Systemic Shock

Chapter Forty-Eight

The winter of 1996-7 was a relatively mild one, but a killer nonetheless. In Syracuse and Worcester, without natural gas, neighbors fought over ownership of trees they should have stacked as cord wood months before. In Roanoke and Knoxville, paranthrax crippled essential services until the cities, gasping in their own filth, welcomed December's refrigeration. The rat population leaped, and typhus was not far behind.

On the central Siberian plateau millions died of simple starvation, with the removal of countless trainloads of Evenk beef and Yakut wheat to storage near the Black Sea. The aboriginal Evenk and Yakut people fared well enough on the land by returning to their old ways; but city-dwelling Russians in Mirnyy and Tura starved. The RUS needed rations for the armies that were moving south from Archangelsk to vast training areas in the southern Ukraine. Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria had declined the honor of hosting the Allied troops, and the RUS could not persuade where once the USSR had commanded.

The RUS did not quarter American troops in the south out of kindness. They did it because advanced training of entire armies could be carried out more or less secretly there. And because thirty divisions of Americans wintering in the Urals would have died like thirty divisions of ants on an ice floe. North of the fiftieth parallel in a Russian winter, winter itself is the enemy.

The SinoInd movement to the west was slowed by the ferocity of Kazakhs, then stopped by the more ferocious ice storms. Only in warmer climes could a war against other men be prosecuted. Chad, for example, was dissuaded by her AIR neighbors from absorbing Libya. If Chad could only wait until the colossi fought to their mutual deaths, an Islamic crescent could become an Islamic world.

Australians and New Zealanders completed their ANZUS exercises with American marines during a sweltering antipodal summer, making ready for a daring game of transoceanic hopscotch, while Canadian diplomats broached tender topics with Somalia for a bailout procedure, just in case. Canada's defensive game and her natural resources were burnishing her image as a major power. Somalia reflected on the Israeli/Turk agreement and its outcome, and then raised the ante. But at least she kept quiet.

In Florida, surviving SinoInd irregulars pushed past the Caloosahatchee River, bypassed the Miami ruins, sacked Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, and advanced on the Tampa Bay cities. Every Chris-Craft and dinghy in the American sports-fishing fleet was now armed: night-scoped AR-18's, heat-seeking SSM, or a self-correcting mortar — anything to interdict the supply hovercraft that hummed across from Cuba. There were still enough Harriers north of Orlando to make a SinoInd air supply route plain suicide. The average Florida cracker was just as irregular as the invader, but he fought for his own turf and knew the inlets and hummocks better. The 'gators fed well. It was thought that Tampa might hold.

Throughout the Northern Hemisphere and to a lesser degree in the Southern, background radiation was still dangerously high two months after the second-strike nuclear flurries of October. Among the most essential of US industries, suddenly, was the scatter of small processing plants for production of selective chelates.

Years before, the Lawrence Berkeley Labs had created LICAM- C, the first chemical capable of selectively and safely removing plutonium ions from living tissue. By now, other chelates existed which had special affinities for iodine, cesium, strontium, calcium. Of course, a human body robbed of its stable iodine and calcium isotopes would not function for long. The murky suspension of Keylate that Americans swallowed contained not only the selective chelates, but coated particles of replacement elements which, like tiny timed-release caps, became available to the body only after chelates had removed newly-absorbed elements. There were side effects, but temporary nausea was better than cancer of the spleen.

Americans listened to local media and took the recommended doses of Keylate. In the Ukraine, Keylate was in short supply. In San Bernardino, missile plant workers took it every four hours through November. In San Marcos Infantry Training School, Recruit Ted Quantrill took it once a day through December.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The big man in the dun uniform barked an order in Chinese, jerking the barrel of his assault rifle as if to goad his prisoner. Quantrill grasped the weapon, thrusting its barrel to the side as he swept one leg behind his captor's knee and wheeled. He fell atop the man, one elbow seeking the vulnerable soft flesh just beneath the sternum's bony mass; jerked his head back as his adversary spat in his face; found his throat hooked by the big man's calf, and was hurled backward.

The dun-clad man swung his weapon toward Quantrill without rising, a grim smile across his camouflage-painted face. "Zap, Quantrill, you're dogmeat," he growled, then shouted at the circle of onlookers: "When are you ass-breaths gonna learn to follow through? You let go of a Sino's weapon once you snag it, and it's all over!" He waved Quantrill back to the encircling squad of recruits and came to his feet in a practiced backward roll, watching the recruit wipe spittle from his face. The instructor's half-sneer seemed fully permanent. This bunch of green-uniformed recruits, it implied, would always be green until the day they saw hand-to-hand combat; that is to say, the day they died.

Sergeant Rafael Sabado could afford to sneer. Though garbed for the moment as a Sino, his own forest-green uniform was neatly sewn with small patches that meant more than some campaign ribbons. Airborne training at Benning; special combat school at Ord; languages at Monterey; unconventional warfare at Bliss. Now that most troop transportation was hamstrung and Fort Benning no longer existed, the Army was forced into one-station training with too few specialists. These poor raw recruits, thought Sabado, would be funneled straight from Texas to Russia. All but a very, very few…

"Sergeant?" The lettering on the fatigues said it was Symons; the concern in the lank intelligent face said he wasn't being a smart-ass. "How can he hold onto a weapon when a bigger man is hauling him away by the neck?"

Sabado paused, cocking his head, then smiled. "Leverage, Symons. He had it, but he let it go. Come back here, uh, Quantrill; we'll run through it."

Quantrill, with surprisingly little reluctance for an anglo kid who couldn't be much over sixteen, moved onto the practice mats. The green eyes watched Sabado's moves with flickering interest. He nodded as Sabado showed him how to hook his arms over the weapon, seemed satisfied with the other instructions.

"Now I want you to spit in my face," Sabado smiled.'I'd castrate you for that ordinarily, but when we're on the mat, be my guest."

The circle was suddenly silent, the recruits motionless. "Fair's fair, Quantrill," someone joked.

"Fuck fairness," Sabado said; "Go ahead, recruit. I won't hurt you."

The Quantrill youth smiled almost shyly, then spat without seeming to pause for spittle. Sabado's eyes flickered, but his head did not move a millimeter. Yet even that instant's involuntary blink hid the beginning of Quantrill's sidelong ducking roll that carried him to the edge of the mats.

"Very good," Sabado purred. “You don't trust me in this uniform. But what's more important is that I didn't flinch from a little spit." He motioned the recruit back with the others, looked around him. "In personal combat you can't afford to care about little things. Flood, mud, shit or blood, it's all the same: flinch and you're dead."

Into the murmur around him, Sabado inserted his calm Tex-Mex voice of command with a tone his recruits had come to dread. This was something Sabado liked, so it was sure as hell gonna hurt. "Choose a partner; don't choose a buddy. I see any asshole buddies, I get to make 'em my partners. Move," he said. Soon, twenty-five pairs of recruits stood toe-to-toe. It was a little exercise their mommies never taught them, Sabado said with relish, though his brother had taught him in a Houston slum. The pairs were to take turns. Every time a man flinched, he lost his turn. If any recruit lost his temper, he'd do laps with a full pack instead of eating chow.

In a way, it was a very simple exercise requiring stainless steel discipline. All the recruits had to do was spit into each other's faces.

Sabado halted the drill after two minutes, affecting not to see the bottled rage in the men; judging to a nicety when they had taken enough. "From now on, every day we run a two-minute spit drill," he said, pausing a beat before adding, "just like screwing a schoolteacher. You got to do it and do it, 'til you get it right." Sabado was good at his work; the laughter took the edge off their outrage and, with luck, some of these recruits would master one more small advantage.

Sabado took them through a few two-on-ones, then some slow practice throws, and lazed watchfully while they continued at it in pairs. He watched the Quantrill kid surreptitiously. A lot of kids, given the order to spit like that, were so scared they could muster no spit at all. Quantrill had tried to sandbag him with that smile — and his side roll had been damned fast. All right then: unbelievably fast. Nobody could be faster than Rafael Sabado, but a very few were almost as fast. The problem was in taking time to hone that natural gift. Sabado knew what the recruits did not: in three weeks they would all be headed past the Canadian border. All but a very, very few…

Chapter Fifty

Two weeks later, Symons and Quantrill were en route to an hour of classroom drill on maintenance of the new Heckler & Koch machine carbine, walking in step as prescribed. Symons sought the source of an aerial whisper overhead, pointed at the drab, newly-camouflaged delta in the distance. "Don't you wish you were crewing one of those," he said, and got a shrug in answer. He persisted: “Rumor says you did, once."

"Don't I wish," Quantrill agreed.

"Jesus, three whole words," Symons grinned, his Dallas drawl bright and animated. "Better watch yourself, Quantrill; people will say we're in love."

"Let "em. I 'm saving myself for a Chinese pederast," said Quantrill.

Laughing: "Tell that to Sergeant Sabado, maybe he'll let up on you."

"It's that obvious, is it?"

"Rumor says the Mex must be into S-M, the way he loves his work. And he sure loves it with you, bubba."

"Tell me something I don't know."

Symons mulled that over. "Well, you don't know the squad's rooting for you. I mean, shit, you aren't giving your friends a chance, man. You could put in a complaint about the way he picks on you. We'd back you one hundred per cent."

Quantrill had to look up to meet Symons's blue-eyed earnest gaze. Somehow he gave the impression that he was looking down. "You're kidding," was all he said.

"Try us."

"The Army's doing that," was the reply. "You notice that parade ground full of kids that came in last week? Still marching in civvies today? Well, guess whose fatigues they'll get when we get out battle gear, Symons. The Army's up against the wall, short on bodies, equipment, training. The more fiendish sonsofbitches they have like Sabado, the better they'll teach us. Anyhow, thanks but no thanks. Somebody told me once, 'Don't say it; it wouldn't help.' She was right."

They paused under a jury-rigged awning, took off their rain cap covers, shook them in approved fashion. Fallout precautions were ritual now. "Well, I tried," Symons chuckled. "If you ever need a friend,—"

"I should buy a dog," Quantrill finished for him, smiling.

"Right. And there's always me."

Another shared glance, a guarded offer of friendship met by a plea for apartheid. Quantrill found it hard to concentrate on field-stripping the H&K weapon during the next hour. Until now, he'd thought the special attentions of Sabado had been only in his imagination.

That afternoon during the current hour-a-day stint in the unfiltered outdoors, Quantrill decided otherwise. Calisthenics were no longer a trial in the brisk chill air, but as the recruits went through gradually quickening combat moves he was certain that Sabado stalked him and Symons, watching closely. The swagger of the small hips and big shoulders could not be hidden by Sabado's shapeless Sino fatigues as the instructor, his Toltec eyes glittering, chose first one victim, then another for disarming drills with a machine carbine.

When Sabado had worked his deft lightnings on Fiero, a hundred-kilo hulk from Socorro with a linebacker's disposition, he held the H&K up in one hand while fishing in his pocket with the other. "A touch of realism," he began, and held up a magazine loaded with ammo, "to sweeten the pot. These are special loads with gel blank tips." To prove it, he slapped the magazine in place, handed the stubby weapon to Fiero. Donning polycarbonate goggles he said, "Set it for semi, Fiero, and see if you can bag me at point-blank range."

The sullen Fiero peered uncertainly at the magazine, raised the carbine, aimed at the smiling face from five meters. Then he lowered its muzzle; licked his lips.

Someone snickered.

Fiero brought the H&K up and fired, a snap shot that caught Sabado on the cheek. The report was oddly muffled, almost like the pop of a plastic bag, and the gel did not even snap Sabado's head. Another round put a crimson blot on the brown-clad breast. Sabado held up one hand then, staring Fiero down as he advanced and took the murderous little German-developed piece. Fiero quickly moved off the practice mats, his glare a challenge to his peers.

"Now then," Sabado breathed in his special murmur, "it's kickass time. Let's say I'm on night patrol and my image enhancer has a malf. But yours doesn't, you can see me just fine. And you'd like a nice shiny H&K for a souvenir. Anybody takes this off me gets a 'bye all next week — unless he takes a slug from this," he patted the weapon. A long silence greeted him. "Well? Would you rather have a ten-minute spit drill?"

By now the spit drill was no more than a nasty joke; Sabado's flaunting of it was the real goad. The first man to step forward was little Tinker, the wiry black from Amarillo. Tinker donned the goggles while Fiero tied a very unmilitary, very Texan bandanna over Sabado's eyes.

"You never looked so good, Sergeant," said a voice.

"I never forget a voice, Symons," smiled Sabado blindly. "You're next." Laughter.

As Tinker advanced on his sergeant the entire squad backed away, conscious that they were not wearing goggles, fearful that the gel blanks would sting. And blind or not, Sabado made a fearsome foe, especially with the padding sewn into that Sino uniform. Seldom had fifty recruits been so silent as Tinker stalked the big man, first from the rear, then reconsidering.

Tinker made his move from Sabado's right, curling his own right forearm under the weapon as he tried a leg sweep against the back of the big man's knees.

Sabado must have heard the movement of Tinker's clothing; he'd been standing erect but, crouching with his left foot forward, he bent his knees in readiness stance and almost maintained his balance. Still, Tinker levered the weapon half out of his opponent's grasp as they twisted and fell together. Sabado's reflexes were a damnable marvel. He went with the spin, his left upper arm slapping the mat to break his fall while his left hand still held the foregrip of the H&K.

Tinker fell chest downward but hung onto the weapon, now with both hands, his knees flailing against Sabado's kidney pads as he wrenched at the prize. Then Sabado made his roll, coming astride the little recruit with both hands free to twist the H&K. The weapon's butt plate — it couldn't be called a stock — caught Tinker's elbow and in an instant Sabado had pressed the carbine's muzzle into the belly of the valiant little youth.

There was no muffled report. "Thank you, Tinker," said the big man, removing the bandanna and helping the recruit to his feet. He raised his voice, waving Tinker away. "For you smaller guys: in real combat, never go to the mat with somebody twice your size if you can help it — unless you "re me. And you aren't. Symons! Front and center."

The bandanna went in place again under Symons's trembling fingers. Symons backed off several paces, took a deep breath in the silence, and sprinted with what he clearly intended to be a flying kick.

The listening Sabado was too quick. At the first sound of rapid footfalls he danced to one side, then back, and loosed several rounds toward the noise on full automatic setting.

Symons had dived, rolled, and was up again before Sabado could fire again at the sound. This time he caught the tall blond recruit in the breast and one arm with crimson gel blanks. "Aaaah, shit," said Symons. "You got me, Sheriff."

"You came on like a herd of turtles," said Sabado, and called for another recruit. No response. This game was altogether too realistic. The sergeant looked around him as if undecided; and Quantrill had seen that innocent-looking survey too many times. "Quantrill," Sabado cooed; "front and center."

Quantrill sighed, stepped forward, took the goggles and tied the bandanna, crowding up against the big man, the H&K at port-arms between them. With one hand Quantrill rearranged the blindfold. "Get your goddam hand off that safety," Sabado murmured, and Quantrill's first ploy failed.

The sturdy recruit backed away then, removing his belt in an elaborate stripper's pantomime that brought laughter. “Ah, haaaa, San Antone," someone mimicked an old Texan refrain in falsetto, and then the other recruits began to get the idea. Quantrill took off one brogan and held it like a long-dead thing. Catcalls, mocking wagers against Quantrill, other crowd noises masked his stealthy approach as he placed each foot silently on the mats. His belt was looped through its buckle, the free end wrapped in his fist, as he planted himself before the grimly smiling Sabado. The sergeant whirled, jabbed the weapon's muzzle forward, then back again, probing to learn if Quantrill was close behind him. The crowd noises were working.

Quantrill made a slow, obvious, obscene gesture and the squad renewed its mirth. Then he tossed the brogan to the mat. The sudden burst of fifteen rounds, fired in a semicircular sweep, struck the mats five meters away from Sabado but, as the sergeant pivoted again, Quantrill was ready. The belt loop dropped over the weapon behind its front sight, the recruit leaping behind the big man, the muzzle of the H&K instantly jerked onto Sabado's shoulder as the belt half-encircled his neck.

Sabado essayed a whirling kick but felt a pair of hands over his trigger hand, a pair of legs tangled in his. The H&K began to fire into the air, Sabado unable to prevent pressure on the trigger, and as he tried to fall on his assailant he felt Quantrill slide away. Again the vicious wrench at the weapon muzzle; this time Sabado snatched at the belt, caught it, felt it come free and without rising he swept the H&K in an arc.

Nothing. The magazine was empty.

Sabado stood up slowly, hauled the blindfold down. After a moment he found Quantrill standing quietly among the other recruits — as if he had been there all along. Sabado stripped away the belt, tossed it to Quantrill, held up the weapon. "It's still mine," he said. "One pace forward, Quantrill, and turn around."

Quantrill held out his arms, slowly turned for inspection. Sabado grunted. "What's that on your hand?"

"Blood, Sergeant," Quantrill said.

A nod. "Did I zap you?"

"Not with the H&K. I tore a fingernail."

"Doesn't count," said Sabado curtly. '”We'll call this one a draw. Put your gear back on, recruit." Speaking for them all to hear: "He used his belt for leverage, and had you nik-niks to cover his noise. And he took his time, and used up all my ammo. And he didn't try me on the mat. Never mind all the things he did wrong; just remember what he did right. Dis-missed!"

After a moment of surprise, the squad vented a cheer, some pummeling Quantrill's back before squad leader Fiero herded them into ranks and marched them back to the jammed dormitory building they used as a barracks.

Sabado stood alone, pretending to study the fit of the H&K's magazine until he was certain that the squad could not see. Then and only then did he begin to rub the knot that was already forming on the big trapezius muscle that sloped from neck to shoulder.

Chapter Fifty-One

Sandys jurnal Dec. 24 Tus.

If he managed to consume enough beer, thought Quantrill, he might forget other Christmas eves. He refused to look at the decorated cedar that winked its tiny chemlamps in one corner of the enlisted men's club; studied his reflection behind the beer-only bar instead.

The seven weeks of basic training had seemed endless. Now that he'd passed through the python of basic, he was ready to be swallowed by a combat outfit. He couldn't wait to see where it would shit him out. He'd know damned soon; nobody stayed long at San Marcos after basic.

Someone had been trying to talk to him on the next stool but finally gave it up. Someone else eased into the vacancy. The civilian beertender served him immediately, without discussion. It was like the rest of the Army, the choice was beer or no beer.

He wondered suddenly if Cathy Palma was having a beer, then wondered why he'd thought of her. Well, she was nearly a friend. Too near. He wondered if Palma had located the kid, Sandy; thought of the plastic tea set; smiled; found his eyes misting. He thought then of the Heckler & Koch, and wondered if he were crazy for itching to get his hands on one. “So where d 'you think they'll send you, Quantrill?" The soft educated Tex-Mex drawl with its smooth sibilance made him jerk around. Then he looked at the reflection instead. Looking at Rafael Sabado through a distant mirror gave Quantrill a sense of distance that he wanted very much. He shrugged.

"I'm interested," Sabado went on. "Everybody's got a theory, or a rumor. A few even have choices," he said, picking his words carefully.

"Florida. Siberia. Canada. Fuckin' lot I care."

Sabado grunted, swilled half his beer, nodded to himself. “I lost my whole family in Houston — just like that," he said with a fingersnap. "That's why I care a whole chingada lot. Why don't you?"

"Why do you hate my guts?" Quantrill said it without thinking it out. It had been flicking at the tip of his mind for days.

"I'll answer that when you've done two things. Have a beer on me — and tell me why you think I hate your guts."

Quantrill had absorbed two beers already; just enough that he felt ready to catalogue all the special little treatments, the physical outrages, he had suffered at the hands of the big Chicano. It took him two minutes, all in a growl. He stared at the bubbles in the fresh beer before him.

"Take a swig," Sabado insisted, nodding at the beer; some intensity went out of his face as he watched Quantrill do it. "First, I never, never buy for anyone I hate. A point of honor; in la raza we live on those," he grinned ruefully. He glanced back at Quantrill's reflection. "As for hitting on you, — there isn't another man in your squad who gives me a workout. They're dulces, fuckin' candy. They lack the killer instinct — and you don't, cabroncito. How old are you anyway? No shit now; strictly off the record."

Quantrill shrugged, and told him.

"Ay de mi, you remind me of me," Sabado gurgled deep in his throat.

"You trying to say you kicked the shit out of me for seven weeks because you like me?"

A shadow passed across the handsome bronze face. "Close, compadre. But I swore off liking people for the duration. I think you did too. If you played your cards right, you could learn to do everything I do."

Quantrill absorbed this with the beer. "You think I joined up to be an instructor?"

"Not exactly. Something a whole lot worse — or better, if it's killing you like."

A quick darting glance directly at the big man beside him: "Why would I like it?"

The high cheekbones faced him. "Why wouldn't you?" Then, studying Quantrill, he narrowed his eyes and purred, "I think maybe you already know. I'd like to think so, Quantrill. Tell you what; let's go outside and inhale some fresh fallout. Trust me. I just don' want to go the macho route with all these assbreaths looking on."

Quantrill decided he would soon be stoop-shouldered from shrugging, but went outside with Sabado. He considered the possibility that Sabado intended to pick a fight; shelved the idea rather than reject it.

Standing beneath the single fluorescent light on the porch, Sabado faced the youth. "Ever play 'gotcha'? Alias the handslap game. Put your palms against mine." Sabado's hands were out, palms up, fingers together.

Quantrill had played the game a few times, but denied it. He hadn't enjoyed it anyway. No challenge.

But Sabado's right hand was less than a blur as it flicked up and around to slap the back of Quantrill's left hand. One instant he felt a cool callused palm against his, and in what seemed the same instant that palm was elsewhere. "That's a gotcha," Sabado murmured. "I keep on until I miss."

Quantrill saw that Sabado's slaps, nothing more than gentle taps, implied great control. He found very quickly that the game could be steeped in psychological nuance. Those big hands feinted, jittered, crossed over to underline their mastery. Only when the sergeant tried to cross both hands in a tour de force move did he miss with both.

"Your turn," Sabado smiled, and jerked his hands away the instant Quantrill touched them. "No, keep your thumbs in," he said as Quantrill used his left thumb to score.

"You were doing it."

"To spook you," Sabado said easily. "Makes it a cinch. Your opponent gets fluttery guts and then he's lost."

Quantrill looked away with a headshake as if to some onlooker. And scored with a double-crossover. He scored with each hand; sometimes with eyes closed; sometimes crossing. He did not miss once in fifty moves.

"Okay, game's over," Sabado grunted finally, as if troubled. "For awhile I couldn't figure out how you were doing it. Nobody's quicker than I am."

"You think I'm cheating?"

A snort. "No. I was wrong, that's all; somebody is quicker, compadre. Not because I was spooked. That's easy enough to prove."

Sabado placed his hands atop QuantriU's again, pointed out that neither of them betrayed hypertension with vibratory tremors. "Yeah, I thought so," Sabado said, lowering his hands. "You're a gunsel, all right."

A gunsel, he said, was an old tag. The Army psychomotor test people had culled it from studies on what they termed the 'gunslinger mystique'. The adrenal medulla produced both adrenalin and noradrenalin in response to stress, heightening the speed and strength of muscle response. In nearly all humans were emotional side effects as well as physical, a shakiness that could interfere with coordination, that could even produce panic or unconsciousness.

But in every million humans were a few who made optimum stress-management responses. Those few, said Sabado, got the advantages of their adrenal glands without the disadvantages. "That's me," he added, “and that's you. In the 1880's we'd've been gunslingers. Nowadays there isn't much call for that. But the Army needs a few gunsels, people who can act alone under special hazards. I'm a referral service for those few."

Quantril checked his lapel dosimeter, relieved to find that they were taking only a fraction of a rad per hour outside. "How do they use those guys, Sergeant: Something like a regimental combat team?"

A long slow smiling headshake. "More effective than that, with lower profile. When I said 'alone' I meant it, Quantrill."

"Doesn't sound like the Army to me."

"Doesn't, does it?" Sabado pursed his lips reflectively. "But let's suppose there was a foreign national, someone who did top-level liaison between the President and, ah, another NATO country. Run it on down with me: supposethis bastard was a mole — a deep-cover SinoInd agent — who was pinpointing our key installations to be nuked on cue. Like the Shenandoah Command Center, or the Grand Island Quartermaster complex."

Quantrill's eyes widened. Both of those underground centers had been secret until they'd taken consecutive impact nukes, drilling down into bedrock to atomize a President and a supply center. “I guess the FBI would shoot him on sight," he said.

"The feebies don't ice folks on contract these days. Some CIA people do, but not on US soil. Treasury Department sticks to other duties. That leaves military intelligence, compadre." Sabado's eyes were glimmering slits in the half-light. “I hear the Army has such an agency. I would imagine they'd have a few gunsels train able to go anywhere, anytime, to complete an assignment. The question is: are you interested!"

"This is crazy, Sergeant. I mean, it can't be this simple—"

"It isn't simple; but this is how it starts. Did you think they'd advertise in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram!"

"No-o-o, but if they did they wouldn't ask for anybody fifteen years old."

