Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  “Our own people, Mother?”

  “Yes, our own people. Millions of decent, hard-working Chinese who’ve been exploited for generations by both foreigners and their wealthy blood-brothers. One simply couldn’t leave them to the gentle mercy of the Communists. But it’s really over now. I’m buying land as fast as I can, before everyone realizes the threat is finished and prices rise again.”

  The Archbishop coughed to keep from laughing aloud. How, he wondered, could he ever understand the human soul when he could not understand the soul of the one human being who had given him life? His mother apparently saw no moral incongruity in affirming her responsibility to the people of Hong Kong in one sentence and in the next discussing her plans to profit from their suffering.

  He was touched by her loyalty to the Chinese and wryly amused by the automatic reflex of a commercial mind trained by the old master Sir Jonathan. How, he wondered, could the Old Gentleman have put his impress so deeply on Mary Philippa Osgood, an alien woman from an alien culture? Sir Jonathan, too, had striven to help the poor Chinese, and Sir Jonathan, too, had consistently profited from the political upheavals that tormented the poor.

  Was it really all over, Charles wondered, Hong Kong’s ordeal by its own small Cultural Revolution?

  Neither Hong Kong nor China itself was to emerge from the violence of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution for some time. Hong Kong was to suffer another five months, China almost two years longer. The tide of disorder in the Colony, having reached its height in June 1967, was slowly receding. The high-tide swept China in July 1967, and the immensely greater turmoil in the People’s Republic was to wreak vastly greater damage before it subsided into troubled half-peace.

  Charles Sekloong and Dewey Miller later pieced together the story of the climactic Wuhan Revolt. From July 13 through July 23, they concluded, limited civil war had ravaged the industrial plexus of Central China. The Wuhan Revolt was the most violent rejection of Chairman Mao’s commands.

  Neighboring Kiangsi Province was already aflame. Well organized, heavily armed former soldiers of the Liberation Army fought pitched battles against Maoists and regular troops. Three rival Red Guard factions, each more than 100,000 strong, struggled in the streets of Canton. Antagonistic Red Guards dueled with artillery and tanks in Chungking. Soviet trains carrying arms to Hanoi through Kwangsi Province were hijacked, and their North Vietnamese guards were killed.

  Dispatched by Premier Chou En-lai to mediate, James Sekloong pleaded with the leaders of Kwangsi’s hostile factions: “Keep the rifles, machine guns, and mortars, if you must. But for Heaven’s sake give back the anti-aircraft missiles. Neither of you has an air force.”

  The commanding general sealed off Nanking and ignored all Peking’s orders. He feared the shattered Party Center less than the angry workers who demanded that he crush the Maoists.

  Only in Wuhan, however, did combat units of the Liberation Army inflict severe casualties on each other. Thousands of anti-Maoist workers of the Wuhan Iron and Steel Works precipitated those battles by organizing a paramilitary force called the Million Heroes, which included thousands of disillusioned Red Guards. The general commanding the Wuhan Military Region was already demoralized by Maoist-incited anarchy. He permitted his 8201st Division to support the Million Heroes when the irregulars seized the Yangtze River railway bridge and severed China’s main line of north–south communication. But his 8199th Division, which was loyal to the Maoists, counterattacked to retake the bridge.

  Only one man could cut through the Gordian complexity of doctrine, power, and emotion. On July 21, 1969, Chou En-lai, accompanied by General Shih Ai-kuo, landed at a People’s Air Force base near the embattled city. The Premier summarily relieved the Regional Commander and delivered an ultimatum to the leaders of the opposing factions and the commanders of the 8201st and 8199th Divisions.

  “I am bringing up two artillery divisions,” Chou stormed. “A flotilla of gunboats will reach Wuhan this time tomorrow. Bomber Command is on alert. If all fighting does not stop in two days’ time, those forces will bombard Wuhan. General Shih Ai-kuo will remain to carry out my orders.”

  When James Sekloong escorted the exhausted Premier to his airplane, Chou En-lai was uncharacteristically candid.

  “I must get back before Peking, too, explodes,” he said. “I rely upon you to make these idiots stop fighting each other. Use all necessary force.”

