The troops there seemed to be properly positioned, but the size of the crowds stunned Tang. This massive outpouring of people in defiance of the government he had not expected. It was almost as if… as if the people expected to swallow the troops.
For the first time, General Tang wondered if Sun Siu Ki or the party leaders in Beijing understood what was happening in Hong Kong.
A cry for help from the Kowloon police barracks snapped General Tang back to unpleasant reality. He motioned to the pilot of the helicopter, who swung out over the strait and flew toward the southern tip of Kowloon.
The pilot pointed out another chopper to General Tang, who had trouble seeing it at first.
“A television station helicopter,” the pilot said over the intercom. “I have seen it many times before. They must be taking pictures for the television.”
That, of course, was the last thing that General Tang wanted. Television pictures of this mass outpouring of anti-government sentiment would shake the regime to its foundations. The people in Beijing had no idea, none at all!
Tang waved angrily at the television helicopter. The pilot looked directly at him, then looked away.
“Can you talk to that pilot?” Tang demanded.
“Yes.” The army pilot changed the channels on the radio and called the helicopter.
Hu Chiang didn’t hear the army pilot’s call because he was talking on a different frequency to the squad leader in charge of the trucks carrying the weapons from the police barracks. These trucks had to get through the tunnel to Victoria, so the tank and army troops were going to have to be neutralized. Hu’s pilot heard the call, though, and told Hu about it on the intercom.
“Trouble,” the television station pilot said. “If we ignore him too long, he will have everyone in the world shooting at us.”
“Let’s do it to him first,” Hu said and pointed west toward the harbor as he spoke into the microphone on his headset. The pilot took the TV chopper in the indicated direction.
Tang forgot about the civilian helicopter when he got a glimpse of the police barracks and the uniformed bodies still sprawled upon the lawn, which had been used as a campground. Tang knew corpses when he saw them, and those men looked real dead.
He saw the trucks, which must be loading the weapons Tang knew were stored in the barracks.
He directed his pilot eastward.
The streets of Kowloon were packed with cars. With the tunnel to Victoria closed, there was no place for the Hong Kong Island traffic to go, so a massive traffic jam was the result. Traffic in the city was always bad, yet today it was impossible. People had abandoned the cars in gridlocked intersections. The weapons thieves were fools to assault the police barracks with the streets impassible.
They certainly weren’t going to make a fast getaway in all this traffic. His order to close the tunnel, he thought with a bit of pride, may have proved their undoing.
He again spoke to the pilot, who took him east a half mile until the machine was over the entrance to the harbor tunnel.
The troops were where they were supposed to be, the tank was there … They just needed to be told that there were armed criminals in the vicinity… to be ready!
He consulted the printed frequency list his staff had given him this morning, then dialed the radio to the proper channel. He keyed the mike and began speaking. When he did so he naturally looked down at the people he was talking to, the soldiers surrounding the tank.
He was three words into his message when the tank exploded.
The explosion was not a massive firebalclass="underline" but a cloud of smoke that jetted from the side of the thing, then seemed to envelop it.
As if it were hit by a wire-guided antitank weapon, General Tang thought, then realized that was exactly what had happened.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a streak of fire in the air, not large. Before he could react a loud, metallic bang shook the chopper, followed by a severe vibration, then a slew to the right.
“We’ve been hit,” the pilot shouted over the intercom. He wrestled with the cyclic and collective, trying to gain control, even as the helicopter spun faster and faster to the right and began falling.
Michael Gao was a thirty-six-year-old security analyst with a finance degree from Harvard. He worked for one of the large American mutual funds that regularly invested in the Hong Kong market… when he was working. Just now he was engaged in high treason against the government of a sovereign nation. Dress it up any way you like, he thought wryly, shooting down an army helicopter with a Strella missile is going to be difficult to explain away in court. Ditto popping a tank.
He had wrestled with these issues a thousand times in the past year and always came back to the fact that he personally wanted the Communists out of power in China. He believed it would be better for everyone, including himself, if some form of democratic government were installed in Beijing. And he believed the conversion worth a major national convulsion. That being the case, it logically followed that he should personally commit himself to making it happen. So he had.
No going back now, he told himself as the helo completed the last few revolutions of its out-of-control spiral and smashed onto the top of a gravel dike around the tunnel entrance.
The chopper didn’t explode or burn. After the dust from the impact settled, just a wisp of smoke rose from the crumpled wreckage. No one emerged from the cockpit — no doubt the crew was dead or dying.
No one rushed to their aid.
Michael Gao realized with a start that he was hearing the popping of small arms. He looked down from the top of the building where he stood and watched his friends snipe at the troops around the smoking hulk of the tank.
With a gut-wrenching certainty, Michael Gao knew that if there had been any men in the tank, they too were now dead. The armor-piercing sabot he had fired raised the temperature of the metals it penetrated so high that the materials forming the tank’s interior would spontaneously ignite and cook the crew, if by some miracle they survived the initial concussion and thermal shock.
The soldiers near the tunnel entrance were lying in the street or trying to find cover. Bursts of automatic rifle fire created sparks where the bullets ricocheted off concrete and little puffs where they impacted. This was ridiculous! The rebels didn’t have time for this.
Gao leaned over the edge of the roof, shouted to the man who was on the roof of the lower building across the street, the one facing the tunnel entrance. “Use the loudspeaker!”
The man picked up the microphone. “PLA soldiers! Lay down your arms. You are surrounded. We will kill you all unless you lay down your arms and surrender.”
One by one, the demoralized soldiers threw their assault rifles on the street and raised their arms in the air.
When the general’s helicopter went down, Hu Chiang told his pilot to circle back over the tunnel entrance. He arrived in time to see the last of the soldiers guarding the tunnel throw down their arms.
The problem was the cars and trucks that filled the streets from curb to curb… and the tank that smoldered in the tunnel entrance. In their planning sessions the rebels had anticipated both problems. They had two solutions, both painted yellow and made by Caterpillar. They were on flatbed trucks parked in the rubble of a building being demolished. Now they came clanking onto the street with their blades down.
Vehicles that couldn’t move were bulldozed out of the way. Trucks were pushed up onto sidewalks, cars were stacked one atop the other. All this was accomplished in a bedlam of people running, screaming, protesting, begging the armed rebels not to ruin their cars… all to no avail. The bulldozers pushed and shoved and made a way, and soon the first truck carrying weapons taken from the police barracks armory was waiting near the tunnel entrance. The truck was covered with armed rebels hanging on every available protuberance.