"Don't second-guess the Service. They'd be interested in a toddler if he had your reflexes — but it shit-sure isn't an open sesame, they run you through a heavy wringer before they take you. “If they take you. I gave somebody your name a week ago; surely you don' think I'd make this pitch unless somebody higher up gave the word. But I've told you everything I can until I get a commitment. Yes or no!"

A youth came out the door, affixing his headgear, nodding to the pair who stood near. Quantrill smiled, nodded back, waited until they were alone again. "When do you need my answer?"

"Right now. I didn't come here tonight because I like green beer. Something else that should go without saying but I'll say it anyhow: whatever you answer, you don" even hint to anybody about our little talk. I'd have to say I lie a lot. I wouldn' like that."

Quantrill took a long breath; expelled it. "Okay, I'm still not sure I believe it. But I'll do it. It sure isn't what I had in mind when I joined up, Sergeant. You sure I won't wind up with an assignment like yours?"

He had never heard Sabado laugh and was surprised at the musical gurgle deep in his chest. "This isn't an assignment, Quantrill; this is what I ask for between assignments. I'm not always a sergeant. It depends," he added vaguely.

This Sabado was subtly different from the big swaggerer on the practice mats. The difference was unsettling until Quantrill realized it lay in the man's speech patterns. Tonight Sabado was relaxing, letting his Tex-Mex accent have its way. Tonight Rafael Sabado was not bothering with bullshit. “If he plays a lot of parts, a gunsel must get a lot of ID's," said Quantrill.

"Sure. But none to link him with 'T' Section. For what it's worth, a gunsel can't flash an ID if he gets in trouble on assignment. And he's up against people who know some tricks — cosmetic work, false prints, martial arts — so he gets the best training Uncle can provide. What he doesn't get is any promise about tomorrow."

"At least you're up front about it. I gather a gunsel doesn't take prisoners."

"If they need the quarry alive, the feebies can handle it. If they don't, somebody in T Section gets the assignment."

"What does 'T' stand for?"

"Terminate."

"I hope they terminated the guy who pinpointed Shenandoah."

"What if I tol' you it was a woman, compadrel"

"I dunno. I guess it wouldn't make any difference."

"It didn't," Sabado grunted. "A gunsel takes what comes." Pause; flicker of something unsaid in the face. “He has to. You'll see. You have to make up your mind that T Section chose you and your assignment for a good reason.

You may never know how much you've shortened the war, how many lives you save, but," he gave a sly chuckle, "you get to see results first-hand. More gratifying than lugging mortar rounds in fucking Siberia."

"Too bad; in a way I was wondering what Siberia's like."

"You might find out if you flunk. Don't. Now get some sleep. Tomorrow right after rollcall, you make sick call. Take a book with you. Then ask to see Major Lazarus. That's all. Now repeat that."

"Uh, — sleep. Sick call after rollcall, ask for Major Lazarus."

"Take a book, compadre."

"Right." Quantrill watched the big man take the stairs two at a time; wondered if Sabado really did lie a lot; wondered if there really was a Major Lazarus.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Perhaps Major Lazarus existed. Quantrill never met him, but the fact that he became the only occupant of an examination room told him something. There were very few empty rooms in San Marcos.

The avuncular white-haired medic who bade him strip was a captain wearing a cool blue smock and a warm pink smile. Quantrill found some of the exam, like the prostate probe, familiar. The elastic straps, fitted as anklet, wristlet, and headband, placed unfamiliar devices next to his skin. Quantrill guessed they were feeding data to the computer terminal on the desk while he did calisthenics.

The medic was polite, anonymous, mildly interested in the bullet wound, more interested in Quantrill's microfiche record. When he asked whether Private Quantrill had ever shot to kill, Quantrill decided that someone had been to considerable trouble to check his recent past.

"They were shooting at me," he said defensively.

"Just answer the question, son."

"Yes, I did. I think I got him."

"I'm not judging you. And I'll only ask one more question along this line." A brief silence before, "Did you ever kill anyone, or try to, before that night at Oak Ridge?"

"No." The question, he thought, had been phrased nicely. There were more questions: childhood disease, sexual experiences, enduring friendships, special fears. Quantrill answered it all truthfully.

The psychomotor and sensory acuity tests seemed simpler than they were because the equipment was highly refined. The helmet adjusted snugly, especially around his eyes and ears so that he became momentarily blind and, except for the medic's voice in his headphones, deaf. The gloves were thin knit fabric with slender instrumentation wafers bonded to each gauntlet. When the animated displays were focused, Quantrill saw a red dot move, and snapped his fingers the instant the dot touched an edge of the maze it traversed. Then he found that he could guide the dot by moving his right index finger, and enjoyed the game. He heard various tones, tapped when he first heard them. He touched his forefingers together blindly, then tried it when the display showed an animated view of his hands before him. He smiled grimly as he learned to ignore the false information on the display. Finally came the red dot again, this time an animated mosquito that appeared and winked out repeatedly as he tried to catch it between thumb and forefinger.

Then he sat quietly like a young hooded falcon, listening to the faint running monologue in his headphones, unable to see the medic's astonishment at the test results. He accepted the flaccid mouthpiece, drew deep breaths, expelled them, heard the medic compliment him on his lung capacity. When he toppled forward, he did not feel the cradling arms.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Christmas dinner, for Quantrill, was intravenous. So were all his meals for the following week. He was wholly unaware of his encapsulation and shipment in the McDonnell that snatched up two more capsules in Artesia and Flagstaff. Nor did he awaken during that week, though dimly aware of a dream in which faceless interrogators pried at embedded memories.

Shortly before noon on the third of January, 1997, he awoke slowly, stretched until his joints cracks. He winced at a slight pain low on his right abdomen. He sniffed an aroma, salivated, then eased down from the bed and stopped naked before the big windows to stare in disbelief. His first coherent thought was that he had to be dead, or still asleep.

His view was magnificent. Through the multipaned bay window he could see the tops of great trees, rolling wooded hillocks that fell away to a shoreline a few klicks away. The room was more than sumptuous, its furniture and decorations a collection of many early styles. His bed was a four-poster. Tapestries covered one wall and the window niches in a second wall were lined with some of the most intricate laser carvings he had ever seen — either that, or genuine hand carvings, which would make the room beyond price. He was persuaded that the experience was real by the growl in his belly and by the study carrel, a gleaming plebeian model of state-of-the-art efficiency that stood against one wall like a Mondrian among El Grecos. Its terminal display was lit, and above the printed lines ran a legend that a more wakeful Quantrill would have spotted instantly: WELCOME TO SAN SIMEON.

The holo keyboard was standard. Assured that brunch awaited him in the adjoining bathroom, he ignored his belly long enough to read more, sitting nude at the carrel. Quantrill was for all practical purposes a civilian restricted within the fenced hilltop of San Simeon, a California State Historical Monument leased by Hunter-Liggett military reservation for the use of T Section.

Whoever had crafted the message had probably worked for a chamber of commerce somewhere. The location and quasi-public nature of this monument, the fabled structures and grounds of Hearst's Castle, provided an ideal ambience for training the men and women of T Section. Mr. Quantrill would be personally welcomed at four PM in his room. Until then he was at liberty to use the carrel, peruse a vintage slick-paper brochure praising the conceit of Citizen Hearst, or stroll the grounds — so long as he did not enter any structure but his own two rooms in the little (seventeen rooms!) guest house below the castle. He might notice others on the broad balconies and paths, but must ignore them. Mr. Quantrill might find it helpful to orient himself to his quarters by noting the twin towers of the castle.

He found a sybarite's meal — juice, coffee, steak and eggs, sourdough bread with garlic butter, and a tantalizing sliver of cheesecake — awaiting him, each in controlled-temperature containers on a shelf in the ornate bathroom. A vague resentment smouldered in him; had he gone through the rigors of basic to be pampered, or to fight?

On impulse he tried the bathwater taps, realized he had not soaked in a tub for months. His irritation dwindled; the steak and the stroll could wait. Bending to test the bathwater, he winced again, touched his abdomen. The appendectomy scar was clean, but it had not been there before. Quantrill wondered how long he had been asleep; he did feel a bit weak.

He luxuriated in the ancient tub until hunger drove him out, then consumed every scrap of his meal, never once consulting a mirror until after he had found the small wardrobe in the bedroom. The expensive supple brown loafers fitted to perfection; he assumed that the joggers would, too. He chose the beltless fawn slacks instead of sweatsuit or denims, a yellow vee-necked pullover from the half-dozen shirts, and grinned to himself almost apologetically as he strapped the wristwatch on en route to the bathroom mirror.

This kind of coddling still seemed a hell of a way to fight a war.

A hell of a way, indeed. The mirror revealed a well-dressed young man of leisure, whose smooth face was understandably perplexed. The face, Quantrill saw, was older. And not quite his own.

Chapter Fifty-Four

The knock came two minutes early; tentative raps on the massive wooden door. Quantrill opened it intending to be surly, but changed his mind in an instant. She was a stunner.

"You're Ted Quantrill, I'm told. May I come in? Or would you rather explore the grounds?" Her voice was musical, her olive skin flawless; her name, she said, was Marbrye Sanger. Quantrill decided she was the kind of college girl for whom tight slacks had been designed.

"I've, uh, looked around some. Getting chilly out there," he waved toward the evening haze, then stumped to one side, made maladroit by her presence. "C'mon in; it's warm."

She tossed him a preheated smile, but he fumbled it badly. Evidently she had grown accustomed to the setting and to youths who fell before her like conversational saplings. "I bet you haven't found the booze." He hadn't. She showed him the false front in the rococo cabinet, the ice cooler, the vodka and bourbon, the mixers; and then she made them each a drink before folding the long legs beneath her on the bench at the big window.

"Don't let all this put you off," she said, indicating the room. “It came with the lease but for God's sake don *t break anything. Unless you're better than I am at asking questions to a library carrel, you must be edgy as a straight razor by now. Any questions?"

He began with the obvious. What the hell had they done to his face, and how? Did Marbrye Sanger have the foggiest idea how this gargantuan dollhouse on a mountaintop could be tied in with pursuing a war, and where the goddam hell was everybody, and when were they going to get on with it, and by the way, what was a girl like her doing in a place like this?

San Simeon, she replied, was a world to itself. Its staff was housed in clapboard bungalows nestled among the slopes below the 'big house', as everyone called the castle, and it had been William Randolph Hearst's royal hostel a half-century before. Then the place became a state monument, with sightseers bussed from a parking lot several klicks away for an hour-long guided tour of the big house and what was left of the vineyard, the zoo, the outrageously lavish mosaic pool, and statuary ranging from the sublime to the plain silly. "It's still open on weekends, war or no war. Now you tell me, what could be a more unlikely place for T Section training than a place with tourists barging around snapping holomatics?"

"Unlikely is dead right. About as unlikely as my face."

She sipped her bourbon, squinted at him in the fading light, cocked her head and let her short chestnut curls fall loose as she studied him. If Marbrye Sanger did not know how delicious she looked, thought Quantrill, she was dumber than she seemed. She took another sip without looking away, licked her lips delicately, said, "Quit bitching, Mr. Q. They did some microsurgery on me, too, but as soon as I quit biting my cheeks I got used to it. You look pretty damn' good to me. Were you even better before?"

His glass was empty, his patience draining away as well. “I was me before," he said, heading for the bourbon already a bit light-headed. "How the fuck, 'scuse me, I'm fresh from basic training, how'd they do it so fast? And I'm not 'Mr. Q', I'm Private Ted Quantrill and I wonder when the training starts."

"You're not a private, Ted." The voice was still musical, but low and earnest. "Your pay is a three-striper's, same as mine, and you'll have your fill of training before you leave this lotus-land."

"But there must be somebody I report to."

"You mean Control? Take it from me," she smiled, “Control doesn't impose any hut-hut stuff unless you need it. You'll find out about that in a class we call 'Cover'; the Army more or less took us apart and rebuilt us before we got here. It's a departure from other intelligence schools, but one of the things they know about you is that you don't need saluting or motivating. Gunsels just don't, I guess. None of us do."

Quantrill poured himself a generous slug of bourbon. “What if I motivated myself down the mountain and hitched a ride somewhere?"

"I imagine Control would disappear you — but as far as I know, that's never happened. They know what you want, Ted." For a moment the brown eyes lit with an odd intensity, the nostrils flared above an aggressive grin. "You have the right stuff to take direct action; personal action. Once they weed out the crazies — the ones who just get their jollies from icing people in general — they come down to us. We have the natural equipment to face an enemy one-on-one, and we're willing to flog like hell for the chance. I don't think you'd be here if you wanted anything more than you want that."

Studying the girl, Quantrill sensed her zeal to destroy the destroyers, to hunt the hunters. Evidently he had joined the right club. He smiled and tried to sip without choking.

She watched him drink. "They say bourbon affects people's sex drive. D'you think it interferes or helps?"

He spilled a little, gulped a little. "I'm not sure."

She uncoiled, kicked off her wedgies, a smile of bogus innocence transfixing him as she stepped nearer. Her free hand went under his arm, her cheek nuzzling his. “We could find out. Actually I have a little coke; they didn't search me for my stash — and guess where I keep mine," she giggled.

Too kittenishly. He felt lithe muscle in her casual embrace; sensed a tension, a spring-loaded trigger, in her willingness.

His erection died at birth, and he knew she was crowded near enough to notice. “Maybe later, "he murmured, patting her shoulder. Jeezus but she was tempting; and so was the free alcohol, and for that matter the offer of a free body-search to find forbidden drugs within other delights.

Which made it all clearly a setup. He strode to the cabinet again, filled his glass with mixer. Some small imp made him sway his hips as he moved to the bed and sat down, kicking off his shoes in bald imitation of her, patting the rumpled coverlet. He was uncertain about the twitches on the lovely face, but she sat with him and sipped again. “Now," he said with as much nasal sensuality as he could muster, "tell me about T Section."

Her smile was dazzling this time, her body shaking with repressed mirth. "Don't you like me?"

He stared at her breasts, her high-arched insteps, her mouth. "You are without question a Nobel Prize pussy, Sanger, and I promise to think about you later tonight," he said in open insolence.

Her smile faltered under his scrutiny. There was something of relief and of genuine wistfulness in her, “I 'll accept that, Quantrill. It's costing me, but I'll accept it."

"Now about T Section," he prodded.

It was a zero-sum world, she sighed. Every move you made in T Section was a step forward or backward for somebody. If you had minor weaknesses they would be found and expunged. Major weaknesses got you bounced. You were issued recorders, keyboard cassettes, anything within reason for the classes which were held in upper rooms of the big house, far from the tourist route. You could spend as little time as you liked studying. You were smart to study a lot, because Control was anxious to use only the very best candidates. T Section would give you every tool to succeed, every opportunity to fail — and cardinal sin number one was the failure of common sense.

Quantrill stared at his drink. Common sense told him he'd gulped that first glass too quickly; anything that impaired your control had to be an error. “I can't read your mind," he said. "When do I get a list of do's and don'ts?"

"Tomorrow's Saturday," she said as if she thought she were answering his question. "Your carrel will wake you early and someone will come for you. We'll be doing covert weapons work on the range — there's half a county for us to use here — so wear jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and sneakers." She took a deliberate sip of her drink, eyed him. "Are we going to let this nice big bed go to waste?"

Instantly: "Is sex a failure of common sense?"

"Sometimes yes, sometimes no," she shrugged, and used a finger to trace the seam on his pullover. “Mm; nice shoulders."

He stared into her eyes, smiled sadly. "I think I'd like a rain check," he husked.

"It'll be a long time before the rain stops," she said with nonchalance, slipping to the floor, scuffing into her shoes. "I live on the floor below, and I have some cramming to do. See you in class."

He walked with her to the door, suffused with a mixture of relief, desire, and uncertainty. "I'll tell you something, Marbrye Sanger, this has been the damnedest welcome I ever got, I need to sort things out."

"Don't worry about it," she said with the barest hint of pique. "You haven't flunked yet." Her departing footfalls were almost noiseless in the evening gloom.

Quantrill was still standing in the doorway when the carrel chimed for attention. He found that his name was now an input code and the terminal would answer certain queries from typed input; no voice input accepted.

When and where would he find supper? He wouldn't, that night.

What was the status of Marbrie Sanger? Marbrye — the correction was underlined — Sanger was an advanced trainee in T Section; 'Q¹ clearance, no on-site restriction.

Why had Sanger visited Quantrill? A multiplex enticement-frustration test.

"Shit," he muttered, and typed another question: had he passed? No comment.

The terminal verified Sanger's instructions for the next day, adding that meals would be provided. As afterthought, he asked what courses he would take. He found the list daunting:

COVER, Unofficial, and Control

CRYPTANALYSIS

INTELLIGENCE, Theory

INVESTIGATION, Methods

LINGUISTICS

PSYCHOLOGY, Criminal

PSYCHOLOGY, Social

SCIENCE, Military, unconventional

SCIENCE, Political, and Indoctrination

SURVEILLANCE, Use and Nullification

TERMINATIONS, Covert, and Pursuit

WEAPONS, Covert and Overt

The terminal would give no coursework details. Quantrill suspected that the Sanger hotsy had already reported the results of her welcome; dimly perceived that T Section might have monitored their brief meeting. It did not yet occur to him that San Simeon might be instrumented in such a way that Marbrye Sanger had no need to report; nor that Control, while testing his responses to uncertainty, had already begun the process of instilling in him a mild and necessary paranoia.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Within a few days Quantrill learned to accept the bizarre setting in which he might jog five klicks with a half-dozen other trainees to a refurbished barn for a class; or find a dubok, a message drop, while alone with memorized instructions. He saw the lissome Sanger only in cryptanalysis class; she ignored him. At no time did any class, either in the big house or outside it, contain more than eight members.

Much of the training pitted trainees against each other; no one had to be cautioned against forming close friendships. He failed to locate the scalpel tip which little Barbara Zachary had cyanoacrylated to the back of her neck until the 'unconscious' Zachary pressed it to his throat — but he did not repeat that failure. He forgot that a one-time cipher could be generated from a telephone directory, and drew two extra cryptanalysis tasks that took him half a night to complete. The youngest of the trainees, Quantrill forgot a lot of things; but only once.

He would never forget his instructors. Marty Cross was half Cheyenne and all whip leather, a wizened wisp of a man so adept at covert pursuit that he seemed to simply materialize behind the trainee he stalked. It was Cross who taught Quantrill to become utterly still; so inert that he could stand erect in a cluttered room and be unnoticed for vital seconds.

Sean Lasser, whose middle-aged paunch danced when he laughed, always had something to laugh about after submitting to a search. Quantrill exulted the day he identified Lasser's signet ring as a garrotte complete with spring-wound wire.

Seth Howell, heavy-bodied with spidery arms and legs, had a whispery tenor and a gift for phrasing the dullest indoctrination material as though analyzing an invisible cud of tobacco. Craggy of face, prematurely graying, Howell claimed a hitch in the quad-service Rapid Deployment Force — and another in the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois. Howell's adumbration of the current political mess might not be the whole truth, but it didn't put you to sleep either. He took, for example, the Starlinger-Ahbez hypothesis.

Starlinger, a German, had long ago warned of China's expansive dreams, whatever denials she might make. With her southern borders already overpopulated, China would eventually find it necessary to expand into underpopulated Siberia.

Ahbez, a NATO strategist from Turkey, had added an alternative. China might indeed be able to expand southward if her southern neighbors, for whatever reason, became underpopulated. Ahbez theorized that China might find ways to depopulate India, or the Vietnamese peninsula, without overtly declaring war on them. She might even maintain an outward alliance while draining that ally of people.

"Now, Ahbez is a freak about germ warfare," Howell drawled, his Colorado twang lending him the air of an inspired hick; "and he figgered China might dump a few bugs down south. Well, she didn't; she gave the goddam Injuns the paranthrax they dumped on us. Makes sense. China had the technology, and thought she could hamstring us and let India take the heat.

"That explains why China didn't dump paranthrax on the RUS. She wants to avoid retaliation in kind, and depletion of RUS livestock she intends to own later. But if the Allies start an epidemic in India, — well, China's natural borders to the south could protect her long enough to produce a defense. Meanwhile, India would go belly-up.

"We think China's waiting for us to do just that. But guess what we've spotted from orbit." Howell snapped the holo projector on; the display was a map of the SinoInd lands. He spread one big hand like a tarantula, placed fingertips on Cambodia, Laos, and the other Viet republics, and slid the tarantula to ward China's heartland, Szechuan. "Viets. More of 'em than you ever saw, swarming north like ants as far as the Yangtse River.

"Some are doing winter harvests in Yunnan, feeding others who're training in little groups all over south China. And then a lot are disappearing along the Yangtse. Now, the Yangtse's a muddy bitch; even infrared doesn't tell us what's going on under its surface. Some Viets are going upriver, possibly through pressure locks under the dams that're left. One hell of a lot of Viets are popping up on the Kazakhstan front. You guess where all the rest are."

"Spam?" Quantrill could not resist the awful jest.

"That's been discussed," Howell said. "Cold storage, too. But we think they're going underground, trained as factory workers while they mass for a hundred-division offensive. Little factories, lots of 'em; a cottage-industry war. It'd be futile to impact-nuke every square meter of Szechuan. Just maybe, it's time we gave the Sinos a taste of their own medicine in Szechuan."

Graeme Duff, the bull-necked trainee from Minneapolis: "How do we send germs down into filtered tunnels?"

"Wouldn't the Sinos like to know?" Howell's smile was one-sided. "You can bet they have moles boring around every lab in this country, trying to dope that one out. And that," he said, snapping off the projector, "is where gunsels like you come in."

"We're supposed to penetrate deep cover?" Zachary was always thinking two steps ahead, thought Quantrill enviously.

"Other people are trained for that. They finger the mole; you take him — or her — out. Usually you just disappear him. That leaves the other side wondering if we've turned him.

"Chances are, you'd get a different assignment against certain folks in media." He waited for the murmur of surprise to abate. "Do I have to tell you how important our media are in reassuring what's left of this country that we're winning — whether we are or not? Face it: we've lost half our population and the other half needs its daily holo fix! The SinoInds would love to nuke NBN's world of make-believe, if they knew where our production centers are. Damn' few foreign stars or directors know; we can't be absolutely sure of their loyalties."

"Rivas Paloma," said elegant young Goldhaber, with a surgeon's fingersnap. "Killed in a strafing on location in Mazatlan. Am I right?"

"The Spanish film industry's loss," said Howell obliquely, "may have been NATO's gain."

"But Paloma got an Oscar for directing an anti-Chinese movie," said Goldhaber, frowning. You could depend on the well-born Goldhaber for cultural snippets.

"If he was an assignment — I say if—then he was a mole. Depend on it."

"I guess we have to."

The thin voice was almost a falsetto whisper: "Oh, yes. You literally bet your life you have to. Media star, bishop or bird colonel: if Control says he goes, he goes.

"Which reminds me." Did Seth Howell betray faint cynicism? Quantrill could not be sure as the instructor continued, “Never doubt for a second that President Collier was a lucky break for this country. The Mormons, and nobody else in the US, were ready for this war. They're going to pull us through if we follow the right path. In a war of survival we can't afford the sedition of every Jew and Catholic who won't accept a moral imperative.

"But the LDS has more splinter groups than a toothpick factory. Some of 'em are just wrong. Others are violently opposed to the administration — and they are dead wrong."

Kent Ethridge, the gymnast from Iowa State, spoke as rarely as Quantrill. "In other words," he said slowly, "a war of religious extermination."

"What d 'you think the AIR confederacy is doing," asked Howell.

"Threatening Jews," said Goldhaber, not smiling.

"What if Control identified someone in the Jewish Defense League who was trying to assassinate your President," Howell asked.

"Ice him," Goldhaber replied. "No religion is more important than my country."

Howell stared out the window for a long time, then glanced at each of his trainees. "Thanks to the no-hum outlook most Americans had before last August, one religion is your country. That's overstated a mite, but it's closer to the facts every day."

"I'm not exactly wild," said Goldhaber, "about joining the LDS."

"A gunsel," Howell snorted, "is not exactly eligible." The tone of his voice put an end to one unsettling topic, and led Howell to the unsettled problems between the Allies.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The US, as Howell put it, had a neighbor problem. We needed Mexican oil and were still getting it; but the capitalist, Mormon Collier administration could not entirely satisfy socialist, Catholic Mexico of our continuing good will. One needed only study the bloody clashes between Mormon angles and Catholic latinos in the American southwest. Already the media were spiking rumors that White House Central might relocate again from its New Mexico warrens.

Canada, too, had a strong gentile distaste for the new turn in our political path, but chose to treat it as a temporary aberration. Canada's gross national product and her technologies had swelled to the point where she no longer needed to feel defensive about her southern sister. Rather, said Howell, she began to feel all too protective. From the remnants of Maine to the desperate survivors freezing in Michigan, Canadian currency was now more readily acceptable than US greenbacks. Because Canada was our conduit to Asian battlefields and a potential source of fossil fuel, the Collier administration kept a discreet silence on the currency question. But — Seth Howell chose his words with great care in describing US/Canadian relations — White House Central had an obvious problem. Quantrill had to check the definition of the key word, 'hegemony'.

