Hong Kong (28 page)

which means gears, motors, and magnets. A couple of ring-laser gyros

vide the balance information for the computer, which knows the

achine's position in relation to the earth and where the extremities

_re
- it uses the pistons and servos to keep the thing balanced. York is

extremely agile, amazingly so considering it weighs four hundred and

nine pounds without ammunition."

"Power?"

"Alas, batteries. But these are top-of-the-line batteries and can be recharged quickly or just replaced in the field, a slip-out/slip-in deal. In addition, since the outer layer of each unit's Kevlar skin is photoelectric, outdoors on a sunny day the batteries will stay pretty much charged up as long as excessive exertion is not required of the unit."

Jake Grafton shook his head, slightly awed. "How much does one of these damned things cost?"

"Twice the price of a main battle tank, and worth every penny. They can use every portable weapon in the NATO inventory. Hell, they can even drive a hummer or a tank if you take out the seat and make room for the tail."

"Uh-huh."

All six were out of the semitrailer now. They arranged themselves in a circle, each facing outward. They made a small whining sound when they moved, a sound that would probably be inaudible with a typical urban ambient noise level.

"Preproduction prototypes," Cole said when Jake mentioned the noise. "The production units won't make those noises."

Kerry Kent came over, her wireless computer in her hand. "Let me introduce you to Alvin, Bob, Charlie, Dog, Easy, and Fred."

She
was
referring
to
the
small
letter
on
the
back
of
each
unit's
head and on both shoulders. The nicknames were slight twists on the military phonetic alphabet system.

"The New York Net," Jake Grafton said. He wasn't trying to be runny because he wasn't in the mood: The thought merely whizzed

through his cranium and popped out about as fast. Kent and Cole looked at him oddly without smiling.

She showed Jake the computer presentation. "Each unit can be controlled by its own computer, or one computer can control as many as ten units. When I'm in network mode, I can see what each unit is seeing or look at the composite picture." She moved an icon with a finger and tapped it. Jake leaned forward. The picture did have a remarkable depth of field, although it was presented on a flat screen.

She tapped the screen again. "As you can see, I can designate targets tell specific units to engage it, or let the computer pick a unit. I can assign each unit a task, tell it to go to a certain position, assign targets basically run the fight with this computer. Or I can go to an automatic mode and let the system identify targets in a predetermined order of priority and engage them."

"What if your computer fails or someone shoots you?"

"The system defaults to full automatic mode, which happens to be the preferred mode of operations anyway."

Jake shook his head. "The bad guys are going to figure out what they are up against pretty quickly. Maybe rifle bullets will bounce off these guys, but grenades, rockets, mortars, artillery?"

"Mobility is the key to the York's survival," Kerry rejoined. She tapped the screen.

Charlie York stirred. It tilted its head back to give itself a better view of the overhead, which was about twelve feet up. It crouched, swung its arms, and leaped with arms extended.

It caught the edge of an exposed steel beam and hung there, its tail moving to counteract the swaying of its body. Everyone in the room exhaled at once.

Jake stood there for several seconds with his mouth agape before he remembered to close it. The dozen Chinese men in the room were equally mesmerized. After a moment they cheered.

"The units can leap about six feet high from a standing position," Kerry Kent explained. "On the run they can clear a ten-foot fence. They normally stand six feet six inches high; at full leg extension they are eight feet tall."

"Very athletic," Cole said, nodding his head. He didn't grin at Jake, but almost.

"How long are you going to let Charlie hang from the overhead?" the admiral asked Kent.

Her finger moved, and Charlie dropped to the floor. The unit seemed

catch itself perfectly, balancing with its hands, arms, and tail. Now Charlie looked at Jake, tilted its head a few inches. I j
_n
S
pite of himself, Jake Grafton smiled. "Wow," he said.

A half dozen men began checking the Yorks, inspecting every visible   h They had been trained at Cole's company in California as part of a highly classified program. One man began plugging extension cords into the back of each unit to recharge the batteries. The other men busied themselves carrying crates of ammunition out of the back of the semitrailer and stacking them against a wall.

"So tomorrow is the day?" Jake muttered to his former bombardier-navigator.

"Yep," said Tiger Cole.

"Another big demonstration in the Central District?"

"Yep. The army will be there. We'll strap them on with the Yorks."

"Jesus Christ! A lot of civilians are going to get caught in the cross fire."

Cole nodded once, curtly.

"Do it at night, Tiger. Maximize the advantage that high tech gives you. These Yorks probably see in the dark as well as they do in the daytime."

"This isn't my show." Tiger's voice was bitter. "I argued all that and lost. Revolution is a political act, I was told, the first objective of which is to radicalize the population and turn them against the government. Daytime was the choice."

"Explain to me the difference between your set of high-minded bloodletters and the high-minded bloodletters you are trying to overthrow."

"That's unfair and you know it. You know who and what the Communists are."

Grafton let it drop. This wasn't the time or place to argue politics, he decided. After a bit he asked, "Why only six of these things? Why not a dozen?"

It will be a couple years before the first production models come off the assembly line," Cole told him. "We got all there are."

"I hope they're enough."

"By God, so do I," Tiger Cole said fervently.

"Here's a sandwich and some water, Don Quixote," Babs Steinbaugh said. She scrutinized the computer monitor. The E-mail program was still there, waiting.

