Systemic Shock

Chapter One

In early August of 1996 the Atlantic states baked like some vast piecrust under a paralyzing heat wave. It moved scoutmaster Purvis Little, in Raleigh, to plan the Smoky Mountain pack trip that would save a few lives. It also moved the President of the United States to his retreat in the Shenandoah hills.

The weather relented on the evening of Friday, the ninth. Young Ted Quantrill hardly noticed, racing home after his troop meeting in Raleigh, because he knew he'd have to politick for that pack trip. The President noticed it still less; despite the air conditioning in his hoverchopper, a tiara of sweat beaded his balding head. The bulletin that had drawn him back to Washington suggested complications in the sharp new rise of foreign oil prices; a rise that in itself further impeded his race for reelection against Utah's Senator Yale Collier. The President considered Yale Collier a charismatic fool. Ted Quantrill's parents thought the same of scoutmaster Little. In any event, a modest proportion of fools would survive the next week, while some of their critics would die.

Chapter Two

Through twenty years and three administrations, pundits in American government had watched helplessly as the Socialist Party of China wooed lubricious favors from the Middle East. Every few years some think-tank would announce that global addiction to oil was on the wane, thanks to this or that alternative energy source. Just as regularly, the thinkers went into the tank. Fusion was still an elusive technique. New fission plants had been banned in the UN General Assembly after the pandemic of fear that peaked in 1994. Loss of coolant (Alabama, '87), outgassing (Wales, '91), partial meltdown (Karachi, '93), and accidental scatter of confined radioactive waste (Honshu, '89; Connecticut, Shantung, '94) had taken only a few hundred lives — far fewer than, say, offshore oil rigs had taken.

But the fission boojum had scared the bejeezus out of voters from Reykjavik to Christchurch, and even autocrats reluctantly agreed to decommission some of their reactors. It was not that fission plants no longer existed, but they were fewer while power requirements grew.

If the million-plus deaths from the Birmingham and Minsk bombs of '85 added to the clamor against fission plants, that connection was hard to find. A million deliberate killings was human nature acceptable to the public, while a few hundred accidental killings composed a goad toward reform. Industrialized nations rushed to develop clean power sources. Meanwhile, they continued to burn petroleum.

Direct solar conversion, wind-driven generators, and alternative chemical fuels plugged part of the energy gap, while the price of energy made conservationists of most Americans. Still, fossil fuel remained a favored energy source: storable, compact, simple. While developing one's own oil resources, one was wise to import as much as practicable. So said the Chinese; so said we all. As early as 1979 China's ruling party, the SPC, served notice of its intent to anyone who might be paying attention. The SPC's official news agency, Xinhua, said:

Nearly 160 Moslem mosques of the autonomous Ningxia Hui region of Northwest China are being reopened… after damage to varying degrees in the past few years. The mosques are under repair with government funds, including the famed Yinchuan edifice and a Tonxin mosque known to be 800 years old.

And again:

The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, is now being retranslated into Chinese…

Though riddled with dissent on many topics, the Associated Islamic Republics was quick to imply devout thanks to China for her turnabout. The SPC could pivot as effortlessly on oil as anybody, with better coordination than the reconstituted, ham-fisted Russian Union of Soviets.

The abortive NATO-USSR conflict of 1985 has been chronicled elsewhere by Hackett, et al. Doubtless it won the popular title of World War Three on the basis of the nuclear exchange that swapped Birmingham in England for Minsk in Byelorussia before the collapse of the USSR. The newer and smaller RUS retained the frozen mineral wealth of Siberia; had lost nothing directly to China. But the lands lost to the RUS were all in the temperate zone where grain — and Islam — could be grown, and even exported.

No war, or any other movement, could be considered truly worldwide if it did not directly involve the two billion residents of China and India. Between 1985 and 1996, China's heavy industry expanded with Chinese supertugs towing icebergs to (ex-Saudi) Arabian shores, bringing desalinization equipment to rival Israel's and aiding the transformation of desert wastes. If a few million Chinese suffered from lack of that equipment in 1995, the SPC could wax philosophical so long as those old Japanese-built oil tankers kept sliding into ports near Peking.

China did not lack oil but what she had, she proposed to keep while importing more from reluctant Mexicans and willing Arabs. India was not rich in oil; but she was well-positioned to obtain it easily from Islamic friends.

All this, Americans knew. What had alarmed the State Department a week previously was the first of a series of urgent communiques from Mikhail Talbukhin, the RUS ambassador. The Supreme Council of the RUS had decided that Talbukhin should share a maddening discovery with us: recent price hikes on Arab oil were by no means uniform.

The Russians had voice-printed tapes to prove it. China and India were obtaining massive kickbacks, and had done so for years. Somehow, under the noses of US and RUS spy satellites, the SinoInd powers were obtaining twice as much Middle-East oil as we had thought.

At first the notion of smuggled oil seemed wildly unlikely, but State Department people agreed that the evidence was convincing. The President addressed the question, What Do We Do About It? He did not address it quickly enough for RUS leaders, who saw that something was done about it the following Tuesday.

On Tuesday, August 6, a tremendous explosion had been noted by a US satellite over India's coastal state of Gujarat. It was no coincidence that Gujarat lay directly across the Arabian Sea from the source of India's, and China's, oil. Within hours the United States had stood accused, on the evidence of Indian ordnance experts, of sabotaging a huge Indian water conduit. The RUS backed US denials; not merely because Russians had in fact done the job themselves, but for a much better reason. The RUS craved Western support against the unreconstructed socialists next door.

By Thursday, August 8, alliances had crystallized in the UN. Every active unit of the National Guard went on standby alert.

Chapter Three

Ted Quantrill had given up hope of shouldering a backpack until his father, an active reservist, took a hard look at his orders on a Thursday evening. The following day, Ted was en route to the high Appalachian Trail. On that day the boy assumed his own argument — the trek would be his fifteenth birthday present — had caused the change of heart. Only later did Ted Quantrill begin to suspect the truth.

Chapter Four

From satellite and local report, it was obvious that the Gujarat disaster was more than the loss of a water conduit. Whole square kilometers were ablaze in an area known for its experimental cotton production by Indians with Chinese advisors. But cotton did not burn this way; and even if it did, China would not have risen to such monolithic fury over a trifling setback to an ally's agribiz. The blaze and the fury might be appropriate if both were rooted in oil. Not a few thousand gallons of it, but a few million.

Ranked fourth behind Arabia, the RUS, and Mexico in her known reserves of oil, China could have been providing India's supply, and this scenario was studied. But China exported significant quantities of the stuff only to Japan. With its expertise in shipbuilding and manufacture of precision equipment, Japan slowly forged her co-prosperity link with China, and shared the cyclopean fuel supply. Some of China's imported oil came from Mexico and Venezuela and some, for the sake of appearance, came in tankers from the Middle East. American satellites yielded an estimate, based on a nosecount of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, that China was buying a third of her oil from Arabs.

But no satellite had penetrated the bottom of the Arabian Sea. No research vessel had identified the progress of a stunning Chinese engineering project which, using an acid-hydraulic process, quietly tunneled a meters-broad pipeline under the continental shelf from Arabia to Gujarat on the western plain of India. It was known that China had invested in a scheme to run water conduits from the Himalayas to western India. What no one had suspected was that the conduit was double-barreled. Water ran toward the southwest. Oil ran toward the northeast, then on to China herself. No wonder, then, that China had exploded so many nuclear devices under the Tibetan plateau; the resulting cavities were being filled with oil pumped from the AIR crescent. It was an immense undertaking, yet it required no technical breakthroughs. Its strength lay primarily in its secrecy.

With one well-placed demolition device just upline from a pumping station, the RUS severed water and oil conduits. Automatic cutoffs could not prevent the immediate loss of fifty thousand barrels of crude oil, which gravity-flowed from its conduit and spread atop the water as it burned. The RUS had well and truly blown the cover of the SinoInd conduit. Now, everybody's fat would sizzle in that fire.

Chapter Five

The train clung to its monorail and hummed an electric song as it fled in a lateral arc from Raleigh past Winston-Salem. The scoutmaster, Little, was too busy controlling sixteen of his charges to worry about the seventeenth. The Quantrill boy lazed alone by a window, one hand cupped to his ear, watching an unusual volume of traffic stream near their track that overhung the highway median strip. As always, most highway traffic was cargo; some old diesels, mostly short-haul electrics. But today a surprising number of private cars shared the freeway.

Bustling down the aisle, Purvis Little promised himself to confiscate the Quantrill radio, which defied Little's orders on a pack trip.

Ray Kenney flopped into the seat next to Ted, jabbed an obscene finger in Little's direction. “Old fart, he muttered; "took my translator. Said we were only looking for the dirty words."

Quietly, without stirring: "Weren't you?"

"If I'm gonna learn the language, I gotta know 'em all," Ray said, innocence spread across the pinched features.

Ted smiled at the tacit admission. What Ray lacked in muscle and coordination, he made up by honing his tongue. If words were muscle, Ray Kenney could outrun the monorail.

Ray leaned toward his friend, pretended to stare at the traffic, and whispered. "Got a fiver? Wayne's gonna buy some joints in Asheville. If you want in, I can fix it."

Ted considered the idea. A few tokes by the underaged on a weed in a sleeping bag was nothing new, a token rebellion to relieve chafing under Little's authority. But Wayne Atkinson, their only Eagle scout, seldom did favors without three hidden reasons for them. Atkinson probably had the joints already. "I'll pass, Ray. Thanks anyway."

"Scared?" Ray caught the cool glance from Ted Quantrill's mint-green eyes. The scar over Ted's nose and the sturdy limbs furthered the impression that Ted did not yield easily to fear. He might, however, yield to a claim of it. "Wayne isn't scared. He's cool, he never gets caught."

"But you do; you're not Little's pride and joy."

"If I had merit badges coming out of my ass like Wayne does," Ray began, and then jerked around.

There was no way to tell how many seconds Little had been standing behind them. Ray braced his knees against the seat ahead, thrust his hands between his thighs, slumped and stared at nothing.

"I'll take that radio, Quantrill," said the scoutmaster after waiting long enough to make Ray Kenney sweat. He took the radio, slipped it into his shirt pocket, pursed his zealot lips. "Was it reggae jazz, or polluting your mind with a porn station?"

Not sullen, but weary: "Just a newscast, Mr. Little."

"Oh, no doubt," said Little, suddenly favoring Ray Kenney with a we-know-better smirk. "How will we ever explain your sudden interest in current events, Quantrill?"

Little turned away expecting no answer. He was halfway to his seat when Ted replied, "No mystery, Mr. Little. My father's in the Reserve, flies patrol from Key West to Norfolk. And there's a big tanker gone off the Florida coast."

Little frowned. "Sunk, you say?"

"Just gone; disappeared." Ted's shrug implied, you tell me, you've got the radio.

"Get your gear together, boys," Little called. “Asheville is the next stop." Then he hurried to his seat, fumbled in his shirt pocket, and cupped one hand to his ear.

Ted Quantrill was wrong; a compelling mystery was unfolding in the Florida Strait sea lanes. The tanker Cambio Justo, under Panamanian registry, had last been reported off Long Key, lumbering north toward Hampton Roads with a quarter-million deadweight tons of Mexican crude oil in her guts. The Cambio Justo could hardly run aground in four-hundred-fathom straits. She could not just fly away, nor could she evade satellite surveillance while she thrummed over the surface of a calm sea. But she could always sink.

Two hours after the Cambio Justo vanished, a sinking was everybody's best guess, and as far as it went that guess was dead accurate. What no newsman had guessed yet was that she had not sunk very far.

Chapter Six

The interurban coach disgorged Little's brood in Cherokee. From there to Newfound Gap they invested an old diesel bus with their high spirits. At the Tennessee border they reached the old Appalachian Trail, streamed off the bus, watched the vehicle drone up a switchback and out of sight. The bright orange paint and the acrid stink of diesel exhaust bespoke a familiar world that, for a few of them, vanished with the bus as completely as had the Cambio Justo—and for the same reasons.

"Wait up," Ray Kenney puffed as the youths ambled down the trail under a canopy of oak, hemlock and pine. He pulled a light windbreaker from his pack, zipped it over slender limbs as Ted Quantrill sniffed the sweet tang of conifers in the mountain air.

"Move it, Kenney," a voice commanded from behind. Wayne Atkinson, the oldest of the boy's, enjoy ed a number of advantages in Little's troop. Wayne wouldn't have said just what they were; not couldn't, but wouldn't. His rearguard position was one of responsibility, which Wayne accepted because it also carried great authority. Below average height for his age, he was strongly built, fresh-faced, button-bright and sixteen. Wayne Atkinson gave the impression that he was younger, which enhanced his image to adults. The biggest members of the troop, Joey Cameron and Tom Schell, accepted Wayne's intellectual leadership without qualm and, because they could look down on the top of his head, without fear. Among themselves, the smaller boys called him 'Torquemada'.

Ray was already shrugging his backpack into place when the last of the others eased past on the narrow trail and Atkinson got within jostling distance. Lazily, self-assured: "If your ass is on the trail at sundown, I get to kick it." He followed this promise with a push and Ray, stumbling, trotted forward.

Atkinson reached toward Ted Quantrill with a glance, let his arm drop again, motioned Ted ahead. Ted moved off, trotting after Ray, leaving Atkinson to ponder the moment. Quantrill's part-time job at the swimming pool had toned his body, added some muscle, subtracted some humility. Sooner or later that kind of insolence could infect others, even little twits like Ray Kenney, unless stern measures were taken. Wayne considered the possibilities, pleased with his position, able to see the others ahead who could not see him. It would be necessary to enlist Joey and Tom, just to be sure; and they could provoke the Quantrill kid by using his little pal Kenney as bait. All this required isolation from Purvis Little, who would sooner accept the word of his Eagle scout than that of God Almighty. Wayne's roles at award ceremonies reflected glory on his scoutmaster, and God had never seen fit to do much of that.

To give Little his due, he took his duties seriously and imagined that he was wise. He called rest stops whenever Thad Young faltered. The spindly Thad, long on courage but short on wind, made every march a metaphor of the public education system: everyone proceeded at the pace of the slowest.

The summer sun had disappeared below Thunderhead Mountain, far to their west, before Little reached their campsite near a sparkling creek. The National Park Service still kept some areas pristine; no plumbing, no cabins. The more experienced youths erected their igloo tents quickly to escape the cutting edge of an evening breeze, then emerged again, grumbling, in aid of the fumble-fingered.

Tom Schell slapped good-naturedly at Ted's hand. “Take it easy with that stiffener rod," he said, helping guide it through a tube in the tent fabric. “It's carbon filament. Bust it and it's hell to repair."

"Thanks. It's brand-new; an advance birthday present," Ted replied, imitating Schell's deft handiwork.

The Schell hands were still for a moment. “If you have a birthday up here, I don't wanta know about it."

Ted thought about that. "Aw, birthday hazing is kind of fun."

"Not if Wayne's got it in for you. Look: you've got your friends and I have mine, Teddy. If you're smart, you won't talk about birthdays until we're back in Raleigh."

"How do I get outa this chickenshit outfit," Ted grinned as they pulled the tent fabric taut. No answer beyond a smile. Tom Schell flipped his version of the scout salute from one buttock and wandered off to help elsewhere, leaving Ted to pound anchor stakes. Ray had forgotten the stakes, sidling toward the big campfire site where Little was talking with the strangers.

When he finished, Ted fluffed his mummybag into the sheltering hemisphere of fabric. He found Ray with the others, who by now had abandoned their weiner roast to listen to the tall stranger and to gawk wistfully at his two stalwart daughters. “We'll sleep on the trail if we have to," the man was saying. "We're taking the first ride back toward Huntsville, Mr. Little. I hope it's still there tomorrow."

"We've got a radio too. “Purvis Little did not try to hide his irritation. "I heard all about that tanker. I'm sure it has nothing to do with that mess in India and even if it did, you're only scaring the boys."

A murmur of denial swelled around him; no young male liked to let his visceral butterflies flutter before young females. The stranger said, “I'm scared," in a shaky basso, “and I'd like to see all of us go back together. If there's to be a war, we should be with our families."

"Good luck on the trail," Little replied, his hands urging the man and his silent daughters toward the path. Then he added, with insight rare for him: "If there's another war, those families would be better off here than in Huntsville, or any other big city."

The older scouts were plainly disappointed to see the girls striding from sight in the afterlight. “What the heck was that all about," Ted asked.

"Beats me," said Thad Young. "What's an escalation syndrome?"

"It's when one government tries to hit back at another one," Ray said, "and hits too hard."

"Like Torquemada Atkinson," Thad guessed.

Ray, following Ted back to their tent: "Naw. That's annihilation.” Pleased with his definitions, Ray Kenney did not realize that the first was genesis of the second.

Chapter Seven

The RUS vessel Purukhaut Tuzhauliye nosed into the Arctic Ocean, two days out of the Yenisey Gulf, early Saturday morning with nearly two hundred thousand tons of heavy Siberian crude scheduled for the White Sea and Archangelsk. That was by Russian reckoning; the Chinese had scheduled her up the escalator.

The P. Tuzhauliye's cargo had been extracted from beneath treacherously shifting, half-frozen peat in the oil fields near Dudinka and, by Siberian standards, was precious stuff. The ship's captain conned her carefully through the Kara Sea shallows, quickened her diesels south of Novaya Zemlya Island, neared the dropoff of the continental shelf where, many fathoms deep, something huge and hostile lay waiting.

Chapter Eight

Eight o'clock in the morning, or almost any other time, off Novaya Zemlya was broad daylight in August. Transmuted to a campsite near Clingman's Dome in the Smoky Mountains, that same instant was illuminated only by dying embers of a showy, wasteful Friday night campfire. While Wayne Atkinson outlined the sport he proposed the following day with the help of Joey and Tom, a 'Bulgarian' radioman's assistant on the P. Tuzhauliye received a signal through his microwave unit.

Wayne did not bother to tell his confederates that hazing Ray Kenney might bring on violence with Ted Quantrill. The radioman's assistant had not told anyone his secrets, either. One, that he had been raised an Albanian, scornful of Russians; two, that he had emplaced explosives with remote detonators on every communication device he could find aboard ship, including sonar; and three, that he was one of Peking's many agents in place. The Albanian mole had been in place for over a year. Wayne Atkinson had been enjoying the sleep of the innocent for only a few minutes when, a continent and an ocean beyond, the Albanian paused at his breakfast in the ship's mess.

After a moment the man checked his watch, decided against filling his belly because of the icy water he expected to feel soon, sought his exposure gear, then paid attention to his receiver again. He encoded a signal on his watch while standing in the shadow of the broad fo'c'sle, estimating his chances of surviving the wake of 50,000 horsepower screws after a free leap of ten meters from deck to salt water.

From widely-spaced points down the length of the four-block-long tanker came sounds, hardly more than echoes, of muffled detonations. The Albanian eased himself over the rail, inhaled deeply, and leaped out as far as adrenaline could carry him.

The Albanian heard faint alarm hoots over the splash of his own struggle and the hissing passage of the P. Tuzhauliye, braced himself to enter the great vessel's wake, then felt a series of thudding impacts through the water. More alarms were going off aboard ship, which began to settle visibly as gigantic bubbles burst around her.

In itself, the ship's wake would not have been fatal. The Albanian resurfaced, pulled the 'D' ring on his flotation device, then felt it ripped from his benumbed hands by an enormous eddy — the kind of eddy that might accompany the sudden sinking of four square city blocks. The inflating raft fled in the direction of the P. Tuzhauliye's radar mast which was rapidly submerging and, as the Albanian gasped, he rolled and strangled on ice brine. He was not as lucky as the Grenadan agent on the Cambio Justo, who had been picked up alive by a small submarine tug.

Concrete ships were well-known to westerners. But the first oil tankers had been Chinese junks and so were the first submersibles expressly designed to steal a supertanker intact. For all their burgeoning industry, the Chinese owed much to friendly Japanese shipbuilders. Early semisubmersible drill rigs such as the Aleutian Key, designed in New Orleans, had been built by the Japanese a full generation before. Even the details of omnithrustor propulsion, long a feature of seagoing drill rigs, were employed. Indeed, the Chinese craft had been perfected while transporting oil from wellheads in the East China Sea. Enormous turbine-driven concrete caissons fitted with half-acre suction pads on hydraulic rams, the Chinese submersibles were capable of changing from strongly negative to positive buoyancy in seconds. Or vice-versa. Like the Great Wall and SinoInd pipeline, these craft were both vast and conceptually simple. The most complicated detail was sliding the filmy half-kilometer plastic condom over the submersible and its prey by means of small submarine tugs. No oil slick traced the passage of the drowned tanker as she was borne under polar ice to her final resting place on the shallow undersea Yermak Plateau, sixteen hundred klicks distant.

Though the P. Tuzhauliye was never found, the Cambio Justo would be located four years hence near Matanzas, Cuba. In both cases, the Chinese saw to it that the tanker was soon minus her crude oil, and plus a great deal of salt water.

Chapter Nine

Purvis Little finished gnawing a breakfast chickenbone and began on a cuticle. Ted Quantrill's radio finished its newscast as the scoutmaster turned to his Eagle scout. “First time I've ever been sorry I didn't bring a transceiver. Maybe I'd best hike to the Ranger Station and call some of the parents."

"I'll hold the fort here," said Wayne Atkinson. And make war on some of our little Indians, he added to himself.

Thad Young took his skillet from the coals and wandered from Little's vicinity spooning Stroganoff. In common with most twelve-year-olds, Thad had bizarre notions about breakfast. He listened to Ted and Ray argue the demerits of ashes in their omelet, then remembered the morning newscast and pointed his spoon at Ray. "What's a measured reprisal?"

Blink. "Uhh — exactly two litres of shit in Atkinson's hat," Ray said. "I dunno, Thad; where'd you hear it?"

"Oh, the President's afraid the Russians won't make a measured reprisal. What're you laughing about, Teddy, it's your radio they're listening to."

Ted jogged Ray's shoulder in rough endorsement of the joke, then turned serious. "I think it's about that missing tanker; a lot of politics in the air. My dad'll find the tanker, wait and see."

“In the Arctic? This is another one,” Thad said, with a roll of his eyes. “Mr. Little is gonna hike out and see about it. Or somethin',” he added, consigning all adult motives to limbo.

The warble of Little's whistle convened the troop a few minutes later. Nothing to worry about, said Little, looking worried; but while he visited the ranger station, the troop would be in Wayne Atkinson's care. There were to be no excursions far from camp, and — a hesitation — their gear should be packed in case they had to move to another site.

"I'll bet," said Ray as they watched Little's head bob from sight. "A tenner says we're going home."

"Knock it off, Kenney," from the gangling Joey Cameron. Joey, no great mental specimen, hewed to one cardinal principle: he worshipped authority. Joey enforced his religion whenever possible.

Ray again: “Betcha I'm right. We won't even get to swim in the pond."

"I'll throw you in if you don't strike that tent and pack up." With that, Joey swept his brogan toward a tent stake. They all heard the snap as the stiffener rod broke near the stake.

Ted came to his feet with an anguished, "Cameron, you klutz! That's my—"

Joey Cameron caught Ted off-balance with a big hand on his breastbone, pushed the smaller youth who fell backward over a log. "That's your tough luck," he said. He had intended neither the injury nor the insult, had acted on impulse. But Joey patterned his behavior on Wayne's. Contrition was somehow a weakness to be avoided.

“We can fix it," Ray said quickly, fearful that Ted might come up swinging. He extended his hand to his friend, watched Joey back away with long careful strides, managed to deflect Ted from anger as they studied instructions and ferrules in the mending kit.

In half an hour the rod was repaired, their gear repacked in backpacks. Robbie and Tim Calhoun, thirteen-year-old twins, aided in rigging a polymer line between trees so that packs could be hung above the range of marauding ants. Robbie nodded, satisfied. "Now let's take a swim. Joey can be lifeguard."

"Who'll guard his life," Ted muttered, half in jest.

Ray patted the air. "Forget it, Teddy. You're like the damn' Russians, trying to make a war out of an accident."

"And you're like the damn' UN, trying to get me to do nothing and hiding it with big words." The Calhoun twins stood listening, mystified.

"You mean like 'measured reprisal'? Just remember to measure Joey Cameron first, Teddy. He's a klick high and a year older.”

"So?" Next Thursday I'll be a year older too."

"You'll be a few days older, just like everybody else. Come on, let's see how deep the pond is."

The pond had been dammed a century before; local flat stones fitted by long-dead hands of pioneers. Descendants of those folk still lived nearby in the valleys, with the help of legislation in Tennessee and North Carolina. Sites in Utah, Idaho and Oregon were also set aside for people who kept the old ways; living anachronisms who spun their own cloth, cured their own meat, distilled their own whiskey. There were still other repositories of ancient crafts and ethics in the north among the Amish, in the west among separatists from Mormonism, and in the southwest among latino Catholics, Amerinds, and just plain ornery Texans. City-bred in Raleigh, Ted Quantrill knew little about the back-country ways in his own region and next to nothing about those beyond it. Late Saturday morning, he only knew the sun felt good on his back as he spread himself to dry on moss-crusted stones after his swim.

Gabe Hooker was a boy who went along. He was roughly Ted's age and size, with the special talent for being agreeable. Across the pond, affable Gabe basked in the momentary favor of Wayne Atkinson. He heard Wayne suggest a cleanup project for the tenderfeet back at the campsite, and found himself selected as leader of the cleanup. Gabe rounded up the neophytes and went along.

Ted Quantrill's first intuition came with the silence, and the repeated soughing gasp that punctuated it. He opened one eye, surveyed an apparently empty pond, half-dozed again. He enjoyed the breeze tingly-cool on naked arms; lay cat-smug and mindless as a stone in celebration of idleness. During the early part of the summer Ted had worked half-days at a Raleigh pool, checking filters and diving for lost objects, scrubbing concrete and learning to catnap. And losing baby fat, and gaining inches in height. Unnoticed to himself, Ted was emerging from the cocoon of boyhood. Wayne Atkinson had noticed it — which explains why he was drowning Ray Kenney.

Again the quiet cough, a wheezing word through water. Ted opened the eye again, moved his head very slightly. Twenty meters away was Tom Schell, legs dangling from the lip of mossy stones into deep water at the dam. Tom frowned down at Joey Cameron, neck-deep in water, and at Atkinson whose muscular left arm encircled a log. Wayne's right arm, and both of Joey's, were busy.

"Let him up a minute," Tom urged quietly. "He's swallowed water twice."

"You afraid pissant Quantrill will hear?" Atkinson sneered at Tom Schell, hauled something to the surface, let it burble.

“You want him to?" Tom glanced quickly at Ted, saw no movement.

Wayne and Joey glanced too. “Who cares,” Wayne said, caring a great deal. The Kenney kid had allowed himself to be drawn into the game, duck and be ducked, and had realized too late that Wayne had vicious ideas about its outcome. “You're the little shit that gave me that nickname, aren't you?"

No answer. Schell, reaching out: "Enough's enough, Wayne."

Joey saw his leader nod, wrestled a limply-moving mass to the lip of the dam. Ted Quantrill recognized the face of Ray Kenney as it drooled water.

Flashes of successive thought rapid-fired through Ted's mind. Purvis Little: no help there. Ray was coughing and gagging as Schell dragged him from the water. Schell, Cameron and Atkinson had deliberately set the stage with only one witness, or at least Atkinson had, and none of them doubted that they could overpower Ray and Ted together. Quantrill went to a crouch inhaling deeply, quietly, hyperventilating as he ran on silent feet. Joey saw him then, yelled an alarm in time for Wayne Atkinson to turn.

Quantrill was unsure of the murky bottom and chose to leap feet-first. He chose to plant one foot where Joey's solar plexus should be, and made his next choice in grabbing the handiest piece of Atkinson. It happened to be the sleek blond hair.

Ted's inertia carried him past them and his tactical instinct made him slide behind Atkinson as he gripped and shook the blond mop underwater. He hammered at the face with his free hand, knew from the sodden impacts that his fist caused little damage, released his grip, thrust away and surfaced.

Atkinson emerged facing Joey Cameron, dodged a roundhouse swing by his friend. "It's me, you fucker," he sputtered, and whirled to find Ted.

Their quarry made his eyes wide, began to swim backward into deeper water bearing all the stigmata of terror. Even Joey Cameron was not tall enough to stand on the bottom farther out.