Meanwhile, Canada worried about her RUS alliance. It was not just a question of competition for polar resources, but also of a big new semi-capitalist union adjacent to an enormous semi-Marxist union. Canadians never tired of warning that the Russians had learned nothing but caution in their 1985 debacle. After the RUS learned to modernize their own frozen northlands and to fully exploit their resources, she would doubtless covet Canada's.

Doubtless. But all that could be dealt with later; the spectre of a Chinese Siberia frightened the Canadians even more than

Russians did. Canada stretched out her hand to the RUS, and counted her fingers.

If anyone expected the Russians to make a big display of thanks for Canadian aid, he courted disappointment. The official line from Tass maintained that the ice-crusted Kazakhstan front held the key to western survival. The RUS Supreme Council no longer blustered in blunt ideological jargon terms for foreign audiences. The old words could be dusted off again after the war. The RUS relied instead on a partly genuine, partly spurious identification with the west, and backed the claim with a few gestures such as the Frisbees they exported for US deployment. Without question, the Frisbees had been a major factor in limiting the Indian-supplied invasion of Florida. Just as surely, that invasion was doomed anyway by the vulnerability of its supply lines. Its Latin American supply sources evaporated with the 'Libyan' nuke strikes on Latin American ports, and excepting the few supply submersibles India had punched through the gauntlet of Allied hunter-killer teams, the invaders were now on their own. Tampa Bay would hold.

A few nations were still seeking ways to turn a global atrocity into local profit. Neutral Sweden remembered her windfalls in World War II and sought to employ her merchant fleet as a pipeline for refugees. She could rake in the krona by providing safe floating platforms for those who could pay the price. Brazil, whose neutrality leaned toward the SinoInds, listened to the Swedes; thought she might slash her huge external debt by billions of cruzeiros; and magnanimously offered sanctuary to SinoInd refugees — prepaid in precious metal which Indians had in quantity.

But Argentina and Peru bordered Brazil, and had scarifying debts of their own. They promptly offered to accept Allied refugees for so many pesos and sols per head, whether they came by Swedish surface ships or waterwings. Brazil instantly reconsidered her offer. She needed high technology, not a prefabricated war. The Swedes sulked, and went on selling machine tools to both sides.

Yet America's most sharply-felt boundary was internal: the paranthrax quarantine line which ran up the Mississippi, then the Ohio, extending to Lake Erie via the Ohio state line. Early in February of 1997, the long-awaited vaccine was ready for airdrop, packaged as pressure-fed intramuscular injection ampoules for the millions of Americans in our eastern states. The first drops were made in Tampa and Orlando; the health of our swamp guerrillas was more immediately important than that of miners in West Virginia.

Americans knew, because the holo told them, that the quarantine would be lifted in time. But even the reassurances of Eve Simpson could not counter a suspicion that paranthrax spores might lie dormant for decades. Rumors among the well-informed suggested that the quarantine would stay in effect until every mammal in the US was vaccinated. Until then, it was said, quarantine-runners would be shot on sight. Even quintessential materiel like titanium from mines in New York and Virginia was refined and packaged hot, for hot shipment through Cincinnati. No one needed worry about any bug surviving a ride on that stuff.

The American west and midwest fared as well as could be expected, as reclamation teams cleared debris from city sites most vital to the war effort. Bakersfield had been a petroleum nexus and would be again; the burly oilfield workers learned new skills while revitalizing the city. Fresno, Lubbock, Wichita, and Des Moines were rapidly rebuilt into the agrarian centers they had been before. The first rolling stock into Lubbock's rail yards brought cultivation equipment to plant more Jojoba and variant Euphorbia than cotton. You could dress in cowhides if necessary, but you couldn't run the railroads on cottonseed oil. We did not expect vegetable oils to become a cheap mainstay. We could only hope they would fill the gaps in our production of oil from wells and Colorado shale.

Faced with widespread demolition of energy sources, President Collier gave a nod of the leonine head to fission reactors. Americans had learned to accept the pervasiveness of ionizing radiation; well then, they would learn to accept fission reactors again. Collier was initially heartened by the simultaneous revelations of a dozen LDS Apostles, all divinely guided to press for more reactors. God had not told anyone how they could be secretly built on short notice. Nor had the Deity hinted that nuclear reactors might become targets of gentiles who would view fission reactors as a symbol of a repressive theocracy. The President went ahead with a sense of disquiet. In the future, he felt, it might be wiser to keep these multiple revelations out of the eye of the gentile public. And for that, he would need more control of media.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

"Now you're being testy, Eve," said Rudolf Berg, one of NBN's senior VP's. "Some might even say unpatriotic."

Eve Simpson slid from the exercise machine, mopping her forehead as she glared from Berg to the beach far below. Wind currents from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles had not been kind in March. Eve missed her little outings, and somebody had to pay… "Brucie, get me a Drambuie."

"Calories, Eve," he clucked.

She would not look toward the mirror in the exercise room; she knew what it would tell her. Those extra few kilos were showing at her waist and chin. "A joint then," she raged. "A cup of hemlock, Bruce; something! Rudy here has Brigham-friggin' City on his brain!"

"I'm only thinking of the network and your future, Eve," said Berg. "You can't really expect the President to drop everything and come here."

"I'm becoming nothing more than an interviewer," she spat, then inhaled on the proffered filter-tip joint.

Berg met her anger with aplomb, a grey little man with sequined ideas. Even Professor Kelsey praised Berg's sensitivity to the public pulse. "You're playing a vital role as sugar-tit, Eve. Don't knock it. You have more credibility now than you ever had."

"I have more tit, you mean," she grumbled. “Is there no such thing as a low-calorie London broil?" She inhaled again; held it.

"Eat less, chase your young men more." Berg scratched his nose to hide his expression. “I should imagine there are enough studly young priests in Brigham City to please you."

"Salt Lake City's still hot," she accused, exhaling as if Berg himself had dropped the single nuke that exploded over North Temple Street.

"They'll take you around it, as you very well know. And the Gulf of Kutch invasion is really hot, Eve. Media hot." His tone said that the wheedling phase was over. Her irises said that the marijuana was taking effect. "It's the biggest positive step in this war, and you can get an exclusive from Yale Collier himself — but it won't wait. You 'll have to be on that shuttle in an hour or we go with Lindermann. And the President, I'm told, was looking forward to a chat with you beforehand."

Berg did know how to pull triggers. Eve despised the upstart Ynga Lindermann with her exotic accent and slender rump, whom NBN was surely grooming as a capital-P Personality. Berg knew, too, that Eve valued her tete-a-tetes with men of great power. She hoped that Berg would never guess how simply and directly that aura of power affected her sexually. Even spindly little Berg, when he was wheeling and dealing, made Evie itch.

Of course the idea of virile, farm-raised young Mormon men gave her a different itch; less deeply psychic, much easier to scratch. Also, the Gulf of Kutch affair was more than just prime time. It was a world series-super bowl-Oscar night parlay, and an exclusive summary with Collier was worth a seventy share of the public's attention. "Get wardrobe and makeup alerted," Eve sighed; "and remember, you owe me for this one."

Before she caught the hovership to the Lancaster shuttle, Eve managed a brief video call to her mentor, Kelsey. "You must evince genuine confidence in the church's infallibility," Kelsey counseled in his overblown academese that always made Eve feel like screaming. "Be deferential and dress demurely, and don't hold eye contact with him. The President knows you only as America's sweetheart; don't violate his expectations.

"Drop a few terms about demographics and sub rosa media alliances — just enought to dispel any idea that your youth is equivalent to political naivete. Ah, you might drop my name once. Not twice. Don't argue with anything he says. If the President is convinced you are in thrall to his charisma in your personal private session, this relationship could have an incipient importance far beyond your career at NBN."

"And you could pull strings through me, Doc," she teased. "Just between us, is the Kutch invasion really anything more than a snatch-and-grab raid for morale purposes?"

"Immensely more," he nodded, and switched off.

Eve grabbed the latest microfile on her way to the hover-ship, scanning press releases from ComCenPac in Hawaii. Kelsey had not exaggerated. An Allied airborne brigade dropped into Gujarat lowlands might, by itself, have been only a sacrifice move like the infamous old Dieppe raid — but not when joined by five American divisions sweeping in from the Arabian Sea, with more on the way.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Lieutenant Mills fingerprint-signed the latest dispatch and keyed it for transmission to stateside censors, having performed his own deft deletions on messages that referred, however vaguely, to Project Phillipus. Phillip n had fielded an enormous armada in 1588 A.D.; thanks to the upgraded

Israeli weapon, US/RUS Allies now had ghost armadas of any size we liked.

We had used the deception only once before, to disguise our Trident strikes on Latin American ports. This time the SinoInds might know the nature of the ruse, might find ways to penetrate it the next time. But this time Phillipus had sent waves of Indian interceptors eastward into the Bay of Bengal in search of an invasion force that did not exist beyond a token force. The real invasion had proceeded north from Diego Garcia into the Arabian Sea, then under its cloak of electronic invisibility to the Gulf of Kutch on India's western flank.

The thirty transmach transports, each lumbering up from Diego Garcia with upwards of an entire airborne company including weapons, had been the last force to leave the island and the first to cross Indian shores three hours before dawn on Sunday, 9 March. The scores of huge skirted hovercraft, prefabricated in Australia and sub-freighted as nested modules to the island, were even slower; had embarked for India the previous evening with their own attack choppers running as vanguard. Each craft carried its battalion, self-sufficient with antitank weapons, hoverchoppers, and rations for a week. After that it would be two intertwined wars in India; one of motorized infantry, the other of supply and interdiction. The Indians would depend more on eyesight, less on microwaves — and they didn't have to be geniuses to see our strategy.

Between India's heartland and Sulaiman, nee Pakistan, stretches the great Indian desert which runs north with the Indus River toward Kashmir. If unchecked, Allied hovercraft could swoop up from the Gulf of Kutch, over the Gujarat marshes, and to the very minarets of Lahore in scarcely five hours. Between Lahore and Kazakhstan lay one of the world's great desolations, an awesome series of snowclad mountain ranges. They had names: Karakoram, Pamir, Ladakh. No despot, no army, no form of life had ever conquered them in a thousand times a million years. Whether the US/RUS speared across passes into Tibet, sought passage through the Afghans to RUS territory, or simply sat tight, SinoInds would be cut off from the supplies they needed from the AIR 'neutrals'.

Supply would depend on air cover, and SinoInd forces had no aircraft that could fly rotor-to-rotor with RUS attack choppers developed after the Afghanistan lesson in the eighties. Even US high-tech loiter aircraft could not maneuver well with a rack of heat-seekers at ten-thousand-meter altitudes. RUS air cover could not conquer the Karakorum range, but it could macerate any large supply line trying to use those fastnesses as a conduit.

Suddenly China's thawing spring offensive in Kazakhstan developed more intensity along its southern boundary. She must wreck the Allied transAsian pincer movement at all costs. Her nuke-carved subterranean cavities in Tibet, full of AIR oil, now seemed less secure.

Given the Starlinger-Ahbez scenario, Chang Wei's response might have been expected. He raised the priority of the Ministry of Transport to speed the repair of routes between Szechuan and Tibet. Those routes would soon be choked with human materiel heading for the Tibetan frontier, for Chang would fight to his last Viet to save those oil reserves.

On Nühau, Boren Mills was both fortunate and canny. He was lucky in being so positioned that he, personally, had a need to know the uses of Kikepa Point as a Phillipus relay and perceiver station. Mills had known the airborne troops were Australians and New Zealanders; the seaborne troops were US Marines. He had known of the abort stations in Somalia, and of the two surface ships we sent to certain destruction in the Bay of Bengal.

Because he was a strategist, Mills began to consider a recurrence of searing headaches and double-vision. The Navy would be sending smart young officers to the coast and islands of the Arabian Sea, and Mills had no desire to place his hide where it could be perforated or irradiated by desperate Indians in what would inevitably become all-out suicide attacks to beggar the legends of Iwo Jima.

If the Gulf of Kutch operation was successful. The invasion was only hours old, and if satellite reports were any omen the Marines would face another kind of sea, a boiling bloody surf of Gujaratis and Rajas thanis, north of the coastal swamps. It would almost be a mirror image of the Florida invasion if several divisions of Allied troops were stopped south of the Indian desert.

One thing Mills could depend on because he knew it from a briefing. The Navy would emplace no Phillipus installations in a region subject to sudden capture by counterattack. And what, Mills asked himself more or less rhetorically, if the invasion faltered? Not a total failure; nothing as disastrous as all that. Something more like a momentarily crippling delay. India had failed to delay the invading Allies at the crucial moments before Aussies secured the Kutch beachhead only because Phillipus worked so well.

But Phillipus worked so well because it had been designed by outrageously creative Israelis, systematically modified by extremely orderly Americans skilled in systems management. The perceivers and relays were triplicated so that if one failed, others went on-line instantly. No, argued the Mills alter ego — rhetorically, of course — a crippling 'accidental' failure of the system could not even be surrogated. A truly systemic failure would have to be so exactly triplicated that, eventually, it would be identified as deliberate. Therefore, anybody who tampered with the Phillipus system should leave a subtle trail that would lead to someone else.

Mills knew how to lie to himself. It was just another hypothetical case for his scholarly managerial mind, he mused; if worst came to worse, he could always suffer a relapse from the Wisconsin burrow-bomb, and spend a few weeks recuperating. Someone else — someone like Jon Fowler, the damned circuit designer who was almost certain to be promoted over Mills because two of Fowler's Phillipus refinements quickened the relay response — someone else would be posted to Diego Garcia, or to Jamnagar.

Four days later, elements of the American Sixth Army pushed beyond the coastal lowlands into Rajasthan despite fiendish resistance by ill-equipped, incredibly tenacious Indian regulars. Our Asian foothold seemed secure.

Mills felt insecure. By the most delicate of discreet inquiries he had learned an unpleasant tactical reality about his project, Phillipus. So crucial was its progress, so secret its existence, that personnel in positions like his came under psychiatric scrutiny as a matter of course. Any failure, or suspicion of it, within his cranium would automatically result in his reposting to some forgotten supply depot in, say, central Australia. That might not have been so bad, but under those circumstances the reposting was tantamount to being permanently passed over; sequestered from any possibility of advancement. Such a stigma usually followed its victim into civilian life.

Mills had already decided that after the final curtain of this war he would perform on corporate stages; knew the importance of an outstanding record in reaching the top echelons where military, industrial, and political officers shared first names and villas. Boren Mills could not afford to avoid an Asiatic duty station by claiming a cross-threaded screw upstairs.

It seemed to Mills as though he might develop other plans.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Latinos, thought Quantrill, sought variety in their accents. He had flogged his way through Crypto and Psych, Poly Sci and Cover courses by sheer doggedness, but he feared that Linguistics would boil his brains before the end of March.

"No, Quantrill; slur it and slow it," said Karen Smetana, whose fortyish but still evil little body contrived to distract her students. "In Mexico, only urbanites pick up the tempo — but never as upbeat as Puerto Ricans. Try it again — not so crisp on the rolled 'r', please."

And again. And again. "I'm not getting any better, Smetana," he said. "I'd always be spotted by a local."

"You're already better. And you aren't supposed to pass yourself off as a local; you can't develop deep cover on a week-long assignment. Be glad you took high-school Spanish instead of French, idiot! Would you rather spend a week in Cuernavaca sunshine, or Quebec?"

"She's got a point," smiled Goldhaber to the grumbling Quantrill.

"And you've got a long way to go to pass as njudio from Ciudad Mejico," Smetana reminded Goldhaber.

"Practiced all my life to outgrow Miami pawnshop intonations, and this yentzer wants to give me one from Mexico City."

"You just be glad I don't know what ayentzer is," said the linguist primly. “And don't avoid your strengths. Wherever there's a Jewish community," Smetana punctuated it with a fingerwag, "you'll have something going for you that Zachary or Quantrill would need years to learn. In T Section we don't train you all alike. That's one way a good counter-agent might spot you; most agencies leave indelible marks on an agent's behavior. We want each of you unique. No agency pattern, especially linguistic."

"They'd find a pattern damn' fast if they captured us," Goldhaber cracked. Smetana merely shrugged; his insinuation touched a sore spot.

Most trainees quickly accepted appendectomies, dental and cosmetic surgery, and in a few cases glandular adjustments which had been made without their permission prior to their arrival at San Simeon. They found it harder to accept the mastoid-implanted radio, for a variety of reasons. They had not been consulted; it was a foreign entity, an alien presence in one's head; and as long as the implant resided within the porous mastoid cells, its bearer was subject to audio monitoring twenty-four hours a day. No wonder, then, Control hadn't worried that a trainee might go AWOL.

Some trainees, including Quantrill, shrugged the implant off as an unavoidable necessity. Some, like Goldhaber, re sented it from the first day they were made aware of it in Control class. The tiny device was powered by an energy cell which could be recharged without an incision. The audio transmitter permitted its owner to hear instructions relayed from twenty klicks away, but which were wholly inaudible to a bystander. Its receiver allowed Control to hear every word uttered by a gunsel. At its current state of the art, the receiver could not pick up external noises with much fidelity. It had taken Goldhaber less than a day to 'borrow' an illustrated dictionary from the musty Hearst library. He knew better than to ask Smetana or his carrel about the manual alphabet.

By mid-March, most of the trainees could damn an instructor or a weak cup of coffee among themselves in sign language, and kept it secret as a harmless joke on the system. Lacking instruction in the short-hand forms, they developed some of their own, including facial movement. Quantrill had little time for this casual byplay, fighting hard to overcome several years' disadvantage in schooling — Ethridge, for example, was a college graduate. But Quantrill found he'd much rather read the lips of Marbrye Sanger than those of Simon Goldhaber.

It was Goldhaber, though, who gave their mastoid implant a label. “It lets Control criticize you; a critic of the toughest kind," Goldhaber signed one evening as he and Quantrill jogged an undulating trail two klicks from San Simeon.

Quantrill had trouble reading hands while jogging. “Let's walk awhile," he said, slowing. "Who d'you think Control is? Howell? Smetana?"

Goldhaber, breathing in time with footfalls, practicing silent movement: "These damned sweatsuits make too much noise." Signing:” I suspect Control is some colonel in Intelligence, maybe at Hunter-Liggett, running us by computer."

"By himself?"

Aloud, Goldhaber snorted. Signing, he said, "Not when we go on solo assignments, stupid. Too many decisions for one man, and I don't think they'd let a computer terminate a gunsel without human endorsement."

Quantrill stared hard at the lank Goldhaber. They had been told that, if captured and tortured, a gunsel could ask for instructions on a yet-unspecified means to suicide. Quantrill supposed it involved crushing a subcutaneous capsule; had already checked himself for such an implant, and mistakenly believed that a lymph node in his left armpit was really a termination cap. "But termination is up to me," he signed.

Staring back, one eyebrow lifted: "Naive. How many grams of TNT do they need in your ear? You don't pull your plug. Control does."

Quantrill, in forlorn hope: "But I ask for it first."

"Grow up, Q. It's the ultimate control — invisible, absolute. Now you know why I hate this goddam critic in my head."

Quantrill began to lope then, avoiding Goldhaber's argumentative hands. By now he knew that his and Sanger's critics had followed their dialogue during their first meeting. So long as he did nothing for which he should feel shame, that omnipresent sexless other voice in his head would be a powerful ally — or so he had decided. He did not thank Goldhaber for suggesting that his implanted critic could kill him out of hand.

Simon Goldhaber's guess had missed only in detail. The plastique encapsulated in his mastoid was a shaped charge which, on command, vaporized the transceiver and was so oriented as to drive a white-hot spike of debris into the brain. The faceless theorists of Control in Ft. Ord did not worry too much that a trainee might desert T Section, nor that a graduate gunsel might be turned to the other side. The critic relay function could be managed by personnel of another agency, or if necessary by an aircraft co-opted by Control. Control could even terminate an agent by satellite, given an approximate location of the agent. The critic was not quite foolproof, but near enough; and no part of a gunsel's training told trainees how to build a Faraday cage.

The two joggers neared the castle promontory with its challenging uphill portion. "For Christ's sake slow down," Goldhaber called ahead. "You think Sanger's watching, or are you just trying to kill us both?"

Stung by this reference to the svelte Sanger, Quantrill forgot himself. “Why not? You said Control might blow me away anyhow," he called back. Then he stopped; turned. Goldhaber stood, eyes wide in horror, breathing hard, both hands pressed over his ears as if to protect him from some lethal signal.

Quantrill's hands gestured helplessly. "Sorry; sorry," they fluttered, as Goldhaber trotted past him with a stony glance. Of course there was no assurance that Control was monitoring, or that a monitor would make anything of Quantrill's angry shout. Quantrill told himself as much a few weeks later after Goldhaber disappeared.

Chapter Sixty

Mason Reardon was an eminently forgettable figure; medium age, medium height, weight, nondescript face and manner. When you described Reardon you were describing anybody, hence nobody. Old successes in surveillance made Reardon an expert on how to be a Reardon. On April 2 his night class was a class of one.

"You're letter-perfect on your cover, Quantrill," he mused, "and I watched you tail Cross like an old hand through that mob of tourists today. When Marty Cross says you'll do, you're good. So what's eating you? Afraid you'll choke on your first assignment?"

Quantrill said nothing. His face was denial enough.

"Can't be buck fever; your record shows you've iced two or three people already, and even managed to hide some of it 'til you were under sedation. That takes coolth," Reardon said, savoring that last word like a rarely-indulged sweetmeat, and then took away the gas-pen. Quantrill had been turning it over, again and again, in his hands. "Is it this?" Reardon held the innocent little pen up for display. “It really writes. Its pressure cylinder dissolves in a pond or a toilet tank. Lasser tells me you can zap a fly with it. And two minutes after your mark gets a faceful of spray, he'll show no symptoms but classic heart failure. But it's scheduled for Saturday the fifth, which means you leave here tomorrow, and I'm not clearing you 'til I think you're ready."

"I've memorized the whole campus layout, and the Army annex dorm floor plan. I'm ready."

"You're not. Look, I've even told you this bastard Fowler was nailed while sabotaging a supply fleet that cost us a lot of men — not once, but twice! Naval Intelligence is dead certain it's Lt. Fowler. The only reason they're not icing him themselves is that Fowler's in Corvallis for a tri-service seminar, and the Army's running it.

"What more do you want for reassurance, Quantrill? I assure you, you won't get nursemaided like this when you graduate." Reardon waited in vain for Quantrill to meet his gaze. "I'm tired of guessing — unless you're spooked about your return route."

"Damn" right," Quantrill blurted, the green eyes a sullen flash. "Why didn't Goldhaber get back?"

"Ah. So that's it." Reardon handed the little weapon back, sat down facing Quantrill, inspected his own cuticles. "I've heard the rumor. All I know is that he drew an early assignment, and blew it. Maybe he was tortured by those religious fanatics in Flagstaff and asked for termination. Maybe he's still alive; they didn't tell us. You know your implant — what do you guys call it, a critic? Your critic can't help you if you're trussed up in a cave somewhere."

"So far as I'm concerned," Quantrill snapped, "my critic's some guy with a World Almanac and a monorail timetable who won't know shit about what I'm up against or how I'm feeling about it. All I want from you is a promise that Control will leave me the fuck alone as long as I'm doing the job."

Now Reardon had his anonymous face on: emotionless, impersonal, a system automaton. It occured to Quantrill Reardon might be repeating something he was receiving from a critic of his own. "You have my solemn pledge that Control will not interfere with you unless you ask for it."

"Good enough." Quantrill pocketed the weapon. “Now, where's my ticket to Corvallis?"

Mason Reardon managed a convincing smile, patted his trainee's shoulder, and pronounced himself satisfied now that Quantrill himself seemed satisfied.

The following day, Quantrill flew by Military Airlift Service to Salem, Oregon. Clouds masked much of the desolation below, but he spotted Sacramento through a rift of cumulus. He saw some activity at the docks. For the most part, the city seemed an ages-dead ruin that might have been exposed by shifting dunes that day. What blast effects from the two air bursts had not accomplished, the overlapping firestorms had. The collapsed freeway overpasses had, at least, been cleared. A pattern of faint smudges from survivor hearthfires ringed the rubble-choked city center. It might have been Raleigh, he thought, and steered his mind forward. The Mormons might be able to counter destruction with rebirth; was there any paradox in T Section's development of human weapons, to counter with more destruction?

Quantrill, wearing dark body stain and false gold caps on his teeth, excited no one's interest. His scalp felt tight under the longish tight-fitting black wig. As Vitorio Sanchez, a part-time student and dormitory custodian, he had good reason for the master ID plate in his pocket. He also had an assignment to terminate Lt. Jon Fowler somewhere on the campus of Oregon State University.

'Sanchez' hauled his bulky bag from the Corvallis monorail, located Western Boulevard in a light drizzle, and used one of his tokens on the automated shuttle to the campus, pleased that his briefing had been so thorough. The nearer the shuttle came to the campus, the more variety he saw in foliage — and the more he saw of a familiar color combination. Either Oregon State's colors were orange and black, or Corvallis celebrated Halloween in April.

