A terrible smile spread across the face of Wu Tai Kwong. “I have won,” he whispered. “I have undermined the levee — the sea will come in.”
Despite the fact that she was no longer cold, Callie Grafton shivered. “When the regime collapses, what will happen then?” she asked.
“The people will execute the Communists. That is inevitable. And fitting. That is the fate of all dynasties when they fall. The Communists will go like the others.”
Jake Grafton went out the main door of the hotel and turned right, headed for Nathan Road and the ferry landing. Two men who had been lounging against the wall followed him.
He glanced back just before he turned the corner — they were keeping their distance.
Rounding the corner, another man stepped away from the wall with a pistol in his hand. It must have been in his pocket.
Jake didn’t think, he merely reacted. He dove for the pistol, seizing it and wrenching it away from the man.
No doubt Grafton’s sudden appearance had startled the man, who must have thought that the sight of the weapon would freeze Grafton, make him stand still in the hope of not being shot. In any event, the American’s move was so unexpected that it succeeded.
Jake Grafton’s adrenaline was flowing nicely. With his assailant’s pistol in his left hand, he hit him with all his might in the throat and dropped the man to the sidewalk, gagging.
Now he ran, fighting the crowd, toward the waterfront.
Soldiers were spread across the pier in front of the ferry landing.
They ’ve stopped the ferries!
Jake veered right, toward the small basin beside the huge shopping mall for cruise ship passengers. In this basin small boats normally took on and discharged passengers for harbor tours.
There were a handful of tour boats tied to the pier, all of them sporting little blue-and-white awnings to keep off the sun and rain. Jake ran along the pier until he saw a man working on one. The engine was running, although the boat was still securely moored.
By now Jake had the pistol in his pocket that he had taken off the man in the street. He was going to have a nice collection of these things if he lived long enough.
He looked behind him. The people who had been following were apparently lost in the crowd, which filled most of the street.
He pulled out his wallet, took out a handful of bills, replaced the wallet in his hip pocket. He jumped down into the boat and waved the bills at the boatman, who was in his early thirties, with long hair that hung across his face.
The boatman said something in Chinese. Jake gestured toward Victoria. “Over there,” he said and offered the money again.
The boatman ignored the money. He pointed back toward the soldiers and shook his head.
Okay.
Jake looked at the boat’s controls as the boatman showered him with Chinese. The throttle was there, a wheel, a stick shift for a forward-reverse transmission… the boat was idling.
“Out. Get out!” Jake pulled the pistol just far enough from his pocket for the boatman to see it, then pointed toward the pier.
Frightened, the boatman went. As he did, Jake Grafton jammed the money he had offered into the man’s shirt pocket. Must be my genial expression, Jake thought as he ran forward to untie the rope on the pier bollard.
With it free, he made his way aft as quickly as he could. Where are the men who were following me? Did they lose me in the crowd?
That must be it. They’re probably searching frantically right this minute.
With the bow and stern lines loose, Jake scrambled back to the tiny cockpit and spun the wheel while he jammed the throttle forward. The boat surged ahead, caroming off the boat moored in front of it.
He didn’t waste time but headed for the entrance to the basin.
There, on the pier! The men who followed him from the hotel! They stood watching. Now one of them removed a cell phone from his pocket and made a call.
There was a nice breeze and a decent sea running in the strait, so the little tour boat began pitching the moment it cleared the mouth of the basin.
Some soldiers around the ferry terminal were shouting and gesturing at him, so Jake turned his boat to the northeast, away from Hong Kong Island. Those guys are itching to shoot someone, he thought and decided to get well out of rifle range before he turned south to cross the strait.
In the helicopter circling over the police station, Hu Chiang also looked at his watch. The assault on the police barracks had gone like clockwork, for which he was supremely grateful. Wu Tai Kwong was supposed to be in the left seat of this chopper running the show; the others had insisted that Hu Chiang take Wu’s place.
As he watched the trucks loading small arms at the police barracks, Hu Chiang wondered just where Wu was… and Sonny Wong. No one had seen Sonny in days.
He had almost refused to take Wu’s place as the tactical leader. Generalissimo Hu Chiang — the thing was ridiculous. If the choice had been his he would have declined. Yet he remembered what Wu had said, so long ago when the revolution was just a dream: ‘The cause must be bigger than we are, worth more than we are, or we are wasting our lives pursuing it.”
“We cannot make a Utopia, fix all that is wrong with human society,” he had told Wu.
“True, but we can build a civilization better than the one we have. To build for future generations is our duty, our obligation as thinking creatures.”
Duty. That was Wu’s take on life. He was doing his duty.
So Hu Chiang was in the chopper this morning, half queasy, trying to keep his wits about him as the faithful stormed the police barracks on the southern tip of the Kowloon peninsula.
From this seat a few hundred feet up he could see much of Hong Kong harbor, which was dotted with dozens of moored ships from all over the earth and squadrons of lighters and fishing boats. He could see the airport at Lantau, the Kowloon docks and warehouses, the endless high-rises full of people with hopes and dreams of a better life, the office towers of Victoria’s Central District, and the spine of Hong Kong Island beyond.
The most interesting portion of the view was to the north, toward mainland China, hidden this morning in the June haze. Hong Kong was but a first step, then the revolution must go north, with or without Wu Tai Kwong or Hu Chiang …
The radio sputtered again. The leader of the barracks assault was checking in. “Mission completed,” he said, so proud he almost couldn’t get the words out.
“Roger,” Hu Chiang replied and directed the chopper pilot to circle over the entrance to the highway tunnel under the strait.
The army had it blocked off this morning, of course. Forty or so troops were visible, a truck, and… a tank!
Yep. There it sat, right in front of the harbor tunnel entrance, squat and massive and ominous.
Hu Chiang picked up the mike and began talking.
Another helicopter, this one belonging to the PLA, was circling over Victoria’s Central District and the southern tip of Kowloon. General Tang was in the passenger seat. He had had the chopper pick him up at City Hall and was now looking the situation over.
He had certainly not expected the crowds that he saw coming toward Victoria’s Central District from the west and east. Connaught Road was crammed with people, as were Harcourt Road and Queensway, an endless stream of people coming from the Western District, Wanchai, and Happy Valley, all headed toward Central.
He had his troops deployed in the heart of the Central District and around City Hall, with his headquarters in the square in front of the Bank of the Orient.