truth to me.”

  “Okay, okay,” the producer said. He eyed Jimmy, tried to decide if he was up to talking coherently. No.

  He went into the studio and sat on the stool in front of Jimmy’s mike. As he waited for the current song to end, he thought about what he was going to say. Tell it straight, he decided. Don’t try to jazz it up like Jimmy would. Just act like a man with all his marbles.

  Don’t panic, people, but this is a rumor that may have some truth to it. Authorities, take action. You heard it first, folks, right here on the Jimmy Lee show.

  The song came to an end. The producer flipped the switch to make his microphone hot and began speaking.

  The people in the mobile museum trailer parked three blocks from the Bank of the Orient had a radio tuned to the Jimmy Lee show and a television showing the only station left on the air. Popular music had been coming from the radio and a Chinese soap opera from the television.

  Someone called Kerry Kent’s attention to the voice that came over the radio. A male voice, talking about the revolution that was just beginning, a revolution to overthrow the People’s Republic. Troops were going to be attacked this morning in the Central District by armed rebels, who were trying to cause a major riot, a riot that was supposed to engulf City Hall and lead to the arrest of the authorities there.

  “That isn’t Jimmy Lee’s voice,” the man told Kerry ominously.

  She looked at her watch. This wasn’t supposed to be happening now.

  “Have the people who are to guard the radio and television stations reached there yet?” These people could not be armed until the weapons came through the Cross-Harbor Tunnel.

  “They are on their way. They haven’t called in.”

  “What is going on at the radio station?”

  No one could answer that.

  Virgil Cole was watching now. Kerry Kent called Hu Chiang, who was still circling over the Central District in a helicopter. The feed from the chopper’s television camera was displayed on a monitor in the trailer.

  “You’re over the bank square?” Kerry asked.

  “Yes. I’m ready when you are.”

  Kerry turned to Cole. “The television and radio station guards are not yet in position, but a premature announcement is coming over the radio.”

  “Anything on television?”

  “No.”

  “Are we ready?”

  “We are waiting for the television and radio guards. When the hammer falls, we have to deny the government use of the media and keep it for ourselves.”

  “Is the army listening to Jimmy Lee?”

  Kerry Kent stared at the monitors, which showed her what each of the Sergeant York units was seeing. Then she checked the computer-generated composite. “If they are, they haven’t taken alarm yet,” she said.

  “Call the people on the way to the TV and radio stations. Get an estimated time of arrival. All they have to do is get there before the PLA does.”

  Kerry Kent nodded at one of the computer technicians, who picked up a WB phone and began dialing.

  “Two hours,” the radio operator told Moon Hok. That was how long the colonel at the barracks in the New Territories estimated it would take for the troops Moon requested to be loaded on trucks and transported to the Bank of the Orient square. Neither the barracks colonel nor Moon Hok yet knew that the Cross-Harbor Tunnel no longer belonged to the army, nor were they factoring in the gridlock conditions that prevailed in the streets of southern Kowloon. Still, Moon Hok knew the estimate was optimistic.

  From where he stood he could hear the crowd chanting an antigovernment slogan, something about no more stealing. />
  Once again, Moon Hok thought bitterly, Tang and the governor had placed the army in an impossible situation. The crowd was definitely hostile and growing with each passing minute. In the streets leading to the square the people were packed to standing-room-only density.

  Should they be allowed to remain where they were, or should he push them back and expand his perimeter?

  While he was mulling his options, the radio traffic continued about the helicopter in which General Tang had been riding. It had crashed, according to an army officer who said he had witnessed the disaster from a vehicle a half-mile away. The helicopter had fallen near the Kowloon entrance to the Cross-Harbor Tunnel. Another officer chimed in, claiming he saw the missile that downed the chopper.

  “It was shot down,” he said on the radio net.

  Shot down!

  If the hostile population was now shooting at PLA helicopters, the entire situation had changed. This bank square was militarily indefensible. Perhaps he should load the troops in the trucks and get them out of here. Of course, that move would have political repercussions.

  He decided to dump the whole mess in the governor’s lap. He directed the radio operator to get Governor Sun on the radio.

  But time had run out. Some of the civilians in the crowd outside the military perimeter were listening to the only radio station in Hong Kong that was on the air. These people were being entertained by Jimmy Lee’s producer, who was describing the horrible, treasonous uprising that was about to take place in the Bank of the Orient square.

  At first the people who were listening laughed. Then they stood looking at each other, wondering if this diatribe were true.

  To a crowd that was already rowdy, the radio voice seemed to be describing the perfect way to vent their anger at the myriad of frustrations and injustices that were their lot in life.

  The shouts became loud, angry, and the people began pushing forward toward the soldiers in the square.

  Virgil Cole saw the crowd surge on the monitors. He pushed a button on his control panel so that the audio from the York units was in his headset. Now he could hear the angry chants.

  “If the soldiers feel threatened, they’ll fire tear gas or bullets, and the crowd will panic,” he said to Kent, who was mesmerized by the unfolding spectacle. “Let’s do it now.”

  The soldier who had witnessed Loo Ping’s death at the hands of Charlie York stood now in front of General Moon, pointing at the Bank of the Orient building. He explained about the robot.

  “A monster ten feet tall shot my sergeant and the other three men in my squad. Up there, on the third floor.”

  The general listened to this drivel, then walked away. The junior officers could handle the man. Monsters!

  The man kept pointing at the third floor.

  When he heard glass breaking, Moon Hok involuntarily glanced in the direction the soldier was pointing. He saw glass showering down … from a third-floor window.

  Moon was about to tell one of the staff officers to have the soldier lead him to the monster in the bank when the nearest tank exploded. The explosion burned the general and tossed him through the air. He landed in a heap on the pavement, too stunned to move.

