Systemic Shock (14 page)

Al was another matter. “I can't see, can't see ohjeez," he mewled as Quantrill found the carbine. The man was stumbling away from the heat waves, falling, running again, still on fire, and Quantrill made a lightning decision. Al—what was left of him—might be a better diversion alive than dead. Quantrill grabbed his pack, ran in a crouch to something that lay spread-eagled near the drainage ditch.

He dragged the thing into the ditch with him, took an interminable thirty seconds to gets its sticky coverall off, found that it fitted him better than it had someone else. Two minutes after the first flame had kindled Quantrill was sprinting in the ditch toward the maintenance shops wearing a coverall, pack slung over one arm, a carbine and a camp saw in the other hand.

A man raced by without seeing him, yelling. Quantrill saw elongated shadows bobbing near and dived headlong on dry gravel. As he scrambled to his feet, snatching at a carbine he had never fired, an older man saw him, tossed him a blanket. "Go on, you sumbitch," the man shouted, "fight that fire with the rest of us!" Then the man was running, arms full of blankets, while more men ran by. No women; somehow that figured.

Quantrill grabbed the carbine, paused only long enough to conceal the plastic-sheathed cleaver in the coverall pocket at his shin before surging up from the ditch. Not thirty meters away was the near edge of the delta moorage, its lights searingly brilliant. He gaped incredulous at the great vessel now splashed with reflected firelight, and then at the man who was hacking at a polymer-wrapped cable as Quantrill approached. The man saw him and the carbine in the same instant, raised his hands in supplication.

The man was dressed in a yellow flight suit; clearly not one of the men who should be guarding the delta. "Scrub the mission," he called softly, not taking his eyes from Quan-trill. In the meadow, other men were yelling orders, queries, obscenities.

"We're not armed," said a second man, rising from a crouch behind the second of the four mooring struts. In his eyes, Quantrill saw a calm smoking anger.

With a clarity bright as mooring lights, Quantrill knew that once their guard had become a fireman the delta's crew was trying, under cover of the confusion, to free their huge craft. "Can you shoot this thing?"

The
man nearest him stammered, shrugged. “I used to."

Without a word, Quantrill skated the carbine toward him, fumbled the cleaver from his coverall, attacked the cable. It was glass rope; enormous tensile strength, yet so poor in shear strength that it could be cut by a patient man with a penknife. Quantrill was not patient. The cleaver bit deeply and fast.

The gangling man with the carbine took the cleaver and handed the carbine back as Quantrill stood up, the glass cable parted at his feet. "You got the right uniform," the man said, dashing to a rear strut. "So stand like a guard. Safety's off, buddy, all you do is aim and squeeze the trigger plate. Stand in the middle of that platform," he continued, puffing as he hacked through the polymer sheath of the glass cable. At the other rear corner, the second man was laughing insanely as he worked with shears.

Quantrill heard voices above him, dared not glance up. He heard brief whines and thunks of machinery, a call for 'full emergency buoyancy' which seemed to have no effect, and then saw the yellow-clad pair running up the struts using handhold cavities.

"No countdown;
lift't
" A voice echoed through the yawing hull above Quantrill. No one had warned him to sit down, and the pneumatic anti-inertial rams in the struts had thrust the great delta three meters into the air before Quantrill realized why he felt as if he had stepped into a fast-rising elevator.

The struts scissored, the platform began to rise into the delta's belly, and still there was no sound of propellers. It occurred to Quantrill that they might rise completely out of sight unnoticed, and then a vagrant breeze struck the leviathan hull, and without its gimbaled engines it responded like any balloon with control surfaces.

Quantrill's horizon tilted. He swallowed his heart, grabbed at a cargo pallet tiedown ring with both hands. The carbine began to slide, but he pinned it with his leg. The delta slowly pendulumed back and Quantrill saw that his lower legs had tripped limit switches that, in turn, prevented the platform from seating into the hull.

Now the mooring platform was fifty meters below but now, too, came a bright series of blinks from beyond the mooring lights and a drumming through the hull. Then more blinks from another source, and impacts Quantrill could feel through the hatch floor. Looping an arm through a pallet mount, he groped for the carbine, brought it to his shoulder, aimed in the general direction of the flashes.