A brave scenario occurred to Mr. Little's pride. “Stay put, this 'un's mine," said Atkinson, who was a fair swimmer.

Ted continued his inhale-exhale cycles; noted that Ray ivcnney was trying to sit up as Joey climbed onto the dam. Dirty water hid his legs as Ted drew them up to his chest, still simulating a poor backstroke, mimicking mortal fear of the older youth. Atkinson swam in a fast crawl, grinned, paused to enjoy the moment as he reached for Ted Quantrill's hair. The doubled blow of Quantrill's heels onto his shoulder and sternum knocked him nearly unconscious.

Wayne blanched, shook a mist of pain from his eyes. "For that," he began, then realized that Quantrill had used the double kick to start a backward somersault. Wayne kicked hard, encountered nothing, then felt himself again dragged backward by his hair. He managed to gargle Joey's name before being hauled under, inhaling more water than air as he gasped. His thighs were scissored by another's, his right hand cruelly twisted by another's, his world a light-and-shadow swirl of horror until his groping left hand found another's locked in his hair. Then Atkinson's head was free, but both arms were now pinioned by another's, and in his spinning choking confusion he tried to breathe. It was not a very smart move.

When Quantrill felt his struggling burden grow spastic, less patterned in its panic, he released it and treaded water calmly as Atkinson, sobbing, floundered toward shore. Joey Cameron thought about loyalty instead of terrain and stalked Quantrill across the pond. Here the silt was unroiled. Joey could see the stones on the bottom. He did not see the one Quantrill was holding until it crashed under his chin, and from that instant his vision improved remarkably. He saw that a fist with a rock in it beats a long advantage in reach, and he saw the futility of swinging on someone you cannot find when your eyes are swollen shut and your opponent waits to slash like a barracuda.

Throughout the fight, Quantrill coupled his terrible slashing fury with utter silence as he mastered the urge to weep in rage, and with an increasing clarity of purpose. The cries and sobs that drew younger boys back to the pond issued from older throats than his. By the time Ted Quantrill chased a galloping blood-streaming Joey Cameron to shore, he was dimly aware that he had done several things right; things that were new to him but that seemed very old and appropriate.

Item: let the other guy make all the noise. You know how he's taking it, and your silence rattles him.

Item: make the other guy fight your fight in a setting you choose.

Item: one enemy at a time, please.

Item: don't expect help from weak friends.

Item: don't expect thanks, either. Your friends may not see it the way you do.

Tom Schell qualified for a merit badge in first aid that day; would have qualified for another if they gave them for diplomacy. Tom listened to the wound-licking growls of Atkinson and Cameron, kept his own counsel, and found Ted nursing skinned knuckles at the pond. "You won't get a date with Eve Simpson for that dumb stunt," he said, invoking the name of a buxom teen-aged holovision star. "Wayne was just teaching Ray a lesson. When Little gets back he's gonna be plain pissed off.”

“Let him take it out on Wayne. I did," Quantrill smiled.

This kid is all wire and ice water, thought Schell, staring at Quantrill as if seeing him for the first time. The chill down his back only aggravated Schell. “Su-u-ure. And why'd you tell the twins about your goddam birthday? They passed it along. A word to the wise, Teddy.” Tom Schell shook his head as though superior to all that had happened, as though he had not lent tacit support to the worst of it.

Ted nodded, attended to his knuckles and the pursuit of new thoughts. He was in the process of realizing that each of them — Wayne, Joey, Tom, Ted — thought himself more sinned against than sinning. It never occurred to Ted to view the hapless Ray Kenney as a sinner; that for an individual or a nation, placing oneself in a helpless position against known danger might be an evil that generates its own punishment.

Chapter Ten

The scoutmaster felt reassured by his calls to Raleigh, and by the phrasing of media releases over the Quantrill radio. The emergency session of the UN, he was sure, would do the job. Purvis Little had never heard of I. F. Stone, whose legendary journalistic accuracy grew from a realist's premise: “All governments are liars; nothing they say should be believed."

Little's first act on returning to camp was to call his own emergency session. He blew three short blasts on his whistle, jaw the bandages on Joey Cameron's face, then glanced at lis Eagle. “Good to see you practicing first aid with Joey,” he began. "I need to talk with my patrol leaders."

“Practice hell,” Atkinson said, regarding his splinted left middle finger. Then he remembered to smile. Regardless of the facts, Little always favored the one who was smiling.

"Language," Little tutted; "settle down, now." He draped an avuncular arm over Wayne's shoulder, raised his voice over the hubbub as other scouts surrounded him. “I've got good news, boys. Despite some rumors among our—" he sought the gazes of Ted and Ray, " — young worry warts, we're not going home. I've talked with some parents, and they're confident that our country is not about to make war on China or Atlantis or Venus."

As every boy knew from holovision, the Venus probes had returned with wondrous samples from the shrouded planet. Mineral specimens suggested only a form of primitive quasilife there, and holo comics had extracted all available humor from the notion of intelligence on Venus. Dutiful laughter spread from the patrol leaders.

Little went on to warn his scouts against further worrisome talk about the outside world, and ended by announcing that he'd found a berry thicket not far from camp. Wayne Atkinson bided his time. When the patrols were out of sight searching for berries, he doubled back to find his scoutmaster. Somewhat later he brought Schell and Cameron back, and later still the rest of the troop straggled back with their booty. By then, Purvis Little understood the hostilities in his world roughly as well, and with roughly the same amount of bias, as India understood her problems after her secret session with her Chinese allies.

Chapter Eleven

The President sat back in his chair to give an impression of ease as he regarded the image on his holoscreen. The transmission link to the American embassy in Moscow was only as good as its security, and he worried about that. "You haven't answered the question," he said to the image, then glanced toward the Secretary of State who sat near him.

"Mr. President, Mr. Secretary," said the American ambassador from half a world away, and hesitated, " — I can only say I believe that the RUS will be patient. I 'm convinced they really did pick up faint signatures of Chinese tugs under polar ice — or at least they think they did. But they've assured me they will take no unilateral action as long as there's a shred of doubt."

"What they really doubt," rumbled the Secretary of State, "is the motive for our patience. Isn't that it?"

"With all due respect, Mr. Secretary," said the ambassador, unwilling but staunch, "that's it. The RUS isn't so concerned about its own view as about that of the Chinese and Indians. What if they think we're lacking in resolution?"

"They might make a terrible mistake," said the President. “We have conveyed that to Peking, of course. You're aware the Chinese are serious about offering 'acts of God' as the explanation for the sinkings or whatever the hell they were?"

"Divine retribution for the Gujarat thing? I can't believe it, no sir," said the ambassador.

"Neither do they, obviously," said the Secretary of State. "But the SPC must think that position might be useful if taken seriously by a lot of Judeo-Christian Americans. And that could weaken us from the inside. Guilt enfeebles the sword arm," he said with a thin smile.

"Pity there aren't many Christians in the SPC," said the ambassador.

While it may have been a pity, all three men knew it had been no accident. While the Socialist Party of China carefully nurtured its mosques, its Central Committee regulated the churches and synagogues on the mainland; and those were in major cities where Judeo-Christian worship could be watched easily. The Buddhist and Neo-Confucianist ethics of Chinese intellectuals depended strongly, as they had for centuries, on the concept of shame — to the virtual exclusion of guilt. Proper behavior in China was reinforced not by one's internal fear of wrongdoing, but by one's fear of being caught at it. The Japanese found it easy to deal with the difference; Islamic countries found it almost as easy. On the other hand, most western Russians, particularly since their post-collapse rapprochment with the west, were still molded from the cradle by basically Christian traditions of Godhead, and of guilt. In this dichotomy of basic motives, the Russian Union of Soviets was like the western world, sharing an ethic that looked inward for strength.

In China however, the individual was not the basic societal unit, but only apiece of one. China was hoping to exploit our notions of guilt as a weakness. RUS leaders were regaining tight control over Russian media, the better to exclude such disturbing ideas as the Chinese suggestion that God had taken two tankers in punishment for Gujarat. But Americans were free to choose their messages, and some would focus on the Chinese message in all honesty. Our President knew all too well that assumed guilt might be laid at the feet of his administration in the form of blame — especially by religious fundamentalists who had heard Senator Collier speak.

"Damn the SPC," the President muttered aloud, "and our guilt-hoarding Christians."

"Not for attribution," said the Secretary with quick humor.

"Just those who aren't reasonable," said the President in irritation. "You know who I mean."

They knew, and changed the topic to guess at reprisals the RUS might select for the loss of the P. Tuzhauliye. The ambassador and the Secretary quite properly stuck to the foreign issue; the domestic issue looked even bleaker. Every media survey pointed to the growing strength of the coalitions behind Senator Yale Collier of Utah.

It was not that the President was, as Collier hinted, godless; it was just that Collier was so spectacularly Godly. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints had no better exemplar of Mormonism than the best-known of its Council of Apostles, the organ-voiced Yale Collier. Educated at Brigham Young University, trained as a young missionary in Belgium, seasoned in argument on the Senate floor, Collier kept his farmboy accent and exuded a sense of destined greatness. He was also one of the best verbal counter-punchers on anybody's campaign trail.

In June the President had made a passing reference to Collier as a fundamentalist. Collier had tickled millions of holo watchers by his droll objection. He presumed, with a shake of the great head, that the President knew the term 'fundamentalist', among Mormons, meant 'polygamist'. The Senator had taken only one wife, his handsome mate Eugenia. Perhaps, Collier added waggishly, a man without children found it difficult to believe that a single union could be blessed with eleven children, but such was the case. He, Yale Collier, humbly awaited an apology.

By this stroke, Collier implied that the President was either ignorant of religious terms or casual about the truth; and stressed his own status as a virile family man; and left room for comparison between a once-married man who had eleven kids and a twice-married man who had none. The nation's holo pundits had played the potency jokes threadbare until July.

For example: one satirist noted that the Collier union was in better shape than the national union. The current administration was cursed with two issues, while the Colliers were blessed with eleven.

One major political issue revolved around relations with the Russian Union of Soviets. The liberal administration favored stronger ties with the RUS, still the largest geographic entity on the globe though it had lost the monolithic control it had once exerted over the southern, strongly Islamic, border states. The RUS was currently getting American help toward its goal of making each state in its union self-sufficient in energy resources.

The conservatives under Collier were quick to point out that the US, with its hodgepodge energy programs, could not afford to help make Russians stronger — again! — than we were. A healthy RUS, they argued, was a threat to a fading America. The blossoming SinoInd romance was too obvious a threat for dispute.

Thus, for its Presidential campaign, conservatives linked the foreign issue to the domestic issue of energy programs. For a dozen years America had annually spent billions on fusion research, to be met largely by frustration as most avenues of study terminated in blind alleys. Physicists believed that clean, safe fusion power might yet be practicable, if research programs were expansive enough. But progress was slow at best. One by one, members of Congress yielded to the cries of a public that was paying higher taxes for its energy programs without a downturn in the costs of electricity, fuel, travel. Fusion research funds, pared in 1994, were cut to the bone in 1995. The administration protested: "You can't expect stronger progress from a weakened program."

First give us tax relief," the electorate seemed to be saying, "and other progress second. We can wait for more tokamaks and the other fusion mumbo-jumbo — and don't mention fission to us again."

By this topsy-turvy expectation, the American public further delayed their fusion panacea, and found alliance in a coalition between big business and conservative religious groups. Big business, as always, felt galled by taxation. Besides, as long as energy could be kept expensive to the consumer while industry got it cheaply by tax relief, one could make a profit selling an endless array of windmills, solar panels, storage batteries, and alcohol stills to two hundred and fifty million Americans. This view accorded well with groups that — with some justification — yearned for an earlier time. Fundamentalists tended to favor a still that yielded grain alcohol from corn in a process one controlled at home, over an electric outlet that drew power from a distant turbine/alternator in a process one couldn't understand at all. Besides, you couldn't drink electricity…

Gradually, Americans were reviving a general opinion that muscle power was more ethical than machine power; that simplicity was next to Godliness. The tenets of Mormonism, outwardly simple in its absolutes and its demands that each Mormon household be as independent as possible, became more attractive. One out of every twenty-five Americans was now an LDS member — ten million Latter-Day Saints. They comprised a heaven-sent bloc of patriots, and a hell of a bloc of votes. Privately, the Secretary of State suspected that the country might prosper under a Mormon President. In a liberal democracy, the administration usually bowed to its citizens. In an honest-to-God theocracy the administration bowed only to revelation from Above.

Chapter Twelve

Quantrill was scouring his messkit after supper on Saturday when Tom Schell, without elaborating, told him he was wanted by the scoutmaster. Ted paused long enough to slip on his traditional kerchief, plodded through the dusk with a naive sense of mission in his soul. He felt sure that Little wanted to hear the truth until he entered Little's tent, saw the smugness in Wayne Atkinson's face.

"Sit down, Quantrill," said Little. It was either the best or the worst of signs; for minor discipline, you stood at attention. "What I have to say here is very painful for me."

Ted didn't understand for a moment. "I'm not happy about it either, Mr. Little. When I saw that Ray was unconscious, I just—"

"Don't make it worse by lies," Little cut him off wearily. “I've had the whole story from my patrol leaders, Quantrill. They were all witnesses, and they agree in every detail."

Tom Schell would not meet Quantrill's glance, though Atkinson and Cameron were more than happy to. Ted, angrily: "Do they all agree they'd nearly drowned Ray Kenney?"

"I'm sure Ray Kenney would say anything you told him to," sighed Little, and went on to describe a fictional scene as though he had seen it. Ray, running from a harmless splashing by a good-natured Eagle scout; Wayne, alone, brutally attacked from behind; Joey, trying to reason with the vicious Quantrill after Wayne's aloof departure; Ted Quantrill, hurling stones from shore at the innocent Joey. "It was the most unworthy conduct I have ever encountered in all my years of scouting," Little finished.

"You didn't encounter it at all, Mr. Little," Ted flashed. Anger made him speak too fast, the words running together. "It didn't even happen."

Little swayed his head as if dodging a bad smell. "Oh, Quantrill, look at the lads! I'm sure you'd like to think none of it happened. You may even need — psychological help — to face it," said Little, leaning forward to brush Ted's shoulder with a pitying hand. "But we can't have that sort of violence — mental imbalance — in a scout troop, Quantrill." Almost whispering, nodding earnestly: "It all happened, son. But we can't let it ever happen again. The best thing I can do is to let you resign from the troop on your own accord.

Wouldn't that be easiest for you? For all of us?"

A sensation of enervating prickly heat passed from the base of Ted Quantrill's skull down his limbs as he let Little's words sink in. Fairness, he saw, was something you gave but should never expect to receive. In the half-light of the single chemlamp he noted the simple deluded self-justification on Joey Cameron's face, the effort to hide exultation on Wayne Atkinson's part. Tom Schell fidgeted silently, staring upward. Ted showed them his palms. “What else can I do, Mr. Little? You wouldn't believe me or Ray. Maybe I should resign. Then I won't have to watch Torquemada Atkinson hit on my friends."

"You're the hitter, Quantrill," Joey spat.

Quantrill's head turned with the slow steadiness of a gun turret. "And don't you ever forget it," he said carefully, staring past Joey's broken nose into the half-closed eyes.

Purvis Little jerked his head toward a movement at the tent flap. "Go away, Thad; this doesn't concern you, son."

"Durn right it does," sniffled Thad, pushing his small body into the opening. Behind him, Ted saw, other boys were gathered in the near-darkness. “We been listening, Mr. Little."

A wave-off with both hands from Little: "Shame on you boys! Go on, now—"

"Shame on them," Thad blubbered, pointing an unsteady finger at the patrol leaders. He ducked his head as if fearful of a blow but, now helplessly crying, he rushed on: “I seen part of it today an' Teddy's right, those bastids is liars, you don't know diddly squat about what happened — what those big guys been doing all along!"

A chorus of agreement as others streamed into the tent, some crying in release of long-pent frustrations.

Little had to shout for order, but he got it. Thad disabused him of some errors, and Ray's version was similar. The Calhoun twins, Gabe Hooker, even the shy Vardis Lane all clamored to list old injuries; reasons why the nickname 'Torquemada' had stuck. The sum of it shed little glory and less credibility on Wayne Atkinson, who still hoped to brazen his way out.

Finally, Little turned openmouthed toward his patrol leaders, awed by his own suspicions. Joey saw Wayne's steady glare of denial and aped it until—"Wayne lied, Mr. Little," Tom Schell said quietly. He did not bother to add that he had endorsed every syllable. Maybe no one would notice.

"That's right," said Joey. If Tom was flexible, Joey could be flexible.

"I see," said Purvis Little; and the glance he turned on Ted Quantrill brimmed with hatred. Holding himself carefully in check: "I misjudged you, Quantrill — and some others, too. Forget what I said, but now I have to talk to my patrol leaders and," between gritted teeth, "the rest of you please, please get out."

Chapter Thirteen

The murmur of voices from Little's tent was distant, carrying only sad phatic overtones. Ted, quarreling internally with new unwelcome wisdom, thought Ray Kenney asleep until Ray said, "I'm glad we got you out of that."

"After you got me into it? The least you could do — but thanks." It had not escaped Ted that his friend had asked for gratitude without once giving it.

"We kept you from getting booted out," Ray insisted.

"Getting out anyway, soon as we get home."

"You can't; you're our leader."

Silence. Ted Quantrill knew that he could lead; knew also that he did not want followers.

Ray, through a yawn: "Things'll be different now that Little understands what happened."

"He doesn't. He never will," Ted replied, and discouraged further talk. Ted knew that with one hostile glance, Purvis Little had given him a valuable discovery: most people will hate you for identifying their illusions.

The lesson was worth remembering; the whole day was memorable. Ted Quantrill wondered why he felt no elation, why he wished he were alone so that he could cry, why it was that he felt like crying. He had not yet learned that new wisdom is a loss of innocence, nor that weeping might be appropriate at childhood's end.

Chapter Fourteen

While Quantrill slept in Tennessee, savants in Peking and New Delhi gauged America's response. Once, India would have looked to Moscow for counsel and arms, but no more. The RUS had been forced to cut foreign aid, and to yield more autonomy to the predominantly Islamic peoples of her southern flanks from Lake Baikal to the Black Sea. One sign of her troubles, as the RUS well knew, was the damnable tariqat.

Tariqats, Moslem secret societies, were flourishing in the 1980's while Russian-speaking USSR bureaucrats sweated to modernize Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, sprawling Kazakhstan, reluctant Afghanistan. The tariqat was a far older tradition than Marxism, more staunchly rooted, in some ways harsher in its discipline. And Allah met His payrolls: despairing RUS bureaucrats joked that their earthly rewards could not match baklavah in the sky. No wonder that first the USSR, then the RUS, became alarmed as tariqats flourished in the Islamic RUS republics. The tariqat was a broad covert means to reject Russianization, and RUS moslems embraced it. Moscow knew her underbelly was soft on Islam, and worried about ties between its tariqats and the AIR next door.

Directly to the south of the RUS lay the Associated Islamic

Republics, in a vast crescent from Morocco to Iran, abutting India which was still officially the world's largest democratic nation; unofficially a polyglot nation in the process of trading chaos for Islam.

Since the 1960's, pundits had been predicting that India '… can't keep this up much longer.' Some observers meant her overpopulation; India's women, a miracle of dreadful fecundity, steadily produced mouths that could not be fed, much less find employment. Some referred to India's acceptance of fourteen official languages. Still others indicated India's rejection of western ties while fumbling away her parliamentary democracy.

Underlying India's manifold ills was the central fact that, until recent years, three-quarters of her citizens espoused caste restrictions in some form of Hinduism. But recently, tens of millions ofharijans—untouchables scorned by ruling castes — had become literate, and at that point began an accelerating conversion to Islam urged on by India's already prominent Moslem minority. One might almost suggest certain parallels between the fast-rising conservative religious movements of the two most populous democratic nations on earth. By 1988 the Reformed Jan'ta party, a coalition of reform groups, was led by Moslems. Amid these delicate adjustments came the River War with Pakistan.

Moslem Pakistan had several times struggled to produce a democracy, falling back on martial law each time. Thanks to her draconian rule she lost her eastern half to India in 1971, and when India annexed Bangladesh she welcomed more Moslems into parliament. Still devoutly Moslem, still incapable of sustaining a democracy, still wrangling with India and fumbling with nuclear energy, Pakistan existed largely with western aid until 1988, when she lost the River War.

The Sutlej River cascades from Himalayan headwaters, crossing India's Punjab before entering Pakistan. Pakistan was well into her project to irrigate fallow land with Sutlej water when India, with desert property of her own, began to divert too much of the Sutlej. Pakistan protested. India borrowed a smile from Buddha. And while debate smouldered in the UN, Pakistan's agribiz choked on dust. Pakistan gathered her American tanks and RUS Kalashnikovs, and struck.

Twenty days later, Pakistan was only a memory. If India was poor in fertilizer, it was because a full one-third of her national budget was spent on arms. As her exports of steel, cement, and machinery mushroomed, so did her imports of French helicopters. Profits from her new shipyards funded her navy. Pakistan had suicidally attacked a nation whose one prosperity lay in arms, a growing giant with growing power.

India overflew Sukkur and Karachi in two waves. The first was a horde of small choppers firing minicannon and homing missiles; the second was a wave of larger choppers transporting whole infantry companies. Pakistan surrendered, obtained recognition as the State of Sulaiman, and was instantly absorbed by India as educated Moslems everywhere gave thanks. It was thought possible that India had deliberately provoked the River War. Perhaps 'possible' was too weak a word.

Now, in 1996, the fifty million Moslems of Sulaiman formed a gentle buffer as India's border with the AIR crescent. India was now one-third Moslem; her Hindu majority found it easier to accommodate Islam every day.

In capitals from Moscow to Washington — with a studied pause in Brussels, the real nerve center of common-market Europe — one glance at a map could bring cold sweat. The Islamic co-prosperity sphere ran from Gibraltar to Indonesia; and now that China had made her peace with Islam and forged links to Japan, the still-floundering RUS might be excused for fearing herself savaged by COMECON, the Asiatic common market. It was well-known that India had taken Chinese aid to build her 'irrigation' conduits near the old Pakistani border. But the RUS had only now discovered that China was irrigating her subterranean tanks with oil via the new conduit.

The RUS sabotage, then, was a ploy to reveal SinoInd duplicity, while interrupting it, using American hardware so that retaliation might be delayed and, when it came, less tightly-focused on a RUS barely able to defend its huge perimeter since 1985. Surely the RUS never expected the reprisal to spread across the globe as World War Four.

So much for expectation. India's furious militants scanned American foreign and domestic crises, judged despite Peking's counsel that Washington's response to the tanker reprisal was one of weakness, and made a terrible mistake.

Chapter Fifteen

Ted Quantrill surged up from his mummy bag, mumbling, then fully awake as Ray Kenney continued to shake him. "Ah, jeez, I thought we'd settled all that last night," he said. "What shit's in the fan?"

Ray's eyes were haunted. "On your radio," he said. "Everybody's at Little's tent; come on!" With that Ray ducked out, leaving Quantrill to translate as he would.

In jeans and sneakers, Quantrill plodded to Little's tent. He could hear his radio before he arrived; saw in Purvis Little's face a bleakness deeper than ever before.

"…in Trincomalee fear that the Indian assault group has subdued the leased US base on Sri Lanka. From New Delhi comes a warning that captured American personnel will be held hostage against any loss of Indian lives. This, unless American cruise missiles are turned back from their present course toward New Delhi.

"A report just in — did you check this, Curt? — A report from UPI confirms the Xinhua announcement that a Chinese jing ya satellite is monitoring a wave of cruise missiles proceeding south from a RUS base near Magnitogorsk, near the Urals. Black Star agency denies the Chinese allegation of widespread destruction at the RUS launch complex, but admits several booster launches aborted by saboteurs firing hand-held missiles.

"Meanwhile, sources in Washington remain silent after the early-morning White House statement aired earlier. In the words of Press Secretary Newhouse, 'A measured reprisal, a demonstration of American determination designed to halt the unprovoked Indian aggression in Sri Lanka, is now underway from elements of our Seventh Fleet in the Arabian Sea. The President has asked me to stress that this demonstration is against Indian property, and not against the blameless Indian people. For the duration of this emergency, all military reserve personnel are ordered to report immediately to their units; all leaves are cancelled. We pray God that the modest American response will terminate this rash military adventure by India."

"We have no more word on that report of general mobilization in the SinoInd countries. Stay tuned. Now this."

A syrupy baritone began. "Tired, listless, logy this summer? Don't be downcast on dog-days, ask your pharmacist—" Click.

Purvis Little drew a shaking hand from Quanta-ill's radio, saw that it was shaking, clasped his hands together and stared past them at his feet. "Idon'tknow. Ijust — don't — know."

"My mother's in the reserve. Will she be gone when I get home?" This from Thad.

Tom Schell: "Indian bastards! We'll show 'em."

Wayne Atkinson: "Indians and Chinese both! And since when are Russians our allies?"

Ray Kenney: "I want to go home—"

A chorus tuned up, its most prominent word being 'home'. Without a word, Little began to strike camp, ignoring the narrowed eyes of a watchful Wayne Atkinson. Slowly at first, then with haste that bordered on panic, the troop repacked.

Quantrill tarried to help Thad stuff his pack, saw Atkinson take up his rearguard position, smiled reassuringly as Thad watched them stumble out of sight at a half-trot. "They aren't waiting, Teddy! What're they doing?"

"I don't know; they don't know. Don't worry, Thad, the trail's still there."

Thad shouldered his pack, tried a tremulous smile. “If we hurry, we can catch up and listen to your radio."

"If we hang back, we still can," Quantrill said. He held up his hand, and Thad saw that Quantrill had quietly stolen his radio back. They headed for the trail, switching frequencies, making no effort to catch the others. Long before he reached the trailhead and the rest of the troop, Quantrill knew the target of the Allied US/RUS reprisal.

Chapter Sixteen

India's Uttar Pradesh region lay between New Delhi and Nepal, fed by Himalayan silts, feeding much of India from her huge grain fields on either side of the upper Ganges. Kanpur was more than a railhead: it was the nexus of mountainous wheat surpluses on which India depended. During last-second attempts to flee in half-light over New Delhi's hopelessly choked thoroughfares in a chopper, the co-pilot called back to Prime Minister Casimiro: "Hostiles still twenty minutes from us—"

Punjabi State Minister Mukkerji, trading frowns with Casimiro: "Impossible! Can cruise missiles hover?"

Casimiro licked dry lips, lurched forward as his stomach lurched upward, fought his innards and grabbed for the headset. "Here, give me that thing…" Two minutes later, after a near-mutiny by the pilot, Casimiro's chopper was swinging back toward the parliament complex. The old US cruise missiles could not hover, but could and did change course near Jaipur, hurtling eastward fifty meters above Indian soil toward her brobdingnagian breadbasket at near-sonic velocity. New Delhi, then, was not the American target, and nuclear weapons were not the threat. In hurried parley with General Kirpal, Casimiro and the available cabinet ministers deduced much from scattered reports filtering into their blastproof — though it was feared, not firestorm-proof — digs near Parliament.

I. F. Stone was right, of course; the Americans had lied in saying the cruise missiles had come from a Seventh Fleet Shangri-La. The birds had approached as parasites carried by US bombers from Diego Garcia Island to the Arabian Sea, then launched in their long dog-leg, to put the fear of a Christian God in New Delhi before dashing their brains out against Uttar Pradesh granaries.

Of the seventy-two cruise missiles launched by the Strategic Air Command, sixty-four carried conventional high explosives. The other eight carried aerosol-dispersed chemical poison as lethal as botulism toxin, with special loiter programs to distribute the stuff over what was left of the granaries after the earlybirds had strewn them across the landscape. Seventy-two conventional weapons are far too few to munch all the wheat in Kanpur's vicinity, even granting pinpoint accuracy and complete mission success — which it was not. Six missiles succumbed to natural ills en route, three were actually downed by Indian-manned Mirage fighters in an insane treetop rabbit-chase, and five missiles missed their targets. But following the fifty-eight bull's-eyes sauntered over all eight of the dispersant drones, pumping out cargoes of poison that contaminated exposed wheat and the outsides of many granaries still untouched by explosives.

