Systemic Shock (30 page)

On Nühau, Boren Mills stood at a safe distance and watched the first tsunami climb, a grey-white wall of water and coral fragments, onto Kikepa Point. At the time he felt only mind-numbing awe. Much later he would remember the event in exultation.

On Santa Rosa Island, Eve Simpson stood with NBN gawkers behind protecting glass and announced her disappointment. In its long traverse of the Pacific the tsunami had lost its punch, its capacity to overpower; and so it earned Eve's scorn.

At San Simeon the beach was several klicks away. Quantrill elected to stay on the mountain rather than make the cross-country run with other diehards to coastal bluffs, there to watch the waves thunder in. Quantrill much preferred Marbrye Sanger's proposition; had seen the slabs of rye bread oozing with ham and cream cheese as Sanger packed a meal for two; tried with no success to deny his anticipation of the outing she'd suggested. Quantrill would have said he entertained no illusions about Sanger. Any young gunsel with two flawless kills would have intrigued the hunter in Sanger. He saw himself as legitimate quarry, not sex object, and intended to be caught.

Yale Collier interlaced fingers behind his head, leaned back, studied the holo display on the wall. "You're asking me to put our entire west coast in a state of siege merely on the basis of two Indian overflights?"

"After a thorough analysis, Mr. President, yes," said the General, biting into the issue. He looked at the scatter of soft-faced civilians who shared the war room, wishing Collier's cabinet posts had been filled with more plain soldiers than Christian soldiers. Their very presence was irregular, but the President referred to them as his Chiefs of Civil Staff. And close coordination with civilian agencies had never been more vital than now.

"Those were manned aircraft, experimental Indian recon jobs modified in China to disperse a common flu virus. They were one-way flights, probably sea-launched. That's a hell of—a great deal of trouble, sir, for a non-lethal viral weapon. And if one of the pilots hadn't spotted a nice muddy field near Yuba City, he couldn't have landed alive.

"His aircraft was rigged with explosives and his canopy release had been disconnected. Obviously they intended both planes to disintegrate in midair. One did. The pilot we captured is a suspicious sonofa—gun, lucky for him and for us. So we now have metallurgical analysis and a live pilot to tell us the Chinese, not the Indians, wanted a temporary epidemic along the coast from Coos Bay to San Francisco. That suggests we can expect enemy troops there by the end of the month."

"You're certain the pilot wasn't an Indian who happens to speak Chinese," the President prompted.

"He's about as Indian as a fortune cookie," said the general.

The Chief of Naval Ops: "We've put every hunter-killer team we can muster on intercept sweeps out of Oahu, off the Andreanofs, and in the Guatemala Basin. I don't see how the Sinos could mount such an operation without our detecting it. Frankly, I expect to find 'em sneaking some big troop subs north through the Middle America Trench. We'll be ready."

"You'd better be," said the Secretary of Health. "That flu aerosol is already dispersed. By the twenty-eighth, there won't be an aspirin tab or a roll of toilet paper in Northern California."

"Taking the worst case," said the Secretary of Defense.

"Somehow they hit our beaches around the Oregon border. Do we nuke them or don't we?"

Secretary of State: "I hope to God we can begin civilian evacuation today."

"You talk as though the decision to nuke had already been reached."

"No, sir, I think Health and Interior will agree with me that whatever the decision, we've
got
to pull our civilian population back east of the Coast Range in the next day or two while they're still able to walk—before that virus drops 'em in their tracks."

"Meanwhile," said the general, "we pump flu vaccine into green Fourth Army troops and move our artillery in place around the bays."

"And be ready to lift it again by chopper," nodded the Secretary of Defense. “This whole Sino operation could be a blind."

The CNO: "The Latin-American scenario, Mr. Secretary?"

Defense shrugged. "That or a massive resupply of Florida, which could swamp what's left of Second Army. If the SinoInds have immunized an invasion force against their paranthrax, it could happen. We're not going to overlook anything."

Defense was wrong. We had overlooked the possibility that an invasion force had been so thoroughly destroyed that even its own leaders had no way of knowing whether any of it survived.