His first burst sent a dozen rounds earthward in a hammering hiss that, if not on target, at least quelled the firing from below. His second burst was longer, sweeping the mooring pad; two of the lights flashed out, sparks blooming like fireworks. The Stirling engine nacelles of the delta began to thrum now, slowly at first, with a steady rhythmic beat, the propellers whispering strongly now, a breeze fanning Quantrill as he saw the flash of the rocket launcher from near one of the buildings.

Wherever the projectile went, it did not strike the delta. Quantrill emptied the long double-clip in answering fire and saw a man fly backward like a flung doll. Then, with great care, he pulled himself into a fetal position and risked a look around as the cargo hatch thudded against its seals. Two men, the same two who had attacked the glass cables, slapped manual hatch locks into place, and then the taller one approached Quantrill in a sailor's rolling walk. "Welcome aboard," he said grinning, offering his hand and then, taking his first hard look at Quantrill, shouted: "Good God, cap'n; it's a kid!"

Quantrill insisted that he had not been hit; that the blood was someone else's, though he did not expand on that. Not until he had removed the coverall and started to don a yellow flight suit did he feel the dull ache in his left calf. “He took a slug through the muscle; looks like a clean hole," said a crewman.

"Why doesn't it hurt more," Quantrill asked, limping down a narrow corridor to a faintly-lit room.

"It will," the man predicted. “Take this towel and stretch out. Co-cap 'n Bly's our paramedic, I 'll get him soon as we're at cruise altitude." He started to duck out of the room as Quantrill gazed at the swollen discoloration where the slug had exited his flesh. "You have any idea where we're going?"

"We had a stop scheduled at Hot Springs, but cap'n doesn't want a repeat of this. We're headed home for weapons refitting."

"Where's home?"

"College Station, Texas. If you got any Texas Aggie jokes, pal, better jettison 'em now," he grinned. "We'd like you to be a
live
hero."

The flood of self-redemption, and of awareness that he had been shot, washed over Quantrill in successive waves. He fainted.

Sandys jurnal Aug. 16 Fri.

My dady had mom drive us to aggie pens today. Turkys are real dumb, most were dead and pecked up. We let the longhorns .go, the rushian bores had dug under the ciclone fence. Boy they must be woppers the hole was big as a tumblweed. My dady says its just as well. He dont want to deal with them d-v-ls, there smarter than some folks he knows. Mom and me helped my dady, he cant use his hands, says there better but I think thats a fib. Got fewl for truck. A man says aggie stashion here will do goverment work on ant racks. Boy that must be a sight but why bild ant racks? Mistery!! Man says fallout worse next 2 days so back we go to the hole. I dont like it so much now, it has long deep cracks and I hear things squeek back there. My dady is all tuckered, I wish I was bigger so he coud lean on me.

As the delta neared the Mississippi River, isotope-enhanced RUS curtain bombs carved away two CPA spearheads south of the
Khrebet Dzhagdy
, the Dzhagdy mountain range. Once again the swath of destruction fried animal tissue through armor and, thanks to isotope enhancement, this time the land would lie fallow for over a year before it could be safely traversed. It was essential that a curtain bomb be physically aimed and sequenced with others. Given a few hours preparation, and despite the fact that they condemned half a division of their own rearguard to death as well, RUS munitions specialists were able to detonate a chain of devices that sterilized a strip of their own embattled soil for hundreds of klicks. It was truly a demilitarized no-man's land, and a jubiliant Tass dubbed it the Wall of Lenin. Tacticians on all sides were quick to see that such a device, far from an ultimate weapon, generally was best employed in open country or down the length of a valley. The sizzling stream of neutrons could not zap an infantry squad through a mountain, though their escape might be problematic.

Taras Zenkovitch, the burly Ukrainian field marshal in the Amur heights, watched a split-screen monitor that simultaneously showed spy-eye views of the western Amur basin and the Irkutsk region around Lake Baikal. "Were I Chang Wei," he rumbled into his scrambler circuit to the Supreme Council room deep in the Urals, "I would be mobilizing at Ulan Bator for a strike toward
Ozero
Baikal. Were I Minister Konieff," he added, "I would have our ski troops dug in above those Mongol passes in the next twenty-four hours." Thanks to a glitch in the system, Zenkovitch had no video to the war room half a continent away.

