Systemic Shock (29 page)

Indonesia, on the other side of the globe,
wax
Islamic—which is why Australian fighter-bombers got big pillowy tires. The sporadic war between Australia and Indonesia was one of
all
skirmishes, not of nuclear exchanges. Many a port installation was walloped from the air or by naval artillery. Each side could lay its hands on nukes. Both sides knew it. But Australia, unlike the corrugated islands of Indonesia, had millions of square klicks that were ideal as unimproved airstrip, and good for little else.

So the Aussie fighter-bombers grew bulges in their fuselages, fairings to accommodate fat low-pressure tires, and soon those sortie craft were dispersed so widely across northern Australia that no raid could destroy more than a half-dozen aircraft at a site. Those same aircraft showered the relatively few Indonesian airstrips with bomblets, leaving island runways so cratered that, by May 1997, very few Indonesian sorties flew. Meanwhile, Aussies scanned the Timor Sea and awaited an invasion, while they airlifted supplies to the Rajasthan front.

The SinoInds nuked more than one island in the Indian Ocean, though wasting fully ninety per cent of the bombs intended for those crucial waystations. We needed only a few delta dirigibles cruising at six thousand meters with particle beam weapons to pick off most of the ballistic incomings that our Moonkillers and F-23's missed. After all, we knew exactly what targets the SinoInds sought.

Despite the density of our defensive curtain, Diego Garcia was now uninhabitable; Aussies refueled in the Maldives.

In Rajasthan we fought a desert war, protecting our new air bases near Jodhpur. Our strategy was to press on toward Delhi while provoking the remains of India's air force into ruinous engagements. Indian pilots drew top marks for resourcefulness and courage—a necessity since they fought faster Allied craft that boasted longer range and more advanced fire-control systems. By mid-May, our air sorties into Uttar Pradesh again threatened an utterly crucial wheat supply, and India began pulling her interceptors back from their AIR sites to make up for local attrition.

Twice, in the spring, India had followed up on radar anomalies to find Allied supply convoys motoring boldly toward the Gulf of Kutch. She had dumped a lot of Allied supplies into the Arabian Sea—so much jet fuel, in fact, that Indians calculated our support aircraft would no longer be able to fly cover missions from the Indian desert by June. Our Aussie-bolstered Sixth and Eighth Armies would then be in serious trouble.

Prime Minister Casimiro was stunned, then, to learn in May that New Zealanders were turning SinoInd oil into Allied jet fuel using modular refinery equipment near the Indus. Safe in tunnels near Nagpur, Casimiro had been hopeful until now. "Surely," he said to Minister Chandra, “our second priority is to destroy those midget refineries."

"Our first—surely?" The warrior Kirpal said it as a question, but wanted it as an order.

"First comes our bread. To fight, our people must eat." Casimiro was still looking at Chandra, an old man long familiar with Allied stratagems.

"To eat next winter, we must choke off those airfields now," sighed Chandra, who understood both hunger and priorities, and did not envy Casimiro his political future. “We must never forget that the RUS can airlift mountains of supplies the moment we abandon the AIR corridor to them."

"I knew Russians when they were
our
allies," Casimiro grumbled, "and I never knew them to export troops while they were needed at home.
Never
!"

Kirpal, in a soft rumble: "The day they see us depending on that, they will send a division of Germans to our soil in Tupolevs. And then one of Poles, one of Bulgarians, one of—"

"Always assuming they would go," said Chandra, who knew how quickly the Russians had lost their clout after the internal defections of '85. "But with Slavs or Yakuts, the RUS is perfectly capable of finding reinforcements. Perhaps from the American Fifth Army; as Allah knows, American reinforcements have begun to roll up the southern edge of the Kazakhstan front."

"Chang Wei is not Allah," Kirpal replied with narrowed eyes, "however much he yearns to be. We have little more than his word that the Americans have turned the tide. His demand for more of our troops would bleed the Madhya Pradesh."

On that at least, he had agreement from Chandra and Casimiro. The Prime Minister, with a bleak view of postwar elections, agreed to throw his support to an all-out offensive against those Indus refineries. That meant more conscripts from the factories and repair crews of the eastern provinces; more chaos when recruits speaking a dozen languages mixed with seasoned troops who, like as not, spoke English.