  The York robot called Charlie dropped the empty launch tube for the wire-guided antitank missile and picked up another. While it was bringing the weapon into firing position, the second tank exploded. Dog York, in the building on the south side of the square, had fired that round.

  Charlie aimed this missile at the command vehicle, then squeezed the trigger.

  The missile pulverized the van, showering the men lying on the pavement with sheet metal and radio parts.

  Having fired both the antitank missiles Charlie York had carried into the Bank of the Orient, Kerry Kent decided to have Dog York fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the machine gun nest on the far right side of the square. The York control screen was a Windows-based system—point and click—so in seconds she had a rocket screaming across the square. It struck the ammo feed on the side of the tripod-mounted heavy machine gun and destroyed it.

  Seconds later Dog destroyed another machine gun on the far side of the square.

  The tanks and two machine guns were out of action. Thirty seconds had passed, and every PLA soldier in the square was flat on his face or huddled behind a concrete planter wall.

  The sounds of the explosions echoed through the urban canyons and were heard by more than a hundred thousand people standing and sitting in the streets. The energy level in the crowd soared as people craned their necks, trying to see in the direction of the square.

  When the truck screeched to a halt outside the Victoria Peak television station, Wei Luk was standing in the doorway. With a huge sigh of relief, he watched a dozen university students with assault rifles pile out of the back of the truck and pass down a machine gun. They set up the machine gun where it had an excellent field of fire along the main street leading to the station, then took up positions around the building.

  Wei Luk went back inside. The receptionist stared at him in wide-eyed amazement when he pulled a pistol from his pocket and directed her to unlock the door. Dazed, she pushed the button.

  Wei Luk and his colleagues walked down the hallway toward the main studio, where they saw Peter Po and gave him the high sign.

  Less than two minutes later the station had the feed from the camera in Hu Chiang’s helicopter on the air. Peter Po began a voice-over, explaining to the television audience that the first battle of the revolution had begun.

  In the museum trailer three blocks from the Bank of the Orient square, a cheer went up when the television began playing the aerial feed.

  Virgil Cole turned to the shortwave radio that sat on a bench behind him. In less than a minute he began receiving reports from revolutionaries in television stations all across China that had picked up the Hong Kong signal from the satellite and were rebroadcasting it the length and breadth of the nation. With the program on the air, the revolutionaries would then abandon the stations, forcing all the personnel out and locking the doors of the buildings. When the authorities reacted, as they eventually would, they would have to break into the buildings to stop the broadcasts. And there would be no one there to arrest.

  By then the damage would be done. The news would be out, the credibility of the government severely damaged.

  Virgil Cole leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief. Finally, he thought, we have crossed the threshold. There can be no turning back.

  Alvin and Bob York were in a locked room in the basement of the building that stood on the west side of the square. The door was locked to discourage any soldiers who might be ordered to search the building. Now Alvin broke the lock with a twist of the door handle. Both units climbed the stairs toward the street level. The staircase was narrow with a low ceiling, with barely enough room for the robots when they tucked in their appendages and curled their backs.

  Kerry Kent checked the video feed as the two units climbed the stairs to ensure all was well, then used the mouse to activate Easy and Fred.

  Behind her Virgil Cole helped himself to another cup of coffee. He had spent five years of his life overseeing the design of the York units and had a huge financial stake in the company that manufactured them, so he should have been nervous about the Yorks’ first operational trial. He wasn’t. He had used up all his juice fretting the success of the nationwide television broadcast, which he thought more critical than the performance of the York units to the eventual success of the revolution.

  He sipped the coffee and glanced at the monitors and wondered if he should have absolutely refused Wu Tai Kwong’s demand to confront the PLA in front of an audience. He had confidence in the York units, but crowd psychology was a huge unknown—a stampede could kill thousands.

  As he watched he remembered Wu’s words: “Revolutions are made by people—the Yorks are just things. The people of China must see that others are willing to fight. We can give them something to fight for, but they
must find the courage in their own hearts.”

  As the four York units that had been in hiding came running from the buildings, Charlie and Dog leaped through the broken glass of their respective third-floor windows. They used their hands and feet to cushion the shock of their landing on the concrete street, then they began running toward the center of the square.

  Now all six Yorks were transmitting video and audio to the central computer in the museum trailer; in seconds the computer had transformed the six data streams into a three-dimensional picture of the square, the trucks, the decorative planters, trees, light poles, smoldering hulks of tanks … and the armed men who were rising from the pavement with their weapons in hand, staring wild-eyed at the huge, running robots, which attacked the crews of the two remaining machine guns.

  Inevitably a few of the soldiers snapped their rifles to their shoulders to shoot, and instantly the system directed a York to engage. An onboard CPU slewed the minigun onto the target and triggered a round. Just one round per target, because unlike humans, the Yorks didn’t miss.

  The ring-laser gyros inside each York fed data to a separate maneuvering computer that kept it upright and balanced, the onboard sensors gathered data that was processed internally by the weapons-control computer and passed to the mainframe via UWB, and threats were identified and engaged in the order set by the controller before the battle began. In addition, the weapons-control computer passed information to the maneuvering computer so that it could move the unit to minimize the danger posed by low-priority threats, or threats the York had not yet had time to engage.

  The computers and sensors operated seamlessly. Each unit engaged targets that threatened it and ran, leaped, swerved, and bounded to throw off the aim of opponents it had yet to engage.

  The result was mass confusion. Officers shouted and pointed, gesturing wildly at the Yorks, which were leaping from truck to truck, running across the square, leaping up on the sides of the buildings and executing turns in midair while their miniguns hammered out aimed shots.

  Soldiers who raised their rifles to aim at the sprinting Yorks were shot down, those who did nothing were not harmed.