Hong Kong (27 page)

Callie was unwilling to leave the subject. "So you must have known that someday Wong might turn on you, take over the entire organization, put himself at the head? There is plenty of precedent, I believe. Saddam Hussein and Joe Stalin leap immediately to mind."

"That was a possibility," Wu Tai Kwong reluctantly admitted.

"So what did you plan to prevent that move from succeeding?"

"I planned to kill him before he killed me."

"Looks like you may have miscalculated," Callie snapped.

Thoroughly disgusted, she carried the blankets into the tiny bathroom and shut the door. The door had no lock.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Virgil Cole's daughter, Elaine, was an associate professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was attending a women's political caucus in Washington, D.C., when she received a coded E-mail from her father. Like the message received by Eaton Steinbaugh, the E-mail consisted of a nonsense word, a dozen random letters, from an address in Hong Kong.

She received the message at noon when she checked her E-mail on her laptop in her hotel room. She got off-line, left the computer running, and gazed about her distractedly, the political meeting forgotten.

She opened the drapes on the window. Georgetown was visible but none of monumental Washington, which was out of sight to the right.

She had a small notebook in her computer case. She got it out now, opened it, and examined the notes she had written there. The handwriting was neat, almost compulsively so. She had made the notes the last time she was in Hong Kong visiting her father, over spring break.

Being Virgil Cole's daughter had always been a mixed blessing. He
^w
as quiet and unassuming, brilliant and rich. Somehow her mother's second husband never measured up. He was very nice, and yet... "hen she was young she had thought her mother was crazy for not staying with her father, but as an adult, she could see how difficult

Cole was, especially for her mother, who was neither brilliant nor quiet and unassuming.

Perhaps it had all worked out for the best.

Except for her half brother, of course, who had never come to grips with the fire in his father's soul.

A Chinese revolution. Yes, that was Virgil Cole. A great impossible crusade to which he could give all of his brains and energy and determination would attract him like a candle attracts a moth.

She had never seen him so full of life as he was in April during her visit.

A crusade! A holy war!

She had seen the fire in his eyes, so of course she said yes when he asked her to help. He didn't come right out and baldly ask. He explained what was needed, how the worm programs were already in place and at the right time needed to be triggered from a location outside of Hong Kong, triggered in such a way that the identity of the person doing it could never be established ... beyond a reasonable doubt.

He explained the worms, how they were designed, and she carefully wrote down the instructions she needed to make them dance.

She played with her computer keyboard, checked the E-mail again.

So the revolution was
now.

And she was going to help.

And she might never see her father again.

She was mulling that hard fact when the execute message came. She turned off the computer and stored it carefully in its carrying case. She left the case on the bed and took only the notebook with her.

She caught a taxi in front of the hotel and told the driver she wanted to go to the main public library.

Sure enough, the library had a bank of computers that allowed Internet access. The librarian at the desk near the computers was a plump, middle-aged woman. "The fee is a dollar," the lady told Elaine, who dug in her purse for a bill. "Such a terrible irony—the computers are here for people who can't afford their own, but the users must help defray the cost."

"I understand."

"Everything costs, these days," the librarian said. "We're fighting the battle with the library board to get the fee eliminated, but so far they won't yield."

"Yes."

"Our only rule is no pornography. If people keep calling up porno-hic sites, I'm afraid the computers will have to be removed."

"Do you check to see what people are viewing on the Net?" Elaine ked pretending to be horrified at this privacy intrusion.

"Oh no," the librarian assured her. "But people do walk behind the cubicles, and they talk, you know!"

"Indeed they do. I'm here today to do some research for my thesis."

"Let me know if you need any help," the librarian said and turned to help the next person, a pimpled teen with unkempt long hair who looked as if he might be very interested in porno.coms. As Elaine walked away, the library lady began briefing this intent young man on the evils of cybersex.

With the notebook of passwords and computer codes on the table beside her, it took Elaine less than fifteen minutes to get through the security layers into the main computer of the central bank clearinghouse in Hong Kong. Once there, she began searching for the code that her father assured her would be there.

Virgil Cole answered the ringing cell phone on his office desk with his usual "Hello." He listened a moment, then broke the connection.

"The York units are in," he told Jake Grafton, who was stretched out on Cole's couch thinking about his wife. "Want to see them?"

"I thought Sergeant York was a paper program."

"It's hardware now."

"You got six?"

"That's right."

"Steal 'em?"

"No."

"Buy 'em?"

"Not quite. Let's say the American government retains legal title and I have custody."

Let's go look." Jake reached for his shoes. "I was wondering how you red-hot revolutionaries were going to avoid being massacred by the division of troops the PLA has stationed in Hong Kong. This is it, huh?"

There was not much traffic on the streets at this hour, but Jake

Grafton paused in the entrance way of the consulate. Half hidden in the shadows, he restrained Cole with a touch on the arm while he scanned the street in both directions.

Only when he was sure there was no one waiting did he mutter at Cole and step through the entrance.

Cole led the way across the street and along the sidewalk for fifty yards. They went down the first alley they came to, then down a ramp to a loading dock under the skyscraper. A tractor-trailer rig was flush against the loading dock.