Eaton Steinbaugh sipped on the water. The sandwich looked like tuna salad. Babs read his mind: "You have to eat."

He took the duty bite, then laid the sandwich down. Yep, tuna salad!

"China is so far away," she mused. "What can you do from here?" Here was their snug little home in Sunnyvale.

"Everything. The Net is everywhere." His answer was an oversimplification, of course. Steinbaugh didn't speak a word of Chinese yet he knew enough symbols to work with their computers. He wasn't about to get into a discussion of the fine points with Babs, however, not if he could help it.

"This Cole ... is he paying you anything?"

"No."

"Did you even ask for money?"

"We never discussed it, all right? He didn't mention it and neither did I."

"Seems like if you're going to do the crime, you oughta get enough out of it to pay the lawyers. For Christ's sake, the man's filthy rich."

"Next time."

She grunted and stalked away.

Babs just didn't appreciate his keen wit. Next time, indeed!

As he waited he thought about the trapdoors—sometimes he referred to them as back doors, because he had installed them—which were secret passages into inner sanctums where he wasn't supposed to go. While in Beijing he had worked on the main government computer networks in the Forbidden City. The powers that be didn't want to let him touch the computers, but Cole's company had the contract and the Chinese didn't know how to find the problems and solve them, so they were between a rock and a hard place. After much bureaucratic posturing and grandstanding, they let him put his hands on their stuff.

The network security system was essentially nonexistent. That was deplorable, certainly, but understandable in a country where few people

i
_acce
ss to computers. Constructing and installing a back door was
U
Id's play
^once
ne
n
g
^ure
d out the Chinese symbols and Pinyin cora-

nds. A Pinyin dictionary helped enormously.

Installing back doors in other key government computer systems was terribly difficult either, for these computers all were linked to the mainframes in the Forbidden City.

Like all top-down systems, the Communist bureaucracy with its uniform security guidelines and procedures was extremely vulnerable to cvbersabotage. The best ways to screw with each computer system tended to be similar from system to system, but what worked best with railroad timetables and schedules usually didn't work at all for financial systems. Putting it all together was a sublime challenge, the culmination of his lifelong interest in logical problems. Eaton Steinbaugh enjoyed himself immensely and was bitterly disappointed when the reality of his cancer symptoms could no longer be ignored.

His illness did create another problem, however, one that he took keen interest in solving. The whole point of triggering the inserted code programs from outside Hong Kong was to prevent compromising the computer facility there—Third Planet Communications. But the person doing the triggering was going to leave a trail through the Internet, a trail that government investigators could later follow back to the guilty party.

Unless the guilty party disguised his tracks, made the trail impossible to follow. One way to do that was to use a generic computer, one dedicated to public use, so the identity of the user could never be established beyond a reasonable doubt. Due to his illness, Steinbaugh thought he might be unable to leave his home. He spent a delightful week working up a way to cover his trail through cyberspace and thought he had the problem solved. He wrote a program that randomly changed the ID codes buried throughout his computer's innards— called "cookies"—every time the codes were queried by another computer. He liked the program so much that when the China adventure was over he intended to post it on the Internet for the use of anyone seeking to screw with the commercial Web sites that were constructing profiles of visitors to sell to advertisers and each other, a practice that formed the slimy foundation of E-commerce. Of course, if he wasn't as clever as he thought he was, the FBI was going to be knocking on his door one of these days.

Not that it mattered. In or out of jail, Eaton Steinbaugh only had a few months to live, at the most.

Today, when the computer on his desk began signaling that he had an incoming E-mail, he began pecking at the keys in feverish anticipation.

Yes, there it was. From Virgil Cole. A series of numerals. He counted them.

Eleven.

That was right. Eleven random numbers. The guys at NSA would undoubtedly rack their brains for days trying to crack the code that wasn't there.

As soon as possible.

That was the message.

Start as soon as possible.

Too excited to sit, Steinbaugh got up, stretched, stared at the screen. Start with a bang, he decided.

He sat back down and began.

In less than a minute he was at the door of the main government computer in Beijing looking for his back door.

He typed. Pushed the Enter button.

Nothing.

Don't tell me those bastards have changed the access codes.

Not to worry. He had anticipated that possibility.

There! He found it.

He typed some more, inputting a code that no one else on earth knew.

And voila!

In, in, in!

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Eaton Steinbaugh consulted his notebook, the one in which he had painstakingly written everything, just in case. A copy of the book was in his lawyer's hands, with instructions to send it to Cole when Steinbaugh died.

He found the menu he wanted, typed some more.

In three minutes he was face-to-face with a critical operational menu, one that gave him a variety of choices. He stared at the Pinyin, consulted his notebook, carefully scrolled the page... yes. Here it was.

He moved the mouse. Positioned the cursor over the icon just so.

Clicked once.

Sure enough, the system now gave him access to yet another system,

with another menu.

This menu had five choices: safe, arm, fire, self-destruct, exit.

He positioned the icon over the one he wanted, then clicked the button on the mouse.

Just like that. That was all it took.

Sue Lin Buckingham was waiting for Rip when he got home. He had written another story for the Buckingham newspapers predicting imminent revolution in Hong Kong and sent it to Sydney via E-mail. It would be published under his father's byline, of course, as the first one