Major General Karel Lansky, at the far end of the conference table, sighed and put away his floppy discs. Until now he'd hoped the agenda would get as far as the new developments with First and Third Armies in Kazakhstan, Lansky's own bailiwick. It was too early for conclusions, but damned well time for an opinion: in western Sinkiang, rear echelons of the Chinese People's Army were beginning to panic.

Nothing in satellite or RUS espionage reports suggested an Allied strangulation of supply routes to the CPA, yet the movements of troops and materiel in Sinkiang were in mounting chaos. One RUS brigade had already speared back into Semipalatinsk to find that Sino trucks and ACV's had run short of fuel. Rocket artillery, mortar rounds, fuel, food, everything that qualified as heavy cargo: the CPA was starving for it. The American Third Army had whiplashed under the Sino flank as far as Alma Ata, turning the Sino rear at Lake Balkhash. George Patton would have lanced on into Sinkiang. For once, our hesitation proved wise.

Lansky did not trust the briefings he'd had as liaison with the RUS high command. The Russians ostensibly thought that some civil disturbance—perhaps a full-fledged revolution—was shaping up in western China, though no Chinese radio messages supported such an idea. But, said the Russians, if it had happened to the USSR in 1985 it could happen to anybody!

Lansky gathered evidence and kept silent among the Russians; if his own suspicions were correct, he would be wise to hide them from his Russian friends. Lansky intuited that the CPA was as politically reliable as any military entity in existence. If an internal panic broke out in the rear echelons it was unlikely to have an ideological basis. But there were weapons, both chemical and biological, that could dismember the staunchest warrior cadre.

Lansky knew that the RUS Central Committee had sworn they would unleash no biological warfare weapons without prior agreement among allies. He also knew that the Sinkiang anomaly had all the earmarks of madness, or of plague. Unless the RUS had broken its word by secret dispersal of some terrible weapon in Sinkiang or Tsinghai, Lansky had guessed awry.

He had, and he hadn't. Though a Mikoyan attack bomber had provoked the beginning of the end with conventional smart-bombs against a Tsinghai laboratory, the RUS was for once innocent of intent. Ultimately the Chinese Plague was China's own dragon, come to breathe death on her people.

June 18,'

c/o Texas A & M

Research Station Sonora TX

My Dear Ted:

By now you probably know we've stalemated paranthrax. It was a team effort and for a time, you were part of that team. I thought it might give you a lift to know you've been a giver of life and not a taker.

You really should have said goodbye; it didn't take a Sherlock to trace you to the San Marcos induction center, and God knows you could pass for sixteen. I kept your note—as an object lesson in male inconsistency, I suppose. Surely you've had enough of uniforms by now! How many stripes on yours? Let me suppose it's one or two, and on that supposition I congratulate you. Better yet, write and tell me. I'm not naive enough to think you're still in San Marcos but optimist that I am, I dare hope this will reach you—wherever.

I'm not in Sonora now, either. I can't tell you where. Let's just say I volunteered elsewhere. Incidentally, there's reason to hope that Louise and Sandra Grange are alive and well. Aggie Station resounded with rumors about some of the survivor groups, though they weren't the most law-abiding sects I might mention. But I digress… My current work is with something by the jawbreaking monicker of
Staphylococcus rosacea
, alias Keratophagic Staph, and we can thank God it's still confined to Asia. I'm assuming you've heard about it; it's in the news here. On the other hand: if you're anywhere in its vicinity, burn used hankies, keep your resistance up and your hands away from your eyes. It wouldn't hurt to use goggles. Need I insist that you take any antibiotics you're issued
religiously
! If I have a religion left, perhaps that's it. As long as all religions have their side effects, I may as well pray to Novobiocin as to anything else. Meanwhile, we of the priesthood are busily crafting new gods—the better to counter dat ol' debbil Staph. Wish us Godspeed—or should I say antibioticspeed? I saw a holo interview last night between the Sec. of Defense and Everyman's hotsy, Eve Simpson. Sorry to say she's getting downright chubby; no doubt you mourn that too, too-solid flesh more than I do. As I was saying, the gov't now admits that our transient camps in the San Joaquin Valley weren't just for agribiz. We expected the little invasion that wasn't there. Why tell you about it? Well, for all I know you're in some engineering battalion out there. So is my daughter, Cathy Palma, Jr., and it's just possible that you may run into each other. If so, tell her Mama says you don't have to salute!

