Hong Kong (29 page)

was.

"Your father sent an E-mail," Sue Lin said. "He will wire the money to Switzerland tomorrow."

Rip just nodded. All the members of the Scarlet Team had been in the Third Planet office except Wu and Sonny Wong. Amazingly, the team was going on with the plan despite the fact that one of their members had kidnapped the leader.

Wu had put it together, pushed the entire population of Hong Kong—and China, for the revolutionary movement was nationwide— toward this day with the force of his personality and leadership ability. Now he was a prisoner, held for ransom to enrich Sonny Wong, and nothing could be done!

Rip Buckingham stared at his wife's drawn features. "I don't know what to say," he told her. "I saw Wong earlier this evening at his restaurant. He has Wu, all right. Perhaps Wong will release your brother, perhaps he will kill him. Regardless, we march on." Can't the senior leadership force Wong to release Wu?" There isn't time for that distraction, they say." Rip's upper lip curled. "Some of them seem to think Sonny will share the money with them."

"You think?"

"I don't know what to think."

Rip threw himself in a chair. "I once saw an avalanche in the Andes,"

he mused. "It started slowly enough, but once it began to move no power on earth could stop it. The moving snow carried everything with it—trees, rocks, dirt, more snow. It got bigger and bigger and moved faster and faster...."

He looked at his wife. "Perhaps they are right. Perhaps going forward is our only choice."

She poured him a glass of wine.

"Have you told your mother?" he asked.

"Not yet."

The military base in the arid lands of western China was not a garden spot. Too far from the ocean to receive much moisture, its weather was dominated by the Asian continental high. In the summer the area was too hot, in the winter far too cold, and too dry all the time. High peaks with year-round caps of snow were visible to the north and southwest. And always there was the wind, blowing constantly in a vast, clear, clean, open, empty sky.

The high desert was as physically different from the humid coastal lands of China as one could possibly imagine. Still, for the Chinese, the reality of the place was determined by a far different factor, one that had nothing to do with terrain or weather: The high desert was very sparsely populated.

For people who spent their lives in densely populated urban or rural environments, surrounded by relatives and cousins and lifelong friends, life in the empty desert was cultural shock of the worst sort. The isolation marked each and every one of the soldiers. Some it broke, some it made stronger, all it changed.

The primitive living conditions at the base didn't help. True, China had developed the high-tech industries that created the nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that were the reason the base existed, but the troop barracks were uninsulated and the men used latrines. The water was not purified, so minerals stained the teeth of the men who had been here for years.

Lieutenant Chen Fah Kwei hated the place. Tonight he was the duty officer in the underground bunker that housed the missile launch controls. There were six missiles in this complex, new ones outfitted with the latest fiber-optic ring-laser gyros and high-speed guidance systems.

I j
_t
was
an honor to be the soldier in charge of this arsenal of

I p
₀
wer, but Lieutenant Chen wished his transfer to Shanghai

Id come through soon. He had honor enough to last a lifetime, and

wanted to live someplace with eligible women, laughter, music,

books, films-----

Tonight he thought longingly about these things while he inspected h teeth. He was using his knife blade for a mirror. As he studied the cflection of his open mouth in the highly polished blade, he decided that indeed, the minerals were turning his teeth yellow. He tried to consume the minimum amount of water, swallowed it as quickly as he could, but still the minerals were ruining his teeth.

Glumly, he glanced at the monitors of the main computer, which displayed the status of the six missiles in their silos. Bored, sleepy, and homesick, he was playing with his knife when he felt the first thump, a physical concussion that actually rocked his chair.

At first he thought it was an earthquake, but nothing else happened.

He glanced at the monitor.

Missile One. The status had gone red. Silo temperature was off the scale, hot. Now the fire light began flashing.

Stunned, he stared at the monitor for several seconds while he tried to comprehend the information displayed there.

A fire! There was a fire in Silo One.

He flipped a switch on the panel before him, and instantly a black-and-white television picture of the inside of the silo appeared on a monitor mounted high in the corner of the control room.

He stared at the picture. He couldn't see anything. The missile wasn't there. All he could see was . .. was . ..

Flames.

Flames!

He pushed the red alarm button on his console. He could hear the

stant klaxon, which was ringing here, in the barracks, and in the fire

ation. Men to fight the fire, that was what he needed.

He looked back at the television ... and the set was blank. The fire had burned up the camera or the leads.

computer monitor .. . Still getting readouts, but they were cy-

I he temperature was going through thirteen hundred degrees

renheit. Missile fuel and liquid oxygen must be feeding the fire. At

e temperatures the concrete of the silo would burn, the cap would

rupture, and nuclear material from the warhead might be ejected into the atmosphere, to be spread far and wide by the wind.

Lieutenant Chen Fah Kwei pushed another alarm button on his panel. The wail of the siren warning of a possible nuclear accident joined the blare of the klaxon.

What had happened?

The missile must have ruptured, spilling fuel all over the interior of the silo, where it caught fire.

That must be
—

Even as those thoughts raced through Chen's mind, he felt another thump in the seat of his pants.

The monitor.
Silo Two!

His fingers danced across the controls, bringing up the camera.

A sea of fire.

Sabotage?

The telephone rang. Chen snagged it.

The colonel. "Report," he demanded.

"Sir, the missiles are blowing up in the silos. Two have gone."

Even as he spoke the third missile exploded.

"Impossible," the colonel told him.

