One of the bulldozers backed up to the tank, and a cable was hooked to the thing. Then the dozer began pulling, dragging the tank out of the way.
When it was clear, the other bulldozer raised its blade and led the trucks into the tunnel.
Governor Sun’s secretary thought the New China News Agency weenie on the telephone was some kind of flake. This story of Jimmy Lee falling apart, worried about committing treason… Jimmy Lee? The top one percent of the top one percent of cool?
He put the radio censor on hold and told his colleague at the next desk, “Another nut case. This one wants to talk to the governor.”
“The governor will refuse.”
“I know.”
“He will be angry you asked.”
“What should I do? Perhaps the man is telling the truth.”
The man at the next desk surrendered. “Tell the governor. Let him make the decision.”
At Lantau Airport Ma Chao and his fellow fighter pilots were directed to don their flight gear and wait in the ready room, which they did. Apparently during the wee hours of the night Beijing had ordered a full alert.
Unfortunately, no amplifying orders had been received over the military radio communications net. The telephone system was down, silencing the faxes and computers. An old Bruce Lee movie was playing on the television.
The ready room was abuzz with speculation. Everyone seemed to have an opinion — the more outlandish, the louder the proud possessor proclaimed it. They argued, wondered, gestured, and guessed. The Americans and Taiwanese were invading. The Japanese had declared war. There had been a coup in Beijing.
Ma Chao and his friends sat silently, taking it in, saying little. They thought they knew what was happening, but without explanations or verification from headquarters, they couldn’t be certain. Nor was there a need for immediate action.
Patience was needed, and Ma Chao had plenty. Like all the pilots, he was wearing a sidearm. He had the flap unbuttoned so he could get it out and into action quickly.
As he listened to the fantastic scenarios that were being paraded before the group as quickly as they were concocted, he thought about the commanding officer and his department heads, all Communists, all loyal to the regime, as far as Ma Chao knew.
When the crunch came Ma Chao and his three fellow conspirators were going to have to take charge, and that probably meant they would have to shoot some of the senior men. Ma Chao sat in the ready room wondering if he could do it.
He had assured Wu Tai Kwong that he could. “I am a soldier,” he said. “I have the personal courage to do what must be done.”
“You could shoot men you have served with for many years?”
“I do not know,” he finally replied, truthfully.
“Ah, my friend, on men like you the revolution will succeed or fail. You must use your best judgment, but you must not surrender. You must face unpleasant reality and do what the situation requires of you.”
He had nodded, knowing the truth of Wu’s words.
Wu always told the truth. All of it, never just a piece, and he never sugarcoated it. You got bald reality from him.
“Chinese pilots are poorly trained,” Wu told him and explained how Western air forces trained their pilots. “You Chinese pilots fly straight and level, relying on the ground controller to find the enemy and steer you to him. What if the ground controller is off the air, or the enemy refuses to fly straight and level, waiting for you to assassinate him? What then? Could you improvise?”
Ma Chao did not answer. He thought about the question but refused to state a mere opinion.
“When the revolution begins,” Wu said, “you will have to weigh the situation and make the best decision you can, then go forward confidently, aggressively, believing in yourself. There will be no one to give you orders. You must decide for yourself what needs to be done, then do it. What we require of you is the courage to believe in yourself.”
Ma Chow thought about that courage now as he sat in the ready room waiting for the earth to turn.
Governor Sun’s secretary found that his boss was tied up with an engineer who was trying to explain the difficulty with the subway doors. “The problem is in the computer,” the engineer explained.
“The computer opens and closes train doors?”
“Yes,” the engineer said, pleased that Sun was with him so far. “Something has gone wrong with the software. We must find the problem before we can fix it.”
“I thought you said the problem was power fluctuations?”
“Power fluxes caused the problem with the software.”
The secretary went back to the New China News Agency man he had on hold. “The governor is busy. Why don’t you tell me the message? I’ll write it down and give it to him when he has a moment.”
“This is very important,” the censor said. “The message is too important and too long to be written down.”
The secretary rolled his eyes. “I’ll have the governor call you. How is that?”
“I will await his call.” The censor dictated the telephone number at the radio station, then hung up.
The secretary threw the call-back slip into the governor’s in-basket.
The soldiers on duty at the Victoria end of the Cross-Harbor Tunnel heard echoes through the tunnel of the small battle in Kowloon. They also saw General Tang’s helicopter crash and assumed, correctly, that it had been shot down.
They waited in nervous dread for what might come next. There were only a dozen of them, a small squad, manning a police barricade in front of the tunnel entrance. They were young, the oldest a mere twenty-four, from rural villages far to the north. They had joined the army to escape the drudgery of the rice fields. Only four of them could read the most basic of the Chinese ideographs.
They were armed with old Kalashnikov assault rifles and one machine gun. When they heard the clanking of the bulldozer coming through the tunnel, they assumed it was the tank that they knew had been positioned at the Kowloon end.
Relieved, they relaxed and the sergeant in charge walked down the tunnel to meet the tank coming the other way. He went about fifty yards and waited.
When he realized he was looking at a bulldozer, and behind it trucks, the sergeant knew something was happening that no one had told him about. He turned and scampered back up the tunnel, shouting to his men.
Unsure of what to do, the men waited for direction.
The uncertainty ended as the bulldozer emerged from the tunnel. Two men atop the dozer opened fire on the soldiers standing about.
The other soldiers might have killed these two men and some of the men following the dozer on foot if they had been given a chance, but they weren’t. A machine gun atop a nearby building swept the tunnel entranceway with a long burst, sending the bullets back and forth, knocking the standing soldiers down like bowling pins.
The three-second burst was enough. Men emerging from the tunnel shot the survivors as the bulldozer rolled over two bodies. The trucks turned into the crowded streets and stopped. Men inside the truck beds began passing out assault rifles and ammunition to the crowd of young men and women who had been lounging there.
At the biggest television station in Hong Kong the atmosphere was strictly business as usual when Wei Luk and three other rebels walked in. There were no guards in the lobby, armed or unarmed, and no guards in the reception area; just two potted palms and large photos of the station’s news stars. One of the stars was a man named Peter Po, who, like Wei Luk and his friends, had bet his life that communism could be successfully overthrown.