The room was utterly silent. Ouyang looked around. He was a career soldier. These were politicians. The situation was horrid, the thing of nightmares. But the difference between the two careers was evident here, evident in the ability to take hard decisions. Or not.

“We must decide,” he said. “And you must say ‘yes’. As great an atrocity as it would be…” He swallowed. “The alternative is even worse.”

Still these men were mute, their faces drained of blood, their brains paralyzed by the unthinkable.

Then his chief aide ran into the room, breaking protocol.

“General Ouyang,” the Colonel nearly yelled. “We have a massive network attack from Shanghai. She’s gone offensive!”

Ouyang surged to his feet. His eyes found Bo Jintao.

He saw the man look over at Bao Zhuang. The President they’d deposed. Who was somehow still the elder statesman here.

Bao Zhuang took a breath. “Yes,” he said.

“Do it,” Bo Jintao said, turning back to Ouyang.

Ouyang saluted them both, then ran from the room.

The soldiers open fire on them. Pan Luli feels the bullets rip into men and women around her. Tanks fire shells. Thousands of her sisters and brothers die in the first minute.

Then the crowd is on the army. Weapons the students have hidden are used, and the tanks go silent. Students and householders are climbing over tanks, throwing ladders up against walls, climbing up, throwing carpet and boards and coats over barbed wire.

There’s more gunfire. People are dying. Dying in huge numbers. She sees friends fall, waves of them dying as the soldiers gun them down.

But the rage is strong.

Bo Jintao! Bo Jintao!

He killed Zhi Li!

Then they are over! And the Molotov cocktails are flying, flying, most of them landing in the vast lake in the center of Zhongnanhai, but some striking soldiers, some splashing flame onto buildings, and people are still coming over the walls, and rushing forwards, climbing over walls, a raging human wave.

Ouyang ran next to his aide.

“How do you know it’s an attack?”

“What else could it be, General?”

Within a minute they were outside, almost to his helicopter, what he’s been using as a command center, with its analog radio link to the planes he has circling overhead.

Then he saw the mob cresting the walls, the flaming firebombs hurtling this way, the soldiers falling back.

The soldiers being swallowed up by it.

The rioters coming up with guns in their hands.

“Into the chopper!” he yelled, shoving the Colonel ahead.

He hauled himself on with raw adrenaline. “Lift off! Lift off!”

They rose, the sound of the rotors deafening, their downdraft creating a small storm inside the helicopter. A soldier slammed the armored sliding door closed.

The human wave was still a hundred meters away, visible through the armored glass. Automated defense guns had risen halfway out of their nacelles.

Had stalled, frozen.