He walked in gathering dusk beneath huge dripping conifers from Thirtieth to the modular annex dorms, located the garbage recycling area, trudged behind the dorm annex with shoulders slumped. His fingertip masks were tight even with rain trickling down from his wrists. He pulled a tab on the bag, watched a long jagged rip extend along old seams, drew the antistatic vacuum cleaner from the bag's remains and stuffed the bag into a recycling container. No one would be saving such an article now, even by happenstance.

His entry to the Army dorm annex was merely a matter of offering his ID plate to the door slot and keeping a lugubrious face turned toward his brogans as he passed a trio of young Army officers. The vacuum cleaner unpersoned him, and provided a stash for his change of identity. He turned toward the stairwell that would lead to 'his' room — vacated the previous day by a man in Army Intelligence — and then continued his lackluster pace beyond it as the two Naval officers brushed past.

"… See whether Oregon State coeds are really berserk over uniforms," the taller one was saying.

The other was compact, aquiline-nosed, with a receding vee of dark hair and thick dark brows. "Ah, Jon, always the researcher," he replied softly, glancing at the shabby janitor, holding the sleeve of his dress whites aloof. The lieutenants paused at the entrance to curse the rain, and to don filmy ponchos while Quantrill knelt to pry at an ancient blob of chewing gum in the carpet. A moment later he heard the voices attenuate; hurried back down the stairwell and breathed a long exhalation as his ID plate triggered the door slider.

The room was still furnished. Under a crucifix, the twin-sized bed was unmade. Quantrill sat on it, held up one darkened hand, grinned lamely. The hand wasn't trembling, but he felt as if it should be. The dapper little man with thicket eyebrows might pose a problem, because he obviously knew the tall lantern-jawed officer by name. 'Sanchez' had not needed to hear that name; he'd recognized Lt. Jon Fowler instantly.

And craved his death in that instant. It was cruel sport to meet your enemy the minute you set foot on his turf, like the flaunting of some trophy, and to find that you could not reach out and take it. Quantrill knew that his quarry had a midnight curfew; knew that he slept alone; knew even the position of the bed in which Fowler would lie. He could not know that in icing Fowler he would be compounding an error of Naval Intelligence.

Nor could Jon Fowler assist in setting the record straight. He had a pristine conscience and no idea that he had been isolated, mistakenly, as the Project Phillipus saboteur. By Navy reckoning Fowler was the only man who could have insinuated the subroutines that had twice allowed SinoInd fighter-bombers to destroy Allied supply ships. The Allied presence in India was still not secure, the Mills strategy still undetected.

Quantrill shook the folds from his change of clothing, reassembled the antistatic cleaner, checked the blackout drapes and switched on the wall holo, his alarm set for One AM. Had he chosen, he could have had an alarm sent directly into his head. Yet he did not want that assistance. He wanted to listen to the rain, and to watch Eve Simpson's nightly cameo.

Mason Reardon's promise haunted him like an echo. Maybe Control would interfere only if a gunsel asked for it — but now Quantrill felt sure the cynical Goldhaber had been right.

There were several ways you could ask for it.

Chapter Sixty-One

Quantrill did not sleep. Faint vibrations spoke of late arrivals in the dorm, of spirited military scholars enjoying a brief return to a university campus. The holo spoke and postured of success. Success against paranthrax; in Kazakhstan; in Gujarat; and as always, the heroes of the day were dubbed 'saints'.

Lt. Boren Mills did not sleep either. He had found Oregon coeds with Fowler, but unlike Fowler he'd found them too old, had excused himself early in favor of a cram session in his own room on the floor above Quantrill's. Mills took intellectual delight in applying his notes on linear servo systems to social systems. He paid special attention to the optimal control of human elements in the social circuits of industry.

To Mills, Phillipus was only one step in his progress toward a society of rational control, by the few rational people destined to exert that control. Mills was not disturbed by tile deaths he had caused in the Arabian Sea; he viewed one mighty will, his own, as infinitely more valuable than a thousand lesser wills. Had Friedrich Nietzsche not existed, Mills would have invented him.

For a time Mills had studied the structure of Mormonism, certain that his rise to prominence in a postwar economy would proceed best through that circuit. Now he saw it as a subsystem to be controlled from outside if at all. The LDS simply was not constructed to let a late convert rise to pinnacles of prophet or seer. But among the corporate bodies that might exert outside influence on a theocracy, only one had an open channel by which a brilliant manager might float quickly to the top: media.

Mills put away his notes and watched Eve Simpson. He heard Jon Fowler enter the room across the hall and hoped he'd struck out; Fowler had already enjoyed too much success.

An hour later, Mills was roused from nodding by a faint noise; the sound of a door sliding shut. His holo was on. Still half asleep, Mills decided the noise was from the holo.

Quantrill tingled with anticipation as Fowler's door slid open, keyed by his master plate. If Fowler were still awake, Quantrill would peer at the scribble on his note pad, apologize in soft sibilant accents, claim he had a message for Lt. Fowler as he moved near.

The room was dark, but Fowler's sleep was shallow. As the door slid open, Quantrill saw the form sprawled in bed, stepped through the portal, waved it shut again while memorizing placement of the two chairs and the shoes on the floor. Once more in darkness, he moved silently past the built-in carrel to the opposite end of the room. His own clothing was of low-friction fabric and made little sound. But sheets and blankets, suddenly thrust aside, make their own audio signatures.

"Who's'at?" The light over Fowler's bed winked on, Fowler blinking tousel-headed toward the door. He saw only innocent disarray ahead, did not immediately glance behind him.

The canny Marty Cross had taught Quantrill well. By remaining absolutely still, Quantrill managed to extend the moment to what, subjectively, was almost a geologic era.

Quantrill could not have expressed his need for this first sanctioned kill with words, nor his joy in its approach with song. Here in this moment he could face the specters of slain parents, of friends murdered by panic and by casual bestiality, without apology for his own survival. Here was irresistible justice come to face immovable evil. In his mind, Quantrill had created deaths of Byzantine complexity to fit crimes beyond understanding — but the teachings of Sabado and Lasser urged a quick, clean kill.

Quantrill could not afford to savor the confrontation longer than it took to make identification certain. When he saw Fowler's face, he would fire the gas pen. In the endless heartbeat before that, he was a silent demon of entropy who waited to unwind the clockspring of Fowler's universe, the better to celebrate its last anechoic tick.

Fowler's head snapped around.

The grey mist met him full in the face, his assailant only a blur that muffled him in his bedclothes before he could shout. Quantrill fought to hold Fowler's wrists through the coverlet, lying atop his writhing quarry to prevent signs of violence, waiting out the first ten seconds of Fowler's death struggle. After that, Lasser had assured him, his problem would be over.

But Lasser had not dwelt overmuch on the mechanism of a dying human system, and Quantrill was moved to sorrow by the thin despairing wheeze as the innocent Fowler fought for oxygen he would never use. To Quantrill it seemed that the word, 'Why?' punctuated each gasp.

"You know why," Quantrill muttered, and fought his pity as well.

When the shudder subsided, Quantrill risked a glance at Fowler's fingernails, saw that they were slate-grey. Then he scurried to the half-bath, flushed the pressure cylinder away, remembered Reardon's dictum that every new instant may bring discovery. A cover story perfect at time one might not work at time two. Quantrill took the fifty dollar bill from his pocket, palmed it. He glanced again toward the thing on the bed, turned out the light, damned his sorrow as weakness, listened at the door before sliding it open to the hall. He heard nothing because Mills had slid his own door open while Fowler's toilet flushed and was still standing there, wondering if Fowler was out after curfew, wondering what use he might make of the fact.

Quantrill slid the door open, found himself staring into a familiar face under a vee of short hair with eyes that stared back unwinking under heavy level brows. He mastered the impulse to attack, essayed a sad little flash of gold teeth. “He said he would be nice to me," Quantrill almost whispered, and let the banknote show as he stuffed it into his pocket. "But he was not nice. Me, I think he is sick." He waited until the door slid shut behind him, slouching as if contrite, dropping his eyes, then shuffling away to the stairwell. The witness had said nothing, but had changed everything. Quantrill knew he must not look back.

Mills almost smiled at the retreating youth. This was a datum worth remembering, he thought; a slice of Fowler's life that Mills had never suspected. There had to be a touch of the sadist in Fowler, too; those had been real tears in the eyes of the little latino.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Sandys jurnal Ap 5 Sat.

Chapter Sixty-Three

Because Quantrill could not know that Mills had bought the charade, he could not risk staying in the room until dawn. He ran the wig and custodian's clothing through the vacuum cleaner's macerator, pried off the gold caps and removed the contact lenses, washed the pigment from his brows; flushed the debris away in several stages. He almost forgot to swallow the fingerprint masks and strip away the filmy covers that had transformed expensive low-quarter shoes into cheap brogans, but the shredded covers went down the tube as well. He kept the master ID plate in case he had to flee into some other campus building.

Ten minutes later, he exited the basement room leaving only an antistatic vacuum cleaner behind; a sturdy blond youth whose ready cash took him back to Salem on the two AM interurban. En route, he delaminated the ID plate and abraded its card to powder underfoot.

Finally in Salem he allowed himself to contact Control. "Tau Sector, Tau Sector," he intoned, and waited. The voiceprint, the staggered frequency, and the key phrase all had to match.

Somewhere in Salem the freq. pattern triggered a relay. Somewhere in Ft. Ord the key phrase alerted a sleepy major in Control. From the unique voiceprint ConCom, the electronic part of Control's gestalt mind, identified the gunsel, Quantrill. By far the longest part of the process was the major's yawn before replying.

The major's voice was processed into the epicene contralto a gunsel was trained to recognize. Implanted critics had been known to pick up bits of stray messages. No human voice, not even castrati, sounded quite like Control's, so that no gunsel would be fooled by accident or countermeasure.

It had not escaped T Section's notice that by reprocessing every Control voice into the same voice, ConCom further removed the element of human contact from a gunsel's work. It was, in several ways, inhuman — which pleased Control immensely.

"Your program is running," said Control. Always that acceptance phrase, or back to square one.

"Message delivered, Control. Am I clean?"

"Wait one, Q." The long pause gave the major time to key vital data on his display, then to query the automatic event analyzers that monitored military and civilian agencies in Corvallis, Oregon. There was no homicide bulletin or APB on anyone matching the description of Ted Quantrill. “You're clean," Control reported, "and on the carpet. "So, he could fly back to San Luis Obispo. Other key phrases would have sent the gunsel to a safe site, or to one of the transient camps that now stretched along railway right-of-ways near some cities.

Quantrill acknowledged the flying carpet sanction and, with a mixed bag of passengers, caught a flight from Salem before noon on Sunday. By that time Lt. Jon Fowler's body had been discovered. His death was attributed to heart failure, possibly induced by an early-hours encounter reported by another Naval officer. Boren Mills felt certain it had been a sexual encounter but craftily refused to say so. He thought it wise to leave room for the inference that Fowler might have harbored other secrets. His young visitor, said Mills, had been a foreigner.

Mills did not waste much time gloating over his good fortune in Fowler's death. During the last days of the seminar Mills grew enthusiastic over its subject, which was the refinement of optimal control theory for Project Phillipus. Mills spent much of his spare time with media theorists across the campus, catching up on the academic fads and jargon that had penetrated their field since his last courses at Annenberg. Mills did not discuss the paper he was preparing for two reasons. First, he did not want anyone else writing scholarly papers on the application of optimal control theory to propaganda. And second because he intended to have his own paper protected by the highest security classification he could wangle. It was Mills's intent to submit his paper to the Navy's Office of Public Information. If he could get all such papers classified, he would not have to cope with many rivals. Wiener, Shannon, and Weaver had failed to protect their pre-eminences in information theory after World War II — that is to say, not one of them became a billionaire. Instead, they had spread their new discipline as broadly as possible.

This, to Mills, was plain foolishness. The longer he could cover his arse in his specialty, the faster he might climb to rarefied regions in media. With keenly intelligent planning and a little luck, Mills might exert more influence over his repostings now. One thing he could never do again was to repeat his cunning Phillipus sabotage which, he was sure, would sooner or later be traced to his dead rival, Fowler. Not only was sabotage a personal risk; Mills also felt a mild patriotic fervor. The US/RUS Allies had to win if Boren Mills was to soar triumphant above American business.

From recent reports, the Allies were having a bitch of a time just holding their own.

Chapter Sixty-Four

As the Kazakhstan front warmed up in April, it became clearer to Yale Collier's chiefs of staff that RUS troops and supplies would not be forthcoming in western India. Burnt hulks of RUS cargo aircraft dotted the sandy plain of Iran and the sere Afghan mountain ranges, mute testimony that the RUS had made a genuine run at it. Emboldened by American success with Project Phillipus, the Allies had gambled that they could get away with overflights above AIR neutrals that leaned toward the SinoInds. But SinoInd interceptors lay in wait at places like Kabul, Ashkhabad, and Isfahan, relying on visual intercept and Indian pilots flying the colors of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan. The ill will sown by the pre-1985 USSR had grown into a bitter harvest, urged on by every mullah and tariqat of the AIR.

In Latin America it was the Catholics who stirred up pro-Axis sentiment. We could not maintain military bases in the West Indies any more than we could in Chile, Brazil, or Panama. The genuine neutrality of Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia was due largely to the same general factors that caused Africa's western and southern countries to stay neutral. They might resent Industrialized Allied wealth, but they feared the fanaticism of their pro-Axis neighbors.

Mexico and the northwestern countries of South America, at least, remained pro-Allies. Thanks to their oil and other developed resources, they had bought enough arms to quiet their fears. Venezuela might be OPEC, but she was not Islamic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Sixty-Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandys jurnal May 18 Sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Sixty-Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Sixty-Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanger told herself that what she had was enough.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

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

Even when the RUS brought in the fast-scudding armored ACV's to change the rules on him, young Liang reacted quickly, bagged an even dozen. His new conversion tables accommodated the quick lateral capability of an ACV, permitted his battalion to survive the RUS onslaught where others failed, added a deferential note to his unit's phrase 'Xiao Liang'—young Liang. Now, for the first time, he wondered if he would live to be called 'Lao Liang', old Liang. Liang counted the remaining HEAT warheads, wondering when he would see more.

It wasn't just the ferocity of the previous winter, though frostbite had scalloped Liang's ears. Nor the long desperate footsore march to meet the American Fifth Army which had been hurled against the southern face of the Kazakhstan front in the spring. Even the dwindling of supplies and the rumors of a hellish disease to the rear had not, in themselves, sapped the patriotic juices that once surged through Liang Chen. What drained him most was unitary breakdown.

Liang was feeling the surface of a tumor in the military corpus of China. When the supply of antitank missiles was exhausted, Liang's unit melded with a mortar company. When the food ran out, the forty per cent of his company who could still fight managed to attach themselves to a retreating regimental supply group near Birlik, fighting off American air sorties with small arms fire and a few shoulder-fired SAM's.

And when the first of the infected front-line officers began to don dark glasses to hide the signs of that infection, Liang shrugged it off. The CPA would take care of its own, he thought. But units could not prosper when unitary leaders spread horror.

For it was the field-grade officers who first brought plague to the front, men whose duties required round-trips far back into Tsinghai and Sinkiang, men whose necessary contacts meant contact with what Allied medics had labeled Keratophagic Staph. The disease progressed in a human host, and spread to others, with ghastly dispatch.

Liang Chen's devotion to battle kept him from early contact with the ravages of plague. Not until he heeded the call for retreat north of Alma Ata did Liang, gripping his perch on an ancient halftrack, see undeniable evidence that all units, on every level, were breaking down in panic. He saw a red-eyed captain submachinegunned by his own men who cowered more fearful of his corpse than he had been of their weapons. He saw others refuse to join new units, terrified that new unitary contact might chew their faces away. Finally he ripped a patch from a discarded battle jacket, affixed it to his own, and carried off his imposture as a corporal of a Political Solidarity detachment. No one cared much to fraternize with those zealots, and Liang could face down a major with his sham. Meanwhile he made his way back toward Sinkiang alone to find some unit worthy of membership.

The farther he went eastward past Ining, the more desolation he found. Not death, but desolation. Units were becoming crowds of blind men, led to food and shelter by sighted men who might not be sighted for long.

Liang knew intellectually how vast the world was. He knew in his guts that somewhere in it lay safety, and he knew positively that he was developing a cold. Or something. Liang turned north and set Mongolia as his goal. With no unit, no challenge by frightened guards as he pedaled his stolen bicycle toward Ara Tarn, Liang blew roadside dust from his nostrils, wiped a sleeve across his nose. Presently a command car hurtled past, going in his direction; probably, he thought, with the same goal. Liang cursed the dust of its passage, blinked, wiped his sleeve across his eyes.

That night Liang Chen holed up far off the road where the bike would not tempt others. He had no food and he worried about that. His fever was worse and his eyes itched so that he found himself rubbing them; but this did not worry him much.

What worried Liang more was the sight of his fingernails, late the next day, as he pedaled near exhaustion toward a deserted village. He allowed himself to coast, stared at his left thumbnail, saw its edge receding from the cuticle as though eaten by some subtle acid. Truly, it did not hurt much. Neither did his eyes. The damnable pounding headache and the blurred vision bothered him more.

And then he passed the abandoned truck, saw for an instant the face of a soldier with scarlet eyes and runnels of pus down his cheeks; a face not of the dying, but of the damned. The truck had been deserted; he had glanced into a rearview mirror. Liang Chen sat down by the road and waited for the unending dark.

Some of Minister Cha Tsuni's records went up with his lab; others were deliberately erased. We may never know whether Staphylococcus rosacea was a DNA-tailored bacillus, a spontaneous strain, or one induced by radiation. Like 5. aureus, S. rosacea thrived asymptomatically in the human nose, so human carriers spread the stuff with every exhalation. But also like other staph, 5. rosacea was not fastidious and could live in a wide range of temperatures, with or without oxygen. Thus the bug could live on airborne dust motes and wait to invade lungs, blood, organs. The best defense was solitude; 5. rosacea did not travel well without a host.

Once entrenched in a host, the new bacillus released toxins that could lead to pneumonia, meningitis, huge suppurating carbuncles, and septicemia — all potentially lethal if untreated. But S. rosacea set itself apart from older staph varieties in two ways. It was highly resistant even to the potent, problematical vancomycin. And it had a horrifying affinity for keratinous tissue, especially the saline-washed transparent anterior covering of the eye. In plain language, while inflaming surrounding tissue it consumed the cornea, characteristically staining the victim's cheeks with a stain of yellow pus as it prospered and devoured.

Typically a victim would breathe the bacilli, or airborne staph might invade an open wound. While the disease progressed into pneumonia or a toxin-filled bloodstream the victim became listless, often feverish. He would almost certainly place contaminated hands near his eyes, or walk through his own exhalations.

Either way, the eyes had it. S. rosacea flourished in the salt tears, eating away the cornea and, to lesser effect, into the nails of fingers and toes. Treatment was at first a matter of administering exactly enough of a powerful antibiotic to quell the bug without generating serious side effects, e.g., renal failure, to kill the patient. This knife-edged balance required constant monitoring and considerable skill by trained medics and, given that edge, only thirty per cent of 5. rosacea victims died. But ninety per cent of the survivors would be sightless after the disease had run its full course.

The demoralizing effect of a disease that turned one's eyes into pus receptacles and was highly communicable, would be hard to overestimate. Faced with the specter of a future full of blind men, even sighted survivors often chose desertion or suicide.

The Chinese plague was over a month old before the Allies realized its full pandemic potential and sought a true cure as a blue ribbon top priority. Its horrifying symptoms generated panic far greater than paranthrax ever had, and China thought to share that panic with her enemies. She arranged to cloister a few victims, all palpably learned technical people, in a setting where they would be captured. Since it takes a scientist to adequately interview a scientist, Chang Wei hoped that those few victims might pass the epidemic along from the top.

But those were prisoners the Allies did not choose to take. Horrifying problems engender horrifying solutions; the RUS pulled back, detonated one last Wall of Lenin that demarcated a zone of lifelessness. While fifty thousand SinoInd troops perished in the neutron spray, so did ten thousand of ours, including a Canadian armored regiment and two battalions of American infantry. The Fifth US Army bitterly resented this misuse of 'friendly fire', but did not retaliate. Canada reserved her retaliation.

Then came a signal of utter determination that Chang and Casimiro could not ignore. In an unprecedented burst of candor, the US/RUS Allies sent an open message to the SinoInd Axis listing over fifty locations. At the first sign of deliberate dispersal of the hideous 5. rosacea, we would hit those locations with our cultures of the same stuff, and more.

The Allies roamed orbital space at will now. The threat was highly public, and stupefying. The locations list covered all of the most highly populated regions of the SinoInd Axis: sites in eastern Szechuan, Kiang Su, Hopeh; in Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab, Bangladesh; in the Red and Mekong deltas; near Surabaja and Makasar.

Because the Allies were better stocked with antibiotics and medical staff, and because their civilian populations were better equipped to take their own hygienic measures, the SinoInd pundits abandoned their plans to mount a global series of dispersal raids. Instead, they turned their attention to defensive measures.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

On receipt of the scholarly paper of Lt. Boren Mills, the Navy's Office of Public Information automatically granted it a 'Confidential' classification. Mills instantly pointed out to Naval Intelligence that the paper had been misclassified, and earned himself a ten-minute interview with a bored commander on Oahu whose eyes were not so sleepy two minutes into the discussion. “You can optimize a persuasive message to an Arms Appropriations Committee," Mills pointed out, "just as you can to the public."

The commander took Mills to lunch that balmy day in June and, when affixing his endorsement to the 'Top Secret" reclassification, phrased his recommendations carefully. His phrasing implied that he, the commander, had immediately seen applications of the Mills paper that Mills himself had — perhaps — missed. While achievement is nontransferable, the image of achievement can be transferred. This is the one towering secret of management, and the commander managed nicely.

It was while Mills awaited notice from higher echelons that the tiny submarine washed into the coral off Lehua. The islet of Lehua lies in plain sight of Nühau, one of the many small jewels of the Hawaiian chain that most haoles ignore. Mills had seen it many times. It did not seem likely to offer much in the way of entertainment and, when two Radiomen Third Class returned from a fishing jaunt with the news, Mills tended at first to ignore it.

But the stubby little craft bore Chinese markings, the two ratings insisted, and had all the earmarks of an unexamined derelict. Mills had seen the orders pertaining to the strange assortment of debris that had been washing ashore in Hawaii during the past month. He grumbled. And then he organized the small patrol that was to change his life.

Mills and four ratings brought their inflatable ACV to the site of the beached sub at low tide, circling twice before making fast to a hatch fairing hardly larger than a manhole cover. The polymer hull showed bright coral gashes through gray-green paint.

Radioman Kimball Norton, without much enthusiasm, opened the hatch while one of his fellows stood by with a carbine. Mills, his knuckles white on his carbine, caught the faint smell of decay as Norton stepped back with a grimace. "Anyone alive?"

"Doesn't smell like it, Sir," Norton called back.

"Lob a pacifier grenade in," Mills ordered. "It'll clear the air for you down there."

Norton caught the implication. Mills was perfectly sanguine about ordering a man down that black hole and if he was going to have to do it anyhow, Kim Norton would rather not flaunt his reluctance. He jerked the poptop from the grenade and tossed it down the hole.

The only response was the paperbag 'thwock' of the grenade. After ten minutes, Norton saw the lieutenant's eye stray to his watch. "Permission to go below, Sir?"

"Granted," said Mills. Norton was the kind of man who understood the chain of command, and his status as flail at the end of it; and this, Mills appreciated. Perhaps he would do something for Norton.

They all heard the "Jee-zas," and the clang of a dropped chemlamp, and two ratings took Norton under the arms to quicken his already sprightly exit. There was nobody alive down there, said Norton, coughing. There were over a dozen deaders there in plastic capsules, though. They were in uniform and looked oriental.

Mills waited longer for the finely-divided grenade solids to precipitate; donned SCUBA gear with a prayer of thanks to reservist training he had once cursed; made an external survey of the little Chinese sub.

It had the look of an enormous toy, cheaply mass-produced, and it had no propeller at all. The thing had evidently been powered by the tiny reaction engine at its rear. Though no engineer, Boren Mills knew that this was an unlikely candidate for propulsion. Before surfacing, Mills was aware that this minuscule warship held important information.

He changed again into his uniform, replenished by its authority, and took a second chemlamp. By now the grenade's chemicals were only a tickle in his nostrils. Mills, alone with instruments and tool kit, toured the little sub.

The thing held a cargo of human bodies, twenty of them, in plastic cocoons. They wore CPA uniforms; one was a non-com. Umbilicals ran to the cocoons, suggestive of life-support systems for catatonics — but Mills knew putrefaction when he saw it, even through a polycarbonate bubble. There wasn't room in the narrow walkway for twenty men, or even ten; and he found no evidence of battle stations, steering apparatus, or control console. The sub had not been intended for sorties, then.

Mills recalled the Mendocino Seaquake, cudgeled his memory for connections, and found them. An entire army of Viets had gone to earth near the Yangtze months before — or rather, he corrected himself, had gone to sea. He wondered where the rest would turn up, then wondered why none at all had, before this. Between his sneezes, Mills was smiling.

