Hong Kong by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page A

without comment, as they had been gathered by his reporters.
    When he had sent the story for the China Post on its electronic way, he called it up again and made some changes. His fingers flew over the keyboard, changing the slant of the story, trying to capture the despair of Saburo Genda and the hopelessness of the crowd waiting for money that rightfully belonged to them and would never be paid. He also tried to capture the callousness of the soldiers who used deadly weapons on defenseless people.
    When he had finished this story, he E-mailed it and the governor's statement to the Buckingham newspapers worldwide. The China Post was owned by Buckingham Newspapers, Ltd., of which Rip's father, Richard, was chairman and
    CEO, Richard Buckingham started with one newspaper in Adelaide at the end of World War II, and as he liked to tell it, with hard work, grit, determination, perseverance, and a generous helping of OPM—other people's money—built a newsprint empire that covered the globe. Richard still held a bit under sixty percent of the stock, which was not publicly traded. A series of romantic misadventures had spread the rest of the shares far and wide; even Rip had a smidgen under five percent.
    Thirty minutes after Rip E-mailed the story to Sydney, the telephone rang. It was his father.
    "Sounds like Hong Kong is heating up," Richard growled. "It is."
    "When are you going to pack it in?" "We've had this conversation before, Dad." "We have. And we are going to keep having it. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up in a sweat, thinking of you rotting in some Communist prison because you went off your nut and told the truth in print about those sewer
    rats."
    "All politicians are sewer rats, not just ours."
    "I'm going to quote you on that."
    "Go right ahead."
    "So when?"
    "I don't know that my wife or mother-in-law will ever leave, Dad. This is their place. These are their people."
    "No, Rip. You are their people. You are the husband and son-in-law, and in China that counts for just about everything. You make the decision and they will go along with it. You know that."
    "What about the Post?'
    "I'll send someone else to run it. Maybe put it up for sale."
    "Nobody is going to pay you serious money for a newspaper in Communist China, Dad. Not here, not now."
    "We'll see. You never had a head for business, Rip. You are a damned good newspaperman, though, a rare talent. You come to Sydney, I'll give you any editorial job in the com-
    ny except mine, which you'll get anyway in a few years."
    "I'll think it over."
    'The thought of you in one of those prisons, eating rats
    . Oh, well." Without waiting for a response, his father
    ngup.
    massacre in front of the Bank of the Orient was the hot
    pic of conversation among the American Culture confer-attendees during the afternoon break. One of Callie Grafton's fellow faculty members told her about it as she watched the attendees whispering furiously and gesturing angrily. Three or four of them were trying to whisper into cell
    3nes. Callie didn't tell her informant that Jake had been
    the crowd in front of the bank and had given her an eyewitness account at lunch.
    At least twenty people were killed, the faculty member said, a figure that stunned Callie. Jake hadn't mentioned that people were killed, only that there had been some shooting.
    bviously he didn't want her to worry. "Ridiculous to worry, after the fact," he would say, and grin that grin he always grinned when the danger was past.
    Through the years Jake had wound up in more than his share of dangerous situations. She had thought those days behind her when he was promoted to flag rank. An admiral might go down with his ship, it was true, in a really big war, ut who was having really big wars these days? In today's world admirals sat in offices and pushed paper. And yet... somehow this morning Jake wound up in the middle of a shooting riot!
    Perhaps we should go home, Callie mused, and then re-embered with a jolt