In China, Chang Wei had given up negotiations with Guatemala, the only country capable of furnishing the sites China needed. The continental leapfrog operation would have to be one great leap, but here at least Chang's preparations had a boost from an unlikely source: the development labs of the Ministry of Materiel. Indeed, both the source and the product seemed so unlikely that Chang had insisted on an eyewitness demonstration. The device had already been field-tested during the early moments of the war, providing cruise power for a pygmy sub which had been lost. Further development had languished until Chinese intelligence sources revealed that British subtlety, and not Chinese technology, had caused the loss.

Once convinced of the gadget's potential, Chang had demanded vastly larger versions of it—only to be told of its inherent mass limitations. Its output could reach only a certain level, and that level had neared its theoretical maximum. Chang considered the long-range implications of the device, then initiated security precautions that all but strangled its production. Perhaps fifty scientists and engineers understood its functions. A dozen of those suspected that their lives would not extend beyond SinoInd victory.

Now, in May, Chang was satisfied with the production figures. The devices lay stockpiled in final assembly tunnels near the Yangtze, a swift conduit hundreds of meters deep in the mountain regions.

Chang was not satisfied with the news from Tsinghai. Cha Tsuni, thought Chang, had finally found a bug to test his serenity. The conventional high explosives the RUS had rained on Cha's labs had probably been pure accident, one more target of opportunity to disrupt the flow of materiel to Kazakhstan. Chang found himself wishing Cha's operation had been nuked outright; might have called for it himself had he known how quickly the new disease would spread to Huangyuan,

Surviving the RUS bombardment, Cha was now treating himself for the bacillus he had somehow produced. Treatment, he had complained in his most recent dispatch to Chang, was almost as dangerous as the infection—but hardly as repellent. Cha would not, of course, be permitted to leave the quarantined region in Tsinghai. Already the supply trains detoured through Mongolia while Cha's people sought new antibiotics to quell their demon bacillus. Now some of them were fighting it, in the most literal sense, blindly.

On his second assignment, in May, Quantrill endured temporary silicone pads, subcutaneous cosmetics that gave him an extra chin and cheeks of a cherub to go with the red wig. He looked all of thirteen with his 'baby fat', though quite a large thirteen. He was furnished precisely the right image to emulate a kid scamming in Provo, Utah, during the four days he needed to isolate a newspaper reporter.

Investigative reporting had always been hazardous. It became more hazardous if a reporter stumbled onto traces of a construction project intended to house the secret seat of the American Government. Once the feebies discovered that the reporter had made a microfiche drop to an Irish agent, his days were few. Ireland was too friendly with the SinoInds.

To Quantrill it did not matter how or when Larry Pettet began to supplement his salary with Hibernian money. If T Section said Pettet was superfluous, he would not live to spend much. Pettet entertained few vices, but he had difficulty with even those few in Provo where a vigorous Mormon majority had outlawed booze. Pettet noted with chagrin that more and more cities were returning to prohibition since the Collier administration took over; noted it, and shrugged. He could always find good whiskey; it was all a matter of paying the price.

Larry Pettet paid in full the day after he bought his half-liter of Johnny Walker from the chubby kid who hung around the motel. The JW was the real stuff, all right, but the stocky red-headed kid refused to bring him anything larger. If Pettet wanted several bottles, he'd have to buy it at the kid's brother's place out Bartholomew Canyon Road.

Listening politely to Pettet's nonstop monologue as the reporter drove eastward into the canyon, Quantrill reflected that one could be pernicious without being mean. Pettet laughed easily, sympathized with a kid trying to make ends meet in such a world, asked shrewd questions about the brother's little booze-running operation. Pettet thought it might make a good story once he was safely back in Bismarck. He was still chortling when he walked into the deserted barn, the redheaded kid at his heels.

Quantrill had chosen the site because the barn contained the putrefying carcass of an old horse. If and when anyone cleaned out the place, they would not wonder at the unpleasant smell.

"Jesus," said Pettet as he started to turn in the doorway, "you know there's a very deceased animal in here?"