The weapons storage near the bow clarified a lot. The biggest items in storage were fifteen-cm, shoulder-fired

SSM's and, laid down like cordwood, bangalore torps. Munitions for land warfare, for maximum mobility; for a tiny unit living off the land while traversing it. The assault rifles boasted folding stocks. There must have been at least a hundred thousand rounds of 9-mm. ammo in beltpacs. How many other tiny subs had accompanied this one? Mills guessed perhaps a thousand, and missed by an order of magnitude.

Mills searched for air and food storage tanks. He was pressed inexorably toward the conclusion that, additives and concentrates aside, most of the food and all breathing oxygen were provided by the same subsystem. While he pondered, the young officer traced lines and circuits.

From his SCUBA survey Mills knew that the sub was propelled, incredibly, by a reaction engine. At great depth it would generate a hiss undecipherable by sonar. The problem, of course, was that the sub would require vast amounts of propellant. Unless the craft were staged with huge jettisonable tanks, it made no sense to Mills. A missing piece of puzzle nudged the elbow of his mind, was thrust aside. Ridiculous.

His instruments pinpointed a local source of radiation and, for a long hideous moment, Mills pondered the possibility that he stood before a fused fission device. But this part of the system was obviously linked to umbilicals for food, oxygen, and for — something else. Lines leading to small collector tanks, which fed the reaction engine.

Ridiculous, he thought again. But the evidence was overwhelming; despite the gloomy predictions of the best western minds, Mills thought, he stood beside a plug-in unit that provided endless quantities of oxygen, hydrogen, simple sugars, to permit a small troop-carrying submarine to cross the Pacific without surfacing.

The key device was not a bomb — unless it was a social bomb. It was small enough to carry under his arm — and it used sea water as input mass. Mills stood before a fusion device; and it synthesized. Endlessly.

Boren Mills began to perspire.

During the disassembly, Mills found five occasions to apply quick-setting cyanoacrylate paste. These were occasions when mechanical detents seemed likely to spring up or down. He was to learn that only three of those detents were destruct mechanisms, and that the one electrical booby trap he did not find, had corroded harmlessly. At length he was sure that the tiny cornucopia lay disconnected. No, not quite sure. In any case, he could not haul it up from the little sub without being seen. Mills affixed a USN proprietary tag to the unit and, stowing tools in his beltpac, emerged from the craft.

"Let's get back to quarters," he said to the men. “Each of you will write a full report and, until our reports are in, this is absolutely Q-clearance stuff. Kim, you can help me word my input. You were down there first."

Kim Norton was the nearest thing to a friend that Mills could claim among the enlisted men. The others puzzled alone over their reports that night, confined to quarters, while Norton sat uncomfortable in officer country, alone with Mills.

"If this satisfies you, Sir, it does me," Norton said when their draft was complete. "I wasn't down in that tub for more than a few seconds anyhow."

"Why don't we drop the 'sir' crap for now," said Mills, knowing he sounded less than genuine. His smile didn't add much. He rushed on, crowning the moment with still another lie. ' "The truth is, I wish you had been down there. I tagged a piece of equipment to bring back — hell, Kim, I mentioned it in the report!"

"I wondered about that. How big?"

"Size of a small suitcase. I — just forgot. Can you imagine anything so stupid?"

Norton juggled the notion of stupidity in Mills, and dropped it with a shrug. "We can get it tomorrow," he offered.

"Of course, of course," Mills muttered, "but something just occurred to me." While staring at those detents.

When Norton failed to nibble at the bait, Mills arose and walked to the percolator at the far end of the room. He poured two cups, unobtrusively flicked on his pocket 'corder, and laid it near the percolator. Then he continued their talk. Presently Mills asked, "Did you see much down in the sub?"

"How could I, coughing my head off in the dark? No, Sir."

"My name is 'Boren', Kim. Relax. So you don't even recall the piece of equipment I tagged?"

"I told you before, uh, Boren: no," Norton said with a trace of irritation.

Now that he had something he needed, the Mills smile was genuine. He sat companionably near Norton on the table's edge. "Do you think you could recognize it if you saw it tonight?"

Norton was not happy with the idea until Mills hinted at a citation. But reassured that the officer would make the trip worth his while, Norton agreed to the midnight requisition.

When the rating had gone, Mills strode to the percolator and began to toy with the 'corder. It was only a few klicks from Kikepa Point to the derelict sub. What if there was an honest-to-God fission device, after all, connected to the fusion synthesizer? Well, at least Bonham Base on Kauai would suffer little damage. Mills indulged in this small patriotism, sipped coffee, and avoided looking toward the west. If he could not become a rich man, at least he could avoid blindness.

Two hours later, the synthesizer sat on the desk before Mills. It looked a bit like a cipher machine from an earlier war, fitted for intravenous feeding.

"Nothing to it, eh?" Mills extended his hand. "When all this is over, Kim, you'll be remembered." He swore Norton to secrecy and dismissed him. Then Mills generated a new report that made no mention of the synthesizer. He sealed the device in a desiccant-filled bag, placed that in another bag, then buried the treasure near the access road.

The next morning, Mills and his crew were again at the sub, ostensibly to take exact measurements and photographs for the salvage teams. Mills put two men to work examining the keel, stationed a third on deck to keep the forced-air unit cramming fresh air into the sub, then shifted his big shoulder-bag and went below. He took Kim Norton with him.

While Norton obediently listed loose personal articles in the crew compartment, Mills selected a package in his bag and placed it in the weapons storage locker. He then took the forage hatchet from his bag and carefully brained Kim Norton from behind. He returned to the storage locker to recheck the setting of the timer, then laid his pocket 'corder near the bangalore torpedoes and checked his watch as he flicked the 'corder switch.

Mills climbed outside empty-handed. "I forgot my fast film," he called down the hatch. "We'll have to get it from the cache on shore." While the three crewmen scurried to the small ACV moored by the hatch, he checked the time again, temporized by inspecting the forced-air unit, then called down the hatch again. "Taking the rest of the crew, Kim. We'll be gone fifteen minutes. Sure you don't want to go?"

There was the briefest of pauses before, "I told you before, uh, Boren no," said Norton's recorded voice with a trace of irritation.

"Suit yourself, love," Mills forced himself to say, choosing a phrase least likely to sound premeditated. "But keep your damned hands off those munitions." Then Lieutenant Boren Mills leaped into the ACV. They were nearly to their equipment cache when the submarine disintegrated with two distinct explosions.

Mills was absolved by the board of inquiry, though he assumed blame for leaving Radioman Second Class Norton behind. Fragments of the Chinese vessel were recovered, some of them quite large, none of them in condition to answer the Navy's most vexing questions. In time, fragments of similar vessels turned up.

The Navy file characterized the doomed fleet as an official curiosity, but opined that the craft must have had a huge tender, a mother ship. There was never any serious suggestion that the tiny craft were capable of running submerged from a thousand klicks up the Yangtze to the Oregon coast. The only evidence of that lay buried near Kikepa Point.

During the next two weeks, Mills found a suspicion confirmed: interservice rivalries could not match the complex intimacies of rivalry within the Department of the Navy. During the series of conferences provoked by his scholarship, Mills watched the maneuvering between his superiors in the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Public Information pundits of OPI, and the crusty staff of CNO who only wanted, as one rear admiral said, to cut the crap and convert some senators.

Day by day, hobnobbing with few ranks below full commander, Mills expounded on the persuasive uses of his new discipline and stressed the need for experimental work to prove his ideas. If transferred directly to the CNO staff he would chafe under the control of old men in Naval Ops. If he stayed in Intelligence, he might be hamstrung by their passion for watching the watchers. But the OPI was an aggregate, the Public Information career officers rattling and clanging against men who had been civilian media men a year previous, who would be civilians again a year or so hence. Here in media lay priceless connections and worthless bullshit; expertises so vague, so multifariously counterfeit, that a legitimate media theorist could help himself to a pretty piece of territory among them.

Mills maintained his studious mien, implied a 'natural' preference for his existing Intelligence connections, and steadily built a case for testing optimal control theory on segments of the public. He permitted himself to be persuaded that the best way to test his ideas lay with the feedback techniques already in use by the OPI. Besides, the OPI was fundamentally a service available to both Intelligence and Operations, both of which could profit from Mills's work as media control segued into social control.

By mid-July, Lt. Commander Boren Mills had seen the orders posting him to Sound Stage West. His floppy cassettes, his notes, even old textbooks were accorded special security and Mills made certain that his personal effects were packed in the same containers. In one container lay a souvenir for which he had a less than compelling cover story. It was hardly larger than a breadbox. He hoped he would not have to claim he had found it among the personal effects of Radioman Second Class Kimball Norton.

Chapter Seventy

The revenues of Schleicher County, Texas were not wasted on air-conditioning the Eldorado jail. Quantrill had sweated off two kilos after three days in his shared cell. "Man's got a right to be with his helpmeet," he yelled, shaking the bars, the concrete walls mocking him with echoes.

"If you was a man," chuckled the husky scarred specimen who lay on the lower bunk, "you wouldn't'a let no half pint deputy bust you both."

"God's curse on 'em," Quantrill spat, then railed again at the bars. "God's curse on the gentile bastards!"

"I've had about enough of your noise," said his cellmate. "You and that hightits bitch in the women's wing — what's her name? Delight?"

"Delight," Quantrill yelled, his shoulder-length hair flying as he gripped the bars again. "Pray for deliverance, darlin'!"

From the opposite wing came an answering cry; a pitiable hopeless wail of female anguish. Sanger's voice, maintaining the guise of a young woman easily led.

The open-handed slap drove Quantrill's head against steel bars. "I'll give you deliverance if you don't shut up," said the man, fists on hips, no longer good-humored. "Them gentiles won't care if I beat some true religion into you."

Quantrill, huddling on his knees, hid his face and surreptitiously watched the man's feet. A reasonable amount of abuse, he could handle; but he could not pursue an assignment in the field with broken ribs. Snuffling, wishing he had the knack of weeping real tears on demand: “You sound like my pa."

"Maybe I am your pa," said the man, pleased with himself. "Your ma ever mention a Mitch Beasley?" Beasley eased himself back on his bunk.

"My ma didn't talk about men," said the youth querulously. "She was a good God-fearin' vessel — like my Delight. " He let the silence spread; turned and wiped his nose on his sleeve; let his eyes grow wide and full of ersatz trust. "You really do remind me of my pa," he said. "But pa wasn't no gentile. He was kind of a prophet."

"The hell you say," Beasley murmured.

"We liberated a lot of folks, pa and me," Quantrill insisted. "Andalotofwordly treasure, too. Why, the stuff we buried near Ozona would buy salvation for a dozen sinners."

Beasley, after a long thoughtful pause: "I might just want to meet your pa."

"Gone to his reward," Quantrill said, biting his lip, looking away.

Locusts buzzed in the hackberry tree outside the cell. Beasley's bunk creaked. After an endless thirty seconds: "What if I was to tell you they call me Prophet Beasley?"

Contact. Quantrill had begun to think he'd wasted three more days on another false lead. He made his eyes wide again, came up to a kneeling position, his mouth slightly open. "I didn't think no jail could hold a true prophet," he said.

"Not in the fullness of time," Beasley intoned, studying the muscles of his heavy forearms as he stretched. The deep-chested voice lowered to accommodate the topic: "Maybe it was God's will brought us together, boy. You ever think about that?"

Quantrill gave a tentative nod, then clasped his hands and bowed over them. "Before you decide to leave, will you bless the union of me and my helpmeet?"

"It don't always work that way," Beasley said.

"Maybe — just maybe, God sent me as your earthly salvation."

Time to set the hook. "I'd have to think on it, pray on it. One thing sure, whatever happens me and Delight already said our vows before God."

"You sayin' you're purely stuck on that little hightits I seen joggin' around the exercise yard?"

Quantrill, head bowed: "We said our vows. I can't change that now."

"We'll see," said Beasley, and began to whistle a border tune through the gap in his front teeth. The youth retreated to the far corner of the cell, palms together, speaking in a near-whisper unintelligible from Beasley's bunk.

Quantrill had promised to pray for guidance. In a way he was doing precisely that. "Tau Sector, Tau Sector," he narrowcast, and waited for his critic to reply. Control had set them onto cold trails twice; this one felt warmer by the second.

Sandys jurnal Jul 18 Fri.

Chapter Seventy-One

Though it had been dark for three hours, Quantrill was still perspiring as he lay on his sodden upper bunk cursing a week of inactivity and Beasley's body odor. An insomniac locust still sizzled outside, endorsing the summer heat. He heard the faint squeal of brakes in the distance, then only night sounds. Presently he heard a murmur beyond the lockup; someone talking with the lone deputy. Quantrill would never know how the deputy had been taken out, but knew from the muffled commotion outside the window that someone outside was not too worried about discovery.

"Gadianton," said a male voice somewhere outside their window. In the front office, an alarm quavered, tripped by perimeter sensors.

Beasley rolled to his feet, chinned himself to the high window ledge. Quantrill noted the man's swift physical power. "Lamanites," Beasley hissed the countersign. "Here; and hurry up, I got acolytes."

A cargo hook grated on the ledge, linked to a steel beam that Beasley laid across inside the bars. Beasley was obviously experienced at demolition. From his upper bunk, Quantrill could see gloved hands arranging a one-cm, glass rope that stretched away into darkness. “We got maybe five minutes," said the man outside; "Jansen's got a reg'lar Saturday-night ruckus goin' in a roadhouse up north. But he didn't say nothin" about nobody else."

"I got reasons he'll understand," Beasley insisted. "Now, haul away!"

"On yore head be it — and you better get under somethin', don't forget that roof collapse in Ros well." Racing footsteps dopplered away.

A diesel coughed to life, steadied, clamored in the dark. At the window was only a keening scrape of protest while the cellmates lay curled beneath thin musty mattresses. Then a screech of metal, a shambling clatter of concrete and a puff of dust into the cell.

The hole started waist-high and extended to the ceiling. Beasley went through it with careful questing feet, backward, then was in urgent argument with others outside. Quantrill saw Beasley in the spread of half-light, now armed with a machine pistol. "I've told you what betrayal means, boy," he said. "Among the prophets, I'm the only friend you got."

"I want Delight," Quantrill whined, scrambling through the hole, one eye closed as Marty Cross had taught him. If you kept one eye closed in the light, that eye would have better night vision.

"Ever" body wants delight," an unfamiliar voice snickered. Faintly they could still hear the alarm; Quantrill felt sure it was patched into a radio alert.

"We got a little hightits vessel to get yet," Beasley warned, scooping up the beam and glass rope.

"You get her yourself," was the reply over receding steps of two men. Beasley stopped, indecisive.

"Go on," Quantrill said, taking a chance. "I'll find a way to get her out tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, shit, you don't know much! There ain't time; leave her!"

"I dunno where pa buried the stuff, and she does," Quantrill said, playing his hole card.

More cursing. A small vehicle thundered away without lights and Mitch Beasley sprinted to the larger vehicle. “Find the bitch so I can line up the truck," he called, tossing the cable into a cargo bay.

Quantrill knew Sanger's location; knew also that Control had arranged the transfer of other prisoners. He warned Sanger to get under a mattress, then resumed his monotonic transmission to Control. If law enforcement people reacted too quickly, he warned, they might blow the whole operation.

Beasley backed the terratired vehicle furiously toward the far end of the lockup; rushed to aid Quantrill at the high window. "Don't be scared, darlin'," Quantrill crooned through the window. "The kingdom of God almighty is at hand," and then the truck was lurching away, the glass cable humming as it came taut. The embedded windowframe came free this time, and a moment later Marbrye Sanger was wriggling past rough concrete. He grabbed her, felt the slide of lithe flesh, tasted the dusty, musty flavor of her mouth. Even in a jailbreak at midnight, he thought admiringly, Sanger gave award performances.

The cable and beam stowed, Beasley gestured Quantrill into the open cargo section and waved Sanger into the cab with him. When Beasley gestured now, he did it with a gun barrel. The truck sped away, going to battery mode for stealth, the hum of terratires and windsong muffling the electrics. The break had taken all of three minutes.

Alone, Quantrill spent the next ten minutes in an urgent dialogue with Control. “If Sanger acts too vulnerable to his religious doubletalk," he warned, "this Beasley character may decide to ice me and then sweet-talk her into showing him the stash. Tell her now, Control. He's quick; don't underestimate him."

"We don't," was the impersonal reply. "Beasley's thumbprint was on Sabado's belt buckle. We will brief Sanger as soon as she can acknowledge transmission."

Quantrill filed this for future reference. Sanger did not have to acknowledge a transmission, but inside that cab she was mostly surrounded by steel. Perhaps, after all, Control's own transmissions were more affected by a steel cage than T Section would like to admit. Quantrill reported that they were heading south on a secondary road, then cutting a trail to the east.

Beasley's helmsmanship was savage but unerring, the treadless terratires making a smooth spoor hard to follow. In an hour the truck, low beams flashing on when necessary, had covered fifty klicks of open country showing few and distant lights.

Quantrill roused himself as the truck stopped; saw the rhythmic flash of Beasley's lights, saw answering flashes from afar. Somewhere in the wild country on open range-land, T Section was about to enter the sacred sanctum of the Church of The Sacrificed Lamb.

Chapter Seventy-Two

By the last week in July, media broadcasts had done what SinoInd troops could not: US/RUS forces were pulling back on two fronts in fear of Chinese Plague. India's Parliament initiated a massive withdrawal of her expeditionary troops from Kazakhstan and repositioned them in an arc north of the Indian desert, on recommendation of the sly Kirpal. Everyone knew that a few of those troops had plague but, by isolating all transferred units, India kept ANZUS invaders guessing. China no longer needed those Indian reinforcements because the American Fifth Army had pulled out, taking up new positions in the Irkutsk region north of Mongolia. The Allies no longer feared a coordinated breakout from Mongolia but, perhaps inevitably, Russian troops had run short of antipersonnel mines and Frisbees before retreating.

The Russians knew of Chinese Plague from their radios, and those who placed little faith in protective CBW gear (i.e., most RUS troops) feared that they faced an enemy more than human. A Siberian salient already bulged up across the Amur, chiefly of harmless tribesmen seeking abandoned riches, becoming less harmless as plague spread into the tribes. Our Fifth Army made good use of RUS railways, racing to new positions above the Siberian salient. Thanks to excellent medical aid and frequent injections of half-truths in briefings, the morale of US troops was still good.

Keratophagic staph, our troops were told, depended largely on transmission from host to host, unlike windborne paranthrax. If you were young and well-fed, and if you stayed well clear of infiltrating locals, you might not be in danger. The CBW masks and envelopes would protect you in plague spots. The advance of the enemy — assuming he could rally for any advance — had been taken into account by the countless millions of antipersonnel minelets left by our re treating armies which we could trigger by microwave, or an enemy footfall could do it. The RUS still employed their interdicting Frisbees while backing away from the Sinkiang border. The westward retreat of our First and Third Armies was orderly.

The US Sixth and Eighth Armies still protected sortie bases in India, devastating that country's efforts to harvest a crop—any crop. The Viets were clamoring to know the whereabouts of some twenty divisions of troops they had sent into Szechuan. Allied media were only too happy to suggest a numbing truth (which we did not for a moment believe), namely that entire Viet divisions littered the floor of the Pacific in small defunct submarines. All this, our officers made clear to our troops. From several quarters, Allied troops were repeating an old phrase: home by Christmas.

In short, our troops got only the news.

Non-news: neutral Mexico, though pro-Allies, permitted a few well-heeled SinoInd refugees to take refuge in the State of Nayarit in June before she identified at least one case of plague among them. Removed offshore to the Islas Marias, they posed no threat beyond that of rumor.

Non-news: the rumor of Chinese Plague in Mexico was itself a news-vectored plague, gaining early credence through a few initial holo and radio broadcasts in our southern border cities. Our subsequent denials were fruitless appeals to frightened householders in Tucson and San Diego suburbs. While admitting that 'a few' Americans were needlessly evacuating, we did not add that in three days' time no US Customs people remained at Mexican border posts. Well-supplied by Pemex, Mexicans lost little time in streaming across the border. If gringos were fleeing from shadows, an enterprising campesino could help himself to what they left behind. Within a week, Pemex fuel was sloshing in Mexican trucks that plied the roads north of Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, in entrepreneurial support of this casual invasion. For the first time, America was learning what Germans had experienced in the final months of World Warn.

Non-news: the US Fourth Army was thinly spread on the west coast and depended on Mexico for half of its refined fuel since most of our refineries were in ruins. When Mexican tankers began to produce passengers as well as diesel fuel from San Diego to San Pedro, we had the choice of accepting both or neither. The Mexicans would not listen to schemes that kept their citizens offshore. This disrespect for US law was directly proportional to our loss of clout in Mexican eyes. Since the 1980's, Mexico's petroleum traffic had expanded her wealth greatly, but the US had lost half her population and ninety per cent of her industrial potential in the first week of the war. We were still capable of defying Mexico, but running on our reserves. It was a forthright case of a healthy neighbor leaning on a sick one, and only the politically naive were surprised. We had done exactly the same to Mexico, twice upon a time.Power politics is the only kind there is.

Non-news: our Second Army had all it could do to enforce the continental quarantine and to guard our eastern shores. It was a sympathetic army of occupation, committed to an endless fight against paranthrax in a battle that required great courage and stamina, but conferred little glory.

Non-news: White House Central abandoned its Sandia Mountain warrens for a safer residence in the Wasatch Mountains east of Salt Lake City. White House Deseret was a phrase, and a concept, deeply satisfying to many men in the Collier administration. The citizens of Utah, largely Latter-Day Saints, were among the staunches! patriots and most unquestioning followers America had ever produced. In this climate of Mormon hope for a devout America, only one internal problem had grown larger: the guerrilla groups. Outlaw bands continued to borrow the trappings of Godliness to support their claims to plunder.

Yale Collier's days were focused increasingly on items in the non-news — not a very encouraging sign. He could not afford to threaten Mexico, a major energy supplier, with force against her lackadaisical occupation of our soil. The Mexicans ignored our borders from the wild country of southwest Texas to the coast of central California. It had been a mistake to build tanker facilities at Lompoc and Monterey because Mexicans leaving those tankers triggered widespread evacuation in those coastal regions south of San Francisco. It did little good to broadcast subtle hints that a foreign pilgrim could not spread disease after his burial. It did no good at all to insist that Mexicans were not carriers of the plague that was blinding China.

Collier studied holo maps with the commanding general of Fourth Army, and prayed for guidance. At bottom, Collier believed in the goodness of humankind, and mourned the necessity to wage an undeclared guerrilla war on Mexican emigrants. But already El Paso, Las Cruces, Tucson, and the California coast above San Francisco were ruins in which Mexicans, not US citizens, sifted the detritus and reclaimed the land. If it was to be war, it would have to be low-key, and defensive. We did not have the troops to pursue it far, and Canada rejected our suggestions that Canadian troops might help us. For that matter, we were none too keen to give Canada more influence on our soil than she already had.

After a forty-eight-hour search of his soul, President Collier accepted the plan of Fourth Army strategists. Our fuel reserves would support redeployment of infantry on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley, thence in a thin khaki line south of the Mojave to Phoenix and Roswell. While giving up (temporarily, Collier told himself; only temporarily) valuable anchorages, we still had access to the Pacific from Point Arena northward. Our Navy still owned the continental shelf. Oil fields near Bakersfield and the fecund farms of the San Joaquin would still be ours, protected by the Fourth Army. In effect, we had leased some of our soil to Mexico in exchange for fuel.

Unofficially, the Mexican Government was understanding. If by some miracle the SinoInds managed a west coast invasion, the Mexican fuel would help us reclaim what latinos now called Alta Mexico. Officially, we permitted Mexican squatters while warning that we could not assure their safety.

Collier dared to hope that a persistent CIA abstract from Canada was more than rumor, though Canada was equally persistent in her confidential denials to White House Deseret. Moreover, said the Canadian ambassador, any open rumor that Canadians had beaten keratophagic staph would only exacerbate troubled relations between Canada and the RUS; the beleaguered Russians would instantly demand the secret. A secret (the ambassador repeated) which did not exist. After all: if Canada had found a cure, would she not already be distributing it?

The implied answer was 'yes'. The correct answer was 'no'. Canada needed time to produce her breakthrough against S. rosacea in quantity, and to distribute it selectively.

Chapter Seventy-Three

"Selah," intoned the Prophet Jansen.

Quantrill responded like the others, got to his feet, willed the pins and needles to leave his feet after an hour on his knees in a sweltering barn with fifty others. Rituals of the Church of The Sacrificed Lamb owed little to Mormonism, much to enthusiasm. Once again Seth Howell's briefings were verified in the field; the zealot gangs borrowed just enough from the LDS to attract some unstable Mormon rejects. Whatever crimes they committed would ultimately be placed, by gentiles, at the feet of the LDS. No wonder, then, that the Collier administration entrusted its remedy to T Section…

"I see you got the grease out of your hair in time for devotionals, Brother Stone," said Prophet Monroe, a sallow-haired little man in a suit that had once been expensive. Monroe kept the financial books for the church, but had also helped with an engine change the day before. Barring his religious views, he seemed a reasonable sort.