Then came the RUS cruise missiles, fleeing zero-length launchers from Magnitogorsk. There had been no agreement with Washington; but there had been a RUS recon satellite tracking the US birds, and a volte-face correction in the RUS robot flight path so that, wherever US birds roosted, RUS birds would also. This blatant me-too ploy by Moscow was based on the computer-derived conclusion that only an instant alliance with the Americans could possibly deter China, who alone had the technology and the will to evaporate supertankers, from moving onto RUS soil while the US was embroiled with India. All sixty of the RUS cruise missiles were tipped with conventional explosives. A handful of them hit Kanpur. The rest exploded against granaries, bridges, and a rail depot.

This was good shooting, but bad tactics. India's first conclusion was that she must scrap all the wheat stockpiled within ten klicks of reported contamination, meaning roughly a third of her Uttar Pradesh supply. Her second was that the US/RUS strikes, instead of killing a million Indians outright, had doomed many millions to slow starvation unless India accepted mortifying ceasefire terms for American grain.

The American terms, hastily sketched in by pill-popping diplomats in Washington, were not inhuman; but they did specify an American presence on Indian soil. It was undemocratic, it was Judeo-Christian. It would be humiliating to India's leaders in the sight of Islamics everywhere.

India's third conclusion sprang from reports by tariqat members in Tazhikistan, warning of RUS troops moving into a region that adjoined both China and India. The report was false; had been generated in Peking and released among Tazhiks for a purpose which would, in time, become all too scrutable.

While Washington, Brussels, and Moscow sought some way to engage in meaningful dialogue with Peking and Riyadh as a conduit for calm negotiation with New Delhi, India's war-horse Kirpal was already coordinating a SinoInd reply to the US terms. This coincided perfectly with China's plans: she alone, except for the RUS themselves, knew just how inflated were the population figures across the enormous breadth of Siberia, and just how much RUS oil was being drawn from Siberian wellheads.

Chapter Seventeen

"I absolutely forbid it," Purvis Little shouted toward the sedan that rolled away toward Asheville. Gabe Hooker did not look back. Wayne Atkinson jabbed a scornful finger skyward from the car.

Tom Schell sat on a guard rail at roadside in the dusk. "Face it, Mr. Little, the bus isn't coming on a Sunday. Maybe hitching rides is better; what if there's no bus tomorrow?"

"Safety in numbers," Little said testily. "And I'm still responsible for your safety. It's a long way back to Raleigh, boys." The scoutmaster moved nearer to the group that lounged on packs around the Quantrill boy, listening to the radio which Quantrill had flatly refused to surrender again. Not that it mattered much; on AM or FM, only a few stations were broadcasting and all said the same things. The federal freeze order had stabilized wages and prices while outlining consumer rationing; Russians were championing the US cause; Indian wheat had been the target of our 'bloodless' demonstration; Peking was silent; stay tuned.

Presently Quantrill pocketed his radio. “Too dark for the solar cells; I'll save the batteries for later," he apologized, then raised his voice. "Mr. Little, should we set up camp and eat?"

It gave them something to do. A few vehicles passed, most at high speed. Propane stoves soon glowed under panniers of tea. None of the boys seemed hungry. Those who felt like weeping crept off to do it alone, so it was bedtime before Little realized that four more of his scouts had hiked off to hitch rides to the east.

Ray Kenney's mummy bag was deployed next to Quantrill's. Both of the boys were still awake when the late bulletins came, and both listened with breathless awe until the highway blockage bulletins began to repeat. “How're we gonna get to Raleigh now?" Ray whispered.

"The question is, will it still be there?" Quantrill regretted his reply but felt curiously detached from Raleigh. His father was on active duty; his mother had left to spend a week with kinfolk in Danville; his little sister had died two years ago. Quantrill thought of his upstairs room with its soccer posters, the pylons he used to fly his formula racers in the room, his hidden trove of pornflick cassettes, his suspended model of the Venus lab. It all seemed priceless to his childhood, valueless to his future.

Quantrill framed several replies to Ray Kenney, heard the boy weeping hoarsely, and realized that he was as likely to make things worse as to improve them. He recalled something his father had said once: "Talk is cheap, but silence is just about free." The smile of reminiscence was still on his face when Quantrill began to snore.

Once in the night, Quantrill waked for a moment; puzzled at the heavenly — hellish — display overhead. A meteor-bright line scrawled a curve, winking regularly before a final yellowish flash. The line disappeared almost instantly. Halfway across the sky a tiny star flared, then winked out just as abruptly. Quantrill thought sleepily of Perseid showers; failed to note that meteorites do not maneuver; rolled over and slept. Thus he did not see the awesome streaks that laced the night sky later when space junk began to plummet into the stratosphere.

Chapter Eighteen

The series of launches near Ining, in northwest Sinkiang, were too suspiciously spaced and too numerous to ignore. The RUS passed its data on by coded link with a US synchronous satellite thirty-six thousand klicks above the Pacific. Almost certainly the Americans were monitoring the launches anyway, in addition to the SinoInd subs known to be nearing Scotland, Australia, the US eastern seaboard and elsewhere.

We were monitoring. Our Air Defense Command computer complex, in nanoseconds, offered the 0.858 probability that the Chinese were aiming a stab for our eyes in the sky. Red telephones were in use and fingers were near buttons. All that remained was for any one of those Chinese devices to achieve low orbit, then 'jink' suddenly to higher orbit in a classic pop-up intercept. ADC scrambled the F-23's equipped with Vought AA-Sat (anti-antisatellite) systems from England, California, and Queensland. It was still possible that the Chinese were flinging up saanzi, 'umbrella', surveillance satellites, and not one of Vought's dreadnaughts must slip its leash unless a Chinese vehicle initiated the maneuver that would assure an intercept path with a US satellite.

No human presence could have kept track of so many satellites, from lunar-orbit Ellfive study projects to the synchronous-orbit Comsats to the nineteen-thousand-klick Navstar navigation devices and barely orbital research facilities. ADC's computer watched it all with ease, simultaneously keeping tabs on existing RUS, Chinese, and other satellites.

On one end of a hotline, Col. Robin LoBianco jumped. “Jink, Mr. President! It's targeted against a RUS Molniya."

From the other end: "That's not our war, Robin. I'm watching the display."

"Yessir. Russkis will be mad as — jinkl Shit, it's a Demi-tasse, I have seven jinks! Against ours…"

"Fire the Moonkillers, Robin. That's our war."

Chapter Nineteen

China had hoped to conceal the extent of her A-Sat weapons, the most sophisticated being her Jin ji, 'urgent', system. We had specs on it, a multiple independently-targetable antisatellite weapon cluster; hence a MITAS, hence a Q-clearance word, Demitasse. We had bragged on our Vought AA-Sat systems, which deployed interceptors on rocket boost as first-stage launch vehicles. The F-23's followed programmed pop-up maneuvers before releasing their solid-propellant missiles, which then would seek warheads such as Demitasse in pinpoint intercept. What we had not bragged about was our Moonkillers.

Though offensive armament had been prohibited by treaty on US satellites, defensive weapons had been installed. Satellites with sufficient energy storage were furnished with lasers capable of holing three-centimeter titanium plate. Heat dissipation in the system was so crucial that only five or six laser bursts could be rapidly fired at an approaching enemy. It was, of course, line-of-sight — but it could zap you from almost any orbital distance.

Satellites without surplus electric energy storage used something less elegant. It was a curious version of an idea used by Germans, then in our old SPRINT rockets. Solid propellant rockets are so simple and storable that a five-stage hypervelocity bird could be depended upon after years of storage. The entire weapon fitted into a cylinder fifteen cm. wide, seven meters long. The most deceptive feature was the propellant and chamber walls, so flexible with thermal protection that the cylinder could be curled into a hoop which passed as a segmented toroidal pressure vessel. It was a pressure vessel, all right…

The automated drill was 'uncurl; aim; fire.' Four stages of the weapon were straightforward boosters; the fifth carried a shaped charge that shotgunned a cloud of metal confetti, and the average 'burnt velocity' of those pellets relative to their launcher was on the order of 8,000 meters/sec, perhaps double that figure relative to an onrushing target.

Altogether, some fifty American satellites had been fitted — some retrofitted — with laser or shotgun defenses Taken together with their control modules they composed the Moonkiller system. The name was an obvious conceit, since they would not have stopped a sizeable asteroid; but in the early hours of Monday, 12 August 1996, they made expensive colanders out of forty-two Demitasse warheads,

RUS satellite defenses, Moonkillers and Vought AA-Sats accounted for most of the other Demitasse weapons but, in an hour-long display of orbital pyrotechnics watched by uncounted millions, some of those warheads obliterated their targets. Particularly galling to the US Navy was the loss of fully half of its laser translators. American subs, equipped with extremely sensitive detectors, had for years depended on communications via blue-green satellite laser that penetrated hundreds of meters into ocean depths. If you were on-station, you got the flashes.

In a small Extremely Low Frequency radio facility near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Lt. (JG) Boren Mills whirled from his console. “ELF grid test program to standby, Chief," he said, remembering to speak far down in his throat. Mills had been jerked from reserve status in grad school at Annenberg less than thirty hours before, to this Godforsaken tunnel in cheese country, but Mills was — had been — the kind of grad student who seldom forgot to employ the communication theory work he read. It had already earned him one promotion.

"At your mark, sir," said the balding chief, prompting him.

"Uh — yes, at my mark: mark." Mills touched fingertips to his headset, gnawed his lip, caught himself at it, forced his personal display to read calm.

"Running, sir. Should I test the time-sharing translators again? I can't believe anybody wants to use the ELF grid as main trunk transceivers."

Mills saw a red-code flash on the display, studied it a moment, muttered, "Jesus Christ on Quaaludes," then remembered the chief's query. "Test them again; all possible speed, Chief. We're losing laser translators over the Pacific and Arctic." The ELF radio grid, though it lay across thousands of square klicks of dairyland and had cost an immense fortune, was a distant second choice to orbital laser methods. The message rate of extremely low-frequency radio was, by definition, extremely low. But it was not as vulnerable as an orbital translator either, as Mills was learning.

In moments the chief completed his software tasks, glanced at the new weekend warrior who, though green as a NavSat's eye, was shaping up damned fast on short notice. The chief judged Mills's age as twenty-seven, putting it three years on the long side because of the jaygee, the widow's peak high on a forehead that never sweated, and the hard brown eyes that never wavered. Slim, erect, with a strong nose and graceful movements, Boren Mills could surrogate maturity better than most. The voice was soft, almost a caress, when he wasn't working at it. The chief had seen lots worse. Mills might be one of the Navy's braintrust brats, but he knew how to do a job. The chief eased over to see past Milk's shoulder, and gulped at what he saw.

"Stay at your post or go on report," Mills snapped, then spoke softly into his throat mike as the chief leaped back to his post. “With enough power, you may be able to get Arctic coverage from echo soda module, I say again echo soda. That's an awfully shallow angle to penetrate that deep in sea water, but it's your lasers, Commander. I 'm just an elf… Affirm; grid test programs running and green, we're ready when you are."

Mills turned the level, heavy-browed stare on the chief. "Pull the test programs, ready ELF grid for main-trunk use at-my-mark…mark! Chief, we're losing more orbital modules; too many bogies are getting through."

The chief took a deep breath. “Sir, last time we really tried this grid for main trunk we caused a brown-out in Eau Claire, got charged with witching milk from cattle, and had downtime here you wouldn't believe."

Mills listened again to his headset, saw verification at his console. "ELF grid to main trunk, logged and confirmed," he said softly, watching the display as he typed. "Chief, I want a man on every auxiliary power unit and I want your hangar queens running."

"We don't call 'em that, Sir, we—"

"We are at war, Chief, tell me another time. I don't give a fat rat's ass if every cow in Wisconsin gives condensed milk and farmers freeze in the dark; we are at this moment the Navy's first-line comm net and if any part of the grid goes down it will not be this one. There are SinoInd subs launching God knows what right now. You think they're propaganda leaflets?"

"Nossir. But I notice we seem to be getting a lot of comm from orbit."

"Not enough of it from the Navy. And it's Navy that's got to bag those subs."

The chief scanned his console, nodded to himself, mopped his face. "I'll set up four-hour watches. What should I tell the ratings?"

"Tell them I want no surprises."

"I mean about the A-Sat attack, Sir."

A pause. Then, "Tell them the SinoInd effort to sweep our satellites away has been repulsed. Failed. Defeated."

The chief brightened. "Aye, Sir."

Boren Mills permitted himself an almost silent snort at the ease with which men could be manipulated. Statistically, the SinoInd attack was a failure. But it had been a tactical success. Our hunter-killer teams would suffer delays in coordination. Allied bases in Germany, South Africa, Australia, the Seychelles, and Scotland were to take loads of fast-dispersing nerve gas launched from SinoInd subs offshore. Even these ghastly weapons implied a certain restraint; a hope on the part of Peking that US/RUS strategists would follow her lead in avoiding nuclear weapons and attacks on mainland centers.

But China could not dissuade India from repeating her one-two punch which had overwhelmed Pakistan. Once India's closest ally, the RUS had rained cruise missiles with poor discrimination onto Kanpur; and the RUS presence among Afghans was a chronic thorn in Islamic flesh. Two waves of Indian choppers formed near Peshawar and essayed a blitzkrieg liberation war on Afghan soil. The immediate gains, they felt, could be bargained away after the cease-fire that must surely follow China's sweep of Allied satellites.

RUS patrol craft spotted the first wave of assault choppers using side-looking radar that scanned valleys in the towering Hindu Kush range. Indian choppers, though limited in speed and range, were almost equal to the task of dodging the grid of particle-beam projectors that flared from hardened mountain sites. Almost, but not quite. Offense and defense can celled, leaving the way clear for the Indian troop choppers. The RUS then drew its defensive curtain.

The curtain bomb, a megaton-yield nuclear device, was the culmination of two generations of research into directional-effect neutron bombs. Properly oriented, delivered by unmanned vertols to various altitudes, a curtain lanced its deadly radiation in a tight conic pattern that was lethal a hundred klicks from the detonation site. Since the RUS detonated her devices in a wavering line from Qandahar to Kabul — territory of a tribute state, if not precisely RUS soil — she did not expect this tactic to be considered as a nuclear attack on foreign soil. The fallout, blast, and thermal effects would be largely confined to Afghan regions.

But thousands of India's first-line assault troops perished in the actinic glare of curtain bombs, and by the political definitions that led her into Afghanistan she did not consider that to be RUS soil. China did not know how closely her enemies were linked and interpreted the neutron curtain as an Allied willingness to tempt Armageddon. Within an hour, the full panoply of SinoInd nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons was committed.

The first strategic exchange had favored our side, with the survival of a few US/RUS satellites while the SinoInds had only orbital debris. But both China and India had placed much of their air power on submersibles, some with skyhook choppers to provide midair retrieval for aircraft that could not land vertically.

Both the US and the RUS had spent tens of billions on surface craft, enormous nuclear-powered floating airfields that were too easy to find, too vulnerable to nukes. SinoInd attack subs, with data provided by drones and buoy translators, fired their missiles without surfacing and moved off at flank speed to make second strikes as necessary.

The SinoInd air-launched ballistic missiles were easier to spot, and many were creamed by the tremendous wealth of defensive fire from our carriers and missile frigates. But our carriers were such potent offensive platforms that the SinoInds threw everything at them at once. For every

US/RUS carrier in the Indian Ocean, at least one nuke got within a thousand meters or so; and that was all it took. We lost a carrier in the Mediterranean; we lost one each in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Chastened, stunned by the terrible algebra of One Nuke = One Carrier, our surviving flattops raced for anchorages inside bays with sub nets, with steep mountains nearby, and there were few such places available. The best that could be said was that twenty per cent of the aircraft on our carriers managed to get aloft in search of an enemy, and a place to land.

Governments across the globe ducked for cover. Long-drilled and partly prepared, millions of RUS urbanites sealed themselves into subway tunnels, then slid blast-and-firestorm-proof hatches into place to ride out the blastfurnace interval. Most Americans were asleep and, in any case, had only the sketchiest notion of adequate shelter. When the Emergency Broadcast System went into operation, most American stations ceased transmission while the rest broadcast belated warnings. Many Americans had never heard the term “crisis relocation" until the past day or so, but it was obviously a weasel-phrase for "evacuation". A few city dwellers — the smaller the city, the better their chances — sped beyond their suburbs before freeway arterials became clots of blood and machinery.

The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras; city planners, ecologists, demographers, sociologists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though; often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.

Chapter Twenty

The Civil Defense merit badge had not been popular with Purvis Little, but Tom Schell's parents had insisted. "What we really need," Tom sighed, "is a better map."

Robbie Calhoun: “Maybe Tim has his cartography manual," with a nod toward his twin.

As Tim Calhoun dug feverishly into his pack, Ted Quantrill flogged his own memory. Never very active in collecting merit badges, he did not at first conclude they had done him much good. Woodwork? Cycling? Aviation? First aid? Weather? Weather] "Most of the continental United States lies between thirty and forty-five degrees; and in these, uh, longitudes, prevailing winds are west to east."

"Latitudes," Tim corrected him, flipping through a dogeared pamphlet.

Little regarded Quantrill with interest. “What in the world are you talking about?"

"Meteorology, Mr. Little. Merit badge stuff; I either remember it word-for-word, or not at all."

"Durn if you do," Tim insisted, stabbing at the open pamphlet. "Latitude is the word."

"So I blew it," said Quantrill;'the important word is west-to-east."

"That's a phrase," said Ray Kenney.

"Stop bickering," Little snapped. A dozen times during the hour since they'd waked, he had seen senseless quarrels flare this way — once in a fistfight. Little did some things right, and keeping the boys busy until the bus arrived was one of those things. "Tim, I want an 'X' over every place that's been — hit." He did not want to say 'annihilated by a nuclear weapon'. Not yet. Not even if the Knoxville and Charlotte stations both said so.

Slowly, Tim marked through Raleigh; then Wilmington, Huntsville, Little Rock, Charleston on his regional map.

"Anybody know where Tullahoma is?"

"Couple hundred klicks west of us," said Quantrill, and could not keep from adding, childishly, " — some cartographer you are."

"What does it matter, Quantrill?" Little said quickly.

"No matter — unless you're east of it; downwind. Like we are."

Tom Schell recalled his civil defense study and nodded. "If we head for town now, we might find a deep shelter in time. Mr. Little, it's been twenty minutes since the last car zoomed past here. I 'm gonna hitch the next one and you guys can all rot here if you want to."

Little studied the pinched faces around him, saw Thad Young guarding the radio from shadows that diminished its pathetic output to silence. "Thad, anything more about Asheville?"

"Just that the highways are all clogged. Some looting," said the boy, his ear near the speaker.

"Safety in numbers," Little muttered for the dozenth time, then raised his voice. "Boys, I want you to march single-file behind me. If we can get to Cherokee, we can find a way to Asheville."

Five minutes later the troop had settled into a good pace eastward, just off the left shoulder facing traffic, most with packs though Ray and Thad had discarded theirs. “Yeah, I 'll share my sleeping bag if we have to," Quantrill said to Ray, then made an effort at levity. "But one little fart and you're outside lookin' in."

Tom Schell, at the rear, walked just behind. “But that's all he is," Tom laughed.

"You're supposed to be flagging cars, not ganging up on me," Ray replied.

"So show me a car," Tom said. None had passed since they began their march. He clapped a good-natured hand on Quantrill's shoulder: "Anyhow, Teddy's a gang all by himself. Take it from an expert."

Quantrill turned to smile at Schell, saw the vehicle behind them swerve into sight before he heard it. "I never thanked you for — hey, here comes one!"

The vintage motor home teetered on the curve before its rear duals found purchase, then picked up speed on the downslope. Quantrill saw the lone driver, realized that the vehicle could hold them all, stepped into the near lane and waved his arms hard. Ahead of them, the others were reacting the same way. Tom must have realized that the driver had no intention of slowing; made a gallant gesture by stepping almost into the vehicle's path, facing it, arms up and out.

The driver slammed at his brakes just long enough to provoke a slide, then corrected desperately as the motor home straddled the center stripe. Tom Schell gasped, "Ah, God," before the left front fender impacted his chest at high speed, the sickening sound of his imploding ribcage half lost in the roar of the diesel.

The body of Tom Schell hurtled a full forty meters, pacing the motor home and nearly parallel to it before colliding with an oak, five meters up in its foliage. The driver fought the wheel through the next bend, tires squalling, and continued.

Not one of the survivors moved until the body slid, supple as a bag of empty clothing, from tree to gravel where it lay, jerking. Then something in Purvis Little cried out, not in grief but for retribution. Reaching down for a stone, sprinting ludicrously after the motor home, the scoutmaster howled his impotence without words.

Quantrill raced to within a few paces of the victim, saw Ray Kenney speed past him in pursuit of the others, stopped in revulsion at what he saw. Quantrill bit his lip, knelt at the roadside to think while steadfastly refusing to stare again into the dead eyes. In the distance he could hear the cries of a mindless mob, now all but lost in Smoky Mountain stillness.

It was much easier to hear your radio estimate megadeaths than to see and hear and smell and — Quantrill swallowed against a sourness in the back of his mouth — taste a single death. Big hearty Tom Schell: one moment a mixed bag of vices and companionable virtues, the next a flaccid bag of skin leaking away into imperturbable gravel, one eye winking as though it had all been a grotesque joke. But the dirt would soak up Tom's blood without qualm or shudder. Lucky dirt; you die for it, and it doesn't give a damn.

And how many had died during the few seconds since Tom froze at the center stripe? The question flashed into Quan-trill's mind, held him mesmerized. New York-San Antonio-Colorado Springs-New Orleans, on and on, endlessly. Multiply Tom Schell a million times; ten million. It was suddenly as though Tom had died yesterday, or the day before. It was all a long time and many deaths ago, his mind soothed. Just don't look back for a refresher course.

Slowly, Quantrill took his radio from its sunny lashing atop his pack. After several minutes he stiffened, thinking hard on the outcomes of bacteriological weapons west of Winston-Salem and a flat prohibition against travel westward on US 40. So Asheville was not to be spared after all; and while fallout might be lethal, it diminished with time. Germ warfare, he decided, might not — and it was harder to hide from, and to counter.

Two hundred klicks west was a towering mushroom over what had once been a military research facility. To the east was home, under another such cloud — and microbes were there too. Quantrill repositioned his radio, shrugged his pack higher on his shoulders, and turned his back on home.

Chapter Twenty-One

The US/RUS attack was full of glitches, and there was no hope of catching the enemy by surprise. But while the tunnels under Dairen, Tsingtao and Canton resounded with survivors streaming toward the countryside, fleet installations adjoining these cities were wiped from existence. Karachi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta were no better prepared than American seaports and suffered as many casualties as Oakland, Honolulu, San Diego, Norfolk.

The extended Chinese presence to leased bases in Albania, Cuba, and AIR countries brought a hard-won lesson to her friends as we pounded her sub pens at Durres, Bengazi and Manzanillo. Highland marines stormed a secret supply depot on the Irish coast, took its comm center intact, and lured three Sinoind subs to offshore rendezvous where two of the craft were captured. The third, a small two-hundred-ton experimental job, evidently was shaped very like a whale. Sonar traces suggested that its power plant was unconventional and, British Naval Intelligence inferred from its pygmy dimensions, must have been launched from some vast tender, a hiveship. Pygmy subs simply could not carry enough fuel for extended pelagic cruise unless nuclear-powered.

These tentative conclusions were not reached for some days because the British had very little hard evidence to work from. The pygmy sub had gone down in deep water, scuttled in a half-dozen blasts aft on the pressure hull that took all but one of its dozen crew members to the bottom.

The surviving crewman yielded little under normal interrogation. He was particularly careful in his choice of words when asked about his craft's induction system, and could not hide his educated diction well enough to pass as an ordinary seaman.

Under modest drug-induced hypnosis, the crewman revealed that he was a mechanical engineer entrusted with the little sub's Snorkel and exhaust systems. He knew approximately zip about its engine; only that steam was its exhaust. The British hypothesized about sponson tanks with hydride fuels, and forwarded their findings to US Naval Intelligence. It seemed an odd way to push a sub around, but it was after all an experimental model. Ninety per cent of everything, the Admiralty quoted, was crud. Few analysts entertained suspicions that this was part of the other ten per cent.

Tiny Israel, still a nation surrounded by implacable foes except for moderate Turkey, felt an increasing squeeze as most AIR countries embargoed petroleum and high-grade ore to her shores. Under the circumstances, visitors thought it bizarre that Israel's internal transportation system would grow so dependent on air cushion vehicles that, even with the most effective ACV skirts, still used a third more fuel than wheeled vehicles and many times more than electric trains. Israel's Ministry of Transportation pointed out that an ACV did not require expensive roadbeds, and that her synthetic fuel industry was expanding on a crash basis. From Elat to Acre, Israel's noisy ACV transports levitated centimeters off the sand and left dust-tails in their wakes, until the night of Monday, 12 August 1986.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Yakob ben Arbel swept a hand over his bald head, gazed out the window across Tel Aviv rooftops, glanced again at the note and sighed. “Bones, page twenty-one, line fifteen. I gather the jehad is already in motion. You are certain it said 'bones'?"

"How could I not check it twice," shrugged Irina Konolev. "And it'll barely be dark at nine-fifteen. We haven't a snowball's chance in the Negev of pulling this off without being spotted."

"Speaking of the Negev, our settlements along the eastern wadis are low on fuel. We must get every spare liter we can to them from Beersheba. We have," he checked his chronograph, "four hours, Irina. I hope the Knesset knows what it is about, this time."

"I'll take our records to Netanya for you, unless you want them," she said. The Ministry of Transportation would be a nightmare of conflicting priorities without a copy of records up to the moment.

"You know better than that. My unit will not be back by the time you leave Netanya." A grin: "I shall probably be safer than you. Oh! Call my wife, tell her to keep the TV on and the kids within earshot."

Irina stepped nearer, planted a kiss under his mustache. "That's because you're a better colonel than you are a bureaucrat," she said. "Want your uniform pressed?"

She was nearly out the door before he stopped laughing long enough to say, "It will have worse than wrinkles on it before this night is done. And for the love of Jahweh do not forget the wadi fuel." Then he began checking records on operational readiness of vehicles in the Hazor-Shemona region. For the next four hours, ben Arbel knew he must forget everything but his role as a ministry subchief, and see that every possible drop of fuel was available without alerting AIR moles that something was in the wind. However well or badly he performed, the balance of the job would be in other hands by twenty-one hours, fifteen minutes.

At nine-fifteen PM he would be changing; by nine-twenty, racing to the McDonnell vertols hidden north of Ramla. The vertols were so new that even the US Airlift Command had not received many; so ingeniously modified that each could eject fifty airborne troops like cartridges and pick up more troop pods without stopping.

Yakob ben Arbel smiled. It was fortunate that the United States had continued its tradition of sharing its latest weaponry with Israel through the twists and turns of reformed (if that was the word) Russians and Marxist Moslems. It almost seemed a shame that Israel, with her sophisticated electronic R & D, could not afford to share her biggest breakthrough with the Americans. Later, perhaps; not yet. The entire future existence of the US did not depend, as Israel's did, on a weapon that had never been battle-fledged and could not directly harm a soul.

Ben Arbel inferred rightly; agents of the Mossad had monitored the countdown in Riyadh and Cairo as the AIR set in motion their machinery for jehad; holy war on Israel. While Saudis ruled Arabia and Sadat lived on in Egypt, Israel could hope for something less than eventual apocalypse. Since the quasi-Marxist coups and the formation of the AIR, only uncertainty as to RUS and American responses had kept the jehad on the back burners.

Without any question whatever, the combined AIR forces could inundate all Israel in a month of hand-to-hand fighting, or pulverize her in a day if nukes were employed. Once, Israel had intercepted such messages in time to act first; twice she had responded quickly enough to survive without advance warning. This time she would need, not only advance warning — and she had that much already — but a monumental series of deceptions on a scale unmatched in human history, and all with split-second timing.

The jehad, beginning with nuclear-tipped air strikes from desert bases in Iraq and Arabia just before dawn, would be followed by mop-up bombardments from missile-carrying Egyptian and Libyan frigates. Because Allah was merciful there would be no troop thrusts into Israel's debris until the radioactive wasteland had 'cooled' enough for selected motorized infantry advances. It might take a month, but the AIR could wait. They had waited and prayed for years toward this moment, a time when US/RUS and European eyes were focused on their own survival. Their prayers would be answered, imsh'Allah, on the morrow.

