Dean Ing - Quantrill 1 - Systemic Shock
PART I: VICTIMS
Chapter One
In early August of 1996 the Atlantic states baked like some vast piecrust under a paralyzing heat wave. It moved scoutmaster Purvis Little, in Raleigh, to plan the Smoky Mountain pack trip that would save a few lives. It also moved the President of the United States to his retreat in the Shenandoah hills.
The weather relented on the evening of Friday, the ninth. Young Ted Quantrill hardly noticed, racing home after his troop meeting in Raleigh, because he knew he'd have to politick for that pack trip. The President noticed it still less; despite the air conditioning in his hoverchopper, a tiara of sweat beaded his balding head. The bulletin that had drawn him back to Washington suggested complications in the sharp new rise of foreign oil prices; a rise that in itself further impeded his race for reelection against Utah's Senator Yale Collier. The President considered Yale Collier a charismatic fool. Ted Quantrill's parents thought the same of scoutmaster Little. In any event, a modest proportion of fools would survive the next week, while some of their critics would die.
Chapter Two
Through twenty years and three administrations, pundits in American government had watched helplessly as the Socialist Party of China wooed lubricious favors from the Middle East. Every few years some think-tank would announce that global addiction to oil was on the wane, thanks to this or that alternative energy source. Just as regularly, the thinkers went into the tank. Fusion was still an elusive technique. New fission plants had been banned in the UN General Assembly after the pandemic of fear that peaked in 1994. Loss of coolant (Alabama, '87), outgassing (Wales, '91), partial meltdown (Karachi, '93), and accidental scatter of confined radioactive waste (Honshu, '89; Connecticut, Shantung, '94) had taken only a few hundred lives-far fewer than, say, offshore oil rigs had taken.
But the fission boojum had scared the bejeezus out of voters from Reykjavik to Christchurch, and even autocrats reluctantly agreed to decommission some of their reactors. It was not that fission plants no longer existed, but they were fewer while power requirements grew.
If the million-plus deaths from the Birmingham and Minsk bombs of '85 added to the clamor against fission plants, that connection was hard to find. A million deliberate killings was human nature acceptable to the public, while a few hundred accidental killings composed a goad toward reform. Industrialized nations rushed to develop clean power sources. Meanwhile, they continued to burn petroleum.
Direct solar conversion, wind-driven generators, and alternative chemical fuels plugged part of the energy gap, while the price of energy made conservationists of most Americans. Still, fossil fuel remained a favored energy source: storable, compact, simple. While developing one's own oil resources, one was wise to import as much as practicable. So said the Chinese; so said we all. As early as 1979 China's ruling party, the SPC, served notice of its intent to anyone who might be paying attention. The SPC's official news agency, Xinhua, said:
Nearly 160 Moslem mosques of the autonomous Ningxia Hui region of Northwest China are being reopened. after damage to varying degrees in the past few years. The mosques are under repair with government funds, including the famed Yinchuan edifice and a Tonxin mosque known to be 800 years old.
And again:
The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, is now being retranslated into Chinese.
Though riddled with dissent on many topics, the Associated Islamic Republics was quick to imply devout thanks to China for her turnabout. The SPC could pivot as effortlessly on oil as anybody, with better coordination than the reconstituted, ham-fisted Russian Union of Soviets.
The abortive NATO-USSR conflict of 1985 has been chronicled elsewhere by Hackett, et al. Doubtless it won the popular title of World War Three on the basis of the nuclear exchange that swapped Birmingham in England for Minsk in Byelorussia before the collapse of the USSR. The newer and smaller RUS retained the frozen mineral wealth of Siberia; had lost nothing directly to China. But the lands lost to the RUS were all in the temperate zone where grain-and Islam-could be grown, and even exported.
No war, or any other movement, could be considered truly worldwide if it did not directly involve the two billion residents of China and India. Between 1985 and 1996, China's heavy industry expanded with Chinese supertugs towing icebergs to (ex-Saudi) Arabian shores, bringing desalinization equipment to rival Israel's and aiding the transformation of desert wastes. If a few million Chinese suffered from lack of that equipment in 1995, the SPC could wax philosophical so long as those old Japanese-built oil tankers kept sliding into ports near Peking.