Chairman Oleg Konieff's reply lanced out of the mumble of several voices: "Ski troops in August, Marshal Zenkovitch?"

"They will need skis before Chang is through testing us there."

"Indeed. Have you less concern for their movement from Sinkiang into Kirghiz and Kazakhstan?"

"With the shoulder-fired weapons we furnish the Kazakhs, I would say Chang is the one who will have the greater concern," Zenkovitch replied. "If the Afghans had been as well supplied against us in 1980, our gunships and personnel carriers would have availed us little."

It was a gamble to trust the southern Islamic republics which had once been member states of the USSR, but so far it was paying off. The doughty Turkic-speaking Kazakhs and Kirghiz valued their nomadic traditions more than progress. A mounted, befurred Kazakh with a self-guided SSM at his shoulder comprised a wicked welcome for an Indian gun-ship. RUS leaders were beginning to hope that buffer republics were more economical than tributary states.

"The SinoInds will suffer far more attrition than we, along the southwestern border," Konieff agreed. "Our situation south of Baikal may be more serious—
if
the Chinese still hope to take the new railway."

"We will know that by the efforts they make to destroy it," said Zenkovitch. "Will they send conventional air strikes, or nuke the UstKut and Kumora railyards?"

Another voice; Zenkovitch guessed it was Suslov, the dour Georgian marshal. "You seem to take the loss of our rail link for granted."

"We have known it was vulnerable. We can only sell it dearly and," he tried rough optimism, "hope the sale is not transacted."

Konieff, the crucial connection between the RUS Army high command and the all-powerful Supreme Council, headed off this clash of generals with, "Can our troops move beyond those passes to Ulan Bator?"

"I could have two divisions in Mongolia in sixty hours," Suslov rasped. "But they would only draw more Chinese into a region that must be defended man against man. Far more efficient to strike directly into Sinkiang, as I outlined in my summary."

Murmurs of agreement, with no grave dissent. RUS supply lines were much better to the Kazakhstan-Sinkiang border, and the Kazakhs—more or less friendly—were not expected to resist RUS troops moving toward China.

"And where do you stand on the defense of Irkutsk?"

"I concur with Zenkovitch," said Suslov, "with division HQ supporting a brigade of mountain troops in the passes north of Ulan Bator. No more than a brigade at the moment; we do not want to overstate our preparations there."

When Suslov and Zenkovitch agreed, it was a marriage of exigency and monolithic far-sightedness: fox and hedgehog. Konieff expected agreement from the Supreme Council and said as much.

In another war room near Yangku, Minister of Defense Chang Wei mused over a battle map with strategists of the CPA; the Chinese People's Army. The relief map might have seemed anachronistic with Chang, at forty-three the most vigorous leader of the CPA since Lin Piao during the historic Long March. Yet the solidity of the map lent an air of realism somehow lacking in video displays. Chang's heavy-lidded eyes were cool, but the pulse at his temple was prominent: When he spoke now, the chiefs of staff knew he addressed rotund Jung Hsia, Marshal of the 3rd CPA. "The flatlands and marshes of the Amur were a bitter lesson, compatriots. We would have done better to strike from Ulan Bator."

Jung swallowed audibly. Wu Shih, a Jung disciple who was quick to see an implication, took the apologist's role. "The Amur spearhead was a courageous blow, esteemed Chang. With more hovercraft, the 3rd Army might have reached the Dzhagdy Chain before the counterblow fell." The Dzhagdy range was the last natural barrier to the Okhotsk Sea. Once into those recesses, the CPA troops could have lived through the Wall of Lenin. “We all accepted the risk; must we not accept its consequences?"

As Chang replied he removed small counters from the map, bitterly aware of their symbolism. "Three front-line divisions are a costly consequence," he said, and glanced almost shyly at the small colorless man who had so far said nothing. "Fortunately, I am assured, Minister Cha can extract a greater toll from the enemy."

Cha Tsuni, Vice Minister of Health, gave a barely perceptible nod. A microbiologist and by far the least-known of CPA weaponeers, Cha was accorded special status. Few outside his laboratories in Tsinghai province knew exactly what he was doing. Cha adopted the serenity of a mandarin, the oral grace of a poet. Somehow this mannered image did not seem incongruous as he outlined his plan for mass destruction.