At nine-fifteen PM, Israel's television and radio stations broadcast a bulletin to the effect that the bones of the patriarch Joseph had been positively identified. Some stations carried the item with a tongue-in-cheek waggishness—'what, again?'—but all carried it. Because Israelis, even those with deep-cover civil defense jobs, are as fallible as anybody, stations swamped with telephone calls found it necessary to repeat that the bones were indeed those of Joseph. The ensuing uproar down the length of Israel was immediate; citizens spread the salient news from house to house. By ten PM, darkness hid the dust of the first cargo ACV to thrumm west from Hazeva, loaded to its rubbery skirts with the only cargo Israel considered indispensable.

Monitors in the Sinai and elsewhere informed AIR leaders of the activity, but nothing was done with the information. The Jews, it was felt, were only making genocide easier.

Of the one hundred thousand ACV's that massed along the Plain of Sharon between Tel Aviv and Haifa from midnight to three AM, only a few thousand had needed to traverse much more than two hundred klicks of sand. Last-minute maintenance and refueling proceeded with less than the expected attrition rate, thanks to people like Irina Konolev, her mind and fingers flying as she allocated fuel and personnel from her portable computer terminal in Netanya.

Fleetingly, Irina thought of her plain-featured, stolid boss, the family man with the big laugh who was also the colonel with the big responsibility. She hoped he would still be laughing at dawn; she would not have been surprised to learn that Colonel ben Arbel lay in a personnel pod as his vertol flashed over wavetops of the Red Sea. She might have grinned, had she known that the knot of McDonnells had passed muster at the enemy IFF query near Tiran by flawlessly surrogating an Indian Air Force response. Ben Arbel, in the second wave of vertols, arced inland south of Yanbu while the first wave was converging on another target to the south. The targets were wholly insignificant from a strict military point of view; but as political prizes they were crucial.

At three-oh-three AM, a series of temblors was recorded in the shallow Mediterranean southwest of Beirut. Lebanon and Syria braced for tidal waves that would not come, because the temblors had been initiated by sonic generators in rock far below the seabed ooze. On Cyprus, now an island province of Turkey, the wave could be seen approaching on radar. It was very high, and it stretched to the horizon. Cypriots from Limassol to Cape Greco were wakened and warned to abandon the southern coastline. Cyprus had felt tidal waves before; everyone knew that even a low wave could become huge as it mounted island shallows. Cypriot radar was watching something that wasn't there; one operational mode of Israel's most secret weapon, a microwave ghost that could make radar strain at gnats while swallowing camels.

The face of the wave approached Cyprus behind the ghost image at two hundred klicks per hour. It was composed of the fastest fifty thousand Israeli ACV's in close formation, followed at whatever speed they could muster by the remaining transports. The wave did not break against Cyprus's beaches; much of it continued inland for some distance before settling to disgorge literally millions of passengers — most of Israel's population. Israel had given technical aid to Turkey in return for a secret promise that Cyprus would accept refugees, but the Turks had been given no details on just how that exodus might occur.

The code phrase for the operation was entirely appropriate, for the Old Testament specified the precious cargo which Moses had taken when leaving Egypt. The bones of Joseph had formalized one Exodus, and now they had precipitated another.

Before the human tidal wave settled, AIR military leaders were arguing furiously with the civilian majlis commanding them. It was too late, they railed; the first wave of fighter-bombers was almost airborne; the frigates were off Port Said and Libyan captains might not be willing to honor an abort signal.

But Islam's spiritual leaders knew the Marxist veneer over their people was barely epidermal. In their bones, devout Moslems might reject their leaders, perhaps question their own devotion, once they saw on television that Medina, Mecca, and Q'om were suffering unspeakable defilements before being turned into radioactive craters.

As one Knesset member put it: "Given the certainty that we've taken the Masjid Al Haram and might let the world watch on TV while we cover the Ka'aba with pigskin, I think they'd be willing to defer doomsday. Think about it: once the Holy of Holies has been blown into the ionosphere, a Moslem would have to pray in all directions."

The point was well-taken by top-level majlis of the AIR. If Israelis would permit frequent inspection to verify the Jewish claim that no harm had yet come to the shrines of Mohammed and Khomeini, the majlis would cancel the attack on Israel's abandoned soil. The abandonment had not been complete enough to give the majlis hope that Moslem squatters could infiltrate the place. Sedom and Nazareth and Haifa still rang with the clangor of Israel's business, but now a business run exclusively by warriors of both sexes. In the matter of her vulnerable citizens, Israel had cleared her decks for action. The AIR saw it as a stalemate, though Israel could still lose on Cyprus. The jehad would have to wait…

Chapter Twenty-Three

Our Atlantic coast sunrise was a many-splendored thing on Monday, thanks to micron-sized hunks of Cape Cod and Bethesda and Cocoa Beach that floated in countless quadrillions toward the dawn. Not many people admired it. Most survivors were too busy retching, or wondering how to filter death-laden air once they figured out a way to pump it into their rural root cellars. Or tallying candy bars and drinkables against the headcount in a few mass transit tunnels. Or cursing our lack of Civil Defense which, like charity, begins at home. Or… but the list was worse than endless; it was pointless. Unlike Moscow and Kiev, American cities had not spent the funds to preserve flesh and blood under firestorms fifty klicks in diameter that consumed every ignitable scrap aboveground.

Raised to kindling temperature by nuclear airbursts, trees and plastic facades contributed to monstrous updrafts that sucked air from suburbs; which grew to two-hundred-klick winds roaring across urban structures at a thousand degrees Celsius, mercifully asphyxiating millions before incinerating their remains. As citizens of Tokyo and Dresden had learned by 1945, the immediate danger was firestorm.

Toward the midwest, Americans fared better. Here we were less centralized, with more rural homes dependent on their own solar power, more homeowners who knew how to cannibalize a car's electrical system and to jury-rig a bellows air-pump with cardboard and tape. Here were fewer prime targets, more well-stocked pantries.

The Pacific coast was a patchwork; rubble from San Diego to Santa Barbara, emulating the Boston-to-Norfolk devastation, and an unchanged, achingly lovely stillness from Point Arena to Arcata where Chinese fallout had not yet reached.

Least affected of the American homeland on Monday was the intermountain region from the Sierra-Cascades to the great plains. Albuquerque and the Pueblo-Denver strip were smouldering hulks, of course. The MX sites in Nevada and south of Minot had taken cannonades of nuclear thunder. But the MX called for ground-burst bombs. Though anything downwind of a ground-pounder would be heavily hit by fallout, the firestorm effects were enormously less. There was nothing much to burn in Nevada, and Dakota corn was largely spared. Thanks to a cunning variation on the MX theme, the submerged portable MX modules were also intact. Apparently it had never occurred to SinoInd strategists that a Trident launch system might work handily in Lake Sakakawea.

At the bottom line, as Israelis on Cyprus knew, lay the survival of the population. In our intermountain region, folks near Twin Falls, Winnemucca, Green River, and Holbrook wept and prayed for their urban relatives; and while they prayed, they worked. Prayer and honest labor characterized these people more than most, particularly among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints — Mormons.

It should have surprised no one that paralysis of the body politic might leave one limb functioning if it were insulated against systemic shock. If you put aside the arguable features of Mormon theocracy — the fact of theocracy, women's rights, resurgent polygamy, the identification of Amerinds as lost tribes of Israel, — you could focus on the more secular facts of Mormonism. They scorned drugs, including nicotine and alcohol; they swelled their ranks with as much missionary zeal as any Moslem, and they strengthened their church with tithes. They were studious. They voted as a bloc.

Each of these factors was a survival factor, though not obviously so. The most obvious survival factor was the one which Mormons had taken for a century as an article of faith without demanding an explicit reason: stored provisions.

Every good Mormon knew from the cradle that he was expected to maintain a year's supply of necessities for every family member against some unspecified calamity. Mormon temples maintained stocks of provisions. A year's supply of raw wheat was not expensive, and its consumption meant that one must be able to grind flour and bake bread. The drying of fruit, vegetables, and meat allowed storage at room temperature with no chemical additives more injurious than a bit of salt and sulfur.

Mormons had such a long Darwinian leg up on their gentile neighbors (to a Mormon, all unbelievers including Jews were gentiles) that, by the 1980's, the church found it wise to downplay the stored provisions. Faced with a general disaster, a Mormon might choose to share his stored wealth with an improvident gentile — but no longer advertised his foresight because he did not want that sharing at gunpoint. Devout, self-sufficient, indecently healthy, many of the more liberal Mormons had moved to cities by 1990. Most of those perished. The more conservative Mormons, and the excommunicated zealots of splinter groups, tended to remain in the sprawling intermountain American west; and most of those were alive on Monday, 12 August 1996, the day that would become known as Dead Day.

Chapter Twenty-Four

At first, Quantrill thought the pickup would ghost past him to disappear down the mountain as two others had done, on Tuesday morning. It was a green '95 Chevy hybrid with the inflatable popup camper deck that melded, when stowed, into an efficient kammback. Then he saw it ease onto the shoulder and ran to open the right-hand door. “Got room for my pack?" He was already shucking it.

"What if I said 'no'?" She saw him hesitate, then chuckled. "I'm kidding. Room between us, or push it through the hole," the woman said, aiming a gloved thumb at the orifice behind her.

Quantrill tried to smile as the Chevy coasted downhill, glanced again at the driver. His first impression had been of a tanned little old lady, sun-crinkles at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles running down her throat into the open-necked work shut. But the lines on the throat were sinew, and the chuckle hummed with vitality. He revised her age at under forty, saw that her own gaze mixed shrewdness and curiosity.

"Where'd you spend the night? You look hungry," she said.

"A cave in the bluffs back there. I have some sausage and granola. Afraid to drink the water."

"Smart boy. Got a canteen? Fill it from mine there," she pointed at an insulated jug. "Actually a Halazone tab is all you'd need. With this fiendish high-pressure area, not much fallout is moving our way. My name's Abby Drummond. Headed for Gatlinburg?"

"I guess," he shrugged, topping off his canteen. "Anywhere there's shelter, ma'am."

She drove in silence, the tire-whine loud because the diesel was not running and she was recharging her batteries on steep downslopes. At length she said, "I'll let you off at the Gatlinburg turnoff. I 'm going to detour south of Knoxville."

Quantrill nodded, wondering if the woman regretted giving him the lift. Well, she wasn't very big. A woman alone…

Abby Drummond slowed at the tumoff, then drove a hundred meters past an abandoned sedan and stopped. Quantrill shouldered his pack, waved, walked fifty paces before he heard the voices. He turned, then removed his pack again with hurried stealth.

Two men, heavily dressed as city folk will for an outing, had materialized from the roadside. One stood on the Chevy's front bumper, a prospector's pick waving before the woman's eyes. The other was opening the passenger door. Quantrill could hear them talking, did not need to know what was said. His decision seemed the most natural thing in the world, and changed him forever.

He took the canteen, scanning the brush for a handy weapon, slipped as near as he dared. If he rushed the men, the last fifteen meters would be in the open. Since they stood at right angles, he felt sure that one of them would spot him. He found a stone the size of his fist, let himself breathe deeply, then tossed the stone high in the air.

Quantrill was moving before the stone hit the ground on the driver's side. The pick-wielder jerked around, but the man with one foot in the cab did not move. Quantrill ran as quietly as he could but saw Mr. Pick, hearing quick footfalls, whirl back on uncertain footing. The sodden thunkk of the full canteen against the man's temple carried all of Quantrill's speed plus the length of his arm and canteen strap, and Quantrill's inertia carried him behind the man on an oblique course before he could stop.

The little pick glanced off the Chevy's plastic hood, the man spinning half around before collapsing. He groveled to hands and knees, vented a long moan, then fell face-first in the dirt.

Quantrill backed away, swinging the canteen like a bolo to threaten the second man until he saw that the man's attention was riveted on Abby Drummond, and his hands were now in the air. "Okay, okay," he was chattering, "people make mistakes. What about my buddy, sounds like the boy bashed his head in." But he was stepping backward now, staring at the short ugly revolver in Abby's hand.

Quantrill snatched up the pick, saw that the felled man was breathing heavily, and resisted a vicious impulse as he moved to the open door. Then, as though he had always known such things, he stopped. He was nearing the talker, whose flickering gaze seemed to suggest some quick judgment. It was very simple: Quantrill had been about to obstruct the woman's field of fire. The man was preparing to act.

Quantrill backed off, said "Wait," in a more peremptory way than he intended, retrieved his pack, trotted far down the road ahead of the Chevy. Then he waved it toward him.

Abby Drummond accelerated quickly away and did not entirely stop as Quantrill tumbled into the passenger seat again. A hundred meters back, one man stood helplessly watching them while the second was reeling up to a sitting position.

"Could've been worse," she said. “You'd best drop your canteen out the window. Could be contaminated now. In fact, you and I are taking chances with each other as it is. I've come from Spartanburg."

Quantrill did not understand and said so, discarding his canteen with reluctance. "I've been camping up here since Friday," he said. "If it has fallout on it, so do I."

"Not fallout; microbes. Those men were out of fuel, and were running from the same thing we are — whether you know it or not, ah, what's your name?"

"Ted Quantrill, ma'am."

"I called you a boy, and so did that poor devil back there. We were wrong, Ted. You maybe only sixteen or so, but—"

"Fifteen, almost."

"Man enough for me back there, Ted. Call me 'Abby'; looks like we'll be together awhile, if you're up to it. Frankly, I'm glad to have a man along. I gather you weren't headed home."

Quantrill spent the next twenty minutes telling his tale as Abby guided them toward foothills and the outskirts of Maryville, Tennessee. He did not tell her about Tom Schell: least said, soonest forgotten. She seemed to know which side roads to take and, if she was faking her knowledge of their predicament, he decided it was a damned convincing fake. "Anyway," he finished his account, "if I catch anything, you'll have to give it to me."

Abby chuckled again, saw that he had intended no double-entendre, and slapped the steering wheel as she laughed outright. "I'll see what I can do," she said in arch innocence. "But seriously, I think we got out in time. If we didn't, we'll know by tomorrow, I guess. We probably shouldn't mix with other people for a day or two. The only ethical thing to do, wouldn't you say?"

"You're 'way ahead of me," he said. "Jeez, I don't even know where we're going."

She told him.

"Oak Ridge? Shit-fire, I mean, uh—"

"Whatever turns you on," she said easily.

"I mean wouldn't that be a prime target?"

"It's just a museum now, Ted; the Union Carbide people ran out of funds years ago. I work there in the summers. My best friend there is Jane Osborne; believe you me, Janie knows the tunnels as well as anybody. Most people don't even know about 'em. Not at the museum, but — well, you'll see. Uh-oh."

Quantrill saw why she was slowing. Just ahead lay a bridge, barricaded so that only one car could pass. Four men in khaki, all with riot guns, stood guard. "We can't fight those guys," he muttered.

"Deputies, I'll bet. Act sleepy, I'll do the talking," she said, and rolled down the window as she stopped.

The spokesman was middle-aged, kindly, firm. No traffic from the east, he said. "Official cars only."

"But I'm from Oak Ridge," Abby said. "I am an official." She selected a card from her bulging wallet as she invoked the phrase with resounding dignity. ' "The American Museum of Atomic Energy. I only came down to pick up my son here, and bring him back."

"Back from where," the man said, no longer so kindly, but jerking his eyes toward Quantrill as he returned the card.

"What's the name of that silly mountain we just left, hon," she asked, looking brightly at Ted. "Poor dear, he's been up there only one night alone and so tired he can hardly move. Teddy, answer mother."

"Uh — Clingman's," he said, and rubbed his eyes. "We aren't home yet." It was a complaint; almost a whine.

"Soon. Go back to sleep."

A second man, silent until now, had been listening. His age and wedding ring suggested that he might have a family of his own. "Lady, you had to be crazy to let the boy go camping alone at a time like this. How many anthrax victims has he rubbed up against since yesterday, and why didn't your husband come along?"

"The Lord took my husband, sir," she said softly. "And left me only the boy. I promised he could have his little adventure; and Teddy was complaining that he didn't meet anybody up there. I didn't think God would take him away from me when he's all I have — except for my official duties. I do have those; and I'm late." Not quite a protest.

The older man, ruminatively: "Those are Georgia plates on your car."

Without hesitation: "Georgia plates are cheap, and a widow has to make ends meet. Chief Lawrence in Oak Ridge knows that."

"I reckon he does," the younger man laughed, and turned to his companion. "Look, Sam, they aren't really from across the Smokies — and she is an official. And they haven't had a chance to catch anything. Whaddaya say?"

The older man exhaled slowly, then stood aside. "What was the name of your police chief again?"

Already rolling, the diesel now warming up to take its share of the load: "Calvin Lawrence," Abby said, "even if I didn't vote for him."

The man smiled, waved her on, waved again as the Chevy eased onto the bridge. She waved back, then rolled up the window and heaved a sigh of record proportions. "We're a good team," she said.

Quantrill: "You're a great team all by yourself. I almost believed you myself, mom."

"Mom your ass," she squealed, and backhanded his shoulder lightly. "I'm thirty-four years old, fella. In the right clothes I could pass as your hotsy."

"I think you could pass for any damn' thing you wanted

"And why not? I didn't tell you what my profession is, nine months a year."

Slyly: "Does it involve lying to deputies a lot?"

"By God, but you're getting cocky! What I do, is cause the willing suspension of disbelief."

"I believe it," he said quickly.

"You have some good lines, inside and out," she winked. "Anyway, — I teach drama at a junior college."

"You really a widow?"

"Of the grass variety. Twice. I like macho men, but I don't like to be directed, I like to direct." She glanced at him again, laughed again. “Mom your ass," she repeated, laughing.

When she laughed, Abby Drummond seemed more like thirty than forty. Quantrill decided the tan and the strong muscular lines had led him astray, then reflected that she could be almost any age. All that play-acting might let her be anything she liked. To anybody. Suddenly he was aware of the first stirrings of an erection. "You and that deputy both mentioned anthrax," he said quickly. "Tell me about it; I thought it was a cattle disease."

Chapter Twenty-Five

Abby Drummond had felt secure in Spartanburg until (she told Quantrill) Monday night after she snapped off her holo set and spent an hour reading De Kruif, the Britannica, and other snippets from her small library. Anthrax was one of the few diseases with an epizootic potential that included not only cattle but swine, sheep, horses, domestic pets — and the domesticator as well. Isolated by Koch in 1876 and fought with Pasteur's vaccine in 1881, anthrax in its original form was well-known.

If breathed, anthrax spores caused pulmonary infection that advanced within days to lethal hemoptysis — hemorrhagic pneumonia. Human victims might tremble and fight for breath before the convulsions and the bloody froth at the mouth, or they might just succumb quickly and quietly.

Introduced into a skin abrasion, B. anthracis produced a large carbuncle with an ugly necrotic center which soon fed ravenous microbes into the bloodstream where, without prompt treatment, septicemia led to meningitis and usually death. Ingested, the bug was just as deadly. Consumption of anthrax-killed beef was not a very popular form of suicide, but a little dab would do you.

Toxoids, proteins produced from the bacterial toxins, could provide immunity. Antibiotics might halt the progress of the disease. If there was one optimistic note to be struck in this dirge, it was that recovery from anthrax usually meant permanent immunity.

On the other hand were four murderous fingers. Anthrax was so contagious that a corpse could infect the living. Onset of the disease led to death so quickly that treatment often came too late. The bacillus reverted to spores that could lie in lethal wait for a host, sometimes for years in open fields. Finally there came the fact that, within hours after Indian craft dispersed the disease, the Surgeon General's office announced that a new, more virulent and invasive strain of the bacillus was involved.

The defunct USSR, in 1980, had succeeded too well in developing a modified B. anthracis in one of its bacteriological warfare centers near Sverdlovsk. And had failed miserably to contain it, resulting in the now-famed Sverdlovsk scare that killed scores of citizens and further curtailed the supply of local beef while Tass News Agency denied the obvious. Sverdlovsk had been lucky; the distribution of its anthrax had been meagre, accidental, and vigorously fought. Unlike the farmlands of the southeastern US in 1996.

The SinoInd delivery system took a multiplex approach to the problem of vectoring the disease. To start with, paran-thrax spores were much smaller than those of the original bacilli; a cubic centimeter of them could be dispersed fifty times more widely for the same effect, because they multiplied faster. The dispersal method was by sub-launched Indian cruise missiles, fat capacious cargo drones that flew a leisurely mach 0.7 from the Mexican Gulf toward Virginia, voiding trails of deadly paranthrax spores as they passed over agrarian centers. Macon, High Point, and Roanoke typified the targets.

Though American epidemiologists did not yet know it, pulmonary paranthrax spread fast because still-ambulatory victims spread the microbes in their exhalations. As active bacilli or after sporulation on contact with air, the disease was literally designed to spread into the countryside.

The region west of the Appalachians had been spared immediate effects of paranthrax because the Pensacola bomb did not arrive until two flights of old Marine Sea Harriers scrambled from there, following sonar contacts to the surfaced Indian subs in the Gulf. In the brief engagement, one sub dived after launching five of its fat birds. Our Harriers shot down three of them; the other two spread death.

The second sub was caught with its panels down as it readied the first of its missiles intended for Mississippi, Tennessee,and Kentucky. Despite direct hits on its deck pods with One-eye missiles, the sub might have escaped but for the act for which Marine Captain Darryl Tunbridge won his Medal of Honor. Tunbridge, a flight instructor whose Harrier was equipped with depth charges, used the hover mode of his sturdy old Harrier as he watched tracers climb past his wing. He marveled at the valiant Indian gunner's mate who manned the quad one-cm, antiaircraft guns while his own decks were awash; did not pause to wonder at his own risk as he overtook the diving sub at fifty knots, hanging almost dead overhead, feeling the shudder of one-cm, slugs in his fuel tanks, dropping his depth charges while virtually scraping the sub's squat conning tower. The Harrier faltered as the sub's bow, impelled by two mighty blasts, rose from the water.

Captain Tunbridge's honor was posthumous, but that sub would never launch a missile from her permanent rest at 330 fathoms.

We soon realized our debt to the Pensacola Harriers. We needed more time to discover just how virulently effective were the two cruise missiles that got through. Had the disease spread from farmlands toward agrarian centers, we could have organized teams to distribute penicillin, chlortetracy-cline, erythromycin. Once those centers were fighting for their lives while evacuees fled to spread the epidemic, there was little hope for the nearby farmlands. There was not enough disinfectant on earth to cleanse ten thousand square klicks of grass.

"I think I got out of Spartanburg in time," Abby sighed. "First symptom is usually skin itch, followed by open sores that don't hurt much, with swelling. The fever and pains in the joints don't begin 'til later."

"Lordy; makes me itch just to think about it."

She lent him a vexed glance. "Do tell," she said, and scratched herself. "Hand me the Clorox."

He watched her dampen a face tissue, dab it to cuticles; imitated her; stowed the jug of bleach.' "This all we can do?"

"Until we can get antibiotics. This may not do much good but from what I've read, it's a start. The things I couldn't find at my apartment were antibiotics and thirty-eight cartridges."

"Oh well; six shots are more'n you need," he said.

"You don't get it, Ted. I don't have even one."

Long pause. "You faced those bastards down with an empty gun?"

"Now you got it," she smiled; winked.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jane Osborne's two-bedroom bungalow lay on the outskirts of Oak Ridge near the museum. She did not answer Abby's calls. They saw a neighbor peering from a shuttered window. He refused to answer their hails. They decided against going into the house until after their self-imposed quarantine. But in the detached garage was Abby's storage and, "I've got medicine and an old TV in there," she explained. They wrestled with musty cartons in the garage. The garage lights worked, and Abby immediately plugged the Chevy's recharger into a garage socket. Abby's penicillin was long outdated, but they shared the half-dozen tabs.

Without cable connections, they had only two available TV channels, curiously flat without holovision. They learned that Memphis and Tullahoma fallout did not yet seriously threaten the Oak Ridge area, though local background count had risen as particles drifted down from the stratospheric Jetstream. There were no pictures of gutted cities; the news was vague and optimistic. An old public service announcement illustrated how a basement room could be protected against modest fallout by taping cracks, blocking windows with books, and shoveling dirt shin-deep onto the floor above.

"Jane's house doesn't lend itself very well to that," Abby judged, lighting a candle amid spectacular sunset reflections. “We 'll be better off in the tunnels. I 'm sure Jane can get you in with us."

They elected to eat the canned food in the garage. It was Quantrill who realized that a sparing rinse in bleach, followed by a soaping and rinse from a garden hose, might disinfect them externally. They soaked their clothes as well, rinsing them outdoors in darkness, joking about the effects of bleach to decoy their attention from their mutual and necessary nudity.

But jokes were not equal to the dimly-outlined grace of Abby Drummond. He held the hose as she rinsed her dark shoulder-length hair and erred in thinking that her eyes were closed. He saw the gentle curve of her buttocks, the faint pendulous sway of foam-flecked teats, the effulgent gleam of water on her thighs, and turned slightly away from Abby as his desire had its usual effect. In silhouette, his erection was now a gravity-defying flag.

She wrung her hair dry, squatting, as he turned the stream of water on himself. It wasn't exactly a cold shower, but… "I've been thinking, "she said, and took the hose and soap from him. “We've done a lot for each other in the past twelve hours. Let's not stop now."

She began to lather the small of his back, both of them squatting in the grass, and gradually her hand scrubbed to the back of his thighs. Quantrill held his breath until his ears popped, mesmerized by the soft huskiness of her voice and the progress of that bar of soap. “We could both be sick, or worse, in a week," she continued. And continued. Now he was breathing quickly, a sense of warmth flooding his loins, rising up the back of his neck. For a moment, Quantrill imagined that his ears must be glowing in the dark. At least his ears.

"Hey; you don't know what you're doing," he breathed.

"I know exactly what I'm doing," she insisted, purring it. "I'm making sure you're nice and clean. And when you're all good and soapy, you can help me clean where I can't do it alone."

"I think you'd better not," he said after a moment.

She paused. "If you really and truly don't want me to," she said.

His laugh was embarrassed, frank, sorrowful: "God no, Abby, but in another minute I won't have anything left to, ah, soap you with."

Again the hand, now both hands, sleekly caressing his belly as she wriggled beneath him. She manipulated him, let him feel the warm accepting cleft that pulsed at the exact tip of his body, resumed rubbing him, now cupping his buttocks. “You take your time, lover," she said, "and scrub me out good."

When he felt some control return Quantrill eased downward, pressed into her carefully, felt her move to accommodate him with small sounds of pleasure. He stopped again, his control ebbing.

"Think of yourself as the rotorooter man," she said, understanding better than he, "doing an unpleasant job. Or just think about something else — but not for very long," she teased. Presently her own breathing quickened and, as he gently swept strands of damp hair from her face, she moved against him in repeated sinuous thrusts.

At last she lay still, stroking his ribcage as he moved above her. "Penny for your thoughts," she whispered.

Gruffly: "Wondering — if the — neighbors — can see," he said. "You?"

Insinuating: "Wondering if you know I've already come."

The heat in his loins was suddenly a fever. "Liar."

"Truth. Yes," she crooned, then in vehemence, sensing his urgency, "oh yes; absolutely, please yes," she said, empathizing the synaptic explosions that thundered down the halls of his mind.

For perhaps a minute they lay communicating their satisfaction with grunts of pleasure, brief kisses that said more about reassurance than of lust. Then she gave his backside a playful slap. "Now you'll have to scrub me outside," she said. "There are chiggers in this damn' grass."

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Later, when Quantrill offered to open ajar of mint jelly for her, Abby made the first reference to their earlier delights on the grass outside. “I can cope," she snapped, wrenching the lid loose. "Why do southern men still think sex makes a weakling of a woman?"

"Never thought about it," he shrugged, watching the TV.

"Think about it," she growled, tasting the jelly, watching the set of his jaw as he refused a taste. "Oh, hell, you were just trying to help, Ted. I'm on edge." She laid a hand on his shoulder as she asked softly, "Was I your first, urn, experience? Wait; forgive me, don't answer that."

"First one that was like they say it's supposed to be," he said, "and don't tell me whether to answer you, and don't forget it was your idea! And even if I was klutzy I'm not one damn' bit sorry. You want me to go now?"

He stared toward the ancient TV, which was running a plea for voluntary induction. In its wisdom the Department of Defense trusted in the blonde charms of wide-eyed Eve Simpson, the child star whose cleavage was no longer childish, whose buxom bogus innocence permitted just enough jiggle to enslave the daydreams of youthful — and many not so youthful — males. Little Evie moistened her lips to croon her fascination with 'our boys in uniform'.