  “All necessary force, Comrade Premier? Can you be more precise?”

  “More precise? How could I? It’s in your hands. You must pull this one off or civil war will sweep the country. But I will tell you one thing: When this madness ends, we’ll never let the wild children anywhere near power again—and Lin Piao will go.”

  On July 23 fighting ceased. James collapsed onto a camp bed, having cajoled and threatened, pleaded and warned for a sleepless forty-eight hours. When he woke fourteen hours later, the silence startled him. For the first time in a month, no shots resounded in Wuhan. He wondered if he would have bombarded the city, and grimly concluded that he would have done so if the troops and the Red Guards had not observed the cease-fire. He had come a long, weary way from the Whampoa Academy and the siege of Shanghai forty years earlier. He had, perhaps, come too far on the road that had forked decisively when he fired his Beretta pistol at his Uncle Harry.

  On August 1, 1967, China signally failed to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Nanchang Rising that had given birth to the People’s Liberation Army. The generals were still striving to reestablish their authority by suppressing almost universal civil disorder; the countryside was cut off from the turbulent cities; and Peking was itself virtually isolated from the provinces. Just a year after the rump Central Committee of the Communist Party had decreed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the nation was disintegrating. Though barely averted once, a major civil war still threatened. Much time was needed to impose civil order, much more time to heal the wounds of the body politic. Chou En-lai knew it would require not months or years, but at least half a decade to re-create a stable administration in a peaceful country—if that feat was, indeed, possible.

  The direct threat to Hong Kong ended in September, though random bombs still shook the Colony. Common danger had drawn together the Colony’s Chinese and European inhabitants as had common suffering under the Japanese invasion. The British believed that true unity forged in the mutual ordeal joined the two communities in harmony. The Chinese, who knew better, did not disillusion their alien rulers.

  Most were otherwise concerned. Better times were coming as the escalating war in Vietnam pumped American dollars into Hong Kong’s economy. The timorous bureaucrats of Kwangtung Province, adhering strictly to the letter of the agreement, turned on the water promptly at midnight of September 14. The practical politicians who were regaining power in Peking obviously believed that British Hong Kong was still useful to Communist China. The Colony happily returned to the traditional functions that had made it indispensable and rich—trading with all who wished to trade and taking its due profits.

  Albert Sekloong was still elated by his personal exploit. Driving past the Country Club on Wong Chuk Hong Road, he saw two young boys from the nearby farm village poking bamboo poles at a brown-paper parcel. Shouting to the boys to run, he hurtled out of his canary-yellow Porsche and threw the parcel into the underbrush. The bomb exploded in midair, peppering his right arm with metal fragments. The pain of his wounds was allayed by fulsome praise from the newspapers and near adulation from his grandmother, his mother, and, best of all, his wife. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Sekloong and Brigadier General George Parker were not the only men of action in his generation. Since all others hailed his heroism, Albert could disregard his Uncle Charles’s dry observation that the plaudits might have been less enthusiastic if the Sekloongs were not automatically news in Hong Kong.

  The resurgence of confidence after a half-year of terror was invigorating the Colony’s business—and stimulating Albert�
�s own enterprises. He was particularly pleased by the one venture that was inherently glamorous, though negligible financially beside his other interests. Delighted by the receipts from Life and Death in Saigon, which was still filling theaters in Japan, Europe, and Southeast Asia, he was planning a new production by Dragon Films. That costume epic of the Ming Dynasty would offend neither his grandmother’s Victorian moral sensibilities nor her conservative political sensitivities.

  More important, Albert could rejoice without reservation at the results of the drastic operation Lady Mary and he had mounted two years earlier to rescue his foundering majoring enterprises. But a more mature Albert reflected with new humility that his grandmother’s perspicacity had been even more critical to the success of that endeavor than had his own energy and agility. He further realized that luck had been a determining factor. Luck or “good fortune with a little prodding,” as Lady Mary described it. Luck or “a merciful Providence,” as his Uncle Charles insisted. He gave thanks to that Providence for teaching him that more than acumen and drive were required to assure success in business or any other human enterprise. He was learning that ruthlessness might occasionally be necessary, but that ruthlessness was in itself neither a particular virtue nor a guarantee of success. He reminded himself that he must never again forget the imponderables of human irrationality and human emotions, whether writ large in politics or writ fine in relations between individuals.