Quantrill, alias 'Lendal Stone', nodded; watched Jansen's approach from the corner of his eye. “Clean hands and a pure heart, Prophet Monroe, like you told me," said Quantrill. "Didn't want to be unseemly first time I showed up in church."

"Plenty of wives and little vessels cuttin' their eyes at you, "Monroe grinned; winked. "If they had votes, you'd be Prophet Stone already." Quantrill did not comment on Monroe's fantasy. Most of the women and children seemed dull-eyed captives with all the personality of so many ears of corn in a crib.

"Brother Monroe." The little man jumped, made a show of facing Jansen as an equal. Jansen went on, "Could you spare an acolyte for awhile?"

Quantrill had been watching the man — had studied them all — for three days. Jansen stood tall and tanned in a suit of black, with a formal white shirt and black string tie. His dark gray Stetson and low-quarter black boots fitted well; lent authenticity to his leadership in the devotionals. But every afternoon, Monroe had said, a different prophet performed that solemn office. This was Quantrill's first gathering with the faithful, and it seemed to be an occasion for formal attire. Earlier in the day Jansen had worn work clothes, the tendons in his arms marking him as one familiar with hard work. But always he wore that stern look of command, and his flat twanging baritone implied that it was used to obedience.

"Glad to oblige, Brother." And scared not to, Monroe's tone said. Since Quantrill was Monroe's only helper, the subtlety was shallow. Monroe formally presented Acolyte Lendal Stone to Prophet Jansen, excused himself, and hurried from the barn to seek the warm Texas breeze.

Quantrill gazed up at the commanding face with a polite smile, waiting. Gradually the lines in Jansen's face grew more stern, the eyes more piercing, until Quantrill's smile became quizzical. Then, "Oh, "said the youth, and dropped his gaze.

"Oh," Jansen mocked him. "That's better, boy. Insolent eyes aren't fitten in the young. Remember that."

"Yessir, I will."

"Yes, Prophet Jensen."

Quantrill made his voice very small: "Yes, Prophet Jansen."

Pleased, the baritone lifted a bit. "Prophet Beasley testified on your behalf Sunday morning. Some were in favor of consigning you and your vessel to perdition, but Prophet Beasley thought you might be worthy of the kingdom of God. I heard all about your pa and his ways and your pilgrimage back from Modesto." He paused, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. The next moment his voice was almost singsong, as if murmuring to himself: "That's all a pack of lies, of course."

Still looking down at his feet, Quantrill shook his head ever so slightly. “I know better'n to lie to a prophet, as God is my witness," he mumbled.

"No you don't," said Jansen, enjoying himself. "I know Modesto like the back of my hand. Where was your pa's cafe?"

If this was true, Quantrill had only seconds to make some decisions. Control could not hear Jansen; only Quantrill himself. Scuffing his feet in the dust, scanning his memory furiously for details of his cover, he said, "Out Route one-thirty-two on the right-hand side of the road, east of the shopping center. We had snooker tables and shuffleboard." Surely, Control would recognize this as an interrogation, but his critic lay silent.

Judicious silence, then a chuckle from Jansen: "More of a roadhouse than a cafe." More silence, then suddenly:”What was your under-the-counter beer?"

"Coors," said Quantrill, blessing Mason Reardon's thoroughness in the cover sessions. "But the black-and-whites knowed it; wasn't no secret."

"I just bet it wasn't," Jansen chuckled again. "Well, you pass muster on that score — so you tell me why your pa would hide his treasures from his own seed, but trusts the secret to a vessel that isn't even family!"

In a crystalline burst of insight, Quantrill realized that a man like Jansen was simply incapable of believing such a thing, true or not. He spoke huskily, adding a touch of nasality; tried to recover the lost credibility. "Pa showed us both, Prophet Jansen. It was down the road from a kilometer post, but I ain't that good at numbers. Delight, she's real good, why she — anyhow," he feared overdoing it, "I can't recall five-ninety-two or two-ninety-five, so what I told Prophet Beasley ain't really a lie. Not really," he whined.

"And besides, you'd say anything to get your little hotsy out of the jug. Right?"

"We made a vow. And I ain't seen her at all today," Quantrill said, not missing the practiced ease with which Jansen was removing his broad leather belt.

"A half-lie deserves half-punishment," said Jansen, and began to swing the belt.

If this was half-punishment, Quantrill thought, cringing in the dust, he hoped to be spared the whole article. Jansen had the knack of flicking the belt's tip, and of picking his spot. He picked a dozen spots on Quantrill's naked flesh; wrists, ears, the back of his neck. The young gunsel groaned and writhed face down, hands protecting his head. Quantrill's tears were real, half from pain and half from suppressed rage.

"That wasn't for lyin' to Beasley," Jansen said when he had begun to reinsert his belt through its loops, breathing hard but speaking pleasantly. ' "That was for askin' Almighty God to bear false witness to your half-lie. All the prophets are equal in the sight of the Lord, Acolyte Stone; but I ask you in all loving kindness to be careful which one you talk to about your pa's stash on the Ozona Road.

"Now I don't like to say things twice, so listen. We're missin' three vessels — missed 'em ever since the night you came, some fool thought Beasley was a posse and gave the alarm and off they went. A mother with a nine-year-old and a sucklin' babe. We got men out that you ain't — haven't — met yet, still lookin', since they were in charge when the three got away. It's fitten. If they make it to a highway, we might have to pull up stakes. Your vessel, Delight, is on a sweep with prophets right now. You're goin' with others to cover another area. Bring me a body. Mother, girl, or babe, where one is the others are — and that'll be the Lord's sign you're worthy of us."

Quantrill got to his feet slowly, dusting himself off, disgusted with his own genuine fear of this cool merciless fanatic. “Yessir — Prophet Jansen. You want me to shoot on sight? I don't know what they look like; maybe I should bring 'em in for questioning."

"Mother's skinny, short gray hair; hell, they'll look like strangers, Stone, that's all you need to go on. And you won't have a gun, but I don't need them three for questions. I have all the answers, all I need is bodies. Let it be a challenge to you." The black eyes flickered in glacial amusement: “God put plenty of rocks out there to be used in His service." With that, the Prophet Jansen straightened his severe black suit, polished the tips of his boots before striding from the barn into God's own brightly-polished, midsummer wild-country sun.

A half-hour later, Quantrill stood empty-handed in jeans and canvas work shirt and watched morosely as the terratired vehicle bobbed from sight over the toasted-meringue tints of Texas rangeland. He knew exactly where he was; had known it from the morning when he saw the way that barn listed like some shiplapped drunkard lost on broken limestone soil. He was on the Willard place, without the Willards. There were enough predators on two legs and four to dishearten the most hard-bitten of small ranchers. He had alerted Control, seeking confirmation that he was again in Sutton County east of Sonora with a raging case of dejd vu.

Another man hopped down from the distant vehicle and waved. They paced each other in a slow march to the north, a red sun over their left shoulders, and Quantrill murmured his prayer to the great god Tau Sector.

"We have an interesting sanction, Q," said the sexless Control as Quantrill moved down a gully in search of the escapees. He intended to ignore them unless they shot first, but could not afford to blow the assignment on behalf of some poor human flotsam. Control continued, "Pelletier and

Quinn are reassigned to counter intrusions by Mexican nationals to the south. Their team will not, repeat not, be available to you."

"That's interesting, all right. Doesn't help us much here," Quantrill replied.

"Neg, Q; your new sanction is interesting. S has met two more prophets on picket duty to the south. She reports sexual harassment but stands ready when you are." Something almost humorous, rare in Control: "Even more than you are. From your team reports I make it twelve male prophets, seventeen adult females, ten immature females. No immature males; we doubt they intend to keep you long."

"Figures," Quantrill.murmured, staring down at damp sand in a dry-wash. He knelt to study the hoofprints, thinking at first they had been made by deer. The split print was huge; a bandwidth long, almost as wide, trailed by small secondary marks. "Control, patch me to CenCom research."

"Patching," then a voice indistinguishable from Control's: "CenCom research on standby." CenCom's site was never far from the soul of government. Now it was near Ogden, Utah.

"I have a hoofprint in wet sand," Quantrill mused, "and I want to know what made it. Uh — identify an animal track, CenCom."

"Please lay out a graphic plot," said CenCom, as if he had all the time in the world.

"Neg. Work from oral description, CenCom. Ah, give me a human auditor."

Somewhere an electronic mind was passing the buck without reluctance. CenCom could not care less, or more. Or at all.

"Research auditor on-line for Tau Sector," said the same voice, no longer the same mind.

"I have an animal track and need you to identify it." He was walking again, aware that he might be drawing the curiosity of the man on his flank, speaking now from memory. "Split hoof like a deer but a very wide splay in front. Bullet-shaped marks behind, the diameter of my finger and pointing outward. Width of print eight or nine centimeters, length ten or more."

"Location?"

"Oh; open range in Sutton County, Texas."

"Searching," said the voice. Every five seconds it said,'searching' again. Finally, "No Olympic elk your area. Swine a possibility, but no known variety with prints those dimensions."

"Check on Russian boar," he said, licking dry lips. Suddenly Quantrill wished very much that he had a weapon; and if possible, one much larger than a thirty-caliber brush gun.

"Neg. Repeat, neg. Subject would mass four to five hundred kilos or more, the size of a Montana grizzly. A definite possibility if you downsize your figures."

"Try upsizing yours," Quantrill snorted. "Thank you, CenCom; patch me back to Tau Sector Control." He advised Control of his suspicion that a red-eyed satan of five-hundred kilo mass was not far away. Then, "Now, about my interesting new sanction—"

"Take all males; repeat, your team sanctioned to take all males. Do you copy?"

"All the prophets? Good God, first you tell me Pelletier can't make a weapons drop, and next you call for a massacre!"

Control's tone did not threaten. No threat was necessary in its, "You're aborting, Q?"

"Neg. Maybe we can pick 'em off gradually. Listen, some of these guys are just harmless weirdos. Do I rate an explanation?"

He had never heard a voder translate a sigh before. "Fourth Army can't spare troops into wild country for Mexican incursions. There are more vital things to protect further west. Civilian agencies are swamped and every one of those crazies is a potential nucleus of another group. They're just too good at what they do. Wait one, Q." Pause; a long one. Quantrill saw the man on his flank angling in his direction. Control again: "S has just reported that a Prophet Ryerson has killed a woman escapee. Now your sanction priority reads Jansen, Coates, Beasley, Ryerson, Contreras. The rest are secondary."

"I don't know Coates or Ryerson."

"Your partner does. Intimately," said Control. "They took their frustrations out on her."

Quantrill quenched a rise of fury, coded out, squinting at a rock overhang swept clear in a recent freshet. Protected from the midday sun by the ledge, a shallow stagnant pool gleamed in late reflections. Quantrill spotted the tracks in gritty sand, hurried near, squatted by the puddle and ran his fingers over the deep prints. The hackles of his forearms were at attention.

"What'cha got?" Striding up with his small arsenal was Contreras, the only latino prophet, who made no secret of his distaste for young 'Stone'.

Quantrill stood up, stepped forward, planted a foot squarely on the print he had been studying. "Aw, shit," he mumbled and made a gesture of hopeless cloddishness. "Well, you c'n still see 'em. Biggest deer in these parts, I reckon."

Contreras blanched, crossed himself, realized what he was doing and ended by scratching his right breast. “Come away from there. That's the devil's waterhole."

Quantrill went quickly, glad that Contreras did not want a closer inspection. "The real devil, Prophet Contreras? Honest?"

A gulp and nod. "I saw him once," Contreras said, gruff and matter-of-fact, climbing up a prominence in search of the truck. Quantrill knew he could take Contreras with or without weapons; but he was none too sure of the return route. Better to wait until he and Sanger could cover each other's flanks.

"You seen the devil" Tell me about it," Quantrill pursued, because it seemed to put Contreras on edge.

"Folks who used to own this spread told us he was here," Contreras said, scanning the brush in half-light. "Prophet Jansen, he said it was devil worship to set out sacrifices. He put three of us out as sentries ever' night. Then one mornin' we found a prophet tore all to pieces. His gun had been fired once. We seen the same prints you seen. We spread out and went after him afoot thinkin' it was just some ol' boar hog. It was after dark when I sat down for a breather, waitin' for the moon to show me the way home. Pretty soon I hear a snuffle. Looked around, but all I seen was this boulder on the rise above me.

"And then I seen the boulder move," Contreras breathed. "It sort of growed, big as a chickenhouse, and he was lookin' down on me and I seen his horns and I didn't wait to see no more."

Horns? Quantrill wondered if moon-silhouetted ears or tusks would serve up such a horrific vision. “Why didn't you try and shoot," he asked.

"Shoot the devil? Shoot Ba'al? It's been tried, fool. I value my hide too much," said Contreras, staring toward the headlights that bobbed toward them in dusk, clicking his chemlamp in reply.

The driver, Monroe, had already picked up Beasley, whose elation balanced Monroe's dejection. "They found the Grange woman," Beasley said, clapping a hand on the shoulder of Contreras. "She nearly made it to the Roosevelt Road."

At the name, Quantrill forced his pulse to diminish. Not once, until now, had anyone mentioned the names of the fugitives. It was the third one, the baby, that had diverted Quantrill's suspicion — and hope.

Contreras: "She lead 'em to the others?"

Monroe: "She might have, if Ryerson wasn't so trigger-happy. Jansen figures we'll find the kids around there tomorrow."

"No point snoopin' around out here in Ba'al's back yard anymore," Contreras said in plain relief.

"You see him again?" Beasley's religion was in his ammo clips. He fingered the safety of his carbine.

"Just his prints. The acolyte here seen 'em first at a water hole. Why shit, he didn' know what he seen."

The others laughed uneasily. Quantrill nodded as if the joke were on himself. In a way, it was. At first he had known only that a child's sandal had made a single print in the sand, later marred by the great deep incisions of a demonic hoof. Quantrill's foot had erased the datum. Probably, he thought in sympathetic dread, that grizzly-sized brute had already tracked the child; had sought his kill many klicks from any possible help. But now he was certain that the sandal had been worn by little Sandy Grange. How long ago had she made that print?

Quantrill felt gooseflesh at his nape, arms, calves. The superstitious awe in these murdering fanatics was affecting him, he decided. He'd give a year of his life to be left alone out there with a night-scoped H & K — but the little truck was taking him away, toward a danger he understood, and to Marbrye Sanger whom he thought he understood. Unable to contact Control in such close quarters he sat sullen, silent, listening to Beasley exult over the murder of an exhausted woman; promising himself that Beasley's ledger would balance before long.

Chapter Seventy-Four

Decanting from the truck between the Willard house and barn, Quantrill peered at moving figures, seeking Sanger. The dark earth was splashed with parallelograms of light from the house and, as always, the women and children cowered anonymously hoping to be overlooked. Near the husky terratired truck was a group of prophets, variously armed. At their feet lay a pitiful handful of rags. “Delight?" He'd almost shouted her real name.

"Lendal," Sanger answered in a whine, and he saw that she was restrained by two unfamiliar males.

Quantrill hurried toward her, crooning endearments, and was felled by a backhand from Jansen. "Control your lusts, acolyte," said the big man without heat. "You'll be with your vessel soon enough. Stand over there in the light," he ordered, and Quantrill scrambled up to comply. With his body illuminated, face in shadow, he could use Control as go-between to Sanger.

The huddled body on the ground was pitifully thin, a gray-haired husk of a woman that Quantrill saw had been Louise Grange. Jansen stood above the corpse. "Brothers, you know what'll happen if the gentiles find we're here. We have four trucks; not enough for everybody. It has been revealed to me," he said, his voice rising, peaking on "re-vealed' in a liturgical rhythm long-practiced in many a pulpit, “It has been revealed to me that we must stand ready to flee again, yes I say flee, into the wilderness. The devil's seed is still at large. If we find her not tomorrow, we must repair — to another place."

Jansen had the knack of the old phrasing; could bind credulous minds with his spell that was more music than words.

Quantrill spoke with Control; asked to be patched directly to Sanger who stood between two men and could not be expected to answer. To Sanger he said, "Jansen's warning 'em they'll have to travel light. That may mean killing a few people, Sanger. They'll start with me or you, so don't get separated. Uh — if you have a weapon, cough."

Sanger didn't cough; moved her head sideways instead. Quantrill noticed that Jansen had now ripped away the veneer of equality and fraternity from his orders and was apportioning men to cruise the roads until dawn. The little Grange vessel, with or without a baby in her arms, might try to flag down a vehicle if she had not already collapsed from thirst or exposure. It had been revealed to him, Jansen boasted, that the girl was not far from where her mother had been gunned down. Quantrill's smile at this was grim and short-lived; if Sandy Grange was where he thought she was, she and the baby were between two devils.

Grumbling, trotting away for quick meals and canteen refills, the men hurried to do Jansen's bidding.”Now then," said the mollified Jansen to the youth, "while our brothers toil in the Lord's service, you can bring some worldly goods into the fold, Acolyte Stone. Prophet Monroe, we'll need you to drive."

"I've felt a callin'," growled Beasley, now pressing an old police revolver into Sanger's side, thrusting her forward. "It's fell to me to do the drivin', dear brothers."

Jansen was silent for two heartbeats, then replied in pleasant tautology, "Revelations always reveal. Prophet Monroe can help guard the females of the flock in your stead."

Jansen moved away, incisive with command, checking on fuel, weapons, a sufficiency of guards whose heartlessness he trusted if more of the flock tried to stray. Quantrill suspected that Jansen did not put much trust in Monroe or Contreras where murder was concerned. But Ryerson had shot down an exhausted mother that day, and Ryerson would again help guard the flock while others pressed their search. As Jansen conferred with Monroe and Ryerson, three of their four vehicles rolled away in convoy, running lights taped, the lead truck using one headlamp. From a distance it might have been a single motorcycle.

Beasley motioned Sanger and Quantrill toward the four-passenger pickup, muttering. "Thinks I dunno what he's up to," he grated, and, "figgers that assbreath Monroe wouldn't insist on his cut," he snarled, and, “all we'd get is a hard luck story."

In the dim light of the pickup's instrument cluster, the two gunsels exchanged glances; if Jansen was expected to lie about buried treasures, his young guides were to be silenced. Quantrill was neither surprised nor dismayed; he wanted isolation from the ranks as much as Jansen did, and for the same reason.

Jansen returned in minutes with carbine and sidearm, checked the pickup for pick and shovel, then shoved into the rear seat with Sanger and stowed a recent-model assault rifle at his feet. A moment later Beasley had the vehicle jouncing in the direction the other vehicles had taken while Jansen, cool and cordial, prompted their captives to recall a number.

"It's a little away from post five-ninety-two," Sanger said truthfully. She and Quantrill had buried the marked bills and bits of jewelry themselves before beginning their charade in the Eldorado jail. "I'll find the spot when we get near it. Prophet Jansen, you gonna treat us nice after we share with you?"

"Of course," he said, stroking the chestnut tresses, not putting his automatic pistol away. Then his free hand moved toward her breasts, as one might idly fondle a stray cat.

"You make me feel cared for," she said, letting her head slide onto his chest.

"A good shepherd cares for his flock," Jansen said.

"And we care for our shepherd," Sanger went on, her voice becoming muffled as her head slid steadily downward.

Quantrill heard the hiss of a zipper; peered hard through the windshield, willing himself above anxiety and dull rage, watching Beasley with care. Beasley grinned to himself. By now they were four or five klicks from the ranch. Quantrill felt a tug at his seat back. Jansen was gripping it with one hand.

The report was a thunderclap in the rear seat. Sanger's, "Beasley's yours," came a split second before the second and third explosions. Jansen's scream was only quasi-human.

Beasley slammed the brakes, reaching for the long-barreled revolver under his left thigh. But Beasley was not left-handed and, in any case, Quantrill was braced and ready.

The howling wheezes of Jansen, gutshot three times at point-blank range, carried too much vitality. Sanger fought hard for the automatic now, one elbow jamming into his throat as she sought the trigger again. But the fourth and fifth rounds went through the pickup's roof.

For Quantrill the scene unfolded in slow motion. Facing Beasley, feet braced against floorboards, he swung the edge of his left hand upward, catching Beasley above the lip in a driving slam to the base of the nose. His next slash was against Beasley's throat, but now the driver had relinquished the steering wheel and hammered at Quantrill with a rope corded right forearm. Then the revolver came into view, and at the same instant the pickup began to tilt as it spun sideways into deep ruts. Quantrill harbored a healthy respect for Beasley's superior physical strength, but more still for the heavy slugs. The gunsel's right hand slammed the hand with the revolver against the window frame while he butted upward into Beasley's face.

The revolver went out the window as the pickup tilted onto its right side, Quantrill pivoting his legs to drive them into Beasley's ribcage when the larger man tumbled toward him. The pickup continued its roll, the windshield shattering into the myriad tiny cubes typical of automotive glass. Quantrill planted his head into the safety of Beasley's midriff while he waited for the world to quit its headlong tumble.

Beasley felt himself flung halfway out the windshield opening and, as the vehicle came to rest on its wheels, was conscious enough to try crawling free. But one leg was still inside the cab when the phenomenon of Quantrill's reflexes came into play. The gunsel ducked away from the man's flailing brogan, caught it with both hands, wrenched it more than halfway around and held on.

The grinding snap was audible over Beasley's cry; he tried kicking once more as Quantrill gripped his trousers, screamed as the raw edge of a fractured fibula scraped, then lay across the hood of the vehicle, pounding an impotent fist on the plastic, whinnying with rage and pain.

The driver's door was open, the interior light revealing S anger with teeth bared, both legs locked around one of Jansen's arms as she pinioned him and waited out his final struggle holding his right arm in a double arm-bar. Jansen's head was visible, pressed against the seat back; his eyes open, his face a terrible cyanotic blue-gray. Quantrill twisted a good grip on Beasley's trouser cuff with one hand, stretched back with the heel of his free hand and triphammered Jansen's face until the prophet went limp.

When Sanger glanced toward him, Quantrill hand-signed for a weapon. Sanger found Jansen's automatic in the seat, passed it forward, then felt at Jansen's throat for a pulse.

Quantrill knew she was checking on the evanescence of the human soul, but he was an observer, too. He saw her eyes searching, the play of tiny muscles in the high cheeks, her tonguetip serious and prominent between pursed lips. He thought then that he had never seen Marbrye Sanger looking lovelier than that moment, as she hovered over a man she had destroyed in mortal combat.

When he felt the youth release his leg, Beasley tried instantly to escape. He tumbled from hood to road, blinded by the headlights that still glared at the horizon, gobbling with pain. He managed to stand, testing his weight on the traitor ankle, then jerked himself off-balance as he saw the despised acolyte striding into the cones of light holding a fifteen-round automatic. For six or eight hundred milliseconds, Beasley was the picture of a beaten man.

Then, because he depended upon the naivete of youth, Beasley was something else. Several times in his blood-spattered career, Beasley had indulged in a tactic that had always succeeded by its very strangeness. Literally, he had a fit.

Throwing a fit is not all that difficult. One must simply be willing to short-circuit all of the shame constraints learned from infancy onward. "This or that you must not do; this shames you, that makes others feel shame.' Urination, tearing at one's own hair, speaking gibberish as though in (foreign) tongues, groveling and capering in the dirt — all public behaviors forbidden to most adults to such a degree that ‘speaking in tongues' is a legitimate topic of psycholinguistic study.

"Don't touch me, don'ttouchmedon'ttouchme," Beasley shrieked, flopping down in fair imitation of a chimpanzee, arms slapping past his head to strike the opposite shoulders. Beasley's voice rose gradually to falsetto, ululating like an alarm, then spewing flecks of spittle with syllables crammed together in bizarre combination. He pounded the ground, screamed at the sky, cursed in tongues and in good old Texas American, and all the while he writhed closer to a stone at the edge of the road. But Beasley had to know where his enemy was, the little bastard, standing there without a word as if he knew what he was doing with that Browning in his hand; one good fling with that rock and then we'll see who's so fuggin' calm; and then Beasley paused for that necessary instant to get his bearings as he located the enemy.

The single round, fired from two meters away, was still applauded by its echoes when Quantrill murmured, "Nice try," in compliment to a dead man.

With Sanger's help, Quantrill tumbled the body into the rear seat, arranged next to Jansen so that a casual glance would reveal nothing. Sanger, always fastidious, used a canteen to wash the blood from her hands and blouse as Quantrill steered the pickup toward the ranch.

Sanger kissed Quantrill under the ear before advising Control of their tally. "If we can secure their command post," she went on, “we can pick them off as they return."

Control asked a question on Sanger's frequency.

"An Army-issue M-27 and a new Browning auto with, um, eight rounds left. I propose circling around on foot with the carbine so Quantrill can draw them out in the open with some wild story. There's three of 'em; should be a turkey shoot."

Quantrill doused the lights before the gleam of the ranch house showed on their horizon, heard Control's reply in his own critic. "Q qualified better with Army-issue weapons, S, and you'd be less threatening bait. Swap roles and pursue your assignment."

Quantrill stopped the vehicle a kilometer from their goal, spent the next fifteen minutes crossing the broken plain on foot, informed Control that two of the three guards were strolling about and clearly lit from the ranch house. Only little Monroe was unaccounted for; doubtless he would emerge when the pickup churned into view.