Abby Drummond realized that young Quantrill might soon be wearing a uniform. She stepped toward the TV, paused. "May I?"

Quantrill nodded. She snapped off the set, sat on a box facing him, placed the jelly between her thighs in subtle symbolism, asked permission again as she took his hands.

At first he glanced over her shoulder, then into the dark; anywhere but into her face as she said, "I take too much for granted. And I'm a shitty dancer because I like to lead, and I'm sensitive as hell about the big-strong-man syndrome. So I've sent you some rejection signals I didn't mean.

"You may have tears in your eyes, and you may not have a lot of experience, but the best men start that way, lover. At everything. You're being forced to become a man faster than anybody should, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Have you ever seen anyone die?"

After a moment he met her eyes. "No," he lied.

"Neither have I, but we will. Lots of them, maybe. I'm having a hard time dealing with you because I see you as needing an older person's advice, and as being a man who usually does things right the first time. So I act as though there were two of you. I'll work on that. If you don't want any of teacher's advice, tell me now and I'll do my God-damnedest to quit. But don't ask me to forget you're a man, mister. You are altogether too good at making love to a woman."

"Why the hell," he sighed with the faintest of smiles, “is that last thing so important to me?"

"I don't know, Ted. Maybe advertising has given it more importance than it deserves. But with the bod you have, and the tenderness you show me, — well, don't you worry about it, luv. Hell, I'm giving advice again!"

His smile now more confident: "Don't stop, Abby. Things're going too fast for me and I don't have anybody else to trust. In fact, I wonder if I should trust anybody's advice a hundred per cent."

"You're a natural," she grinned back at him. “Trust your instinct a lot, because it's dead-center. For example, it told you not to trust anything too much. It was right. I saw how you willed yourself to be a child today at that road-block, on the spur of the instant. I think you're a born actor; not all great actors are long on brains but they have great timing and they have terrific instincts. Come to think of it, the smartest actors know how to hide half their brains so they don't scare other people off. If I have any advice on how you'll survive best, it's just to act like a kid and hide half your brains."

"From everybody?"

She saw the direction of his inquiry. “Not quite; you'd die of loneliness. Your instinct will tell you who you can open up to." She placed a middle finger in the mint jelly, placed a tiny smear of it on her lower lip, licked the finger clean, smiling all the while. "No, not quite everybody. Now you take me," she said, leaned forward, transferred the sticky smudge to his own lips.

Quantrill did not have to be told twice.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Wednesday morning, Quantrill was awakened by roving hands for the first time in his life and learned that there was something better than merely breakfast in bed. He fluffed out their bedrolls later while Abby opened canned fruit, and wondered aloud whether Jane Osborne was coming home. "It'd be nice to take a shower in the house," he said.

"I'm going to take a chance on us," she said, and after using bleach on her hands she went into the house. She returned while Quantrill watched the TV. "Recorded message at the museum," she said. "It's now a crisis relocation center and it's full. Taking no messages at the, har, har, moment — maybe a year-long moment. That's not like Ellis; something tells me the museum directorship is in new hands," she went on, more to herself than to him.

"Let's take a shower and then go find out."

"Oh; forgot to tell you. No more water pressure. We'd better drain that hose for drinking water. There'll be more in the hot water tank and the tank behind the toilet."

Abby found her old watercouch folded away and, with Quantrill's help, half-filled it in a rear niche of the Chevy. The hundred liters of water would last them two weeks, she said. They used the toilet water for its customary purpose, a single flush serving them both.

Of still more importance was the penicillin they found in Jane Osborne's medicine trove. Abby admitted she had acted from unreasoning fear in swallowing her tabs the day before, and convinced Quantrill that he should not begin to take his fresh ones unless he developed definite symptoms. She was telephoning fruitlessly to find a source of radiation meters when the TV and hall light winked off.

"Well, that's all the omen I need," she said grimly, and after locking the house they drove through eerily silent streets to the museum.

"Boy, I never saw a museum like that before," Quantrill muttered at the gate. The cyclone fence was strung on heavy pipe, an obvious jury rig blocking the drive to the foremost building. He spied other structures in the distance.

"You said it," Abby replied, peering at the rump end of a cargo van that faced away from them in the drive, twenty meters inside the gate. Concrete blocks had been stacked chest-high in a vee that protected the van, and bullet holes pocked the metal panels that showed. She fumbled for her wallet, murmured, "Just be your boyish self," and stepped from the Chevy.

The voice that issued from the van was a shocking study in contrasts, warmly feminine but powered at the hundred decibel level. It would have been audible a kilometer away. "PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ENTER THIS CRISIS RELOCATION CENTER. THE CENTER IS CROWDED FAR BEYOND CAPACITY, AND THESE PREMISES ARE UNDER MARTIAL LAW. YOU ARE UNDER SURVEILLANCE BY HEAVILY ARMED OFFICERS. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT WITHOUT FURTHER WARNING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE."

Waving her identification, Abby called out, "I work here! Abigail Drummond, grounds maintenance records; I'm sure my supervisor will be glad to see me."

"PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ENTER THIS CRISIS RELOCATION CENTER," the voice began again, and repeated its stentorian message. Abby plugged fingers into ears and waited until the bullhorn thanked her again for her patience.

"I am vitally needed here," she shouted. “May I speak to Mr. Ellis, or Miz Osborne, please?"

"PLEASE DO NOT—," the bullhorn replied, fell silent, then said in crisp male tones, "YOU IN THE CAMPER! GET OUT AND STAND IN FRONT, LEAN FORWARD, BOTH HANDS ON THE HOOD."

Quantrill did as he was told, prickles of fear and anticipation on his spine. From the tail of his eye he saw an armed man approach the gate from the van. The man said nothing, only thrust a pocket comm set through the gate slit to Abby.

Her talk with the new administration was short and not particularly sweet. Perry Ellis was in custody; Jane Osborne would verify the stranger's identity when she returned from a work detail; and what made a grounds keeper think she was vital to the center?

Abby's reply was a brilliant bit of temporizing. The center would need expert maintenance of its grounds equipment for latrine trenches and protective earth ramps, and someone to coordinate it with the computer. She and her cousin, Ted Quantrill, could operate heavy equipment and the diagnostic machines that made breakdowns few and far between. She and her cousin would wait in the camper for Ms. Osborne's return.

Sliding back into the Chevy's cab, they rolled up the windows and exchanged a quick handsqueeze. "I hope you know how to operate heavy equipment, 'cause I can't even drive. You sure you want to go in there?"

Drumming fingertips on the doorsill: "All I know is, a lot of people can stay alive there. It used to be a center for civil defense studies. I suspect they aren't overcrowded, and they don't intend to be. Ellis in custody, hm? It takes a decision from the Governor to initiate martial law, Ted, and we haven't heard anything about that. I think it's a scam — but a damned effective one. Once we get inside we're going to be like prison inmates. But we can still stick together. It's got all the advantages of organization, and all the disadvantages too."

A swatch of Ray Kenney's sarcasm, invented to spite a scout leader, popped into Quantrill's head. "Every hour is a sixty-minute asskiss," he quoted.

"It beats radiation poisoning," she said. "If you know a better place to go, tell me."

Until that moment Quantrill had thought of himself as an uncomplicated risk-taker; the sort of loner who would always gamble against long odds rather than submit to regimentation. Suddenly and with startling clarity he saw that, when the risk was not a bloody nose but life itself, he could be downright conservative. "I'll go with you," he said, adding with sudden concern, "if they'll let me."

"Why wouldn't they? Gorgeous young specimen like you," she grinned. She learned why they wouldn't, five minutes later.

Without preamble the bullhorn crackled: "ABIGAIL DRUMMOND, YOU ARE VERIFIED AS A SEASONAL EMPLOYEE. YOUR SKILLS ARE USEFUL, IF NOT VITAL. IF YOU'RE AN IMPOSTOR YOU WILL BE SHOT, LADY, DON'T THINK WE WON'T. SEND YOUR COUSIN AWAY; WE ALREADY HAVE TOO MANY MEN."

Abby and Quantrill exchanged a long stare. Abby got out of the Chevy, called toward the van: "I'll drive him back to town."

After a long pause the bullhorn said, "GOOD DECISION."

Cursing, Abby drove back toward town. "Already have too many men, do they? I don't like the sound of that. And they have my personnel records so they know my age and what I look like. Now where do we go?"

Quan trill stroked her hair. "I go away, and you go in there."

"You're kidding. I'd be petrified in there if you weren't with me. Janie's the fainting type; no help in a tight spot."

They passed an all-hours market. Behind a shattered glass front they could see a man cradling a deer rifle. “At least I'll have a few days' food," he went on as if he hadn't heard. “If you don't like it there it should be easy to get out."

"That's an idea," she said, and turned onto a secondary road, talking quickly. Minutes later she drove the Chevy off the road toward a copse of wilting trees and coasted to a stop. "Just past here is the perimeter fence, Ted. They may have sentries, but we have eyes, too. There's a drainage ditch from the maintenance shops that'd hide me almost to the fence. We could set up rendezvous, say at dark, and toss some blankets over the barbed wire to get you in. You could hide for weeks in the tunnels, maybe mix with the others. Or we could get me out, depending how it looks inside."

They spent a half-hour going over alternatives. Whether it took Abby a half-day or three days to make rendezvous, they were faced with the fact that Quantrill could not drive. Their last half-hour was spent teaching him, a cram session that left them both irritable.

"At least you're not slamming the brakes anymore," she said as he drove, overcorrecting, toward the gate. "Wait.

Stop here and turn around, Ted; sure as hell they'll demand the Chevy as an entrance fee. I'll walk from here."

Sweating with concentration, Quantrill got the vehicle pointed back toward town. “Abby," he said as she slid out. She paused, managed a wan smile. "Abby, I never said I love you, did I?"

Airily, misunderstanding: "I'd never ask you to tell such a whopper for a one-night stand, Ted. Cheers." She turned away.

In the distance the bullhorn was blustering. Quantrill ignored it. "But it's not a lie," he shouted, protesting.

"Don't say it, Ted," she said, not turning. "It wouldn't help."

He watched her retreat, holding herself unnaturally erect, and realized that she was compensating for simple terror. He drove away quickly, aware that in another moment he would have called her back in panic. Whatever happened, he told himself, at least Abby had reached her sanctuary.

Quantrill took two wrong turns before finding the bungalow, let himself in with Abby's key, assured himself that the telephone line was still active even without house current. It had been Abby's idea that she might be able to phone him. He spent an hour taping seams in Abby's bedroom, stacking books and magazines against the outside wall, listening to his radio quantify the gradual rise in radiation in the area. He found a certain satisfaction in anger over their decision, the night before, to sleep in the garage. It would have been so much better, infinitely more voluptuous, to writhe with Abby between sheets. On impulse he pulled back her coverlet, thrust his face against her pillow; inhaled. It did not smell of her presence, but mustily of her absence.

Quantrill did not understand how much the human organism is sexually provoked by sudden social change. He knew only an enormous need, and lying in Abby's bed his daydream led him to assuage that need. He felt guilty afterward, as always — but felt relieved as well.

Sundown found Quantrill piling blankets on the Chevy's seat. This time he ran over only a few curbs and took only one wrong turn before parking the little camper near their rendezvous point. He had moved stealthily on foot into the grove of small trees, was estimating where he could most easily drive up to the chain-link fence, when he first heard the delta approaching.

It came as a faint hiss, then a whirr, then the susurrus often billion sopranos whispering in the dusk. When he finally looked to the west the tiling was nearly overhead. The yellow delta slid down its invisible glidepath like a sharply defined cloud, rocking very slightly in warm evening breezes, a rigid polymer-skinned dirigible the length of two football fields, powered by external multiblade propellers. Quantrill had seen the fat spade-shaped cargo craft many times, but always at great distance. Even with its elevons canted and its engine pods gimbaling for thrust vector control, a delta did not look like a steerable craft; certainly not like one that could winch sixty thousand kilos of cargo into its belly and skate away into the sky at the speed of a fast monorail.

A trapezoid of lights flickered across the meadow inside the museum perimeter, making Quantrill squint. It seemed to throw the drainage ditch into deeper shadow. The ponderous delicacy of the delta's mooring held Quantrill's attention for long minutes. Finally anchored by rigid struts, the great helium-filled airship stilled its propellers. The air-cushion cargo pallet rose to meet the section of shell that scissored down with cargo. Quantrill could hear faint shouts of the handlers five hundred meters away and wondered if the commotion would help Abby.

A part of him hoped that Abby would want out, for whatever reason; he did not want to go over that fence. Yet if Abby said to come, he would do it. When had she made a poor decision?

He would not know the answer for many hours.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

While Quantrill roved the perimeter in search of sentries, peering through the last light of a blood and saffron dusk, Eve Simpson catalogued her new hardships among California's Channel Islands. "They promised me," she said, scowling in the late sun as she jogged along the beach, '"promised me I'd be playing that civil defense bit against a war hero. So what do I get? A vapid nit without a ribbon!"

Trundling beside little Evie in a gold cart, her male secretary made an entry in his portable 'corder and judged that it was time for his hourly demur. “Evie dear, they don't have any new heroes available just yet. He did look the part. And my goodness, what a voice!"

"Resonance I'll give him," Eve puffed. "Brains, I couldn't find. The next hapless ass NBN fobs off on me who blows a dozen takes because his labile memory isn't up to three lines of dialogue, welllll," she said ominously, and fought to recover her breathing rhythm. As much as she despised jogging, Eve loathed dieting more.

Bruce, her secretary, knew why the National Broadcasting Network paid him so well: given enough provocation, NBN's most prized teen sexpot could discover a blinding migraine that might hold up shooting schedules for days. It wouldn't be such a bitch of a job, he admitted to himself, if little Evie were your standard model seventeen-year-old Hollywood centerfold — which is to say, trained to be utterly disinterested in anything beyond immediate appearances. But Eve Simpson was distinctly abnormal, he gloomed, noting the rivers of perspiration that trickled down her spine to be absorbed by the velour stretched across those famous buns. In ten years she might be pudgy. Right now she was a morsel men — most men, he smiled to himself — craved. Until they fetched up against the inner Evie. A mind swift and incisive as a weasel's bite, a tongue she wielded like a broken bottle. A clever gay fellow could feast like a pilot fish on gutted egos, cruising near the jaws of Eve Simpson.

Eve slowed to a walk as the beach curled toward the east, then turned away from rocky prominences and began to retrace her path. "You're watching the rad counter, I hope," she said. "The Lompoc and Santa Barbara fallout pattern could shift on us."

"We're clean as puppy teeth," he said and snickered, waving a negligent palm at the glass-ported concrete dome just under their skyline. "I'll bet there's a batch of vice-presidents gnawing their cuticles to ribbons up there, watching you and worrying enough for all of us." He steered around a pile of kelp, giggled. "If the wind changed we'd hear them from here; they'd have a feces hemorrhage."

"Bruce, you wouldn't say'shit' if you had a mouthful," she accused, lengthening her stride as she called back. "Did you ever wonder if there were such a thing as being too socialized?"

"Oh, Gohhhd, Evie's a sociologist again," he moaned.

"At least you can pronounce it," she shot back. “Oh: see if I have a schedule conflict between my dialect tutor and blocking out the scenes for my Friday 'cast. And have wardrobe magic up some bra straps that don't slice me in three," she added.

It was pure hell to make do on a desert island, she thought. Well, not exactly a desert. Eve slowed to a walk again, noting the similarities between the familiar scrub oak and cactus of Catalina, and her present location on Santa Cruz Island. She knew the history of Santa Cruz from the Caire settlements through the Stanton purchase, its off-limits status, and the far-sighted lease arrangements NBN had worked out with the Bureau of Public Information. Knowing the dichotomy between news broadcasts and the actual progress of the war, little Evie thought of it as the Bureau of Public Disinformation. Invasion defenses by civil defense organizations in Los Angeles, indeed! What organization? What Los Angeles?

For that matter, what civil defense? Eve's media theory tutor, a Southern Cal professor named Kelsey with connections at AP and UPI, was already squirreling away a collection of news items which, by the process of wartime censorship, had become non-news. One day it might become ten pages in a learned journal; meanwhile it was grist for Eve's formidable mill.

News: patriotic Americans over eighteen years of age were swamping induction centers.

Non-news: it didn't take many people to swamp induction centers that for the moment had no means to ship inductees, or training centers for them. When the military machinery got in gear, sixteen-year-olds might feel the draft.

News: a coordinated counterattack by US/RUS orbital weapons had won the first great battle in near space. We alone had orbital spies.

Non-news: the RUS moonbase was now only a collection of desperate people in a few leaking domes, unable to mount another launch and without hope of survival if another bevy of nukes came their way.

News: an estimated twenty per cent of China's population, and twenty-five per cent of India's, had perished.

Non-news: so had a full forty per cent of ours. Centralization had provided the good life. Too much centralization had obliterated it.

News: survivors in all US coastal areas were girding themselves for invasion, clearing debris from vital thoroughfares, cheerful in their faith in flag, mom, and apple pie.

Non-news: that piece of news was a lie. Survivors in most coastal regions were scrabbling for existence after less than a week. Any transportation that depended on rails or macadam was in thick yogurt, though belt line throughways around a few cities had survived beyond Dead Day. Moms were dying, apples were radioactive, and east of the Alleghenies the flag carried paranthrax.

News: crisis relocation centers were getting supplies from federal stores by secret means in a coordinated mutual-aid effort. The few isolated cases of local satrapy would be documented and punished.

Non-news: it would be hard to keep the role of the delta dirigibles a secret for long, and few of the centers showed much interest in anything beyond their own survival. Some were dispensing antibiotics and broadcasting survival tips oriented toward keeping their gates clear of more evacuees.

News: The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints urged Americans to turn to prayer and good works; to accept this judgment of God with a firm resolve to emulate the Godly as a path to survival.

Non-news: Catholics, Jews, Unitarians and athiests wanted equal time. It was not difficult to infer a connection between different ratios of survival between faiths, and different amount of Godliness. What was difficult, to gentiles, was explaining away the fact that Mormon temples were responding heroically with food and medical help to anyone standing in the queues outside.

Eve Simpson had already absorbed an undergraduate's knowledge of media and information processing. She knew that word of mouth was still the best advertising, and that a convincing demonstration was the spoon that filled mouths with the right words. It occurred to Eve that Senator Collier of Utah was a convincing demonstrator with the right words and, under these circumstances, the right background. B.A., J.D., and LDS. His Presidential candidacy might be a foregone conclusion if the latest rumor were true.

She had heard it while on Stage Three, one of the concrete domes of the hush-hush complex they called Sound Stage West. The complex had been built into the mountain overlooking the secluded valley of Santa Cruz Island so that news, non-news, and rumor could all receive their 'proper' processing in an emergency. The President, it was rumored, was not safely tucked into a maximum-security hole, nor was the Vice President. The stream of messages issued by the

White House press secretary only purported to come from the top. The rumor dealt with a brace of impact nukes and one of the provisioned caverns of Virginia's once-lovely Shenandoah Valley. If it was true — real non-news — then the Speaker of the House was now President of the United States.

Eve found the rumor worrisome. "Give me that towel," she said suddenly, and mopped herself as she climbed aboard the golf cart. "Put this thing in overdrive or something, Brucie; I want back inside."

"You've got time," he soothed.

"Have I? If our government goes belly-up, Bruce, the only thing left to glue this country together will be media. Tell me honestly: do you think Sound Stage West could take a direct hit?"

"So they say," he replied, intent on conning the vehicle. "Since three of NBN's top shareholders and a senator are here with their hotsies and luggage, I tend to believe it."

The big titties bounced with Eve's laughter. "Why is it that fags have all the brains," she gurgled rhetorically. Bruce merely smiled. He knew how to field a left-handed compliment, however poorly tossed.

Chapter Thirty

By nine PM Eve had finished her stint for NBN, a rack of lamb, a half-hour mimicking the lilting lingo of South Afrikaners for the government's impending plea to African neutrals, and a quick scan of Media's Games Governments Play. It was a curiosity and a commonplace that, for all her media experience and theory, Eve had never actually watched a news broadcast during its taping. Now, cloistered with five hundred others in an effort to maintain a 'business-as-usual' impression to holo viewers, Eve found herself in closer quarters. She needed merely to traverse a tunnel to emerge in the wings of NBN's Nightly News set. The item on the Amur crossing, she realized, was several hours old even though it was datelined on Thursday morning, RUS time.

In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the Nightly News tape aired at midnight. Lieutenant Boren Mills had been awake for twenty hours; he damned the discomfort of his contact lenses, switching to bifocals in the privacy of his room in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters. His attention was only half on the holo because Mills already knew of the SinoInd invasion of the Amur region.

"… Shortly before dawn, this Thursday morning," said a young man in clipped British diction. In the distance sprawled mountains; a river glinted not far away, partly hidden by massive concrete apartment complexes of a typical small RUS city. At ten klicks' distance no flames were visible, but smoke roiled from rooftops. Mills guessed it must be Khabarovsk.

But the newsman continued, "Elements of the Chinese Third Army crossed the Amur River here, at Blagoveshchensk. Amphibious trucks towed primitive rafts filled with soldiers, protected by mortar fire. The Chinese met stiff resistance here and at Khabarovsk; but in several places along the six hundred kilometer front, CPA troops have driven thirty kilometers or more into RUS territory.

"The civilian population has been evacuated. The civil defense cadre of Blagoveshchensk remained behind and is inflicting heavy casualties on the advancing Chinese People's Army. A RUS spokesman has assured this correspondent that the CPA cannot hope to consolidate these temporary gains. He says the Chinese are using outmoded equipment that probably can't withstand modern RUS weapons expected soon from Vladivostok.

"But this morning, the CPA took portions of the old trans-Siberian railway north of the Amur. So, at high noon in Siberia, the CPA boasts an invasion and a vital rail link. The question is: can they keep either of them moving? In Blagoveshchensk, I'm Peter Westwood for the BBC."

Mills was wide awake now. As the news turned to Cana da's entry into the western rank of warring nations, he cudgeled his memory for the Vladivostok messages that had passed through his ELF channels. The RUS port city, within artillery distance of China, had taken such a nuclear shellacking that even its submarine pen entrances near Artem had collapsed. There was no longer any point in sending US subs there for repair or provisioning. Mills made a silent wager that China had more than an old rail link in mind. Strongly gifted with visual memory, he recalled that the Chinese thrust was generally northeastward. By driving to the Sea of Okhotsk they would also cut the big new Baikal-Amur railway — a truly crucial artery through Siberia which had cost twice as much as our Alaska pipeline.

Oil, iron, coal, even diamonds passed from Siberia to the coast on the new artery and if it were slashed, much of Siberia might bleed to death. Yes, Mills decided, the RUS was in damned big trouble if SinoInd forces could push a spearhead to the Okhotsk Sea. And if the RUS was posturing about help from devastated Vladivostok, that posture would fool no one — that is, no one but surviving Americans who found their media more believable each year.

Boren Mills had guessed already that Canada was ready to throw in with the good guys, even with her growing mistrust toward the fumbling RUS colossus that owned more Arctic resources and techniques than Canada herself. Mills did not care what Canada did, so long as she did not permit the US Navy to install the new ELF grid at Barnes Icecap on Baffin Island. The grid could be laid there cheaply and quickly, could be easily hidden there; but already, as a very junior and very efficient officer, Mills knew that he could give odds on his being posted there. Baffin Island! Mills groaned to himself and, as NBN turned to the siege of Guantanamo, began to snore.

Chapter Thirty-One

"Turn the durn thing off, Liza," growled the weather-beaten man on the pallet. "It's just wastin' power, and l can do without hearin' why the Mexes are neutral." The hand he waved toward the old portable TV was a ghastly contrast to the rest of his wiry body. The fingers were so grossly swollen by blisters that the hand seemed a cluster of long pinkish grapes. Way land Grange had not yet lost much of the sparse straight hair on his head, but swarthy skin already was peeling from his forearms. He closed his eyes, held his breath, lay back and faced the ageless stalactites overhead.

Louise Grange nodded to eleven-year-old Sandy, who snapped off the set. "You ought not to take off that cold compress, Daddy," she rebuked her husband softly.

"Ain't the hand that hurts," he grunted, now staring into the gloom of a cavern lit by a single candle that kept his wife's coffee warm. "Tryin not to lose my supper." His stomach muscles knotted again; he felt the cool damp rag caress his forehead, recognized the loving touch as his daughter's. Like her father, Sandy wasn't long on talk. But her soothing hands were quick and sure, and the girl always seemed to know where it hurt without being told. "Must be half-past twelve," he managed to say. "Time you was asleep, sprat."

"Daddy's right, Sandy," said Louise, nodding toward the pile of quilts and supplies they had carried from the scorched Blazer. "Make you a nice pallet, hon."

"Can I write in my journal?" Sandy's few words, moth-flutter soft as usual, managed to carry both acquiescence and pleading without a hint of protest.

"Just for a minute," her mother warned, redirecting a stray wisp of graying blonde hair that had escaped the bun at her nape. Louise and Wayland Grange exchanged eyebrow lifts, signals that passed for smiles in the laconic little family.

Sandy's journal was one of life's little mysteries. Wayland had once teased his wife about a traveling book salesman because, as he put it, “You and me together couldn't read our way through a deck of cigarette papers."

Sandy's school near Sonora, Texas, may not have had carrels or video classes, but it had something, for sure. Even if Sandy did not read much, even if her spelling was no-holds-barred after she'd missed a year with that lung infection, the sprat had filled more than one spiral binder with words. No one but Sandy had ever read those words. No one in the family had ever mentioned the possibility, despite curiosity that was a mixture of pride and concern. The Granges were that kind of family.

For minutes the silence of the cavern was broken only by the skritch of pencil and sounds of breathing. Across the great sweep of Edwards Plateau in southwest Texas were dozens of known caverns and many more undiscovered. Wayland had guessed that hundreds of others, folks who had spent their lives among the sand-strewn washes and sere rangeland of Sutton County, would emerge safely from their favorite hideyholes when the time came. Their own cavern was no match for Longhorn or Carlsbad, but Wayland had first made love to Louise on the cool sand of its long-dry streambed. It was their retreat; secret, inviting when temperatures soared and locusts buzz-sawed in the mesquite. Some men longed for tropical beaches. Wayland Grange would have given you three Waikikis and a Boca Paila for their inviolate, unnamed grotto south of Sonora. As long as a man had to die someplace, it might as well be where he had loved living the most.

Low, so Sandy would not overhear: "Daddy, we got to find you some help. I'll try the ceebee after the child is asleep."

"Now where you think help's comin' from, Liza? Sure God, none's comin' from San Angelo." He tried to chuckle. He would never know how he found his way, drunked up like that, to the state four-wheel-drive Blazer and then south from San Angelo to Sonora. The air base had taken a twenty megaton airburst just far enough away from the research station at San Angelo that the grain silo had withstood the blast. It had been Wayland's luck that he and Doug Weller had killed a liter of mezcal in the silo, waiting for Aggie researchers to doctor the packets of grain for experimental animals at the Sonora breeding farm. Way land had been lying just inside the concrete silo arch, all but his forearms protected from direct rays of furious radiation, when it happened.

He hadn't even heard it, didn't feel the earth heave, did not stagger to his feet until seven hours after the great blast that turned San Angelo to a disaster area. Too small and laterally spread to support a genuine firestorm, the little city might not die. But neither would it be able to help a man who had rushed to put his family a hundred klicks away in a cavern.

"We got all we needed out of San Angelo," Louise whispered, spreading the cool cloth on his brow. "I thought sure you was gone, Daddy. It was just God's mercy."

"That and hundred mile-a-hour overdrive. Liza, don't you let nobody take that Blazer. It's my regular state vehicle. You tell 'em I still need it to check on the animals on the range."

"Poor things," she said, thinking of the swine, the fowl, the cattle still penned near Sonora. "How about them still penned up?"

"All I hope is that they bust out. They're bred to live on Edwards Plateau — better'n they did when my great-granddaddy first come. Specially the hogs. Peccary ain't in it with them big boogers. One of them Aggie boys told me once a ol' boar can put on enough fat to armor him against a bomb."

"Pity you ain't a fat old boar."

"I done enough rootin' in my time," he said. "And you gave me the only litter I ever wanted."

"Hush, don't talk like that, Way land." When she used his given name, she was worried. “You talk like an old man."