  Nonetheless, Albert was justifiably pleased with himself. After Lady Mary’s contacts prepared the way, he had sold the six Electras of Hong Kong Airways to Air America, the private airline of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Dragon Plastics and Electronics Ltd. was amassing substantial profits from sales of its printed and quartz-chip circuits in the United States and Japan. Wheat and commodity futures had risen dramatically after Lady Mary called Dewey Miller’s attention to the probability of Soviet and Chinese shortages. Peking was buying hundreds of thousands of tons of grain to alleviate the shortages following upon the disruption of the Cultural Revolution and, in particular, to feed the Liberation Army and the Security Forces. Megalith Housing had already sold flats that would not come into existence until 1970. Best of all, judicious “gifts” to the generals who ruled Indonesia had regained the drilling concessions of Borneo South Seas Exploration, and he was momentarily expecting confirmation of the major oil strike his geologists confidently promised. The shares of his holding company, Ah Sek, were rising rapidly, while J. Sekloong and Sons was exuberantly profitable. Albert had, he felt, proved himself in adversity.

  He was therefore not particularly put out by his grandmother’s wry tone when she asked Kazuko and him to join his Uncle Charles and his mother, Sarah, for dinner at her table.

  “I suppose champagne is in order,” Lady Mary said. “But I’d be still happier, Albert, if you truly recognized that someone has to look after the next generation. Not just your boy and girl. They’re only babies. But little Mary and Jonathan. Even the unspeakable Chappie. That someone, Albert, I’m afraid, is you.”

  “I’m loaded down already, Grandma.” Albert protested automatically. “I know I’ve been lucky and I’d have gone under without you. But now’s the time to make a real killing.”

  “Albert, money is for use,” Sarah said, “not just for making more money.”

  “You’ve got two sides to your brain, Albert, and you’ve got two hands,” Lady Mary added. “You must find time for the family and for those others who need help. Otherwise all your killings will be meaningless. Why your great-grandfather …”

  “Not another lecture on the Old Gentleman, Grandma, please,” Albert smiled. “I know all the great things he did, and, I promise, I’m trying.”

  “Yes, another lecture, whether you like it or not.” Lady Mary’s smile paid reluctant tribute to Albert’s charm. “Money is all important to those who don’t have it. It means freedom and power. But money should be no more than a tool to those who possess large quantities. Otherwise, it means enslavement.”

  “We almost didn’t have it, Grandma,” Albert said. “My fault, but we were all worried, weren’t we?”

  “Do stop preening yourself,” Lady Mary rejoined tartly. “It requires near genius to begin making a fortune when one starts with nothing. Already possessing large sums, one must be very clever indeed not to make more. One must be a veritable genius of ineptitude to lose a fortune.”

  “And, Albert, you must make your money work for you and for others,” his mother reminded him. “So many things need to be done here and elsewhere.”

  Albert was nonplussed by the new demands imposed at his moment of triumph. Archbishop Charles Sekloong hid a smile behind his damask napkin. Some day, he reflected, Albert might rise to the almost impossibly high standards set by his mother, his grandmother, and his great-grandfather.

  “What,” Albert finally asked, “do you expect of me now?”

  “You are now the Sekloong,” his grandmother replied. “You must willingly assume total responsibility for the entire clan. You must preserve not only the Sekloong fortunes, but the Sekloong reputation. Our name means more than wealth. It means intelligent charity and wide awareness of the effect of our actions on other human beings. It means generously recompensing—in all manner of ways, not just financially—those whose brains and hands have given you your wealth. Above all, it means responsibility for the less fortunate, as your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandfather understood.”

  “I can only try, after I’ve tried to understand exactly what you mean.” Albert joked to cover his embarrassment, but reverted to seriousness. “And, I promise you, I will try.”

  “You may say grace, now, Charles.” Lady Mary relented. “Please give profound thanks for our survival—and pray the Lord to preserve the Sekloongs from their greatest failing, pride.”

