Systemic Shock (7 page)

"Tell them I want no surprises."

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

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

The chief brightened. "Aye, Sir."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Anybody know where Tullahoma is?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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