Systemic Shock (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

"One of those guys shooting us down."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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