Presently the pickup raced in, horn tooting, obviously much worse for recent wear. Quantrill waited until he saw Monroe hurry from the barn, then slipped to the rear of the ramshackle ranch house. Its rear door had been nailed shut and inside he heard female voices raised in consternation at what they saw from the front windows.

"From what S is saying, they're not buying her story," said Control. "They've taken her weapon."

Quantrill could see that much. Monroe stared motionless at the carnage in the back seat, but Contreras held a sidearm on Sanger and was too near her for a safe shot at fifty meters, much less a three-round burst from the M-27. A beefy young gorilla stood by with a pump shotgun. From Sanger's description he'd be the murderer-rapist, Ryerson.

Quantrill ducked behind the house, smashed a window with the butt of his carbine, heard screams from within. "Lights out," he hissed at them, then broke the other window at the back of the house and wriggled forward along the foundation line.

The lights did not go out, but two dozen wails went up from within. It was just as well for Quantrill; the light gave him a good view as the heavy-set Ryerson abandoned Sanger to race toward what he imagined was a prison break. Ryerson fired one blast from his shotgun as he ran, evidently not caring what he hit so long as the sound carried authority.

Now some of the brutalized sheep of the Church of the Sacrificed Lamb were battering at the remaining shards of windowglass as Quantrill held his finger motionless on the trigger. He lay still, in full view of anyone who happened to glance at the porch foundation. Ryerson pounded nearer, heading for the rear of the house. And still Sanger did not make a move to get clear of Contreras.

To Quantrill's intense relief, Ryerson disappeared around the other side of the house. Then a chorus of screams as Ryerson punctuated the roar of his voice with the shotgun's exclamation. Contreras whirled in Quantrill's direction, Sanger's unerring kick sent him spinning, and with two three-round bursts Quantrill left Contreras dying. Sanger dived for the sidearm of Contreras, rolled out of the light, then followed Monroe who had run bleating into the scrub.

Quantrill stood and darted a quick look, aghast as he saw through the front window into bedlam. The parlor partition had been removed so that one side of the house was a long dormitory of squalid pallets. Slumped in the ruined back window was a ruined human being gunned down while athwart the ledge. Two dozen women and children lay on the floor screaming, some trying to protect their small wards as another blast lanced in, blowing a hat-sized hole in the roof not far from where Quantrill stood. Quantrill did not know whether his enemy had correctly interpreted the burps of the M-27 until he saw the hulking Ryerson move into view, peering past his victim who lay in the window.

Ryerson was grinning fiercely as he recycled the pump, but the grin flicked to something else as he glanced down the length of the room and saw what faced him outside the front window, ten meters away. Quantrill, knees flexed, his fire selector set on 'full auto', stared impassively over his front sight into the eyes of Prophet Ryerson. It was the last thing Ryerson ever saw.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Control had an excellent suggestion which Quantrill followed when at last the female captives could listen to him. They trooped to the barn, there to stay until dawn unless they spied familiar vehicles returning. In that case, Quantrill advised, their best course was to fade as fast and silently as possible into the open range — and not all in one bunch. Three of the women had husbands among the prophets, but none were thinking in any terms but plain desertion by now.

Sanger returned as Quantrill was questioning one of the women. According to Sanger/Monroe had been too slow and too loud. "The score," she said, counting the remaining half-dozen rounds in her clip, "is five to zip. Control tells me we should be setting out the pickup as bait if we're still operational."

Quantrill did not expect the prophets until dawn but, as

Control pointed out, the enemy would be haggard, sleepless. The T Section pair could sleep in relays and would have both cover and surprise on their side. They broke into the pantry cum weapons cache in the house, loaded the half-dozen weapons and all the ammunition into the pickup before returning to the rutted road.

At midnight the pickup stood across the ruts in a depression where it could be seen from only fifty meters away. Beasley's massive form slumped behind the wheel as if asleep. Jansen sat erect in the back seat, held up by a pick handle under his chin. Empty weapons, each barrel and receiver filled with dirt, lay strewn widely where a questing prophet would have to expose himself to fire from two quadrants.

From Sanger's description of the setup, Control was pleased. If the prophet vehicles returned one at a time there should be no problem. If they returned in convoy, the gunsels were ordered to be sure no vehicle was left operational, and to be ready for a day-long siege while awaiting help.

Their fire positions established by chemlamp, they huddled together for warmth in the starflecked night, Sanger taking first watch because she could not, as her partner could, shrug off the effects of violence and drop off quickly into slumber. Marbrye Sanger held her sleeping youth close, gently massaged his back and shoulders, watched for moving lights, and now and then silently kissed the unresponsive lips. Quantrill, normally a light sleeper, could have made no greater demonstration of trust than to abandon care in her arms; and Sanger's silent tears were of purest contentment.

Control advised Sanger, at three AM, to turn her watch over to her partner. She roused him, found that sleep came easily to her now, and smiled to herself as she felt his hand glide gently along her arms. Perhaps, she thought, he even returned her affection in some small way.

When Sanger's breathing steadied into sleep rhythms, Quantrill eased out of his jacket and spread it over her. He was tempted to rouse her with subtle caresses but knew that she needed sleep more than he needed active love-making.

He made himself content to feel her warmth and her implied faith. He steadfastly refused to dwell on the possible meanings of their mutual accommodation to one another, for in that direction lay acknowledged friendship; love; vulnerability. Had Sanger given him reason to suspect her yearning Quantrill would have been shocked and, to a degree, disappointed. Gunsels knew better than that, he told himself: the only viable response to tenderness was retreat.

He found it easier to think about Sandy Grange, but not much easier. From the women of the prophets he had learned that Louise Grange had been near the end of her strength even before her escape. Little Sandy had taken her tiny sister and her prized backpack, and had fled shortly before Quantrill's first arrival, her mother stumbling away into the dark not knowing which way the two had gone, Coates and Ryerson too far in arrears to find them.

It was patently ridiculous to be worrying about two small lives at risk in the wild country when his quarry was still capable of razing whole townships. But there it was: given a choice, Quantrill would cheerfully abandon his assignment in hopes of finding Sandy before some stupendous predator did. But the choice was not his. He was rigidly bound by Control — more accurately, by his growing suspicion that his implanted critic might levy the ultimate criticism upon him if he abandoned an assignment.

He thought on the problem for an hour before contacting Control, speaking softly to avoid waking Sanger. "If those captive women and children run loose tomorrow, they could wind up in another band of crazies. Or feeding some really nasty predators out here. I recommend a sweep of the whole area, Control."

The answer was prompt. "Neg; we can pass that on to the locals, but we need you to hold the lines against Mexicans north of Alamogordo. The situation is deteriorating all along the border."

"Since when is that T Section business?"

"Since you volunteered, Q."

"I never volunteered for a personal destruct mechanism."

"You are a personal destruct mechanism, Q. It doesn't have to be a self-destruct. You still have free will to choose."

"Like Simon Goldhaber did?"

"If suicide is your choice. That would gain no one anything."

"Sounds like we're all losing, doesn't it?"

"It sounds from here as if you need a rest. Some of your decisions tonight have been amateurish."

"For instance?"

"You attacked two armed men while they were in control of a moving vehicle, in terrain you did not choose."

Privately, Quantrill had already cursed Sanger for that but, "You weren't here and we were. It worked," he observed drily. "If your situation is going to hell, why not give us a longer leash?"

"The news from Asia is good, Q. We're having setbacks here but nothing we can't handle. I recommend you defer your objections until debriefing. T Section has now relocated from San Simeon to Santa Fe. If all goes well, you will be apprised of the big picture there." The unspoken warning was clear enough: if you slip up, you won't be around for debriefing.

"Thank you, Control." Quantrill coded out, frowning into the false dawn, planning his disobedience with care.

Dawn swelled through a golden haze and Quantrill listened to a lark's a capella welcome of the light for long minutes. He saw an insolent jackrabbit stand erect, ears turned to the south, then spring away. The lark fell silent. "Okay, Sanger," he grunted, "company's coming."

Quantrill had rolled his M-27 into a blanket forty meters from Sanger's bower. He ran to it, swung its bipod into place, lay prone in the protection of a stone outcrop. He placed his spare magazines where they could not be spattered by a ricochet. The curl of the road would hide the battered pickup until an approaching vehicle was past, below his and Sanger's hidden positions. They would each have the advantage of enfilade.

But they had forgotten the choking dust that would prompt a second vehicle to stay well behind. With the first arc of sun came two vehicles, trailing dust clouds, a hundred meters apart.

The terratired vehicle squalled to a stop thirty meters from the pickup. One short-sleeved man exited running, turned to shout to the driver who pulled a sporting rifle from the floor. Sanger's first burst tattooed the truck, the driver turning in time to receive her next burst. He seemed to leap backward as if jerked on a wire, the rifle spinning like a majorette's baton. The second man was unarmed. Quantrill watched him snatch up one of the weapons Sanger had placed at the verge, and smiled. If it would shoot gravel, Sanger might have a problem.

The driver of the second vehicle must have seen dust spurt from the jacket of the first driver. The all-terrain pickup swung hard out of the ruts and began a desperate U-turn, throwing gouts of dust and gravel as it veered toward Quantrill, chips of paint flying as Sanger poured automatic fire into its rear quarter panel.

Quantrill saw the shirt-sleeved man hunkered behind his truck away from Sanger, frantically shaking his useless trophy, an absurdly easy target from the nearside. Then, in one long easy burst, Quantrill perforated the windshield of the moving vehicle from edge to edge, watched the rider plummet to the ground, the pickup bucking and snorting as it slowed to a stop a hundred meters distant, the driver hanging half out of the cab.

"Down, Sanger," he shouted, and sent two singles moaning high over her nest. He put a round into the dust at the feet of the lone survivor, grinned at the man's impromptu leap. "Tell Sanger to stay the hell down," he muttered to Control as Mr. Shirtsleeves scrambled into his truck. The next few seconds would be critical. Quantrill drew breath and held it, his sights on a man who seemed to be fighting an invisible brushfire at the wheel.

The truck roared, lurched. Quantrill disintegrated its windshield, punctured both rear tires, and then emptied an entire fresh magazine into the other vehicle for effect.

"Permission to pursue, Control," he said, and called Sanger down on the double. He was shaking with silent laughter as he dragged Beasley's body from the pickup, and hand-signed silence to Sanger whose glance at her partner was furious. The pickup was cold, but not for long.

Quantrill steered directly across a wide arc in the trail, gesturing for Sanger to withhold her fire at the fleeing prophet. Her face was a scowl of mimed protest until she saw their quarry lurch away from the trail on flat tires. Only then did she realize that Quantrill was registering joy as he herded the man away from the ranch house.

"Subject is heading north in open country at his best speed, Control," Quantrill said, grinning at Sanger. "I propose to close on him after we pass the ranch, to avoid witnesses. We have a deader in the back seat. We can disappear him out here."

Sanger shook her head in disgust, aware that Quantrill was playing Control's game for reasons of his own. Control could not possibly know how many witnesses had identified the T Section team, and gave the sanction for the delayed kill.

Cutting his speed, hand-signing his explanation to Sanger as best he could, Quantrill paced their quarry for twenty minutes. He was wondering how much farther he dared go when the pickup faltered. "Bag him," he shouted, and braked savagely. The pickup was out of fuel.

Sanger fired through the dust pall. The fleeing truck lurched, began to circle. Quantrill fumbled for his own M-27, added his short bursts to Sanger's, saw their quarry grind to a stop a hundred meters away.

"Got him," Sanger cried.

"He's on fire," Quantrill said, gesturing for Sanger's silence. "He will be in a minute," said his hands.

Hands on hips, Sanger watched as Quantrill carried Jansen's body to their most recent target. He managed to set the pock-marked truck afire with matches. Now they were afoot, he advised Control, and would head back toward the ranch to intercept the one vehicle that had not shown up at their ambush. Control agreed.

By now Sanger had had time to fume over the fact that they were searching for a small blonde girl with a tiny baby. For a time, they pondered a thin vertical smudge to the north, then decided it was a dust-devil.

"You deliberately shanghaied us here, and abandoned those poor devils at the ranch," Sanger's hands accused as they turned eastward.

"I don't think that last pair of prophets will go any farther than the ambush,"' he replied manually.

"Two dozen hostages against two," Sanger insisted.

"But one of those is my," he began, and could not make the sign for friend. "I knew that kid," he signaled.

Sanger rolled her eyes toward heaven, squelched a smile, then pointed a finger in warning and added, "Don't you ever put me in the middle like this again. Clear!"

His sheepish nod was almost that of innocence, and disarmed her wrath into inaudible chuckles.

Together, Quantrill and Sanger covered several sections of land before resting, at noon, beneath a lone scrub oak. He admitted via signs to Sanger that he hadn't really expected to cut a fresh trail from Sandy Grange.

"But you had to try," she signed.

A shrug.

"Would you do as much for me"¹."

Dust-covered, sweat-stained, he could not help grinning. “For you I do other things."

"Promises, promises," she signed, licking cracked lips, fully aware that she was a dust-caked travesty of herself at the moment. She found that he did not care about the dust; warned herself that Quantrill's unusually gentle and deliberate love-making was only a ploy to keep their breathing quiet — one more way to allay the suspicions of Control.

At midafternoon they set out again, this time quartering toward the ranch, and found it at last. Control meted out a small punishment then, insisting that they head straight for the south. The last pair of prophets had been intercepted by a civil patrol outside the town of Menard. Was there any reason why the team could not buy a ride and rendezvous with others north of Del Rio?

Quantrill and Sanger spat cottony fluff, accepted their new assignment, and trudged toward the highway. Sanger signed once, as they waited coins in hand to buy a ride just before dark: "Don't feel bad. You risked your head for the kid, when we both know she's probably been iced days ago."

Quantrill nodded. He made no other reply then or later; it was not the first time he had exiled a memory.

Sandys jurnal 30 Jul. Wens.

Chapter Seventy-Six

Eve Simpson had expected to find some careworn drudge in a closet-sized office in a forgotten corner of Sound Stage West. Her first astonishment was that Commander Boren Mills rated office and apartment space nearly as large as her own. It did not sweeten her mood much.

"You know damned well who I am," she flashed at the female rating who screened Mills's callers. "And your inky-fingered censor is about to find out who my friends are if I don't see him right now."

The heavy door behind the secretary slid back. The harried rating flushed as she turned. "I'm sorry, sir," she said, "I was about to—"

"It's okay — ah, as you were," Mills said easily. "I think I know—"

"It's not okay," Eve stormed, stalking around the desk. "I came to beard this old bastard Mills in his den. Nobody chops up an interview of mine like that, mister."

"The old bastard is in," said the young commander with a rapid wink at the rating. "Let's beard him together."

Eve swept past the young officer, determined to maintain the fine edge on her anger, glaring about her in search of a third party in the inner office. She thought the young officer's handshake would be perfunctory until he kissed her hand.

"Where is Mills?"

"Praying for forgiveness," he murmured, "and holding your hand."

She jerked back, made an open-palmed gesture, then dropped both hands to her ample hips. "Shit oh dear," said the rosebud mouth, fighting a smile. "I suppose you think I haven't been charmed by experts."

"You deserve nothing less," he said, meaning it. Now buxom to the point of pudginess, Eve no longer provoked dry mouths and itchy fingers in most young men — except on video, where NBN's image enhancement magic made her appear merely a bit plumpish. To Boren Mills, she was a classic by Titian, a haughty nymph with the mouth of a cruel Cupid; intelligence to match her arrogance; perfection itself.

Eve did not have to trust a man to enjoy him. This cool natty customer with the widow's peak and the smooth line just might be susceptible to her young-old charm if not to her threats. Besides, she thought with a tingly rush, he swung a heavy stick around NBN for such a young guy. Probably a pal of Brucie's. But oh, well, whatthehell… "What I really deserve," she said musically, "is freedom of the press."

Mills poured her a Cointreau, sat with her on a well-lighted couch, listened to her argument. Her interview with an English-speaking Chinese refugee in Mexico, she insisted, was just what the American public wanted: a dirge for a dying China. "That stuff about the little matter synthesizer was pure dynamite," she added, "even if it was just rumor."

"And could blow up in our faces," Mills replied. "If you weren't who you are, I wouldn't be discussing it. But obviously you have the need to know. Forget about what Americans believe, for the moment. What if the RUS believed — and I happen to know it couldn't be true — that the chromium and platinum they trade us might not be key minerals if someone could synthesize them? Even a rumor like that could damage relations with them."

Eve fumed, invoked a name in White House Deseret. Mills, undaunted, countered with optimal control theory and the awe in which it was held by the Secretary of State — not to mention the White House Press Secretary. The message optimization program, he said, had shown that no rumor about matter synthesizers should be offered to credulous Americans. Mills did not add that he controlled the numerical biases of that computer program.

"Anyhow," said Eve, her formidable curiosity abubble, "what makes you so sure matter synthesis isn't possible?"

"It is possible," he said; "it's been done. But at incredible cost, using big experimental facilities. The clincher lies in the idea that any government as rigidly controlled as China would mass-produce a small gadget like that, even if it could. Give a few million Chinese their own personal synthesizers, and the government's control would vanish overnight. Think about it."

While she sipped and thought, Mills wondered whether any girl Eve's age could possibly juggle the subtleties of the problem. It had never occurred to him that her intellect might rival his own.

"Seems to me that would be true everywhere. Chinese, us, the RUS, the Canadians, — any government that thrives on central control," she reflected.

He said, "Uh — to some degree you may be right." She was precisely, preternaturally right, he thought, elevating his opinion of this morsel — no, this banquet!

But Mills was a patient man, and managed to avoid figuratively licking his chops. He had already been tempted by dizzying offers for his civilian services; knew the day would come soon when he could pick his banquets, even without the synthesizer. But with it? He could rule a country as Rothschilds and Rockefellers never had. As Eve dallied with the scenario he had suggested, Mills was wondering if the Chinese had scaled up the device, and whether copies still existed other than his own. He must set up a research team and somehow compel their loyalties — but all in good time. Sooner or later, scaled up or merely mass-produced as it was, the synthesizer could make an economy dependent on Mills.

Because, of course, Boren Mills did not intend ever to sell, lease, or license it. He would only sell its products, and grow rich beyond imagining. His eyes refocused on the face of Eve Simpson.

"So the rumor is a problem in domestic policy as well as foreign policy," she was saying as though he were not there. "The Chinese would've been crazy to produce such a thing; and whether it exists or not, Americans would be howling for one in every garage."

Mills, startled: "Not in the kitchen?"

"I was thinking of fuel," she said.

"Might as well think of beef or heroin," he said, to channel her thinking toward the bizarre.

Judiciously: "Very complex molecules."

"Jesus Christ; what don't you know?"

Titillated by the power she sensed in him, Eve gazed at him through lowered lashes. "I don't know if you fool around."

It was one way to deflect this brilliant wanton from pursuing a secret that Mills had thus far protected. It was also the exact question he had been pondering about Eve Simpson; and her question was his answer. “I should probably play coy," he said, seeking cues to her appetites.

"I didn't know men with clout knew how," she lied, watching the advance of his manicured forefinger on her thigh.

"Men with clout are kinky," he purred, his tongue showing through the smile, deliberate in his choice of feminine nuance.

"It's a small world," she said huskily, undressing him, " — but I see that some things are larger than others."

He laughed, letting her set the pace. Later he could study the holotape of this first encounter, the better to consolidate this essential alliance. But it was to be weeks before he focused on something she said while nodding, nodding, nodding above him. "Even with," she said dreamily, "free synthesis, — there should be — ways to — make them — sweat."

There were: superstition, media, implanted fears both emotional and physical. Mills was expert with emotional implants, and had learned a few things about the physical kind. There was that bunch of brutes attached to Army Intelligence, for instance…

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Once she had tooled up to produce the oral vaccine for keratophagic staph, Canada knew she had won her war. The vaccine was processed from polysaccharide components of the dried S. rosacea organism in factories isolated by permafrost and wilderness. While firmly denying her breakthrough, Canada managed to distribute the vaccine in her antiradiation chelate doses to virtually her entire population.

Soon, more of the vaccine was secretly dispensed in military rations to Canadian and US troops in Asia. An infantry man who traded every chocolate bar away was trading his immunity, though he could not know it; a confirmed chocoholic who ate too much of it suffered from something similar to influenza. Some Canadian chocolate was distributed to RUS troops, too — but if the wrapper said shukulaht in Cyrillic, it provided no immunity.

Sooner or later, there would be enough oral vaccine to eradicate Chinese Plague throughout Asia, but Canada took the long view. The RUS would get it later, rather than sooner.

By the second week in August, 1997, Allied forces in Asia celebrated the war's anniversary in defensive consolidations — their weasel-phrase for a brisk retreat. ANZUS forces in India no longer sought the spearhead that would have met our Fifth Army on the western edge of SinoInd territory; for one thing, the US First and Fifth Armies had largely completed their redeployment north of Manchuria, into Siberia. RUS strategists growled as the Americans moved ever eastward, ever farther from defense of Russian population centers and nearer to the Bering Strait. The RUS were pulling their own armies back, intending to wall off European Russia using the Urals as a buffer, and still had the US Third Army to help.

Konieff, who still chaired the anxiety-ridden Supreme Council, argued that it was better to have the rest of the Americans in Siberia, for however short a time, than to let the region be overrun immediately by surviving SinoInds. Besides, the Americans had left an entire army, with English and Canadian assault brigades, in Central Asia. Some members of the Council warned of duplicity here. Fearing that the foreign army might turn hostile on the banks of the Volga, the RUS worked out an accommodation. The Americans and their English-speaking friends could retreat through a corridor south of the Caspian Sea toward Turkey. Only the Iranians would protest this, and Iran had long since bled herself powerless with childish purges.

Konieff did not know that the US Joint Chiefs had placed our Third Army at such risk only after top-level meetings with the Canadians. Canada pledged to protect the escape corridor for our armies in Siberia, if we would lend our battle-wise Third Army to the Turks — who had a bit of a problem.

Turkey's problem began in 1992 when she contracted with Israel for desalinization plants on the shores of the Tuz Golu, a huge brackish lake in Turkey's central Anatolian plateau. The Israelis had tapped geothermal energy in nearby volcanic highlands by 1994, and knew better than the Turks that the central plateau offered an excellent, if not quite ideal, staging area for a project that would take a decade to complete. Israel envisioned nothing less than a fabrication and launch complex by which Israelis could begin their escape from Earth.

Not that this scheme had the blessings of every member of the Knesset. The premise had stuck like raw pork in the gullet of many a traditional Zionist. But the odds against Israel's tomorrows mounted every year, and the only thing more unthinkable than an orbital New Israel was an Israel that could survive its present neighbors where it was.

With the Turkish connection, Israel would gain freedom of movement to build and launch the seed ships to harvest asteroids to build vast habitats in Lagrangian orbits. Turkey would gain a newly fertile highland near Ankara, and rapid industrialization using Israeli and Canadian engineering. Canada would gain from favorable trade with New Israel's space faring factories, and harbored the conviction that this solution would rinse away, once and for all, the trouble spot of old Israel. Canada well knew that worldwide objections would be raised against an orbital New Israel. She also knew that no corporate state on Earth had been in the past, or ever would be in the future, likely to bring such single-minded dedication and ability to the establishment of space colonies.

Canada found that Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, and other AIR countries would willingly help finance the extraterrestrialization of Israel. In 1995, major powers would have intervened. By 2010, some major power might again intervene. But this odd consortium of Canadians, Islamics, and Israelis saw the next few years as a launch window in time.

Turkey, nominally a democratic Islamic moderate, had already permitted many Israelis to relocate from Cyprus to the Tuz Golu region, but knew that in transforming her central plateau to an Israeli staging area she would risk opposition from inside and out. Internally, the nomadic Kurds were raiding advance Israeli camps. Externally, Turkey feared that the RUS might retain enough clout to mount an expeditionary force to prevent Israel from developing her orbital habitats.

Turkey's problem, then, was simply that she needed an army of janissaries for a few years. Canada was the broker for these services. She knew that the US was in no position to withhold our Third Army, now that we depended on Canada for aid.

Ultimately, White House Deseret viewed the 'Ellfive Solution' with cautious optimism. The Apostles — the ruling committee of the LDS — felt that the official Mormon accounts of world history would, in time, greatly benefit by a general Jewish exodus from the planet. They reasoned (simplistically) that Jews everywhere would clamor for berths on Ellfive shuttle ships, so that Mormon America would be rid of one highly visible religious minority. The truth was that most American Jews had lived urban lives, and died urban deaths, a year before. More Jews survived in Europe than in America. Like Japan, Europe was rich in industry, poor in natural resources. There was good reason to expect that New Israel could have her pick of emigrants to a new industrial frontier.

The long purposeful retreat of the US Third Army was applauded by Allies and SinoInds alike for varied reasons. Iran and Kurdistan mounted token opposition, but feared contamination by plague more than they feared the passage of the infidel. Thanks to Canadian chocolate, very few cases of plague assailed our troops in Asia and by early September, our Third Army reached Eastern Turkey. The First and Fifth US Armies were streaming toward the Bering Strait while the weather held.