A long silence before he whispered, "Liza, I ain't gonna be a ol' man. I'm spewin' outa both ends and I got chorizo sausages for fingers, and I can't hardly whip a newborn foal, let alone lift one. We got to think on the notion that you and the sprat'll be on your own pretty soon."

"Hush. The Lord will provide," she said, louder than she had intended. "We got food for two weeks here, and good water back in the cave."

"And you stick here," he insisted, still whispering. “If I don't make it, don't tell nobody. Make out that I'm nosin' around Sutton County like always, and get the Blazer serviced for me if you can. You done it before."

"When you were bombed on that Mexican rotgut," she sniffed.

"Don't start in, Liza. I prob'ly won't do it no more." Quickly: "Yes you will, and bad as it tastes I'll do it with you."

"What would the sprat think," he marveled, and laughed almost silently until another stomach cramp intervened.

"She'd think we're crazy together, and she wouldn't be far wrong. Now you get some sleep," she said, nestling beside him, hoping that her presence would lead him to slumber.

Sandys jurnal Aug. 14 Wens.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Quantrill waited for Abby Drummond until long after his hope had evaporated with the last of a plutonium-enhanced sunset. He gave thanks for the Chevy's silent electrics and retraced his way to the bungalow, shoring up his spirits with a reminder that he had vital new information. Sentries moved in twos, and from their voices the same pair came past at roughly half-hourly intervals. He assumed they were armed and wondered if, given a gun, he had the guts to fire on them.

The next day he returned with an ornate brass spyglass from Jane Osborne's mantel, studying the delta dirigible that still surged listlessly on its mounts a half-kilometer from his cover. For a cargo vessel highly touted for its efficiency, the delta was certainly taking its time. Not once did he note the date: August 15, his birthday.

By Friday, Quantrill was half-crazed with waiting. The radio warned locals to stay indoors except for the most necessary outings and gave conflicting reports of a Chinese invasion that threatened a major RUS supply line in Siberia. Britain declared war on the SinoInd powers, as had Canada and, in accord with the ANZUS pact, Australia and New Zealand. Indonesia and Southeast Asian countries favored the SinoInd axis, in concert with other Islamic states. All Africa was neutral toward the major combatants, though its Mediterranean countries were poised to pounce on Israel. Most of southern Africa favored the US/RUS allies; so did some west equatorials. The young fragmented African republics trebled their border patrols in fear of neighbors while warning Axis and Allies away. Africa had reeled under foreign invaders too many times to trust either faction.

Quantrill gave up trying to visualize the alignments, feeling blind without televised graphics or even a tutor terminal. It was clear to him that Europe seemed solidly pro-Allies, and that the new Marxist countries of Latin America feared official ties with the SinoInds. Things would work out, he thought: the media were very specific on that point.

He rechecked his equipment again Friday evening before his rendezvous. He could eat from his pack for days though water might be a problem if Abby had to hide him. He had the fence-straddling blankets and the short ladder from the garage; first-aid supplies; and a frighteningly sharp little cleaver from the kitchen. He eased the Chevy into shadow before the sun touched the horizon.

He had already watched the sentries pass, wondering why the big yellow delta was still moored, when her faint whistle reached him. He had forgotten the whistle would be their signal; found it almost impossible to whistle back; scurried to the fence heedless of danger as he managed his whistled response, peering hard into the high grass.

"Ted?" Abby's voice, strained of its vitality. "Ted?"

"Abby! I can't see you," he called.

"Just as well. I didn't make it, lover. Listen—"

"Finally you did," he said, between a sob and a laugh.

"Shut up and listen." She coughed, spat, tried again. "It's worse than I thought. Paramilitary types own this place." Cough. "They have radio and satellite uplinks, little rocket launchers, the works. Only problem is, they use us like we were property. Nobody gets in or out on pain of death. They give you ID, and you get shot if you can't produce it. You wouldn't last, Ted."

"Abby, the sentries won't be back for ten minutes. I can have you over the wire right away. Promise; I promise, honey! When I say the word, you make a run for it."

More coughs, and something else. Then a pause.'”Run for it, huh? I can't, I'm — tired, lover." More quickly, still curiously lacklustre in spirit: "I've decided to stay. Just came to tell you thanks, and don't bother. I'd — probably end up turning you in. You don't know me, Ted; I'm really a moral coward."

In something near panic, he virtually shouted: "I'm coming in!"

"If you do I'll — stand up and scream." Cough. "I mean it." Pause. "Thanks for the memory and all that crap, Ted. You come in here and I'm your enemy." Cough, then a despairing laugh: "We have too many men here already." Then something like a clearing of her throat.

Quantrill's mind rebounded from her rejection. When you're tired, he thought, you lose heart. But Abby sounded both tired and determined. "I love you, Abby." It was not what he had intended to say.

"You're a snot-nosed kid," she said. "You've let yourself get tied to a piece of ass, captured like that delta over there. Pity you can't hitch a ride west on it."

"Why couldn't we?"

"It's a hostage. Tied down with glass cable." Cough. "Look, I'm going back, kid. I don't need you and I took a chance getting out here. Do yourself a favor: screw off."

"Abby, don't throw me away," he pleaded. Tears gleamed on his cheeks.

Cough; clearing of her throat, then words tightly strung as on wires: "Fuck off, kid. I won't answer again."

He saw a movement in the grass ten meters from the ditch. He did not see the sentries, but knew they would soon be in sight. She made no further response to his pleas and, galvanized by a masochistic urge to see her once more, he made his way to the tallest of nearby trees.

The sun's afterglow at his back, Quantrill strained to locate his lover and tormentor from his perch high in the tree. Then he saw her crawling toward the ditch. She was in a coverall, face down, dragging her legs. A dark stain had spread from above her waist to her thighs. Twice she paused, racked by coughs that she fought against. Once she spat, and in the bronze afterlight he could see that it was dark with blood. His mouth was open to shout when he realized that the sentries were approaching.

Abby must have heard them too. She lay full-length, hands pressed over her mouth. Quantrill suddenly saw himself as an obvious large bulk which he could not entirely hide behind the tree trunk. He could not climb down unobtrusively, dared not drop, was motionless with anticipation and fear.

The men, hardly beyond their teens, talked as they paced the perimeter, carrying stubby carbines in unmilitary fashion. "… don't give a shit what they say," the taller one was griping; "I bet these goddam coveralls aren't much protection in the open. I bet—"

"Hold it!" The other grasped his arm, swung his carbine up and stared into the grass away from Quantrill.

"Just a dog barking," said the tall one.

"I know a cough when I — there," he exulted. For all her best efforts to muffle it, Abby's spasm came again. The stocky youth swept his arm around to suggest a flanking maneuver. Quantrill heard safeties clicking off. Both men moved away from him, closing in on the prone Abby, and Quantrill could not make himself move.

She played dead. "Told you I hit somebody out here 'while ago," the tall one crowed as they stood over the motionless form. "Turn him over, Al."

The stocky Al toed at Abby's ribcage, then pressed hard and sprang back at her thin scream of pain. “It's a cunt," he shouted.

"Work detail," she moaned; "I was on work detail!" Now she sobbed, trying to roll over, jerking with agony. "Help me—"

"Sheeeit," said Al.

"Why'n't you call when we come up, then," asked the other.

"She's the one got outa the shops today," Al concluded. "They won't like knowin' you only managed to wing 'er." They talked louder as Abby's sobs increased, her pleas only a noise to be overcome.

The tall one nodded, stepped up close and readied his own carbine. "I can fix that; it don't make much noise."

"Naw, you'd leave powder burns. More questions," said Al. "C'mon."

They left Abby, walking backward, and Quantrill developed an instant's scenario in which he would reach her, somehow get her over the fence during the next half-hour, then to a doctor. He gasped when Al, playing out his own fanciful game, snapped the carbine up and fired a burst from ten meters.

Abby Drummond screamed only once; louder than the hissing muffled staccato of gunfire, not loud enough to be heard across the meadow. Her body rolled with the impacts, came to a final rest in the relaxation of death. "That's how you do it," Al snickered, patting his carbine. "Let's get a move on, Wally. We'll report at the end of the shift like it wasn't nothin' to be excited about."

Wally followed Al, looking back at their victim. "You're just plain bad-ass," he said admiringly as they swaggered off.

Chapter Thirty-Three

When Quantrill's shock and fear turned to rage, he was able to control his body enough to climb down from the tree. Now he knew that Abby had paid twice for trying to make the rendezvous, realized her desperate valor in repulsing him; saw the pitiless logic that had compelled her. He did not see his own frozen helpless apartheid as survival, but instead as plain cowardice. He refused to dwell on the moment of her death. That had happened a long time ago; what mattered now was the immediate future. He could drive the Chevy, but where? Local fallout was a long-term worry. His most pressing worry now was one he had nurtured from early childhood.

In the interplay between Quantrill's intellect and his will crowded a hierarchy of motives. His intellect would not have risked death for revenge, or for personal gain, or for the sheer hell of it. Very well then: his will offered the motive most effective on youths of the south and southwest: the stinging goad of the white feather. He had stood by and watched inert while horrors had been inflicted. Only direct action would set things right.

Quantrill had not yet developed the subtlety to seek the roots of corruption; he sought only to prune its branches. At some point between self-accusation and his return from the Chevy he had become a killer. He had no revolver, no experience, truly no white-hot anger. He had more lethal weapons: unshakable resolve and a talent for improvising.

He filled the big water jug from the Chevy's camper stove tank, filled the half-liter squeeze bottle from that, tested its range. He chose a small tree near the fence and, with his collapsible camp saw, cut it more than halfway through. The lights from the delta mooring dispelled the night just enough for him to recognize the two forms that passed once more before he was ready.

He heaved the contents of the jug through the fence, wiped his hands dry on grass, lay down in the shrubbery near enough to touch the fence links. Now his muscle tone was that of a young cat lying in wait. He would remain still until his quarry passed so that the first glimmer of his revenge would not be seen.

The two sentries were not talking, merely plodding their path, as they stepped onto damp matted grass. “Whatthefuck is this," said Wally, stopping, his words masking the rasp of Quantrill's stove lighter.

Al did not answer in words, but in a howl as the stove fuel ignited, a line of flame racing through the fence and along the path underfoot. Qu an trill was already spraying more fuel from his squeeze bottle onto Al's head and shoulders, his target illuminated by the blazing grass.

Wally jumped to one side. He might have saved himself had he not stood petrified in astonishment as Al flailed and slapped at his blazing hair. He never saw the stream of fluid that played up his back, barely had time to feel its volatile wetness before he too was a lambent torch in the night.

Quantrill did not wait to see how thorough was his handiwork but raced to his campsaw and, aided by the light of a growing grass fire, made a dozen feverish passes through the sawcut in ten seconds. The tree cracked like a rifle. Quantrill tossed his saw over the fence, hurled his pack over after it, then scrambled up the leaning tree trunk and rode it as it fell across the barbed wire.

By now the meadow was ablaze, doubtless a beacon to many eyes. Quantrill did not realize yet that the flames were high enough to hide his next moves, and opted for the saw instead of his cleaver. The tall Wally was whimpering, trying with dull single-mindedness to get out of the remnant of his coverall. QuantriU's flying kick caught him in the groin, sent him sprawling. With one foot in the tall man's chest, Quan-trill needed only a single pass with the saw.

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!"

Chapter Thirty-Four

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.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Sandys jurnal Aug. 16 Fri.

Chapter Thirty-Six

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.

"The RUS would not be surprised," he began, placing his palm over the map's flat Mongolian expanse, "to find our mongol clients defecting as we expand our air bases in the Gobi Desert. They have had the same problem," he added with the barest of sarcasms. “They probably would welcome such a general defection, a migration to safety among the Buryat people — something like a pincers surrounding Lake Baikal.

"It is possible that such an exodus would be turned back by force, but the RUS needs laborers and, for the moment, can feed them. Now, esteemed comrades, I ask you what would happen if it should be discovered that refugees had spread smallpox into the Baikal region?"

The response was immediate consternation save Chang, who had already heard the arguments. Once eradicated from the globe except for laboratory strains, smallpox could be spread easily by immunized carriers. When CPA infantry advanced into the epidemic, they would be protected by vaccination. Such a weapon could be countered within a few months, of course, but by that time the Irkutsk region would be in Chinese hands. So would the Baikal-Amur railway, and by a lightning thrust northward China could cut the Russian Union of Soviets in two. The natural resources of Siberia could then be at SinoInd disposal, and an armistice might be quickly arranged with RUS leaders whose troops might not advance into an epidemic. Time enough, after that, to deal with America and the other allies. American concentration into urban clots had made it easy to diminish its gross national product a hundredfold. Under such circumstances, — and always assuming that Canada would not prove too meddlesome — an encroachment on the US might prove interesting.

Jung Hsia: "And why did we not use this tactic earlier?"

"Because we did not know what similar weapons the enemy might use in retaliation," Chang supplied. "But paranthrax is sweeping the eastern portion of the United States to such effect that we should be able to make the RUS see reason. They have not, hence probably will not, use germ warfare on this continent. In other words, after one quick success we might obtain a pan-Asian moratorium on biological weapons."

"A dangerous presumption," said Wu. "And the others?"

"Americans are more vulnerable than we, and less advanced in the precise tailoring of microbes," Cha smiled. “Even with their delivery systems, they could not destroy us as easily with microbes as we could destroy them. Besides: it was India, not we, who spread paranthrax on them. We have already expressed regrets, by suitable channels, to the Americans about that."

Jung stared at his relief map and sighed. “How quickly the tactics become a simple matter of ethnocide."

"I think not," Chang replied smoothly. "The US/RUS allies will surely see, and soon, that the statistics of genocide favor us. It will not be long before atmospheric contamination has risen so high that the RUS and US will be begging one another not to drop another nuclear device anywhere on the globe."

"Curtailing their own special advantage," Wu put in.

"Exactly. As I have already told you," Chang added obliquely, "our own, ah, delivery system is well underway in Szechuan. Only China is so experienced in coordinating thousands of small industrial centers. Only we know just how many small factories are contributing to the devices. Not even Casimiro must discover it in India; there is no way to maintain a secret that is shared by five hundred members of a democratic Parliament."

There had already been one leak from the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament, on the Florida invasion. This was only a minor irritant in the Yangku war room, for neither the invaders nor their delivery system were importantly Chinese.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Quantrill quickly discovered, on awakening Sunday morning, that Texas A & M was more than a football team in east Texas. It was a research center and a military training university as well, with far-flung research stations. He was slower to realize that he was becoming an honorary Texan as the story of his Oak Ridge exploit flashed across the sprawling high-tech campus.

He was scanned, anesthetized, treated, and fitted with a padded thigh crutch before breakfast. Over steak and eggs, in talk with his rescuers, he realized that an entire regimental combat team had been en route to recover the when, driven by his own internal demon, Quantrill appeared under the craft. Yes, he'd started the grass fire; no one asked why. Yes, he'd been scared witless when he had nearly slid from the cargo platform. He saw no point in wondering aloud why he had felt such an insulating calm before and after that moment. Quantrill had never studied differential response to stress, never wondered why a few people in every generation are predisposed by their glands to become gunfighters, stuntpeople, circus aerialists.

Then David Chartrand, the civilian captain of the Norway, sprang the good news and the bad news. The captain's own son had vanished with the Air Force Academy, and this youngster refreshed older, better memories for the reflective Chartrand. "I could name millionaires who want this thing, Ted: it's a delta pass. Anywhere a delta goes in this country, you can go," he grinned, handing Quantrill a coded plastic card. "Not just the Norway but the Kukon, the Mobile, and the rest. Just don't show it around too much; you could get mugged for it. And when you've finished your eggs, I want to introduce you to the country."

The egg- laden fork stopped in midair. "To the what?"

Now the bad news: "The whole country, son. Some people from ABC and CBS want you on a newscast."

There was absolutely no point in his chewing the rest of those eggs, Quantrill decided, because there was no possible way he could swallow them. He had been videotaped once at school; had found it harrowing. Almost, he wished himself back on that swaying cargo platform.

Still, he went with Chartrand and the tall, gum-chewing cargomaster, Bernie Grey. Emerging from the pneumatic pod that had shushed them cross-campus underground, Quantrill tried to smile back at a dozen people who scurried about with lights, cameras, coffee. His smile faded as he recognized ABC's Juliet Bixby and Hal Kraft of CBS. Both were familiar media faces, and Quantrill thought his breakfast insecure.

Bernie Grey, slender-muscled and long-haired, volunteered for the first setup interview. It was Bernie who had first mistaken Quantrill for an enemy. Bemie struck out with the fair Juliet, but seemed unabashed. Chartrand, unfailingly polite, minimized his role and heaped credit on Quantrill. The youngster in the yellow flight suit, a romantic figure with his limp and his external thigh crutch gleaming in the light, provided that rarity of the moment: an attractive man-child, a diffident and inspirational model. Bixby and Kraft did not share Quantrill's worry; if the kid broke down or had an erection on camera, well, that's what editing was for. Ted Quantrill was now public property; he just hadn't been completely processed yet.

Thanks to sensitive cameras, Quantrill was spared the ferocious heat of earlier media victims. He sweated all the same, perched on a stool as he had been told, the injured leg stretched out as if by necessity. The last part of the interview was transcribed as follows.

Q: How did you know the Norway had been hijacked, Ted?

A: Rumor around Oak Ridge.

Q: You're not from Tennessee, though.

A: From Raleigh. In North Carolina, ma'am. (SUDDENLY ANIMATED) I'd sure like to know if my parents are okay. Dad is Captain Hurley Quantrill and mother's Janine Quantrill.

Q: We can check on it. Who brought you to Oak Ridge?

A: Ab — about a dozen people. Rides. You know…

Q: Captain Chartrand says you had a scout uniform on beneath your coverall when you came aboard.

A: (NOD)

Q: Tell us about it in your own words, Ted.

A: I, uh, had a scout uniform on beneath my coverall. Uh, when I came aboard.

Q: Um-hmm. Now tell us what it's like to rescue a delta.

A: Felt pretty good, sir.

Q: There are some fellows your age who would give anything to serve our country as you've done, Ted. What do you have to say to them?

A: (SHRUG)

Q: I'll put it another way. Ted Quantrill, what have you learned from your Oak Ridge experience?

A: Kill the sonofabitch. Uh, I'm sorry. I have to go.

Kraft and Bixby waved cheerful goodbyes as Quantrill limped away to find friends in yellow flight suits. By the time the tape was massaged into news, fifteen-year-old Ted Quantrill would be edited into a model scout. Like all media professionals, the interviewers shared an easy cynicism about the moments that would remain non-news.

Juliet Bixby studied her rival over her coffee cup. "That last question of yours was a heller, Kraft."

"News to me. I couldn't open him up at all."

"Oh, but you did." Shuddering: “Once when I was about five, I got separated from my parents at the San Diego zoo. I sat down in a quiet place, just waiting for them to catch up, and I kept having this funny feeling. And then I looked over my shoulder. Right on the other side of the bars from me was the biggest, cold-heartedest-lookjng Bengal tiger I have ever seen. Just looking down at me, like you'd study a chocolate drop. Well, that was how the kid looked, right at the last. No anger or remorse, Kraft — just cold competence."

"Christ, how you dramatize! Anyhow, he'll be only tonight's hero, Bix. Tomorrow he'll be forgotten."

"Maybe," said the famous Bixby contralto, "but not by me. You'll never catch me stepping between that little fucker and anything he really wants."

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The full extent of the logistics problem faced by the US in late August of 1996 was only dimly visible to any fifteen-year-old — and scarcely less so to the Quartermaster General. During the next week, while the Norway's gondola grew small projectile ports like pimples, Quantrill learned to pay less attention to holovision and more to what was happening around him. Holo charts, for instance, showed only a series of paranthrax hotspots east of the Alleghenies. Late summer harvests were supposedly a success with decontamination procedures and, admittedly, a new standard of acceptable contaminants. Yet Quantrill knew that the National Guard was now prohibiting any traffic across the Mississippi River because, after convincing medics that he no longer needed a thigh crutch, he served on the Norway's overnight flight which supplied intrusion detectors to troops on the west bank. And the short-range missile pods under the Norway's gondola suggested a breakdown of law and order. He inferred more about the scope of immunology when Bemie Grey told him what the Norway would deliver halfway across Texas to an A & M—"Aggie" — research station in Sonora.

Quantrill was learning to polymer-bond glass rope to a shackle fitting at the time. "Twelve thousand hamsters?" He squinted at Bemie's long horse-face, suspecting a joke.

"Plus life-support stuff, plus breedin' cages. And if you don't lay that shackle down, pard, the exotherm's gonna zap your fingers."

Quantrill did as he was told, saw a faint swirl of vapor from the aperture where the glass rope fitted, resumed his train of thought. "I thought Sonora was in Mexico."

"Bite your tongue," Bernie glowered, and winked. "We're still a little edgy about bein' confused with Mexico." He went on to explain that Sonora, Texas, was suitably isolated for immunological work, with natural caves and facilities for researchers dating back many years. "There's Aggie research stations all over. I grant there ain't much to see but you're welcome to come cuss it with me." Bernie held the shackle fitting by the rope; nodded.

"Bernie, where'd you learn your trade?"

"Rice University." Sigh: "Gone with the rest of Houston, I reckon. I was a basketball jock, but they had good courses in Aerospace structures. I got along."

"Personal question; okay?"

"Flog it by me."

"Why does everybody in Texas talk like old cowboy movies?"

Bernie Grey threw his head back and guffawed, then mimed a mystified fool. “Beats hell outa me, Ted." Sobering, still amused: "We don't all do it, and I don't do it all the time. You can't run a high-tech cargo system with cowpoke's lingo. Call it a linguistic badge; it tells folks you won't have no truck with eastern shuck."

Quantrill found himself smiling for the first time in a week. "But it is a shuck. Isn't it?"

"Yup. One you could stand to learn if you're here long. Just don't pile it on too deep 'til you learn how to spread it. And don't feel obliged. It ain't your fault if you can't carry the tune."

Quantrill followed Bernie to the great dome where deltas underwent refitting, watched the rope terminal pass a tensile test, listened while his friend rhapsodized on the favorite topic of Texans: Texas. Despite the leveling influence of media, a state the size of Texas had plenty of room for subcultures. A Beaumont Cajun's dialect might be barely intelligible to an Odessa roughneck unless one of them had traveled a bit. Geography had something to do with it, but much of it was a matter of choice. Only half joking, Bernie argued that air conditioning had nearly destroyed the urban Texan's identity, his acceptance of occasional hard times and determination to survive them with good humor.

"Wouldn't be a bit surprised," said Bernie, "if the war brought back the old frontier in some parts. There's fellers in Fort Stockton still packin' Colts to use on rattlers and road-signs. And the weather drives the sissies out; in Sonora the sun'll melt the fillin's outa your teeth."

Quantrill assumed a slightly bowlegged slouch. "Purely makes a feller mean, don't it?"

Bernie cocked his head, fighting a grin, and nodded. “Too many sharps and flats, pard, but you got a good ear fer-bullshit. You'll do," he added, letting the grin come, ruffling Quantrill's hair. "Now let's get this shackle on the Norway. We'll be liftin' about three ayem; put us over Sonora by breakfast."

Quantrill groaned. "Doesn't anything start in broad daylight?"

"You bet it does." Lowering his voice as they passed an Aggie undergrad in the tunnel, Bernie continued. "Cap'n says we shot down an Indian photorecon job near Lake Charles today. You can bet it didn't fly from New Delhi."

"Mexico? Jeez, I thought they were on our side."

"They were 'til they joined OPEC and didn't need us anymore. If you know any history, you can't blame 'em. But cap'n thinks that recon ship came from somewhere off the gulf coast. If there's more, — well, we'd be sugar candy for some fuckin' Injun on a long sortie. So we're goin' tonight. We don't make much of a signature for night fighters."

"Boy, that's a weird idea," Quantrill said.

"What?"

"One of those guys shooting us down."

"Weird ain't exactly how I'd put it."

"It is if you think about it. Here we go again: cowboys and Indians."

Bernie Grey paused with his hand on a mooring strut of the Norway; shook his head. "I swan if this kid ain't one for the books." In mock dejection, he climbed into the airship.

Quantrill followed, now familiar with the handholds, and let the radiation monitor read him. Campus klaxons had whonnnnked their warnings only once during their stay at College Station; ground winds from the Austin area, someone said. But the campus background count was rising, as it had nearly everywhere else, and the few who traveled aboveground usually did so under wraps or in electrabouts.

Quantrill waited while Bernie used the airhose, a jury rig with filtered air and fans to vent the dust overboard. Then he played the hose on himself, returned to the monitor. “Now I see why captain Chartrand insists we get a burr haircut," he said.

"It's that or a shower cap," Bernie shrugged, "or fried brains over the long haul. Shoot, you just try and park a

Texan under a shower cap! Instead, we're all gonna look like Army recruits. But better that than be one," he laughed.

Quantrill had seen the inductees, some of them looking no older than he, doing close-order drill in the hangar and gym. He felt no shame that he was one of fortune's few; by now he was accepted as an apprentice by the Norway's usual eight-man crew, and was learning how to laugh again. Some things he worried about: he still had learned nothing about either of his parents. Some things he refused to think about. His will commanded that it was better to focus on a sense of belonging than on the hopeless sense of all that he had lost.

Shortly before three a.m. on Saturday morning, the Norway, her cargo of supplies and small live animals distributed by Bernie Grey for optimum trim, slid up over the Brazos ^: River in a northerly arc to bypass the Austin desolation. Quantrill had been slapped on the shoulder by the cap'n, called 'son'; told that he would awaken over Edwards Plateau. His freshly-cut hair and an innocent anticipation had kept him awake for an hour, savoring the voyage like a child. But he was asleep on his aircouch when the Norway lifted.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

From six thousand meters, the dry ravines serrating Edwards Plateau were thrown into sharp relief by the dawn sun. Slender, sure-fingered Blythe Rogers, inevitably nicknamed 'co-cap'n Bly, pointed out salient features to the alert green-eyed youth who leaned over Rogers's shoulder. "Sometimes you see deer under those low cliffs," he said. ”More likely along the Llano River ahead to portside, which isn't much of a river but wherever you see pecan trees fifty meters high, there's water and game—"

Quantrill's arm shot out, pointing at a ridge to starboard. "What's that?"

Rogers squinted, staring past the outstretched finger. Far below, a dark speck raced into the ridge shadow at an unlikely pace. "Must be a stray calf — but Gawd, he's traveling!" Without speaking, Chartrand gestured at the display, then studied his instrument panel again. “Why not," Rogers asked himself aloud, and flicked on the image enhancer.

By now they were almost over the animal and Rogers swept the ridge at low magnification. Briefly then, their quarry could be seen standing motionless. Rogers increased the magnification.

"God a "mighty," Rogers breathed, before they slid past the ridge. "Cap'n, did you see that peccary?"

A nod. "Glad I could see it from up here — only that was no peccary, Ely."

"You ever see tusks like that on a cow?"

Chartrand smiled and shook his head. "No, and I never saw a peccary the size of a Shetland pony. Gentlemen, you have just met an Aggie russian boar. Damn' if I know what it's doing out of the Aggie pens, but they were breeding some there. Working on a big low-aggression strain. I just hope that one's had his lobotomy, or whatever it takes."

Quantrill felt a prickling along his arms. The beast had been clear on the display for only a moment; huge shoulders innocent of fat, sharply ridged back tapering to muscular haunches, tiny hooves. But more awesome than the upward-curving tusks that flanked the snout like ivory goalposts was the fact that the great animal stood on hind legs, ears pricked forward over the demonic visage. The boar leaned against the canyon wall as if deliberately trying to blend into shadow. Quantrill asked, "Are they smart?"

"Beat you at checkers, I 'm told," Chartrand said, flicking toggles as he spoke. "I'm getting the substation beacon, Ted; time for you to get aft. We'll moor in ten minutes."

Quantrill saw the distant gleam of window reflections on the horizon, tiny rectangular masses in a depression, trees that suggested a town. He scurried back to his station and buckled up. A delta crewman learned very soon that the big airships waddled and yawed as they lost headway. More than one veteran crewman had needed his barfbag.