Must get some sleep. I have to keep my resistance up, too. Think of me now and then as I do of you and, if the spirit strikes, write. When all this is over, don't hesitate to use me for a reference, Ted. By then it may be all I'm good for.

As ever

Catherine Palma

Quantrill read the letter with an aching sadness that became anger on second reading. Damn Palma! Her letter needed ten days to reach him and ten seconds to breach his defenses. The last thing a gunsel needed was a reminder that there were still kind and loving people out there, taking terrible chances without rage or vengeance to prod them.

He scanned the passage on survivor groups a third time, dredging up wry amusement to counter his ire. For damned sure they weren't law-abiding sects; according to Seth Howell they were the chief reason why West Texas and much of New Mexico were justifying the label of Wild Country.

Neither Howell nor Reardon had said so, but Quantrill felt sure his next assignment would be into wild country. Two of the new gunsels, Desmond Quinn and Maxim Pelletier, were sitting in on his cram sessions—but so was Sanger. Maybe Howell was right: to stop a bunch of crazies you'd have to ice them all or pinpoint the leaders first. Isolating leaders meant infiltration, and to minimax the operation it would be best to let gunsels, for once, do the prelim work usually reserved for the FBI or other agencies.

Of course that meant T Section's charter was thereby broadened. The Collier administration seemed reluctant to delegate death contracts to agencies which were themselves becoming Mormon in sympathy. T Section had no Mormons and no sympathies. It had one recent casualty whose Chicano background should have been good cover for an infiltrator in wild country. That cover had bought him a shallow grave on the banks of the Pecos River. Quantrill could not yet fully believe that some religious nut had bagged Rafael Sabado but, taking it at face value, he could endorse the notion of sending gunsels into the region in teams.

He glanced at the Palma letter again, acutely aware that Control would have read it first. "Palma, you soft-hearted loser," he snarled, and tossed the letter into the carrel shredder. It wouldn't hurt, he thought, to let his mastoid critic transmit a scorn he did not feel.

He checked the time: a half-hour before dark. Maybe Sanger would feel like a 'little jog', their own code phrase for twenty minutes of cross-country run and ten minutes of clean, piping-hot undiluted lust somewhere on the hillside below the big house. With Marbrye Sanger, he felt, you knew where you stood; knew that her needs were on honest display; could depend on a quid pro quo without emotional aftershocks.

On one level Quantrill admitted his use of sexuality to salve a psychic wound. On another he assumed that Sanger was all surface, uncomplicated, beyond the need for friendship.

His was an assumption that Control endorsed. Had Control found any evidence that Marbrye Sanger ached for dearer sharing with Quantrill, the pairing would have been dissolved by 'coincidence', and permanently. But Sanger was subtle, and regularly chose partners other than Quantrill—and was more vocal in her enjoyment of them. Control, for all its vigilance, did not ask whether Marbrye Sanger invested all her external encounters with the same inner valence.

Sanger rejoiced at Quantrill's syncopated knock. She was not fool enough to show it; if anything, Sanger overestimated Control and her critic; preserved the cool grace that characterized her. She agreed to the little jog, careful to avoid primping, mindful of the video unit that might squat behind her mirror.

Each time she was alone with Quantrill, Sanger sought new insights behind those troubled green eyes; touchstones into the character of a youth she must never claim as friend. She could provoke him into stories of his past, titillate him, ravish him, goad him to take her in the same way. But she knew that she must never befriend him.

Sanger told herself that what she had was enough.

Liang Chen had taken more than enough. Accustomed from infancy to the security of his social unit, he *d been quite willing to leave his lakeside village unit in Hunan to join the biggest military unit on earth: The Chinese People's Army. Unit within unit, the huge CPA bureaucracy churned its human molecules into motorized infantry, armored, engineering, quartermaster units with all deliberate speed—i.e., slowly. Liang was quick to learn, stalwart under pressure, good with math; the right recipe for an antitank fire controller.