We had historical precedents in Dunkirk and Cyprus for the massive crossing from the Chukchi Peninsula to Alaska. We believed that the SinoInds, like the Russians, were too weak to mount serious opposition to our crossing. But just in case, the US and Canadian fleets assembled in the Chukchi and Bering Seas.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

The Bering Shoot was a misnomer coined by media; it should have been called the Chukchi Nukes. Before dawn on Thursday, September 11, a covey of ballistic birds sailed over from the Sea of Okhotsk to pound the Chukchi Peninsula where over one million US troops were staging to cross the strait.

Most of our naval forces stayed submerged and could not affect the outcome of the SinoInd attack. It was the big delta dirigibles, refitted by the US Navy after their success in the Maldives, that intercepted most of the nukes with particle-beam weapons. Inevitably, shock waves from airbursts blew seven of our fifteen deltas out of the skies over Chukchi. Our few orbital weapons salvoed every warhead they could muster against the SinoInd craft in the Sea of Okhotsk, and no second strike came from that quarter or any other.

In all, the Bering Shoot accounted for two hundred thousand US casualties. Without the antimissile delta squadron it would have been over a million. In the two weeks after the Bering Shoot, naval and commercial craft shepherded all but the rearguard of our Fifth Army across the strait. The rearguard was, man for man, probably the most heavily armed and mechanized military group ever assembled. Sampling each fuel dump before razing it, chiefly with crews of no more than two to each armored ACV, the rearguard met no strong opposition. In this respect, they fared better than their comrades who had reached Alaskan soil.

Opposition to the returning US armies came from the last quarter they had expected: White House Deseret.

One of the most signal failures of American media was its failure to reassure our civilian population on the subject of plague. Everyone knew that any influx from Asia would bring keratophagic staph and blindness — and no facts to the contrary had much effect. When Yale Collier announced an 'overnight, God-sent miracle cure' from Canada, only Mormons and the RUS believed him. The public outcry in the US amounted to an instant plebiscite which Collier dared not ignore. In the face of several resignations by general officers, the President insisted that our First and Fifth Armies hold fast in Alaska — at least until the message optimizers in our media could turn the public from its panic.

To pragmatic veterans this implied a winter in Alaska and many of them said The Hell With It. While fuel dumps still burned in Chukchi, entire divisions were moving toward the states of Washington and Oregon in open defiance of their Commander-in-Chief. America had never faced such widespread military defection, perhaps because America had never been in such disorder.

Once again Canada found a compromise, and urged it on our deserters without much concern for Collier's approval. Obviously, she pointed out to the deserters, they did not carry plague — for which they could thank Canadians. Just as obviously, Canada was emerging from the war as one of the few winners. American deserters could apply for Canadian citizenship immediately, so long as they did not continue their headlong rush beyond the regions where Canada's hegemony reached.

Canadian money was now preferred in most of the US northwest. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and their frequently summary courts were already maintaining order from Portland to Duluth, sanctioned by the US Government which worried more about its southern borders than its north. There was, bluntly, not enough US Government to go around anymore.

It became clear to the Collier administration that we could keep Alaska and Hawaii but we would — temporarily of course — lose Washington, Oregon, Montana, most of Idaho, North Dakota, and so on to the shrewdly sympathetic Canadians. But there was hope for future reparations because, for one thing, Mormonism had a solid toehold in western Canada.

It was equally clear to the RUS that the Union of Soviets was dying of Chinese Plague and Canadian neglect. On September 23 the RUS made their demand on Canada: vaccine or war.

No one — not Canada, not the US, not even Chairman Konieff — knew whether remaining RUS weapons could deal serious blows past Canadian defenses. Canada's Parliament quickly replied that shipments of oral vaccine were being readied for the Russians and, meanwhile, the US Third Army in Turkey could help by sending its stocks of Canadian chocolate to the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, across the Turkish borders.

The RUS, naturally, wanted distribution to begin in the Urals and the heartlands around Novgorod, Gorkiy, Volgograd. It was transparently clear to the Supreme Council that Canada was more interested in saving rebellious Ukrainians than in protecting the central RUS nervous system.

Less than fifty hours after acceding to the RUS demand, Canada began her airlift of vaccine-laden chocolate. Ironically, the distribution could have been faster if the vaccine had been by gel capsule, but Russians knew by now that immunity came in shukulaht; so chocolate it must be.

A few cases of plague had turned up in Leningrad, Grodno, and Baku, cities on the edge of RUS dominion. Tens of thousands of cases were being treated in the heartlands. Naturally, predictably, the Canadian airdrops began in Estonia, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan. Canada wisely asked UN observers to help, and to vouch for the fact that enough vaccine had been dropped onto Russian soil to immunize a hundred million people. All the RUS needed to do was complete the distribution. Any country powerful enough to threaten war on Canada was surely capable of passing out chocolate — and, Canada added, she would not send aircrews of slow transport craft two thousand klicks into the heartlands of a country which had just threatened war against her.

Boren Mills could not have optimized messages better than the Canadians. Millions of RUS citizens — Russians, Tatars, Bashkirs, all those who heard the news through RUS jamming and feared the plague more than they feared the Supreme Council — made pathetic attempts to reach the vaccine dropsites. Few RUS citizens owned private vehicles, so most of the travelers went by government-owned mass transit, which required faked permits, outright bribes, or stowaway status. The result of the peripheral airdrop by Canada was almost complete clogging of RUS mass transit. This failure of the RUS circulatory system destroyed the remaining confidence Russians had in their leaders — gangrene throughout the body politic.

Chairman Konieff'slast success, in a stormy session of the Supreme Council, was in preventing Field Marshal Zenkovitch and his faction from countering civilian panic with bullets. Zenkovitch was after all, said Konieff, a Ukrainian who perhaps thought real Russians should not obtain their chocolate immunity.

Taras Zenkovitch removed his belt with its empty holster and placed it, breathing deeply, on the table. "If that is what you believe," he said to them all, "you leave me no alternative to resignation."

"I spoke in anger with a troubled soul," said Konieff. "We are not Dzugashvilü, Stalins who would destroy our people to save an idea. Please, comrade Zenkovitch, accept my public apology."

Second Minister Vyacheslov, a gaunt Byelorussian, patted the trembling arm of Zenkovitch and said in his vodka tenor, "Taras Zenkovitch, your army might serve best by trying to keep the transit system running. At the same time, surely each of us retains enough personal charm to obtain a few cartons of vaccine from local officials."

"Begging from party hacks in Estonia," growled Zenkovitch; "is that what we are reduced to?"

"We could be further reduced," said Vyacheslov, placing a hand over his own eyes in a gesture that now signified plague.

Vyacheslov, a great believer in hands-on charisma, carried the day. Both Zenkovitch and the absent Suslov had been assured by field officers that any orders to a military unit that included forcible removal of vaccine from a dropsite would mean almost certain mutiny, supported by the local officials. Marshal Zenkovitch huddled with his staff to expedite civilian travel while Konieff and others made ready to visit known dropsites. Each committeeman carried a pocketful of small elegant cases, and in each case was a large elegant medal. It was the only coin in which they hoped to pay party hacks.

Though Vyacheslov and several others returned with vaccine, Konieff'stwo-place jet vanished over the Caspian Sea. It was believed that he fell victim to Iranian or friendly fire. In any case, Konieff would not have returned to find a functioning Supreme Council near Perm; the transportation riots had already begun, and the food riots would not be long in coming.

China's fragmentation was well advanced, more profoundly than in RUS states because Chang's Central Committee had depended even more on the acceptance of central control. With the unitary breakdown in the CPA came a fast reshuffle into China's ancient standby, the feudal warlord system. The best that could be said for Chang's government was that, until early October, it still controlled Shansi Province with remnants of the Third CPA manning parapets of the Great Wall against plague-infected deserters returning from the western provinces.

Then Jung Hsia, Third Army Marshal, discovered that Chang was dickering with Canadians for plague vaccine in a transaction which would amount to surrender. Supposedly, Chang hoped to buy immunity from prosecution with mi-crocoded specifications for some secret device, no doubt a weapon. Jung reflected that Chang's own death squad had removed a number of top technical people during the past fortnight; and Jung further reflected that he knew a few folk whose unpleasant arts might unlock Chang's tongue. But art sometimes fails in its purpose, and Jung did not learn what kind of weapon had been worth so many assassinations. Chang Wei died of multiple injuries in the night, and Jung became a warlord until Chang sympathizers offered Jung Hsia to Canada as 'earnest money' for a transaction they needed urgently.

India's Casimiro, taken alive near Nagpur by New Zealanders, was released on October 3, disappearing again into Madhya Pradesh with a Turkish delegate from the UN. It took Casimiro two weeks to assemble something that might be called a Parliamentary quorum, with a few members voting arguable proxies. The chaos of India was hardly more chaotic than it had been a decade, or two or three, before.

In some ways Indians stood to gain; many US troops in western India were to remain as an army of occupation. For the first time in Indian history, hungry Indians had reasonable hopes that surpluses in certain regions would be diverted in the interests of full bellies instead of mountainous bribes.

Still, angry Moslem tribesmen sniped at the garrisoned infidels and were targeted in turn. It had always been thus. It might always be thus. The winter of 1997-8 would see as many deaths throughout moribund Asia as had been suffered in the opening weeks of the war.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Blanton Young, Vice President of the United States, stood and stared out the window of the Presidential suite toward the dusting of November snow atop the Uinta Peaks east of Provo. His hands were pressed to his ears as if to guard against more bad news. Finally he turned, blinking back tears, shoved hands into the pockets of his jacket. "Six months, Mr. President? And just when we'll need you most! These are tears of self-pity," he added wryly.

Yale Collier draped an arm over the broad shoulders of his friend, felt the physical strength and forgave, as always, the internal weaknesses. "Six months at the least, "he reminded Young. "I might still be around to nominate you three years from now, if this chemotherapy works."

"But — Yale, I know my limitations," blurted Young, and pointed toward the fax folders on the desk across the room. "Do you honestly think I can handle all that?"

"You'll have help, just as I do. You'll make mistakes, and you'll learn from them. Don't underestimate our strengths; the Church has never been stronger, Blanton, and—"a wan smile, "God's work may be much easier with the 'Streamlined America' package."

At the phrase, Blanton Young smiled too. It was a common ploy of any government to phrase weakness in terms of strength. Using semantic differential programs managed by a brilliant young naval officer, Collier's savants had obtained the new catchphrase, a 'Streamlined America', and hoped that the verbal mask would hide some unpleasant restructuring beneath that slick surface.

US boundaries had been streamlined into a broad, roughedged diamond with apexes near Cleveland, Houston, Eureka, and Pollock, South Dakota. The secession of the eastern states had been bloodless — even amicable, once it became clear that the quarantine line was necessary and would be maintained indefinitely. White House Deseret had suggested a protectorate status for the eastern seaboard, but the Old South preferred to confederate on its own.

Alta Mexico now extended its hazy borders from the Texas 'Big Bend' country to the central California coast. Canada, perhaps with more politesse than was really necessary, had 'provisionally' accepted most of our northern states as territories. Despite returning troops — a mixed blessing — the plain fact was that the US could not maintain civil order in regions where illegal immigrants, paranthrax, deserters, and armed zealot groups abounded. The physical streamlining of the US, by November 1997, had finally stabilized.

Internal streamlining had scarcely begun but, with the help of far-sighted industrialists, Collier's administration was taking the necessary steps.

The President, seemingly as healthy as ever, placed his cancer-ridden body at the work carrel of his desk; waved Blanton Young to the seat beside him. "Take the reform of the Federal Communications Commission," he said, selecting a fax sheet. "With lifetime appointments, we can count on a majority of good conservatives for decades to come."

"The FCC is the least of our troubles," moaned Young.

"How very right you are," Yale Collier said softly. "Blanton, with full unrestricted control of network holovision in this country, we can remake it into the true Zion. How beautiful upon the mountains," he murmured, glancing out the window.

For the past six weeks, the Vice President had been immersed in the process of nationalizing our fossil fuel sources; had only skimmed daily briefs on other topics. "Print media will be tougher," he hazarded.

"What print media? The price of newsprint and Polypaper are forcing the dailies to offer subscription by holo — which we can influence in several ways. The outlaw media can be dealt with by — law enforcement," he said vaguely. "And I hardly need tell you how much more effective American business can be under the control of new conglomerates like International Entertainment & Electronics. Look," he urged, turning to his carrel display.

The President keyed an instruction, smiled at the multihued organization chart that swept across the big holo-screen. IEE was little more than a set of interlocked intentions so far, and had provoked liberal outcries when those intentions reached the Securities Exchange Commission. But the nation still reeled from its war losses: we had failed to obtain full reparation in the peace so recently negotiated by Canada, Brazil, and Arabia between the allies and SinoInds. The war had begun over the price of oil, and impoverished America now found the stuff dearer than ever. Islam had not really fought the war, but had won it nevertheless.

The United States needed efficient reconstruction, did not want it from outside, and could not obtain it from inside without ‘streamlining' a few checks against repressive monopolies. This kind of cooperation between government and industry had fertilized the Union Pacific and Standard Oil, and it could boost the growth of International Entertainment & Electronics.

IEE was a set of commercial broadcast networks, interlaced with the Holo Corporation of America, tied to Loring Aircraft, engaged to Entertainment Talent Associates, in bed with Deseret Pacific Industries, romantically linked to Latter-Day Shale. It would have to tread carefully around a few other surviving consortia and necessary evils such as organized labor — but tread, it would.

Blanton Young asked the pivotal question: "And how much of all this is in the hands of devout stockholders?"

"Enough to assure us," said the President, 'of the very most cordial relations. This country must never allow the identities of Church and State to merge," he said, the great voice rolling across the room, "but in Zion I foresee that both government and business will serve God."

"A magnificent vision," Young murmured as Collier wiped the display. "I presume the Apostolic Council will recommend men for key positions in IEE. You'd be surprised how many shale company executives forgot they were Latter-Day Saints the day we confiscated their present-day mineral leases."

"Regrettable — but predictable in sight of so many heretic groups. That's one job IEE will undertake early: to lead our strays back to righteousness through media. As it happens," Collier went on, "I have in mind a certain young man for IEE's Chief Executive Officer — who is not even a member of the Church."

"You always have your reasons; I'm waiting," said Young, always most comfortable when working under supervision.

"Commander Mills is a decorated war hero, a media genius, and a great organizer. No liberal rabble-rouser can show he's one of us."

"Then how do you know he is?"

"By their works shall ye know them," said Collier, "and Mills is working for a vision of Zion that is very like our own." The smile he turned on Young now was one of sadness, but not of self-pity: "It will be your task to preserve that vision; to win more hearts; to keep the hearts we've won. In all loving kindness, Blanton, I offer you this warning: you have a tendency to persuade more by punishment than by reward. If this nation is to regain its old glory, it will be by the same old path of reward, with less emphasis on retribution. That is partly what I had in mind with the establishment of a Search and Rescue bureau," he said, tapping another fax-sheet.

"Yes, Mr. President," said Blanton Young, using the full title to suggest agreement with a philosophy he could never espouse. Raised in a strict household, Young respected punishment. His father had often said it: “An ass will use up bushels of carrots, but you only need one stick."

"I'd like you to get back to work on this S & R bureau so the media people can give it exposure," said Collier, renewing an old topic shelved during the secession months. The big hands flew over the keyboard, the voice resonant and vital as ever. It seemed implausible to Young that his chief was a dying man as Collier outlined a favorite scheme, a small arm of government that would come to represent the best any administration could offer.

Search & Rescue squads, chiefly underpaid paramedics, had long been on a few county payrolls and enjoyed enviable reputations. Now, living in ruins and short on dedicated paramedics, many Americans needed S & R teams more than ever. It was Yale Collier's dream to organize a federal cadre who would search out the lost; rescue the imperiled; and would do it on camera with panache, a reminder to Americans that a Godly administration would go anywhere in support.of its people. Smart uniforms, the latest equipment, the sharpest personnel, the best training. Such was the vision of President Yale Collier.

The Vice President questioned, advised, concurred, silently filed away some thoughts for further study. An S & R bureau might achieve great things with sparse funding, he saw, and said as much; but he cautioned that some rescues would inevitably involve victims of the paramilitary bands that defied the central government.

Collier tended to gloss over this facet of the S & R charter; yes, yes, certainly an S & R team should be capable of handling a few armed outlaws on occasion, but it was important that S & R build an image more of rescue team than SWAT team.

Thus was oral agreement reached without a meeting of minds. As he sat beside his old friend and made notes on organization details, Blanton Young again mulled over the sort of recruits he might prefer. It was certain that some of the clear-eyed young S & R men — and women, of course, for show — would be confronted by brutish, bewhiskered ruffians who swaggered up to spit into the eye of Authority. The kind of rebels now termed by the LDS as 'Gadianton robbers'.

And how should God's judgments be meted out to the wicked? Young was in no doubt here; he knew the passage well from the Book of Mormon, iv, 5:

"…the judgments of God will overtake the wicked; and it is by the wicked that the wicked are punished…"

Young was pleased with the neatness of his secret solution. Forty years before, an American administration had recruited the wartime wicked of the OSS into an ostensibly peaceable CIA. Surely, the armed forces still harbored a few young cutthroats who would not look out of place among the clear-eyed exemplars of Streamlined America…

Chapter Eighty

"… and in the coming months we'll be seeing a lot of these special, dedicated people," hummed the voice of Eve Simpson. On the big holo screen of T Section's briefing room near Santa Fe, a powerfully built young man winched himself to the portal of an open elevator shaft carrying a limp and lovely girl to safety. The voice-over continued on the slickly made documentary, but no one was listening anymore.

"Ethridge, you let 'em pluck your eyebrows," crowed Barb Zachary, glancing from the screen to the blushing Kent Ethridge. The gunsel, Ethridge, was one of perhaps two dozen in the room. T Section survivors; a small elite assembly.

"We made a deal; they let me pluck the blonde," Ethridge replied. Actually, Ethridge had played the part only on orders, after a computer search cited his gymnastic grace, and after Eve Simpson saw him on an old holotape.

Max Pelletier, tiny and dark and lethal as a Brown Recluse: "You should've held out for the Simpson hotsy, Kent."

"Fat as a pig," Ethridge protested. "I don't know how they hid that on the holo."

"I can see this isn't holding you spellbound," said the disgusted instructor Seth Howell, flicking on the room lights and freezing the holo frame. Howell wore a uniform identical to the one Ethridge had worn in the holotape: flare-leg black synthosuedes, long-sleeved black blouse with turned-back cuffs and deep vee collar, set off by a brilliant yellow side-tie neckerchief. On his left shoulder was a yellow sunflower patch with centered, stylized S & R in black; soft black moccasins completed the outfit. Howell was a big man, heavy in the trunk with a bony neck and long slender limbs. For all their sarcasms, the gunsels could see that the exquisite cut of the S & R dress uniforms enhanced the image of the wearer.

"Of course they hyped it — even stuck Ethridge in a dress uniform. On assignment you'd wear a mottled two-piece coverall and overlap-closure boots."

"Always assuming you could make the grade," put in Marty Cross, who'd been harping all morning on the difference between the simple requirements of T Section and the broad-spectrum charter of the Search & Rescue people. Cross was in civvies — but boasted a tiny sunflower emblem on a neck chain.

"Hype, hype, hype, hype," chanted Des Quinn, as if counting cadence. "I joined up for the duration. The war's over, gentlemen, and I say fuck it, all I want is out. And they can start by taking this out," he said, tapping himself ominously behind the ear.

Quantrill exchanged a glance with Sanger, several seats away. Her eyebrow lift was cynical reply to Quinn.

"I'll say it once more," sighed the portly Sean Lasser with good humor; "when your implant energy cell runs down, that's the end of it. There's always the chance they could trigger the terminator or cause infection when taking it out, and there's no danger in leaving it in there, so—"

"I don't buy that," said Quinn. "That goddam cell could be energized again by accident or maybe on purpose for all we know. Am I gonna have to find a surgeon myself?"

"Anyone but a T Section surgeon would almost certainly set it off, Quinn, even after the energy cell is kaput. The Army did not intend those things to come out," said Lasser softly. "Ever."

A three-beat silence. You could always gain rapt attention by telling a man more about the time bomb in his head. "I could file suit," said Quinn, looking around for support but finding ambiguity — the ambiguity he might have expected from T Section survivors, who had not survived by forthright honesty.

"Right now you're begging for court-martial," rasped Howell, then caught himself and shrugged. " 'Course I'm just an interested spectator now, recruiting for a strictly civ-il-yun agency. Got my discharge over the Christmas holidays."

"I just bet you did," from Quinn.

"I can vouch for it," said the laconic Cross. "He buggered an ape in a tree." Cross surveyed the pained expressions, gave it up. Cheyenne humor seemed lost on this bunch.

"You two may be civilians," Lasser waved at Cross and Howell, "but I'm still on duty." Turning to his gunsel audience, he went on. "T Section's cutting orders for you, but I'll summarize them and then dismiss you.

"You've all got thirty-day compassionate leave with pay, beginning zero-eight-hundred tomorrow, 13 January. We, don't want to see you around Santa Fe for a month. Bum around solo, look for work, see how rough it's going to be on the outside, — whatever. Use your covers; you know better than to talk about T Section. No buddyingup; solo means just that.

"Don't stray beyond, ah, streamlined America — but that's in your orders, too. You'll probably be seeing more about Search & Rescue. Think about it. For the record, I wish I weren't too old for it; it'll be a snappy elite bunch and the pay will be good." A pause, an old reflective grin: "A lot of young starry-eyed Mormons will be competing against you for S & R; it offers medical training, airborne and mountain survival stuff, urban disaster work, — you name it." He saw Quantrill's hand rise lazily, nodded toward him.

"That's not where we specialize," said Quantrill. "I mean, — I'd stick out like a bullet in a box of bonbons, Lasser." Murmurs from Pelletier and Zachary; a nod from Sanger. "All day you and Howell and Cross have been dropping hints about needing us for what we do."

"Yeah; tell us what you can't tell us," prompted Graeme Duff.

Lasser's raised brow and lopsided smile implied, fair enough. He stroked his chin, looked thoughtfully at his old colleague Howell, saw that the responsibility was properly his own. "It's all innuendo, "he admitted, "so I'm guessing why certain people might want to see you apply for S & R. It takes a certain kind of dedication to put your arse on the line for some idiot who's caught in a collapsed building. That's the image of Search & Rescue, to save the lost sheep.

"But if I read the signs right, there'll be times when S & R will need muscle — a sprinkle of gunsels, maybe. How many stray nuclear warheads are in the hands of private citizens now? How much binary nerve gas? Maybe S & R will have to deal with those questions. Simply put: there may be occasions when they'll need to search out treason and rescue the system. It's a system in shock, and first aid may hurt a little. I say 'maybe' about all this, because I wasn't told." He darted another quick look at Ho well.

The big man stood with folded arms, resplendent in black synthosuede, and said nothing. The twitch at the corner of his mouth said, you got it, Lasser.

Quantrill again: "Why can't I apply today and avoid the rush?"

"Officially? Because you're still in the army, fool," Lasser said, scowling in mock irritation: "Still off the record, I don't know. All I do know is, they don't want any of you for a few months yet — not even your applications." He surveyed the gunsels he had trained, palms out; a friendly little fellow who, as they all knew, could be hiding two dozen deadly weapons on his person. "Any more questions?"

Sanger was yawning. Pelletier muttered a joke to Quinn. "Dismissed." said Lasser.

Chapter Eighty-One

Cedar Rapids and Dayton would be knee-deep in snow this time of year; Quantrill scratched them from his mental list. The port of Eureka was a boomtown, perhaps not too cold for a few days of desultory job-hunting. Bakers field and Odessa would be warm, if you didn't mind the brawling and the sidearms. Maybe in a week or so…

He snorted at his attempts at doublethink, turned up the fleece collar of his denim jacket against a cold breeze that scudded across Route 84 on the outskirts of Clovis, New Mexico. He knew damned well where he was going first, and if it took the full thirty days to make sure, he would spend them. Palma, back at her old post, would be glad to see him; might even find him a job or at least a cot and a computer carrel. In mid-February he'd be back in Santa Fe for mustering out and, almost certainly, a set of black synthosuedes with the sunflower patch.

He placed two five-dollar pieces between gloved fingers of his right hand, ready for the casual wave that might negotiate a ride as far as Lubbock or San Angelo. With his left hand he fumbled for the folded note Sanger had slipped him; read it again in the hard chill light of a winter sun.

Not 'Marbrye', but 'Sanger'. No affectionate terminal phrases, no promises or complaints or worrisome strategies to enmesh him. Just the sort of note he had drafted for her, but had given it up when it said too much. He told himself it was stupid to wish she had said more; no one with a mastoid critic could afford that.

Slowly, he abraded the note to shreds under his hiking boot, then squinted toward the faint cough of a diesel in the distance. He tucked the camera out of sight because he did not want to answer questions about that telephoto lens. The thirty-mm. self-propelled warhead might not penetrate heavy armor, but it would stop a truck — or anything on four legs. Quantrill could not bring back the dead, but he could avenge them. Smiling, waving, he sought his ride into wild country.