"The silos are on fire!" Chen screamed. "I can see the fire on the television monitors. The temperatures are unbelievable. The concrete will burn."

"Activate the automatic firefighting system."

"Which silos?"

"All of them," the colonel roared.

Chen did as he was told. The firefighting system would spray tons of water into the silos as fast as the huge pumps could supply it.

The system was on and pumping as the missiles in Silos Four, Five, and Six exploded in order.

The control room was crammed with people shouting into telephones and talking to each other at the top of their lungs when Chen realized that one explanation of the tragedy was that the self-destruct circuits in the missiles had been triggered.

Of course, he had not triggered anything. The safety caps on the self-destruct switches were still safety-wired down. To destroy a missile in flight, the appropriate cap had to be forcibly lifted and the switch thrown before a self-destruct order was sent to the computer.

But what if the computer received or generated a self-destruct order without the button being pushed? Was that possible? It seemed to have happened six times!

Perhaps,
Lieutenant Chen thought,
the thing I should have done after the first explosion was turn off the main computer.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ma Chao was a fighter pilot in the air force of the People's Liberation Army. Based at Hong Kong's new international airport at Chek Lap Kok on Lantau Island, across the runway from the main passenger terminal, his squadron was equipped with Shengyang J-11 fighters, a Chinese license-built version of the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, one of the world's premier fighters.

Major Ma's squadron came to Hong Kong in 1997 upon the departure of the British. For Ma Chao and his fellow pilots, the move to Hong Kong had been cultural shock of the first magnitude. They had been stationed at a typical base several hundred miles up the coast, across the strait from Taiwan. Ma Chao had grown up in Beijing and attended the military academy, where he was selected for flight training.

His first operational posting was to the squadron where he still served, almost twenty years later. When he first reported the squadron was equipped with the Chinese-made version of the Russian MiG-19, called the F-6.

The F-6 was the perfect plane for the Chinese air force. It was a simple, robust, swept-wing day fighter, easy to maintain and operate, adequately armed with three 30-millimeter cannon and two air-to-air heat-seeking missiles. Although the fuel capacity was relatively limited,

•
_waS
in all 1950s-era Soviet designs, the plane's single engine was powerful enough to give it supersonic speed.

Ma had loved the plane, which was a delight to fly. Unfortunately H'dn't get to fly it often. The fuel and maintenance budget allowed h pilot to fly no more than two or three times a month, and then 1 in excellent weather. Fearful that the undertrained pilots might   jf
_trie
y tried to fly aggressively, the generals insisted that the planes flown as near to the center of their performance envelopes as pos-ible These doctrine limitations were universal throughout the air force. Although the Chinese licensed the Su-27 design from the Russians for manufacture in order to upgrade the capabilites of their air force, the set-in-stone training limitations did not change. Ma and his fellow fighter pilots were strictly forbidden to perform aerobatic maneuvers or stress the airplanes in any way that might increase the risk of losing the plane. Consequently, their fortnightly training flights consisted of a straightforward climb to altitude, followed by a straight and level intercept under the control of a ground-based radar operator—a ground-controlled intercept, or GCI—then a return to base.

Ma Chao had spent his adult life with this system, never questioning it. The revelation occurred in Hong Kong a month after he arrived. One evening a woman he had come to know showed him a videotape of an Su-27 aerobatic performance at a Paris air show years before. Ma was astounded by the airplane's capabilities, which had been there all the time, waiting for the pilot with the courage to utilize them.

It seemed that all the assumptions upon which Ma Chao's life was ased were equally suspect. Ma Chao soon discovered that Hong Kong, ith its high-tech, high-rise, high-rent hustle and bustle and diversity, as as close to paradise as he would ever get. Every trip away from e squadron spaces was sensory overload, a cultural adventure that Ma nd his friends found extraordinarily fascinating.

when he was finally approached by members of Wu Tai Kwong's

carlet Team, he was an easy recruit. From the cockpit of an Su-27 he

ould see the future. Wu Tai Kwong was absolutely right: The great

i Hong Kong that Ma Chao flew over every two weeks was the

e of the Chinese people; the rice paddies and poverty of the main-

and were the past.

his June night Ma Chao was in the barracks preparing for bed

when his cell phone rang. The cell phone was one of the wonders of the new age—Ma hadn't even known such things existed until he came to Hong Kong. This one was very special and could not be purchased commercially. This phone handled normal cellular telephonic communications well enough, but it also received covert wide bandwidth messages that were broadcast over commercial television signals. Since the WB signals degraded normal television reception slightly, this technology was never going to be approved for commercial use.

Tonight the message was a single line of traditional Chinese poetry. Ma Chao knew precisely what the code meant: Tomorrow!

Sonny Wong also knew what the message meant when he heard it. The senior leadership of the Scarlet Team had decided that the cause was more important than Wu Tai Kwong.

Sonny was certain that would be the decision, but it was nice to see events work out as he had predicted they would.

The government had provided the opening; the Scarlet Team would lead the revolution of the Chinese people. Sonny Wong would collect fifty million dollars from Virgil Cole and ten million from Rip Buckingham, a nice comfortable fortune that he would keep in Switzerland. This pile would be his safety net, his rainy day money, to be used if the Communists proved too tough to crack.

Once he had the money, he would eliminate Wu, Virgil Cole, and Hu Chiang. With these three out of the way, he would be in position to take over the Scarlet Team.