The Norway's automated snubber gear engaged minutes later as Quantrill, peering from a clear bubble, watched mooring struts scissor down and out. The prop shrouds gimbaled to produce lateral thrust and, with distinct thuds, the struts found their tapered sockets. The coloratura whisper of propellers died; faint whooshes of pneumatic interlocks; then Quantrill was unbuckling to help Bernie Grey at the cargo hatch. The Norway had brought her vital cargo to the Aggie station with her usual efficiency and quietude.

Quantrill scampered down a strut, tasting the aroma of Edwards Plateau, confident of his movements in the airship that was now his ship. It seemed indestructible as a bridge pillar, and Quantrill had no slightest inkling that he would never lift in the Norway again.

Chapter Forty

David Chartrand was so preoccupied with his work that he did not monitor the special channel which updated other Air Defense Identification Zone limitations on civilian aircraft. The ADIZ display would have been his only hint that something big was breaking in the Mexican Gulf early Saturday.

The Navy's ELF grid in Wisconsin had been hamstrung for hours after a nerve center sustained burrow-bombs emplaced by a suicidal Libyan squad infiltrating from Canada. Three naval ratings had perished, five more ratings and an officer had been wounded. It was therefore hit-or-miss for a coordinated defense against the Indian wave of saturation sorties.

In a convoluted irony, the Indian attack aircraft had been developed from older craft furnished by the late USSR, which had copied earlier British STOL designs. Never intended to land on anything smaller than a carrier, the swing-wing jets were boosted from subs in the gulf. With luck they would be recovered by skyhook choppers or, failing that, would ditch at rendezvous points after their low-level passes at selected targets. The boosters permitted external fuel tanks and wavetop loitering while the squadrons formed south of the hundred-fathom line.

Three squadrons of twelve attack craft then streaked north and west, saving afterburner fuel for the moment of slash-and-run. From Warner Robins in Georgia to the anchorage at Corpus Christi, the SinoInd swingwings swept in with little warning to deliver their single ground-pounder nukes, deliberately chosen as 'dirty' bombs. Most of the targets were suspected induction centers — which explains why sleepy little San Marcos, a college town between Austin and San Antonio, rated such lethal attention.

Because the flight paths of the attack aircraft were northwestward, US interceptors in Georgia and Florida were forced to chase, rather than intercept, the intruders. Air Defense Command interceptors from Alabama to Texas scrambled in time to engage the enemy. They saved Tuscaloosa, Lake Charles, and College Station among others, but they also found that the Indian STOLs had minicannon. They did not find Ranjit Khan in time to save San Marcos. What happened there was an act of randomness, or of God. Or of Puck. In any event, India did not greatly care for San Marcos or for the other sortie targets. What she cared very much about was the decoying of American air cover from Florida — and in that, she succeeded handsomely. The troop-carrying ACV's needed only an hour to cross the strait from Cuba, and neared Florida across a front longer than the Florida keys. We dared not nuke them; the wind was toward our defenders. But we reduced Cuban installations to slag the next day.

The invasion troops were led by Cubans, whose Kremlin connection had evaporated with the end of foreign aid. With the Cubans were well-trained Punjabis, Tamils, Gujaratis.

And with every Indian came fifty Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Chileans anxious to avenge their ideological father, the martyred Fidel. The two thousand Indians were present chiefly to maintain the hardware. The hundred thousand latinos hungered for booty. They had not been told that paranthrax was already creeping down the Florida peninsula. Perhaps they would not have cared much.

Ranjit Khan sortied past the Texas coast up the Guadalupe River with an early sun over his shoulder, jerking his eyes from horizon to viewscreen comparator. His electronic package was relatively unsophisticated but Ranjit's comparator found Gonzales, Texas, and after that it was a simple matter to cram fuel into the afterburners for his dash to San Marcos. The town was not very large. Ranjit needed only to arm his hundred-kiloton weapon, jettison it while crossing San Marcos at Mach 1.5, and delay his banked turn while the drogue chute deposited his ground-pounder. But when Ranjit flicked at the armament switch, the pig-humping thing popped out of the console! Ranjit swore, reached under the edge of the console; his crew chief was going to catch hell.

Ranjit Khan felt several wires but could not see them. With the control stick between his knees he fumbled for the switch, saw it bobbing behind the hole in the console, leaned forward again and felt the aircraft respond as he nudged the stick.

Cold sweat gushed from Ranjit's forehead as he hauled back on the stick and the steeple of some Christian mosque, or whatever they were called, flashed by. In his rearview he saw twinkling myriads of glass fragments burst from office buildings in his thunderous wake. He had bombed San Marcos — but only with his machwave, very much too low for a proper pass.

Ranjit thought he could reinsert the Allah-accursed switch and arm his weapon, given a few minutes at loiter speed with his wings extended. He must relax, take his time, melt the ice in his guts and make a return pass. The Indian pilot throttled back and activated his wing hydraulics; began a long circle at fuel-hoarding speed. He was too intent on his console repair to notice the blip closing from behind on his sweep radar.

Goliad, Texas, did not have an air force — and then again, it did. It had an absolutely gorgeous, positively ancient F-51, the Golid Chapter of the Confederate Air Force. The CAP was a joke crafted by experts, and parts of that joke tended to be hazardous. Hank Curran was his own mechanic, his own man, and he was sixty-nine years old. He had flown a Mustang in Korea almost half a century before, and later while other Texans invested in bigger tractors Hank was looking for a toy. A bubble-canopied, Allison-engined, six-gunned, four-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour toy. He found one with clipped tips and NASA scoops in Chino, California, in 1972 and by now he had replaced every piston and control cable. The scoops were replaced, wingtips added. Hank's paint job even had the black-and-white invasion stripes — but this was a different invasion.

The day everyone called Dead Day had been a lively day in the hangar at Goliad. Hank Curran invested the time installing one air-cooled and thoroughly illegal fifty-calibre machine gun in the 'Slang's starboard wing. He had never really expected to use it, but other pilots in the CAF had swapped him the metal links and over a hundred rounds of hopefully-live ammo; actually, it was all API, the armor-piercing incendiary rounds that had once been inserted at intervals in an ammo belt. Ever since, Hank had slept with one ear open for that air raid klaxon. Goliad even had one of those, linked to Port Lavaca's.

Early Saturday morning the klaxon made Hank spill his coffee. Nothing but sheer valiant CAF cupidity made him tear the screen door off as he ran for his Ford. He had the chocks away from the 'Slang's wheels and the engine oil temp up off the peg when Ranjit Khan's STOL thundered across the shoreline at Port Lavaca. Hank's canopy was sealing as he saw a hundred knots come up on his airspeed indicator, eleven minutes' worth of radar warning had been plenty for the Confederate Air Force.

Hank figured the bogie would come in low. He himself went high, the Allison rejoicing. He also figured his chances of being shot down by our own interceptors were about fifty-fifty, give or take a bit. At the moment, Hank did not give a shit. He believed what the holo told him; did not fully appreciate that San Antonio had been flattened to her beltline. San Tone was the great cradle of US military aviation. Hank Curran would protect its grave.

When the bogie wailed by him near Gonzales, its afterburners rocketing pink in the early light, Hank thought at first it was an old Marine Tomcat. Then he saw it bobble, stray low, dip, and correct in a beeline for San Marcos. No friendly pilot on earth would make a mach-plus pass over Gonzales at treetop level. And then Hank recognized the silhouette. He shoved the throttle to the firewall and hoped he could keep the rice-pickin' bastard in sight. He had no radar, no access to military scrambler circuits, and no hope of catching an aircraft of twice his speed.

Unless the bogie slowed down.

Hank had manually, dangerously, charged his fifty because he had no automatic equipment. He knew that if it fired, it might fire all over hell and half of Texas because he had not boresighted or adjusted the gun; and every round would be a tracer, telling the sumbitch he was on the 'wanted' list. But Hank knew how to slide the stick over, easing the pedals, to let his aerial gun platform walk its fiery dotted line of tracers to a target. The problem was, the goddam bogie purely disappeared west of San Marcos as its afterburners winked out. Then he saw a sunglint on wings, the STOL rising up almost to Hank's own altitude at breathtaking speed, and again came the glint. The bogie began a great loitering arc that just might bring it around in a circle. Hank thanked Heaven he was not showing a contrail, kept himself high in the sun, and wished his eyes were younger.

Ranjit Khan's oval pattern took him two minutes, and by that time he knew he must pull the switch and its mount down, past the wiring bundle, to snap the miserable thing. He also knew that he would have to ground the switch body against the console or some other part of the STOL's airframe to complete the circuit. Unless the 'arm* signal was sent, he could not jettison his weapon either. So much for emergency refitting; Ranjit was not very keen on ditching at any speed whatever with the equivalent of a hundred thousand tons of explosive in the canister slung under his belly.

The offending item came into sight with one final tug; Ranjit nosed his aircraft down, set a visual heading for San Marcos, snapped the switch to 'arm' position and reached to ground it against the console plate. One way or another, he was about to do his bit for Asian democracy. And still Ranjit did not check his radar display.

The F-51 bored in from the southeast, her Allison singing like Valkyries, Hank Curran drymouthed as the enemy came within range. He would get only this one pass, and he had a slight advantage in altitude and a good angle on the bastard. Then the STOL's wings began to scimitar, its nose dropping as it gained speed, and Hank figured he'd been seen. He pressed the studs on his control stick, waiting that vital split-second to see where his tracers were stitching away before he maneuvered.

The worst possible thing happened, Hank thought — incorrectly. The recoil hammered his airframe, crabbing the entire aircraft very slightly so that Hank's tracer burst was not only far ahead of the Indian STOL but above it, too. If he hadn't been seen before, he sure-God had announced himself now.

Ranjit saw mach-three fireflies arc across ahead of him, knew instantly which quarter they had come from. He hit the afterburners, banked to the north, — and ran into Hank's last few rounds of API, lobbed in desperate seven-league trajectory after the fleeing jet.

Ranjit's aircraft had only one battery, the backup unit having been removed for this mission in the interest of fuel economy. It only takes one fifty caliber slug to decant one battery, zizzing through the bottom of the device to leave two clean holes. A second slug toured the engine accessory pack, damaging the alternator. By the time Ranjit was fifteen thousand meters up, he had lost sight of San Marcos and all interest in it; found that he had no electrical power for instruments or switches. He still had pneumatics and manual systems, so he could still fire his nose cannon.

The trouble was, there was nothing to shoot at and he could no longer be sure whether he had actually armed and dropped his nuclear bomb. He had seen no flash light the sky. His instruments certainly were not going to tell him. Ranjit raged and pounded against the arm of his ejection seat as he streaked over Kerrville on a westerly bearing. He armed his cannon, fired four rounds. Someone was going to regret this debacle. Ultimately, he thought, that someone might well be himself; but that was what paradise was for, to welcome warriors downed in holy battle. Ranjit Khan peered below in search of his own personal jehad.

The F-51 had been too long past redline on her tach, and Hank Curran gnawed the whiskers on his underlip as he tapped on the oil pressure gauge. A Mustang didn't deadstick worth a damn and he didn't want to do a gear-up in a plowed field. He decided to try the airstrip at Kyle. He might wind up in something worse than a field if anybody ever found out he'd been boring holes in the sky with tracer bullets like an old fool. But Hank had only been trying to protect his country, and just maybe that friggin' Hindu or Chinaman had cut and run for it because of him. He would never know whether his now-stuttering, vibrating old beauty had made any difference in anybody's life but his; he would like to think maybe it had.

Maybe it had.

Hank Curran ran out of runway and folded a wing within earshot of San Marcos, where five thousand inductees were in basic training. Ranjit Khan, with one eye on his chronograph, was estimating his remaining fuel and wondering whether he could get to Mexico. He was clearly not going to get another crack at San Marcos even if he could find it. He opted for Mexico; banked, then saw the buttercup-yellow gleam of a delta dirigible far ahead. It was motionless, moored near a group of long white buildings. It made the biggest, brightest target Ranjit Khan had ever seen.

Chapter Forty-One

"… like Vietnam all over again if the Cubans can hide in the Everglades," Bernie Grey puffed, steering the air-cushion pallet of supplies into the depot. Almost the first thing they had heard in greeting was news of the Florida invasion, only minutes old. A handful of maroon-coveralled Aggie personnel were on hand; most had flocked to the Caverns of Sonora, with most of the townsfolk.

Quantrill slid the pallet onto the floor. “I'd rather they hid than have 'em take over. Uh — this the last load?"

"Yup. Le's find some breakfast, ol' buddy." Their footfalls echoes through the depot building, Bernie glancing at his note 'corder. "Cap'n wants to get to Monahans by noon to pick up some—" Quantrill never learned what Monahans had to offer; the klaxon's hoot penetrated the building and, before they could spring to the exit, the Norway had already unlocked her struts. "Air raid," Bernie screamed, vaulting onto the cargo platform with an olympian leap. "Find a hideyhole, Ted!"

Already the airship was underway, the inertial bounce of the struts carrying her too high for Quantrill to reach. His first reaction was anger that the cargomaster hadn't helped him get aboard. Then he saw Bernie's elaborated arm sweep, a warning to get away, and realized that a lighter-than-air craft was a much more vulnerable place than a ditch or culvert. To Quantrill, an air raid meant a nuclear blast. He saw two men galloping toward a concrete grain silo and chased after them. He was the only one in yellow flight togs; was to learn that the entire regular crew of the Norway had made it aboard. His backpack was still aboard, too.

The great airship whispered southward where, Chartrand knew, the shallow canyon of Devil's River might suffice as a foxhole for a delta. A nuclear shock wave, catching the Norway moored, would utterly shred the great craft's filament-and-polymer body, but Chartrand imagined that either Sonora or the Aggie station was the target.

"I want every man in shock harness," Chartrand said on the intercom. "We're probably going to scrape some of our hide off."

The cargomaster: “Cap 'n, should you fire our little birds? Hate to have 'em going off under us if we hit—"

"Sweet shit, here he comes!" Blythe Rogers, his display a split-screen with overlapping views, had obeyed the radar and was scanning the northeast quadrant for the blip. Unbidden, he threw the visual display onto Chartrand's monitor. Computer-enhanced visuals lent an unreal aspect to the monitor, the colors too sharp, too bright. And the arrowing enemy STOL growing too large as yellow lights burst from its nose. "The motherlover's gunning for us," Rogers shouted in amazement.

They had been airborne for scarcely two minutes; the arroyo still distant. Chartrand hauled the huge vessel into a shallow climbing turn, felt the faint tremors as three explosive mini-cannon projectiles found their marks. A line of small explosions racketed across the packed earth of Edwards Plateau and then the Indian STOL had passed, wings extended, banking for another pass.

Ranjit Khan knew he had made a mistake, loitering in on the enormous shovel-shaped mass of airship in an effort to get a certain kill; but he had not realized it could bumble away so quickly. Ranjit had seen sparkles of bright polymer and wispy structure splash from the delta's hull and knew that he had drawn blood. Ranjit was an educated man; knew that dirigibles had considerable space between their great gossamer buoyancy bags. But Indian dirigibles were filled with hydrogen, and Ranjit had expected to fly over a fireball. He throttled back, realizing that the airship pilot would require him to maneuver at great waste of his remaining fuel if the damned thing could squat in the shallow canyon to the south.

Ranjit was no fool. This time he would make a head-on pass, slowing to the snail's pace of an STOL as he forced the gasbag to turn or die. In the canyon it could not maneuver. So thought Ranjit Khan.

"We're losing pressure in Cell Five," Rogers said. "Can't tell how big the leak, but big enough."

Calm, quick: "Deploy two series of patches." Rogers flipped the protective cover from buttons, keyed an instruction.

The helium cell material was a ripstop fabric thinner than a wastrel's excuse, but it could be punctured rather easily. For in-flight repair, a delta boasted tiny subsystems on the floor of each cell; gadgets that actually blew bubbles. The skin of a bubble was a white polymer that turned from slick to sticky, then chitinous, as it encountered oxygen. Yet, for such a bubble to maintain neutral buoyancy in helium, it could have only one substance inflating it: hydrogen.

The bubbles migrated toward a leak so that they deployed to a puncture, popped, stuck and hardened in the hole, and usually plugged the leak, a white spot on the cell's black surface, easy to find and fix. But two dozen lemon-sized bubbles could not patch the rents in Cell Five. Chartrand found the Norway settling stern-first, and ordered more patches while he adjusted the elevens further. Then he called for more helium. "If I can get some sky under this bitch, gentlemen, abandon ship. Consider it an order," he said, still calm, watching his orientation display as the Norway slid over the lip of the canyon barely meters above the scrub. Even if he could maintain altitude, it would not be enough to let a chute open.

"We've got those twenty-two's, cap'n," Bernie Grey said.

"If you get a shot, take it," said Chartrand. Texas A & M had given them no heavy machine guns, but ROTC classes used weapons scaled down from twin-fifties for use against target drones. The twins fired twenty-two caliber slugs, four hundred rounds a minute. They would have been useful at

Oak Ridge, but against an Indian STOL?

Ranjit was having problems. He had felt one surge of fuel pumps, knew that his fuel plenums were nearly empty. He could make another pass and then horse the aircraft up and southward, ejecting a thousand meters or so before the craft began to drop. He might still walk to Mexico. He throttled back still more, practically gliding at a speed of three hundred klicks. The yellow delta had touched, tail-first, onto rocky alkali flats and even if it tried to turn, he could rake the gossamer brute with cannon. This time he could not miss.

Nor could Chartrand. He saw the line of alkali puffs stutter toward him from the approaching bird of prey. As the Norway's struts swung down to absorb the airship's inertia, Chartrand made ready to trip their pneumatics. She would be tail-heavy, her prop shrouds were aimed ju-u-ust right, and she had something more potent than a pair of twenty-two's slung against her belly.

Ranjit saw his cannon rounds march up the arroyo to his target. There was no question of missing now.

The Norway flopped slowly, then rebounded with her pneumatics, actually rose fifty meters like a broaching whale, nose proud. The aft end of the gondola spurted long tongues of fire.

Ranjit saw the enemy's maneuver and started to smile. Turning upward rather man sideways was a surprise, but his cannon were boring through the great ship, end-to-end. As he began the smile, he also commanded his hand to put the STOL into a steep bank, the better to reach an optimum cruise altitude. But neither the smile nor the bank ever really occurred. Tiny spots before Ranjit's eyes grew from gnats to fencepoles in a second, and of the twelve little missiles Chartrand had fired shotgun-fashion dead ahead, eleven shrieked past.

The twelfth passed into Ranjit's portside air intake, detonating against the duct wall adjacent to his remaining fuel.

David Chartrand saw the deadly fireflower blossom, become hunks of wing and impeller and ejection pod, and then it was a shower of metal and plastic, almost as big as the Norway as they engulfed one another thirty meters above Devil's River Canyon.

Sandys jurnal Aug. 24 Sat,

Chapter Forty-Two

A grain elevator, Quantrill found, could be almost as deep below ground level as it was high. So insulated were the tunnel occupants that they knew nothing of the Norway's fate until many hours later. No one at Aggie Station noticed the smoke to the south. The youth in the yellow flight suit was recognized from a week-old holocast; seemed willing enough to move cargoes around Aggie Station while he waited for the delta to return. Still confident that he would scramble aboard his airship after a day or so, and exhausted after relocating thousands of terrified hamsters, Quantrill fell instantly asleep in the staff quarters.

Dr. Catherine Palma damned her comm link with College Station that night as the three-note signal interrupted her work a hundred meters from Quantrill. It wasn't tough enough setting up a four-level paranthrax barrier with a few lay people before competent lab personnel arrived. No, she also had to second-guess the radiation counters, trial contusions, and play administrator. Palma stored her console display, queried the comm link, and swore again; the Red Cross had finally come through for the green-eyed kid.

Cathy Palma pushed herself away from the desk feeling all of her fifty-one years; trudged to the staff dorm. She found Quantrill naked, his covers kicked away in sleep, the dull gleam of synthoderm over a wound in one leg. She stood beside him for a long time, thinking that those muscular youthful limbs had taken their last indolent tan; wondering if she would ever see her own daughter again. Cathy Junior would have liked this boy, but of course he was much too young.

He stirred then, and Palma silently made her way back to her office. Though she had not entertained sexual thoughts about the boy, she felt a twinge of the voyeur's guilt. Time enough to talk with him the next day. Thank God, she thought, for objectivity.

When she returned to her office she was met by one of the Sonora field men with news of the Norway disaster. Palma spent the next two hours at her comm link trying to bridge the supply gap which the delta's loss represented. She did not think of the youth again until the next morning.

Sunday morning was like any other morning for Palma. A hectic scramble to rejuggle tasks; a radioed promise to use two valuable hours finding and treating one of the field men who, from the sound of it, had taken a massive radiation dose and could not be moved; and ah, yes, the Quantrill boy.

She checked her pocket, then took her coffee across the half-deserted little cafeteria. He was alone, studying her face as she neared him.

"It's about my parents," he said. No barely-submerged hysteria there, but no hope either. And no wasted amenities.

She slid into a chair, willing him to play the man. “I 'm Dr. Catherine Palma, Mr. Quantrill. I've heard about you. Yes," she went on levelly, "I've just had word from — whoever finds out such things. You can't always believe what you hear." Step One: give the poor devil a hint by manner and innuendo.

He looked away, as though to find some new exit from the room. "That news about the Norway: we have to believe that, don't we?"

Toying with her cup: "Yes, we sent a team out last night as soon as I heard. Apparently an enemy jet and our delta collided. No survivors. I'm sorry, Mr. Quantrill, I knew some of those men too."

"I was starting to think of the Norway as home. Even left my scout uniform and backpack in her. Now — look, could I find some other clothes besides these?" He looked down at the bright yellow uniform, his eyes dry, distant.

"There must be some Aggie coveralls—"

"No," he said quickly. "Just — just plain old clothes." Her gaze was interrogative. He shrugged into her silence, added, "I'll work for you, Dr. Palma. But I don't want to join anything I like. That hasn't worked out very well."

After a long thoughtful pause, Palma said, "I suppose it does sharpen one's sense of loss. But you have to make alliances with something, Quant — may I call you Ted?"

A nod. "I don't have to make 'em with things I love, Doc. And I might like it here. I'm not making that sound very smart, am I?"

"Look, Ted, sometimes a long sleep and then some hard work can do wonders." She pulled the vial from her pocket, set it before him. "Why don't you wash those down with water and hit the sack? It's not much, but it's all I can do." She had almost added that if he were older, they might have gotten drunk together. But her responsibility, not his age, was the barrier.

"Maybe I will. Thanks." He put the vial into his pocket.

Almost angrily she said, “Don't you want to know what I found out?"

"About my folks? You've already told me. They're dead, aren't they? One, or both?"

It was curiously difficult for her to say it: "Both. Your father was — in action." She couldn't say 'killed'. "Your mother was admitted to a clinic in Durham, North Carolina, and I'm afraid paranthrax swept the place." More softly: "Do you know what we're doing here?"

"An antidote for it. Chartrand said that "d make this place a target if word got out."

"We don't call it an antidote, but you have the idea. Does it make you feel better to know you're helping destroy the thing that destroyed your home?"

"You want the truth, Doc?"

She sighed and stood up. "No thanks. There's too much of that going around." His response was a smile, peer to peer, and that was somehow unsettling from a fifteen-year-old. “Not that you asked me, Quantrill, but don't cut yourself off from humanity. We all need somebody, now and then."

"To dump on?"

"If you have to put it that way; yes."

"Who do you have, Doc?"

"I have the little fellows like the ones I gave you. Mostly so I can get enough sleep to keep going. And why am I telling you that," she laughed. Palma had good teeth.

"You needed somebody to dump on." His humor was so mordant, so subdued she nearly missed it. This youngster already played the man too well; perhaps that was the trouble.

"Fair enough," she said. “We take what we can get. See me when you feel better; right now I have to make a house call," she ended with a private cynicism and walked away quickly, dismayed at her prevision of a future full of children grown old too soon.

Sandys jurnal Aug 25 Sun.

The delta Santos-Dumont, hastily rescheduled to Sonora, brought vital personnel as well as supplies. Cathy Palma, sworn in as a Captain in the Preventive Medicine Division of the Army Medical Department, assumed her lessened duties with undisguised relief. Palma was on good terms with the civilian staff. Since the Army needed a smooth interface with the locals, the graying Palma found herself functioning as a one-woman clinical service. The crisis relocation center in the big Caverns of Sonora had its own clinic; the town itself was almost deserted.

On Thursday she sought out young Quantrill and handed him a small polypaper bag. "I thought you might need this to keep your nose clean — or whatever," she said, grinning.

He dutifully opened the bag, shook out the freshly-laundered square of bright cloth, and rewarded Palma with an open smile. "I give up, Doc; where'd you find it?" He was holding his scout neckerchief, with familiar snags now neatly mended.

She told him of the local people who could not be persuaded to leave their own small underground lairs; of a man who had retreated to a cave like some wounded animal, and was unquestionably dying there; of the little blonde girl who had presented the doctor with a new treasure she had found near the Norway's crash site.

Palma had instantly realized that a scout neckerchief from the Norway could only belong to one person. "You have to realize that the Grange family isn't the kind that takes charity, Ted. Little Sandy paid me for easing her father's pain in the only coin she had."

"She had more," Quantrill guessed. "This was in my pack; I bet the little bugger found the whole thing. It's okay, Doc, she's welcome to it."

This was Quantrill's first sign of interest in anything since their first meeting. Others could move cargo — and this youngster seemed determined to retreat into himself. He hadn't even approached the Santos-Dumont during her brief moorage. "Quantrill, I need a strong back and a driver, and with that gimpy leg you're the one we can spare the most," she spoke the half-lie gruffly. "I'm requisitioning you."

"I don't drive worth a damn."

"You will," she promised. That was the day Quantrill first left Aggie Station with Palma. At her insistence he wore a white lab coat; quickly mastered the four-wheel-drive van, more slowly became an asset in Palma's mercy rounds. There were advantages, she decided, in a strong youth who seemed unmoved by the sight of suffering.

For the first few days Palma used her new assistant sparingly, leaving him in the depot area at times. Soon she was sending him alone on errands to towns like Eldorado, Junction, and Ozona in the filter-conditioned van. She noted without comment that he was picking up the local dialect. Perhaps it would soon be time to introduce him to people whose troubles were more immediate than his own.

Sandys jurnal Sep. 2 Mon.

The emergency call from Salida Ranch came at one of the few times when Palma was near enough to make such a remote house call. Salida, a sheep ranch near the Llano River, was Quantrill's first experience at taking a four-wheeler over such rough terrain. By now he was nearly as adept as Palma at following the map display and found the faded clapboard house with its sheds, pens, and drunkenly-leaning barn a half-hour from the highway. Palma walked through old ruts to the house, Quantrill carrying her medical bag. A gaunt woman, her skin sun-creased like cured sharkskin, welcomed them with a gap-toothed smile. When Quantrill saw her husband, he wondered what she had to smile about; the man's lower leg was a gory mess.

"You're lucky, Mr. Willard," Palma said as she cleaned the worst wound, a gash in the wiry leg that might have been made by a cleaver. "These tendons will repair themselves if you'll give them a chance. Where were you standing when the boar came at you?"

"Standin' hell, I was ten feet up a mesquite," Willard said, his voice husky with exhaustion. "I knowed that devil was takin' my lambs, I seen his tracks for a week now. But when I throwed down on him with the thirty-thirty he was in heavy brush. Gawd but he was big!"

"I didn't know they ate sheep," Quantrill said.

"I didn't know they clumb trees," said Willard, “but you can tell them peabrains at Aggie Station they've crossed a Russian boar with a sure-'nough squirrel." It had not been a sow, he insisted. "A boar with the devil's own corkscrew."

Palma: "Did you get him?"

Willard: "Well, I hit him. Then he rushed me. If he hadn't'a been so heavy that branch would'a held him, and I wouldn't'a been here now. Hon, show the doc what he done to my brush gun."

Mrs. Willard produced an old lever-action carbine, holding it by the tip of its short barrel. Its stock was splintered and gouged, with bright scars in the blued metal of the receiver. And the rank odor suggested that the boar had anointed the gun.

"I'm gettin' me an automatic scattergun," Willard said, "and them Aggie fruitcakes can pay for it."

Quantrill typed Raima's instructions on a pocket printer as she finished dressing the leg; passed the copy to her. Palma repeated everything orally before yielding the copy to the taciturn Mrs. Willard, then paused outside the little house. "If he tries to work, Mrs. Willard, it may fester, and you'll have to get him to town. Can you cope out here alone?"

