The man couldn’t hold his feet still. All that dancing brought him a few steps closer, and he continued to toy with the holster. Now he pulled the pistol, took his eyes off her long enough to check it over.
When he looked again at Lin Pe, the officer still had the pistol in his hand. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind about something.
Would he search her? Shoot her?
She stood, turned to the nearest garbage can, took off the lid, and began rummaging through it as the artillery continued to pound.
Several minutes later she half turned so she could see him. His pistol was in his holster and he had his back to her as he talked to another officer.
Lin Pe bent over the next garbage can.
As the barrage hammered the entrance to the Cross-Harbor Tunnel, Bob York led Wu Tai Kwong and fifty other men through the subway tunnel under the strait. They had entered at the Central District Station; now they walked as quickly as they could given the unevenness of the rails and ties and the fact that the only light came from flashlights.
The third rail was not hot, which was a blessing since people occasionally stumbled against it. Wu had almost refused to let them use the flashlight, but with the York leading the way, no PLA soldier was going to surprise this little band.
The impact of the artillery shells could be felt rather than heard, a series of thuds that made the rails vibrate.
“What will we do if the electric power comes back on?” one soldier asked Wu.
“We have it turned off. It will not come on.”
“But if it does, a train might come through here.”
“You must trust me,” Wu told the nervous man, “as I trust you. We hold our lives in each other’s hands.”
Ironically, no one mentioned what Wu knew to be the worst aspect of the small, narrow tunneclass="underline" Any bullets fired in here would ricochet viciously. With its concrete sides and dearth of hiding places, this tunnel was a horrible place to fight.
Moving along, carrying two machine guns and a half dozen antitank rocket launchers, the rebels made good time. Still, Wu breathed easier when he felt the floor of the tunnel tilt upward and they began the climb to Kowloon.
They passed the southernmost subway station on Kowloon, Tsim Sha Tsui, and kept going. The next station was Jordan Road, and there they would stop. Beyond that was the station at the intersection of Nathan and Waterloo roads, Yau Ma Tei. Wu thought that PLA troops were somewhere between those two stations.
Twenty minutes after the barrage began, it was over. The rubble around the tunnel entrance was covered by a dense cloud of dirt and concrete particles, and there had been one casualty: a woman near the Tsim Sha Tsui East shopping development who went outside to watch and was hit by a sliver of flying metal. None of the other spectators was even scratched.
Breaking the silence following the barrage was the sound of running feet pounding the pavement. Four thousand troops of the People’s Liberation Army charged through the streets toward the tunnel as fast as they could run.
The Alvin York robot stood behind the curtain in the shoe shop where it had been placed. In its hands it held a water-cooled machine gun. Belt after belt of ammo was draped over its shoulders. All of its sensors were in operation at the moment, but only three were feeding data to the network: the UWB radar in its chest and the infrared sensor in its face, both of which looked through the curtain that obscured him and the glass of the shop window, and the audio sensor. The main York processing unit used data from all the Yorks to update the tactical situation. In addition, the net was receiving data from the ten reconnaissance bats that were still circling unseen over Kowloon and feeding real-time infrared video into the system.
All this information was displayed in two- and three-dimensional form on the master control monitors. Cole and the York technicians watched intently and waited. The waiting was growing more difficult by the second. Cole wanted to hit the troops after the leading edge of the assault was well past in the hope that the Yorks could disrupt the rear, which would panic the people in the lead.
“They are coming down Nathan and the Wylie-Chatham roads,” one technician said. “No doubt they will push down Austin, aiming for the tunnel.”
“We’ve got the Yorks positioned well enough,” Cole said. “They can’t win the battle for us, though they will help. We’re going to have to win it for ourselves.” He turned to the man at another panel and said, “Call the field commanders and tell them where the enemy is.”
Finally he touched the York operator on the shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “Do it.”
The operator slid the mouse over the Alvin York icon and clicked once.
Alvin reached out its left hand and tore the curtain down that hid it from people in the street. Only when the curtain was completely out of the way did it put its left hand back on the machine gun. Then it pulled the trigger, sweeping the gun back and forth, hosing bullets at the soldiers in the street, shattering window glass and knocking them down.
Alvin moved forward, right through the remains of the window to the street.
When it hit the sidewalk it turned north, away from the southern tip of the peninsula, and broke into a run. Alvin ran like a halfback. In seconds the York’s erratic, shifting pace was up to twenty miles per hour, a terrific dash against the bulk of the running soldiers, who were still flowing down the street toward it.
The York fired the machine gun as it ran, a shot for each target, its titanium claw working the gun so quickly that many of the soldiers thought the York was firing a continuous burst. In addition, the 5.56-millimeter weapon in the chest turret was engaging targets, different targets, in aimed single-shot rapid fire.
Several times the robot shot at soldiers that were too close to fall by the time it got to them, so it ran over them, hitting them like a speeding truck, causing their bodies to bounce away.
Here and there soldiers managed to fire shots at Alvin. A bounding York running erratically at twenty miles per hour along a totally dark street packed with humanity was an extremely difficult target, so most of the shots missed. The few full-metal-jacket bullets that hit the York spanged away after striking titanium or Kevlar.
Fred York’s nearest major threat was a machine gun nest in the third floor of a building on the corner of Nathan and Jordan roads. It left the apartment where it had been stationed and climbed the stairs to the roof of the building. In addition to the built-in weapon, Fred carried two antitank rocket launchers.
Children and householders stuck their heads out of their apartments to silently watch the robot pass, its machinery softly whining and the minigun barrel on the chest mount spinning ominously. Instinctively the civilians knew to say nothing, to make no noise, and to refrain from touching, but they could not resist the opportunity to see a York up close and personal.
Fred kept its legs flexed, so by bending its head it could get through the doors. When it straightened its head, the stalk on top dragged along the ceiling.
Once on the dark roof the robot moved quickly. It crossed the roof in three strides, saw that the next roof was only one story lower, and jumped.
An alley barred the way to the next building, which was two stories taller than the one the York unit was on. Without breaking stride Fred leaped the alley and went through a window of the taller building. Shards of glass cascaded to the street below.
Without electricity or the glow of city lights outside, the office building the York had leaped into was Stygian. This mattered not a whit to the York, which went through the nearest door and made its way along the hall, looking for the stairs.