Cole climbed the stairs, nodded at two men sitting on the dock, and knocked on the door. A man carrying an assault rifle opened the door. Cole and Grafton went in.

The Sergeant York units were two-legged robots about six and a half feet tall. The legs had three knees—back, front, back—with three-pronged feet. They had articulated arms and, where human hands would be, three flexible grasping appendages, almost like jointed claws, which ended in sharp points. Two were hinged to close inward and one outward, almost like an opposed thumb.

Mounted on the right side of the torso on a flexible mount was a four-barreled Gatling gun that fired standard 5.56 millimeter rounds from a flexible belt feed. Capacity was two hundred rounds.

And the York units had heads mounted on flexible stalks that could turn right or left, be raised or lowered. Two Yorks were standing on the concrete floor back-to-back, turning their heads and looking about with an ominous curiosity.

"The best part," Cole said with more enthusiasm than Grafton thought he had in him, "is the tail. What do you think of the tail?" The prehensile tail was only about eighteen inches long, thick where it came out of the body and tapering quickly.

"It's cool." Jake could think of no other reply.

"The engineers wanted three legs, and the army absolutely refused to buy the thing if it had more than two—they were worried about their image. The tail was my compromise. It helps with stability, balance, agility, shock absorption.... With the tail the York is quicker and faster, and can leap higher. And it gives us room for more batteries, which are heavy."

"What were those soldiers thinking?"

"Yeah."

Three Chinese men were watching Kerry Kent walk a York out of

,
_sern
itrailer. She used a small computer unit, much like a laptop.

Th re were no wires. Like Grafton the Chinese men watched the Ser-

nt York robots and whispered to each other. ' lake Grafton felt mesmerized by the spectral stare of the robots that ere outside the trailer. Their heads never stopped moving. They had

mouth or nose, but in the eye-socket position—the widest part of

the head__were two cameras. The one on the right side had a lens

turret on the face. As Jake inspected the nearest one, the turret rotated another lens in front of the left camera, if it was a camera.

"What the hell are these things looking at?" he asked Cole.

"Us, the room we're in, everything. They are learning their surroundings."

"Smart machines?"

"These things use a combination of digital and analog technology in their central processors so they can learn their surroundings without having to carry around computers the size of grand pianos. It's a neural network, modeled on the human brain. That breakthrough in computer design was one of the advances that took robot technology to another level."

"I see," Jake said as the third robot walked to a spot beside the other two and came to a stop. It tilted its head a minute amount, almost quizzically, as it scrutinized the two men.

"One of the fascinating things about neural networks," Cole continued, "is that the network needs rest periods or the error rate increases. Nap times."

"What is that thing looking for?" Jake asked, indicating the curious York.

'Just checking for weapons. When they're in a combat mode, they fire on unidentified persons carrying weapons."

'They can't shoot at everyone with a weapon. How do the Yorks separate the good guys from the bad guys?"

It's a complex program, based on physical characteristics—such as size, clothing, sex, possession of a weapon—and aggressive behavior. Some behavioral scientists worked with our programmers to write it."

"Sex?"

"Most soldiers are men. That's a fact." "I see."

"My main contributions to the Sergeant York project were som breakthroughs in ultrawide bandwidth radio technology. They com municate with their controller and with each other via UWB, which as you probably know has some unusual characteristics, unlike UHF or VHF.

"So these things talk to each other?"

"They are a true network—what one knows, they all know. Information is exchanged via UWB on a continuous basis, which means that these six are soon working from a very detailed three-dimensional database. Each unit also contains a UWB radar, so it can see through walls and solid objects. Very short-range, of course. The radars are off-the-shelf units, stuff being used to inspect bridge abutments for cracks and look for lost kids in storm sewers."

"What about the stalk on top of the head?"

"There is a flexible lens there for looking around corners. The sensor on the right side of the head works with visible light, the left with infrared. At night the sensitivity on the right sensor automatically increases so it can handle starlight."

The fourth York walked out of the truck and took a position beside the others but facing off at a ninety-degree angle.

"These units are prototypes," Cole explained, "not the refined designs the U.S. army will get as production units. These lack sensors in the rear quadrant, so they usually want to face in different directions so they will get the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama."

"They 'want'?"

"Sergeant York has artificial intelligence. The operator can position the units, monitor their performance, override automatic features, approve target selection and the like, but these things can be turned loose on full automatic mode—then they fight like an army. They
are
an army. We developed them to fight and win on the conventional battlefield, the tactical nuke battlefield, and urban battlefields like Mogadishu. The Somali experience was the catalyst for their development."

Jake whistled, and two of the York units turned their heads to look at him.

"I guess I forgot to mention audio. They have excellent hearing in a much wider frequency spectrum than the human ear can handle."

"How much battle damage can they sustain?"

"A lot. They are constructed of titanium, the internal works are

. , i
_ec
|
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ith Kevlar, and Kevlar forms the outer skin. Still, mobility is their main defense."

"Two legs and a tail... how mobile are they?" the admiral asked.

Cole pointed to the Kevlar-coated areas on the nearest York's leg,

,
_snapes
of which were just visible under the skin. "The major mus-

1 are hydraulic pistons; the minor ones are electromechanical servos—