The leathery face was placid. "If need be. It's a visitation, Doctor. That boar's the devil's sign, just like the rest of the war. If I have to cope by sacrificin' lambs, so be it."

Palma bit back an acid reply. "You may be right about offering meat," she said finally. "Do you have poison?"

"For Ba'al? He'd get us, sure."

Palma and Quantrill exchanged glances; said nothing. Jouncing back toward the highway, Quantrill could contain his opinion no longer. ' "That poor old woman is plain gaga," he said.

"She's probably younger than I am," said Palma in jocose warning, "and you'll hear lots stranger ideas. Religious fundamentalists tend to think of the war as a judgment. I must say," she laughed gently, "a bunch of Russian boars loose on the land makes a very likely-seeming link with the powers of darkness."

"No more than paranthrax or fallout."

"Hm. Maybe, but a boar has the devil's own face — speaking metaphorically, you understand! And the hooves, and — did you know that a big boar's penis is ridged as though it were threaded? Don't laugh, Ted; that's what Willard meant by the corkscrew. The same sort of thing that was once said of Satan.

"Stop looking at me that way, you fool, I don't believe a word of it. But when you can hang three or four coincidences together, you get — well, you get Ba'al. The Biblical false lord. I suppose it's logical, in Mrs. Willard's eyes, to sacrifice to whatever god makes his presence felt the most. And maybe it 'll keep that big devil away from the pens at night."

Palma ignored Quantrill's lifted brow at her repetition of the word,'devil'. He persisted: "Maybe Willard should've used a silver bullet."

"Maybe — if that bullet were as big as your fist. You wouldn't expect to stop a Kodiak bear with a little thirty-thirty. Those animals that escaped from the Aggie pens were truly enormous; bigger by far than the Asiatic strain that reached over two hundred and fifty kilos; I've seen them. No, what Willard needed was an elephant gun and lots of intelli gence. I'm afraid guns are much more effective on humans than on game of equal size."

Sandys jurnal Sept. 3 Tus.

Chapter Forty-Three

On Wednesday, Quantrill drove Palma to the Caverns of Sonora where, for the first time, he saw an effective relocation center. Laughing, chattering as though on a peacetime outing, hundreds of citizens exercised briefly on the surface, then returned below to be replaced by others. A few people labored to erect windmill towers, building a complex of twelve-volt lighting systems cannibalized from some of the many cars parked nearby.

Palma's requisition was quickly filled from the makeshift pharmacy near the cavern entrance. “In another week," said Cathy Palma, leading Quantrill toward the surface by a winding stair, "most of these people will be back home. Unless the SinoInds hit us again, or we get a duster." A dust storm, she added, would sweep up settled fallout, would make topside breathing hazardous for a day or so even though most of the ionizing radiation had decayed to bearable levels.

Quantrill squinted in the sunlight, moved to their van. "What was the stuff you picked up here?"

"Some drugs; opiates I'd hoped we wouldn't need, but the chelates didn't do the job." She coded the display as Quantrill drove along blacktop. "We've got another stop in the canyon a few klicks away. I told you about the Grange family; very tenacious in their ways, right or wrong. I'm afraid we're going to lose Wayland Grange, but he doesn't want the little girl to know that. So you keep her topside while I'm in their cave."

Quantrill found his orders easy to follow. The cave entrance was well-hidden in a tributary arroyo, and he would not have seen it but for the staunch little blonde figure in the pink dress, waving as they drew near. "Sandy, this is my helper. Why don't you show him the view," Palma said, indicating the broken countryside.

The girl nodded, her eyes large, solemn with surprise. She was small for an eleven-year-old, almost stocky, with scabs on both knees. She had not yet lost her baby fat, but her arms and legs hinted that she would develop a milkmaid's sturdiness. The little face was that of a worried angel, cheeks pink as her cotton dress, growing pinker yet as Quantrill extended his hand. The memory of another little blonde girl surfaced for an instant, was thrust vigorously back into the recesses of his mind. Endless mourning had not been a feature of the Quantrill family.

"Didn't expect company," she said, so softly he barely heard. She looked down at her feet, sockless in jogging shoes, as she offered her dirt-smeared hand.

Quantrill intuited her shyness in the handshake, resisted an impulse to hug the kid, realized he towered over her. He sat on a stone outcrop. "I'm Ted. I've got a bad leg," he said, "so take it easy on me."

It was the right tack. Soon she was guiding him by the hand, pointing to distant wreckage which had been winnowed for human remains, growing more animated as she showed him the places where she played outside. 'Do you still play, Ted?"

He grinned. "When I get the chance, Sandy. But I'm no good at 'tag' right now. Give me another week."

"It's a deal," she chortled, then grew serious. “When my daddy gets well I'll show you the cave. What's the matter, don't you like caves?"

His face had betrayed him. "Uh, sure. Just got a twinge from my leg. I saw the Caverns of Sonora this morning."

Pride showed in Sandy's, "Pooh, they're nothin'. My daddy and mom don't know how big ours is. But I do. If I had a real good friend, I might show her what I found. Or him," faintly.

Charmed by her artless transparency, Quantrill hinted that he knew what she'd found, gradually leading her to guess that the backpack was his.

She caught her lower lip in her teeth, faltering, "I didn't mean to swipe your knapsack, I mean,—"

"We call it a backpack, and you didn't swipe it. It's yours, Sandy. From me to you. Okay?"

"Okay." Studied silence. Then, "I found some other stuff too. One thing like a big dress of ribbons but I think it's a parachute on a big heavy can. Is that yours, too?"

Supposing her singular treasure was a chute flare, Quantrill shook his head. "Finders keepers, Sandy. Just don't fiddle with the can. It might be dangerous," he said in understatement far beyond his comprehension. "A girl pretty as you could make a terrific dress from a chute. Maybe not as nice as the dress you're wearing," he finished, affecting not to notice the holes and smudges in the pink fabric.

"Aw, this ol' thing," she murmured, and covered her embarrassment by asking how his pack came to be in the delta. Quantrill spun a tale of his journey in the Norway, recognizing that the girl hungered for heroes, willing to present himself as such for a child in need. He did not perceive, as Palma did, that the friendship might be therapy for him as well.

In an hour, Quantrill and Sandy Grange were talking as equals, punning, exchanging riddles. Palma's call brought them back to the present; but before advancing to meet

Sandy's hollow-faced mother, Quantrill promised the girl he would return. Once more shy in the presence of the doctor, Sandy excused herself and, with a final wave, ducked from sight to seek her father.

"You'll have to tell Sandy soon," Palma said to Louise Grange.

"Wayland won't have it," was the sorrowing reply. "Better to have it sudden than have the child like I am, day and night."

"The relocation center has room," said Palma obliquely, “when it's over. And I'll do whatever I can; you know that."

"We'll make do," said the woman, and straightened her shoulders. "Just like when Sandy was sick and out of school."

Quantrill did not have to be told that their presence was an added burden on Louise Grange's composure. He started the van quickly and, with Palma's permission, illegally patched a video newscast into their dashboard display as he drove.

The news was increasingly an animated production. In Florida, Axis troops had advanced as far as the Everglades, where a small army of civilian 'swamp rats' was taking a heavy toll of invaders. Fort Myers and Miami suburbs were holding, thanks to a fleet of 'Frisbee' drones, the first solid evidence that RUS weapons would be expended for the benefit of Americans.

The disclike Frisbee, remotely deployed, three meters in diameter, squatted or floated inert until its sensors located a moving target. Frisbees did not discriminate friend from foe, but swarmed up briefly to discharge small particle-beam bursts while jittering in midair between obstacles. A hundred Frisbees made a fine defensive line against infantry or lightly armored vehicles — and so long as they held a line, neither invaders nor defenders were wise to enter the area. The only large moving thing a Frisbee disdained to zap was another Frisbee.

A truce was being negotiated between Israel and the AIR, with mediation by the UN, among rumors that all Israel might relocate with assistance provided by the Islamics. The site of New Israel was open to conjecture, but it was understood that the site would not be lands presently occupied by Moslems. With this understanding, Turkey trod a tightrope between her NATO Allies and her AIR neighbors.

Scattered commando raids, an undeclared war of limited reprisals, had been launched by European Allies and leased SinoInd bases in North Africa. Thus far, they had used no nuclear or biological weapons — perhaps because France, a reluctant ally of the US/RUS cause, had her own credible nuclear deterrent and an old grudge against some Africans.

Now relocated in Swiss bunkers, the UN continued its pleas against further use of genocidal weapons. One encouraging sign was the bombing of China's flood-control dams by high-flying RUS hive bombers, using guided bombs with conventional explosives. Since the RUS was still exchanging sporadic nuke strikes with India, the non-nuclear bombs suggested a RUS willingness to consider a nuclear moratorium — as long as it was mutual. RUS marksmen were obviously ready for conventional war, to judge from their success in turning back the 'migration' from Mongolia. China's plans for a smallpox epidemic had depended on live carriers, and few of those got through before the ploy was discovered. RUS Frisbees finished the job; smallpox vaccine developed a brief popularity south of Lake Baikal.

Canada's missile launches had been almost entirely defensive MITVs, intercepting SinoInd birds in polar trajectory. So effective was Canada's umbrella that she had lost only Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa among her larger cities. The same shower of MITVs that saved Vancouver had also saved Seattle, Portland, and Boise — for the time being. Canada's new capital was rumored to be somewhere near Winnipeg; nations were suddenly vague about their business addresses.

Somehow the newscast managed to convey a smooth transition to a new President of the United States without dwelling on classified details on the death of the previous incumbent. Official bulletins now came from White House Central, an unnamed site almost certainly west of the Mississippi. Only once did the title, 'President Hyatt' identify the ex-Speaker of the House. It was easy to infer that the system, not the man, counted most. The system was apparently healthy, had not gone into shock, was even now gearing for national elections while it trained millions of inductees for a systemic defense.

The newscast ended with a personal message from Eve Simpson, whose hologramed convexities adorned barracks walls across the nation. Little Evie still innocently adored her boys in uniform and proved it with blown kisses.

"Did you notice," asked Palma as she killed the display, "they're not telling us where all of Evie's boys are going?" Quantrill turned into Aggie Station with a shrug. "Florida, I thought. That's where we need defense most, isn't it?" Negative headshake. "Paranthrax will become a natural barrier until we lick it from here. No, Ted; our boys won't be training to fight there. For our west coast, maybe — but I'm guessing they'll be heading for an overseas offensive. Don't ask me how or where."

"It's about time," he said, slowing the van. "If you like being cannon-fodder," she snapped. "Anybody on an offensive in Asia is just asking for it. Don't even think about it, Ted. Think about little Sandy Grange back there; that's what we have to defend." Palma took her bag, stalked away.

Quantrill watched the angry set of Palma's shoulders, reflecting that some people were natural defenders — Dr. Catherine Palma, for instance. And that some might find their niche only on offense — himself, for instance.

Sandys jurnal Sep. 4 Wens.

Chapter Forty-Four

There was no precise moment when Quantrill could say he began to follow the global war news. He avoided friendships at Aggie Station with a distant politeness. He was drawn to the day-room holo set in the evenings, to books when he was idle during the day. He read Armstrong's Grey Wolf and judged that in every era there might be need for a pitiless, iron-willed Kemal Ataturk. From Pratt's The Battles That Changed History he learned that most bloody mass engagements end with, at best, expensive victories by exhausted victors. He decided, after Tinnin's The Hit Team, that greater victories are won when a small accurate concentration of intense force is thrust against an enemy's nerve center — as a single bullet might topple a mighty strategist and send an empire into shock.

He found himself still shockable the day he detoured on an errand to the relocation center. He'd found a child's plastic tea set, bartered a lapel dosimeter for it, and kept it hidden until he trailed old tire marks to the grotto where the Grange family maintained its miserable existence. The Grange vehicle was gone. He wondered if they, like others who had chosen separate shelters, had moved nearer town.

But Sandy met him at the entrance. He saw traces of tears in the patina of dust on her cheeks, saw her sunburst of delight as, silently, he pulled the tea set from behind him. "It's looooovely," she cooed, hugging it to her breast.

"Don't tell mom if you swiped it, she 'll be back from a swap meet soon."

He swore it had been a legitimate purchase, his heart full of her reflected joy. She beckoned to him then, and for the first time he eased into the little cavern. Wire-strung blankets defined the room.

The smell was overpowering. A man lay in the single patch of sunlight, only his face showing over hand-stitched quilts. Skin stretched tightly over his white fleshless face, eyes sunken, no hair — not even eyebrows — to relieve his skeletal appearance. The eyes snapped open; the lips formed words. Quantrill wondered how the girl could steel herself to kneel so near the stench of corruption; to smile into the face of death. Quantrill shifted position to hide his shudder.

"It's the boy I met the other day," Sandy murmured brightly. "He brought me a tea set." She watched the gray lips, then nodded. "We'll go outside before mom gets back, daddy."

"As soon as possible, Quantrill moved outside and reveled in the clean dry air, admitted that he might have time for a mock tea party. “I snuck away; don't you tell," he said in an effort at the local dialect. "Have to get back right soon."

They were sipping cups full of air when Louise Grange drove up, her eyes darting from one to the other. "What's happened? Is Doctor Palma here?"

"No'm," Quantrill said sheepishly, and indicated the tea set. "I promised Sandy I'd pay her a visit. Thought she might like this."

Louise Grange placed her hand over her shallow breast, sighed, found a smile for him.' "That's — awful nice of you."

"I 'm gonna show him where I play, mom," Sandy began.

"Not in the hole, child! You didn't go inside, boy?"

Quantrill saw the almost infinitesimal headshake from Sandy. "Uh — well, we were going to."

"Not today, I 'm afraid," said the woman. “It ain't fit for company. It pains me not to be a good neighbor, but—" She wrung thin hands together, beseeching him to understand without words.

"Time I was going anyhow," he said, and smiled. He waved to the girl as he put the van in motion. As long as she was visible in the rearview, he could see Sandy waving. He saw that his hands were clenched on the steering wheel, and cursed sickness. And friendship.

Sandys jurnal Sep 9 Man.

Sandys jurnal Sep. 10 Tus.

Chapter Forty-Five

The Libyan burrow-bombs may have played hell with the ELF grid, thought Boren Mills, but the concussion had blown him off the Baffin Island listings. Mills and others recovered in a spacious modern hospital in Thunder Bay, just across Lake Superior from the US, and Mills was secretly amused to learn that he now qualified for a foreign service medal. He complained of blurred vision for a week after his eyesight returned to normal, certain that the longer his recuperation, the more likely he would be posted to a reasonable duty station. In his own mind Mills was not malingering. He was studying the war's progress, the better to discover how he might get himself posted to some spot where he would be most effective. Boren Mills had been victimized by an explosion, and knew that he would never be effective in battle.

Thanks to attrition in the Navy, Mills became a full lieutenant upon his return to active duty. His foreign service and purple heart ribbons lent dash to his uniform. A new sparkle invaded his eyes the day they spied a classified bulletin on Israel's new gift to the US.

The Ghost Armada, as it was dubbed, had brought Israelis safely to Cyprus by fooling every extant electronic device. Though chafing at the delay, America was glad to have the new system which could throw false blips on enemy acquisition radar while it kept genuine bogies off the scopes. Mills indulged in a brief brainstorm, concluding that Israel's weapon was nothing like the old Stealth program which had been leaked by the US for political purposes a generation before. The Ghost Armada would have to focus on the sensors, not on the target to be sensed. Its application for US purposes would require the best possible protection. Anybody remotely connected with the program would be nonexpendable, pampered, defended.

Lieutenant Boren Mills spent two days on his letter, updating and modifying his own assessment of his special talents. The self-assessment always formed part of the core of a computer's file on anyone. If he was not identified by a records search as a man ideally suited to help develop a remote-coding microwave system, Boren Mills would be sadly mistaken.

Boren Mills made fewer mistakes than most.

Permanent party posting to Kikepa Point was not quite what Mills had in mind. He considered a relapse, researched the island of Nühau, then concluded that he would be as secure there as anywhere. Certainly a posting to a naval research facility on a privately-owned island in the Hawaiian chain was better than Baffin Island. If you were going to live one step from the end of the world, it might as well be the warm tropical end.

Mills could have been on a military transport the next day, but wisely spent his next four days in a transient BOQ cramming his head and his personal floppy cassettes with everything he could learn on remote electronic query and input modules. He was a very quick study; by the time he landed on Oahu for the Nühau hovercraft, Lieutenant Boren Mills would bear some surface similarity to the experience profile he had claimed to the Navy's central computer.

His only worry was the seclusion of Nühau. There would be no large population there, no finishing schools or sophisticated high schools with their breathtaking arrays of pre-collegiate beauties. Mills's sexual preferences were kinky only in the narrowness of the age group he preferred, i.e., early post-Lolita. Physical ripening, that first delectable flowering of maturity, fascinated Mills; captured his lusts. He did not maltreat or embitter the girls he knew; preferred, in fact, a sixteen-year-old who already knew her way around. There had been plenty of those in the cities, Mills reflected; but it might be different at Kikepa Point.

He would cope somehow. As he packed, Mills was smiling on the inside. His posting to the Naval R & D facility suggested that he was already on the way to success. In a trivial way, he had already proven that he could remotely stuff an electronic system with balderdash.

Chapter Forty-Six

Just when the optimists were clearing their throats to gloat over the 'modest' levels of global fallout, the second paroxysm of nukes came in October. The first group emerged from the sand seas of eastern Libya to take out Schwyz (an error; it was meant for Zurich), Lucerne, Berne, Lausanne, Zurich (if at first you don't succeed…), and in a shocker, Rome. It amounted to a simple refusal by Libya to take any more guff from the UN, from which she had withdrawn. Libya did not know whether she was united with Syria at the moment, or not. Syria said not. Libya's ruling junta, more willing than their venerated Khaddafi to follow bombast with bombs, unilaterally chose to break through the stalemate with Israel. Other countries of the AIR might permit the UN to mediate the newly vexed Jewish Question, but not Libya. To her junta it seemed clear that Christians and Jews had turned the UN into one enormous Swiss-based conspiracy. Ergo, Switzerland delenda est.

Libya did not target Cyprus or Israel itself, convinced that the Jewish Ghost Armada would somehow deflect her medium-range missiles harmlessly. Libya did not have enough Indian nukes to waste a single one.

Within a day, Libya's Mediterranean coast was a beach of radioactive glass, her junta atomized, her southern borders invaded by neighboring Chad, her existence as a political entity erased by a rain of missiles from a still-functioning Europe.

Strategists on all sides blanched, then, when missiles streaked up from a site near Ras Lanuf on the Libyan coast two days later. No one had suspected that Libya had a nuclear second-strike capability, let alone a delivery system that could reach the port cities of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba.

It seemed to Latin-American Marxists almost as if a maddened Libya, in her death throes, had responded on behalf of the US in retaliation for the Florida invasion. But the US submarine-based Trident missiles threw many smaller warheads, and did not throw them so far. SinoInd leaders insisted that the Libyan second-strike had really been a Yanqui stroke, but no one could prove it. No one except the crew of the USS Kamehameha, whose Mediterranean armament included eight Tridents of extended range with warheads that did not fit the known Trident signatures. The Tridents had emerged from very near Libyan soil. Flummoxed by American use of Israel's new weapon, every electronic watcher pinpointed the launch site fifteen klicks inland. Latin American governments took the body blows as a probable hint by an injured colossus that no further unfriendly acts would be tolerated. If any fresh SinoInd troops entered Florida, they'd better not speak Spanish.

As if to prove they were as capable as anyone of further contaminating the globe, Chinese subs launched waves of nukes against RUS industrial centers in Western Siberia, and US centers in Colorado and Wyoming. In both cases, fossil fuels were the targets. The RUS machine still depended on petroleum, though America had made headway in converting western shale and coal into fuel. Too many of the warheads got through, and some were ground-pounders.

The immediate US/RUS answer was nuclear, chiefly from subs that pounded SinoInd oil reserves in Rajasthan and Sinkiang. As if in afterthought, a flurry of RUS warheads detonated underwater in Japan's inland sea north of Kyushu, where shoreline debris eventually proved that Chinese submersibles had been hiding there. Japan's leaders could hardly have been ignorant of the Chinese presence, as Japanese media were quick to allege. The Japanese dead numbered only in thousands, chiefly from inundations by great waves. But the inland sea was squarely between Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Japan was virtually one great urban clot. Thereafter, Japan took her neutrality seriously.

The delayed US/RUS response began quietly in places like Vorkuta, San Marcos, Izhevsk, Klamath Falls: basic training sites. Green US troops began their passage through Ontario to Hudson Bay. Canada had developed her submersible cargo fleet to carry ore and petroleum under pack ice through a wintry Northwest Passage, but with round-the-clock refitting the sluggish vessels soon carried troops past Peary Land and Spitzbergen to Archangelsk. It was hoped that lurking SinoInd attack vessels could be decoyed by surface applications of the Ghost Armada. Meanwhile, so many US/RUS all-weather stealth aircraft were spanning the Bering Strait that visual-contact air engagements with SinoInd swing-wings were becoming the rule there.

Chapter Forty-Seven

It had been over a month since Cathy Palma had ridden with Quantrill to the Grange cave. They'd found the entrance dynamited, the survivors gone without trace. The single wooden cross that stood in the rubble had been carefully carved:

Wayland F. Grange 1955-

For a time, Quantrill hoped Louise and Sandy Grange would turn up in Sonora, or among the thousands in the relocation center. Then in early October, Grange's Blazer was found abandoned and stripped, evidently by one of the religious zealot groups that seemed to be flowering as suddenly as desert plants. Quantrill accepted the news without comment.

Soon afterward came the flurry of second strikes that sent survivors back underground for weeks. Quantrill read more and watched the holo. And avoided emotional ties more than ever, though Palma had urged him to enroll in the relocation center school, hoping that he would respond to others his own age.

"Look," he said once to the exasperated Palma; "my strategy is to learn from the library terminal. Geometry, inorganic chem, military history. It's all I have time for, and you said yourself I shouldn't go outside again for another week."

"You think we can't run an immunology program without you, Ted? Don't flatter yourself." She saw the dull anger in his face. "You've done a lot; nobody denies that. But just between us, they're already in Phase Three in the labs. We're licking the bug! Believe me, Aggie Station can spare one cargo handler. And I can spare you if it means finishing your education." She did not add, and rejoining your peers.

"Between you and the holo, I'm getting what I want," he said stonily, and changed the subject. "For one thing, I'd like you to help me cut through all the crap I'm getting on the news about local guerrilla gangs. They sound like crazies to me, but you don't see anybody on the news really saying that. I need somebody to brief me, not bullshit me."

Palma did not like his increasing use of military terms: strategy, briefing, guerrilla came easily to him these days. "Now's as good a time as any," she sighed.

He took his time phrasing the question, a legacy from taking courses via library holo terminals. "Are they Mormons?"

"No!" Her knee-jerk response surprised Palma herself. She chuckled, peered guiltily at Quantrill, then back to her work. "Well, actually some of them think they are. I could make the same claim, Ted. I was raised LDS, but after my husband began trying to be a closet polygamist I backslid to a jack-Mormon, and then—" Shrug. "No, you can't be a Mormon and deny the tenets of the Apostles. Or the revelations of the modern Prophets. But a lot of people have their own revelations, and these days a lot of those are nightmarish. That can be a strong divisive force if it happens to a particularly devout man."

"Or woman."

"All males may become priests, even blacks," she said. She added with a trace of bitterness, "Females can never attain priesthood. Honor, veneration, service, yes; priest hood, no. You wouldn't believe the underclothes a Mormon woman's supposed to have, and I won't burden you with that. If a woman complains too much, she's put on a sort of probation—'disfellowship', they call it. Nice, hm? Or they just excommunicate you. I didn't wait for that final rejection."

"Maybe I shouldn't be asking you—"

"Ask away, whatthehell," she said as if sealing some internal bargain.

"Why do they raid other people? I thought Mormons had food and stuff all socked away."

She silenced the labeler, fixed him with a firm gaze. "They do. I repeat, these guerrillas aren't true Mormons. Of course they take terrible chances driving like maniacs through fallout, and some of them will be sorry. Some of them are just banditti, out for loot, but some honestly think they're bringing the gospel. The cars they steal, the churches they burn, are all part of their saintly splinter-group zeal to stamp out heretics. And there are in-betweeners who aren't above collecting some riches on the way to Heaven. Reminds me a little of the devout conquistadors of the Sixteenth Century."

As the labeler began ticking away again, Quantrill put some other labels — political labels from newscasts — together. "Let me guess; a heretic is anybody who doesn't wear a Collier button."

"'Pull through with Collier'," she quoted the campaign slogan. "Collier's a good man, for my money; he publicly disavows the cults, but they may intimidate a lot of people from the polls. You can't expect police to control them all. I'm inclined to think Governor Street is fighting an uphill battle, even here in his own home state."

The ex-Governor of Texas was also an ex-Major General, whose current position as Undersecretary of State bolstered his.claim as potential commander-in-chief of a besieged country. But fairly or not, James Street was saddled and hagridden by blame for a war which had come while his party was in power.

"At least all the networks seem to like Street," Quantrill said.

"Of course they do; they don't like censorship, and an LDS Apostle in White House Central will lean in that direction."

"Who needs holovision? Seems to me if you read the Book of Mormon, you know what's gonna happen anyway." She smiled at what she imagined was a joke. He read her expression, then pulled a thin faxed pamphlet no bigger than a wallet card from his pocket. She glanced at its cover. “Urn. The Church of God In Revealed Context, eh? Yes, they're one of the biggest splinters in the backside of the LDS. Not as violent as some."

"Just tell me if that's really from the Book of Mormon, Palma. The centerfold. Read it," he urged.

"It's disjunct, as I recall," said Palma. "Junk, hell. Destroying nations with fiery flying serpents is a pretty close description, I'd say. The only thing that doesn't follow is that explanation where they tell you the ship is a ship of state. No kidding, Palma; is it, or isn't it,—"

"DISJUNCT," she said loudly to silence him, "means separated; disjointed. I don't remember the whole Book of Nephi, but I do know the special wackiness of the Church of God In Revealed Context. They do numerology mumbo-jumbo, like numbering phrases and reading off those that are prime numbers, or something equally arbitrary. And sometimes they come up with passages that fit when they were never intended to. This particular cult doesn't invent any new text — I think. They just combine pieces of what's already there — usually in order, but that piece about building a ship might be pages away."

He mulled this over. "I guess it'd be easy to check."

"Yes, but few gentiles do — and Revealed Contexters play strictly by their own rules, so even if their compressed text doesn't match the original, they can claim it's all in the original. They just pull special messages out by numerical revelation." Their steadfastness in their beliefs, she added, made them take great risks at times; and made them in some ways dangerous.

Again, Quantrill was silent for a time. Then, "You think these religious nuts would hurt a little kid?"

She thought of the Church of the Blood of the Lamb, a full generation before; of true believers who would shotgun their kin in a quarrel over dogma. "No, Ted; certainly not a little girl who won't cast a vote for years to come." She met his glance and his smile, and wondered if she were right. There seemed little doubt that somehow, the Granges had met with one of the zealot gangs.

A week later — with all the delays from precincts where ballots were hand-counted, it was on Wednesday afternoon, 6 November, — President-elect Yale Collier delivered his victory speech. Cathy Palma listened morosely, though she had voted for the man. She was more concerned about QuantriU's defection; hadn't known of his delta pass until too late to stop him.

And what could she have done to stop him? The captain of the delta Schwarz knew about Quantrill anyway; would hardly have denied him free passage. The Schwarz had been the first delta in a month scheduled to College Station via San

Marcos. With either destination, Quantrill's intent seemed clear. Perversely, Palma hoped the kid would break a leg en route to enlist. He was diving headlong, she thought, into the meat grinder that had devoured his family, his friends, his future. To Palma it seemed a popular form of suicide.

For the dozenth time, she-unfolded the page she'd crumpled after reading it. She had found it, in Quantrill's hasty scrawl, on his bunk atop a neatly folded yellow delta coverall. Palma's heart would have leapt if the yellow flight suit had been missing, for then she might have expected to see him again.

Palma did not expect to see him again. "These should fit somebody," he'd written. "I can't wear a uniform that reminds me of friends. I don't think that's what uniforms are for. Someday we can argue about it. Good luck. Ted Quantrill."

No, she thought, staring sightlessly at the page. They wouldn't argue; first because he was probably right.

And second because he would very probably be dead in sixty days.