"Two," said Quantrill, and shot him dead.

This time, thought Quantrill as he shoved the spy's body under rotting floorboards near the flyblown horse, he'd done a more professional job. It had been quick, crisp, as quiet as a silencer could make it; and he did not feel quite the same sense of loss, perhaps because he had not paused to savor the act.

Quantrill was discovering a fact about himself. By denying himself that rising tide of savage malevolence beforehand, he spared himself much of the remorse he felt afterward. Vaguely he understood that his value system would not haunt him for an act of war as it would for a personal vendetta. His sleep was still haunted, but no longer by those he had loved.

As Quantrill changed buses in Fresno, a Japanese trawler south of Kyushu mooched sluggishly over the surface of the Philippine Sea. Her sonar said that an incredible trove of protein was moving out into the Pacific at a pace and depth that ruled out pursuit by the trawler herself. That was what the herd subs were for; to sample a potential harvest, and to drive it by audio signals to the nets. If this enormous migration was not one of fish, it certainly fooled the trawler.

Probably, the skipper guessed, it was a school of sharks. Never mind that sharks rarely massed in such numbers. The school, a vast shoal steady at six hundred fathoms, ran too deep for Sei or Orca. Pacific Squid did not grow to six-meter length, the apparent dimension of the blips found by sonar. There was only one good way to find out what they were, and the herd sub darted away under emergency hydride boost to take a sample.

The trawler picked up a muffled detonation later and assumed at first that it was the two-man sub, dispatching one of her little homing torps against a straggler. The huge shoal was moving away under an inversion layer, a kilometer down.

Later the skipper was not so sure about that homing torp. The sonar record was ambiguous and could be misinterpreted. Whatever the herd sub found, its crew could not report from their grave in the primeval ooze of the Nansei Shoto Trench. The vast stream of life passed implacably on to the east and presently the phenomenon was forgotten.

Sandys jurnal May 18 Sun.

The truth is babys are all ugly even Child. I dont care. Mom says she looks like her dady, I try and try but cant remember how my dady looked. Poor mom is all tit, she lost wait after Child came but I gess making milk takes it out of you. Child is helthy at least she has a good yell. Todays a day of rest, ha ha. Well, the profets dont work us as hard on Sundays. I dont know whos ranch we took butlm sure our convoy passed near Sonora, it even smells like home. One thing about herding sheep it keeps you away from Profet Jonsen. They tell us the devil is loose here on Edwards Platow, they sacrifise insides of sheep. Somthing sure eats the guts out on the range, I bet its just a old cyote but I hope it is the devil, theres plenty of folks here hed grab in a minit. If mom was strong we coud lite out cross country but wed never get far with Child and the prof ets know it so they let me go out alone. They coud care less if the devil gets me. Me neither.

Tonite the radio talked about big quakes under the ocean I don't believe it, I never felt a thing here. If true I pity the Looshans whoever they are
.

The great sea quake of May 1997 had been expected, but seismologists could not have foreseen its intensity. Its focus was below the great Mendocino fracture two thousand klicks north of Hawaii. Its first cyclopean pressure wave created a tsunami that thundered onto Hawaiian shores three hours later, obliterating beachfront buildings on the north of Molokai and Oahu. The loss of life was very light, thanks to the seismic alert system. Many lives on Kamchatka and in the Aleutians were saved in the same way—which is not to say that the death toll was small. Until that Sunday morning in May, the great Japanese quake of 1923 reigned in record books as the greatest killer of its type in all human history with one hundred thousand victims.

The record books would not be revised this time, because the Chinese People's Republic was in no rush to acknowledge the magnitude of its ill luck. For that matter, while the great majority of the seaquake victims were Asiatic, few were Chinese. Chang Wei 'lost' many records and arranged a hundred deaths to prevent the disaster from becoming generally known.

Chang wondered occasionally how it was possible that a series of waves could demolish an undersea fleet so completely. He might have understood had he known how seismic P-waves could kill fish, even trigger demolition devices affixed to secret weapons. It had been Chang's own designers who, in their zeal to protect a staggering breakthrough, had converted a rough crossing into an appalling catastrophe in the deep.