  Postlude

  June 28, 1970

  1:04–4:31 A.M.

  The deserted offices of J. Sekloong and Sons on the nineteenth floor of St. George’s Building swayed slightly each time the raging wind hurled solid rain against their sheet-glass windows. At 1:04 on the morning of Sunday, June 28, 1970, Typhoon Linda was gathering herself to leave Hong Kong and storm into China. One propeller-shaft snapped like a bamboo wand, the 8,000-ton freighter Oriental Monarch pounded herself into a jagged wreck against the airport runway. When its hillside foundation gave way, the twelve-story Alexandra Mansion on Stubbs Road subsided into a tumulus of concrete, mud, and twisted automobiles that entombed thirty-seven corpses. The Colony’s ordeal was not yet over; the typhoon’s lashing tail was still to wreak great damage and sweep away many lives.

  Within the darkened suite, the single rose in the crystal bud vase beside the upright telephone dropped two petals on Sir Jonathan’s ebony desk. The shining leather and bright steel womb Albert Sekloong had made his adjoining room reverberated with the repeated impacts, and the framed article from Time magazine rattled against the chased-gold Japanese wallpaper. Albert’s communications center shrilled peremptorily for three full minutes. But no intelligence perceived the signal, and no hand lifted the telephone. Precisely upon the 181st second, an orange light glowed on the brushed-steel console beside the kidney-shaped desk. A relay tripped automatically, and, fifteen seconds later, a green light flashed. Faithful to its designer’s intent, Albert’s expensive toy was transferring urgent calls over great distances without human intercession.

  The Colony’s internal communications had been short-circuited by flood-waters seeping into cables and junction-boxes. Under Secretary Spencer Taylor Smith could not communicate with the boxlike United States Consulate-General on Garden Road, which was still linked to the web of cables and satellites the American military had spun around the globe. No more could General Shih Ai-kuo telephone the sealed building in grimy North Point where the New China News Agency, the Peking regime’s unofficial embassy, maintained its own telecommunications center. But the two private cables from Sekloong Manor to the Sekloong offices
were still operating, as were the heavily shielded cables from St. George’s Building to the computers of Cable and Wireless that fed electronic pulses into underseas cables to Washington and land-lines to Peking.

  For the next three hours, those impromptu links were to carry scrambled telephone calls from the two antagonistic capitals to their senior emissaries confined in The Castle by Typhoon Linda’s furious departure. The protracted negotiations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America in Warsaw were culminating in an urgent dialogue in Hong Kong. The great storm admirably suited Lady Mary’s purpose, since it forced the American diplomat and the Chinese general to talk face to face. Moreover, the rapid escalation of the crisis denied them the evasions and procrastination of normal diplomatic usage.

  Peking forced the pace. At 12:20 on that Sunday morning—its clocks an hour behind Hong Kong’s—the Chinese capital was arid and hot. Miniature whirlwinds of yellow dust from Central Asia swirled under the dim streetlights of the Boulevard of Protracted Peace, and the solitary wail of a train bound for Sinkiang 1,600 miles to the northwest echoed in the silence of the dark city. But beams of light from the Premier’s offices in the Great Hall of the People and from the Headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army twelve miles distant welcomed the limousines of senior officials.

  Premier Chou En-lai was warily approaching a head-on confrontation with his nominal superior in the Communist Party and his nominal subordinate in the Central Government—Deputy Chairman Lin Piao, who was also First Vice Premier and Minister of Defense. Though he knew that attacking Nationalist-held Taiwan could bring China and the United States into armed collision, the Premier could not countermand the assault Lin Piao had ordered. The Deputy Chairman planned to establish his supreme power—and to overthrow Chou En-lai—by using his troops to “liberate” the island, an achievement that had eluded the Premier’s diplomacy for two decades. That feat would make Lin Piao’s power unchallengeable by solidifying the support of the victorious generals behind him. His personal victory would lead to radical oppression at home, ending almost inevitably in popular rebellion; it would, further, commit a militant China to adventurism abroad that must eventually result in a nuclear clash with the United States. Yet, even the Premier would be vilified as a “traitor to the revolution” by the Deputy Chairman’s sycophants if he directly opposed the operation.