China did not lack oil but what she had, she proposed to keep while importing more from reluctant Mexicans and willing Arabs. India was not rich in oil; but she was well-positioned to obtain it easily from Islamic friends.
All this, Americans knew. What had alarmed the State Department a week previously was the first of a series of urgent communiques from Mikhail Talbukhin, the RUS ambassador. The Supreme Council of the RUS had decided that Talbukhin should share a maddening discovery with us: recent price hikes on Arab oil were by no means uniform.
The Russians had voice-printed tapes to prove it. China and India were obtaining massive kickbacks, and had done so for years. Somehow, under the noses of US and RUS spy satellites, the Sinolnd powers were obtaining twice as much Middle-East oil as we had thought.
At first the notion of smuggled oil seemed wildly unlikely, but State Department people agreed that the evidence was convincing. The President addressed the question, What Do We Do About It? He did not address it quickly enough for RUS leaders, who saw that something was done about it the following Tuesday.
On Tuesday, August 6, a tremendous explosion had been noted by a US satellite over India's coastal state of Gujarat. It was no coincidence that Gujarat lay directly across the Arabian Sea from the source of India's, and China's, oil. Within hours the United States had stood accused, on the evidence of Indian ordnance experts, of sabotaging a huge Indian water conduit. The RUS backed US denials; not merely because Russians had in fact done the job themselves, but for a much better reason. The RUS craved Western support against the unreconstructed socialists next door.
By Thursday, August 8, alliances had crystallized in the UN. Every active unit of the National Guard went on standby alert.
Chapter Three
Ted Quantrill had given up hope of shouldering a backpack until his father, an active reservist, took a hard look at his orders on a Thursday evening. The following day, Ted was en route to the high Appalachian Trail. On that day the boy assumed his own argument-the trek would be his fifteenth birthday present-had caused the change of heart. Only later did Ted Quantrill begin to suspect the truth.
Chapter Four
From satellite and local report, it was obvious that the Gujarat disaster was more than the loss of a water conduit. Whole square kilometers were ablaze in an area known for its experimental cotton production by Indians with Chinese advisors. But cotton did not burn this way; and even if it did, China would not have risen to such monolithic fury over a trifling setback to an ally's agribiz. The blaze and the fury might be appropriate if both were rooted in oil. Not a few thousand gallons of it, but a few million.
Ranked fourth behind Arabia, the RUS, and Mexico in her known reserves of oil, China could have been providing India's supply, and this scenario was studied. But China exported significant quantities of the stuff only to Japan. With its expertise in shipbuilding and manufacture of precision equipment, Japan slowly forged her co-prosperity link with China, and shared the cyclopean fuel supply. Some of China's imported oil came from Mexico and Venezuela and some, for the sake of appearance, came in tankers from
the Middle East. American satellites yielded an estimate, based on a nosecount of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, that China was buying a third of her oil from Arabs.
But no satellite had penetrated the bottom of the Arabian Sea. No research vessel had identified the progress of a stunning Chinese engineering project which, using an acid-hydraulic process, quietly tunneled a meters-broad pipeline under the continental shelf from Arabia to Gujarat on the western plain of India. It was known that China had invested in a scheme to run water conduits from the Himalayas to western India. What no one had suspected was that the conduit was double-barreled. Water ran toward the southwest. Oil ran toward the northeast, then on to China herself. No wonder, then, that China had exploded so many nuclear devices under the Tibetan plateau; the resulting cavities were being filled with oil pumped from the AIR crescent. It was an immense undertaking, yet it required no technical breakthroughs. Its strength lay primarily in its secrecy.
With one well-placed demolition device just upline from a pumping station, the RUS severed water and oil conduits. Automatic cutoffs could not prevent the immediate loss of fifty thousand barrels of crude oil, which gravity-flowed from its conduit and spread atop the water as it burned. The RUS had well and truly blown the cover of the Sinolnd conduit. Now, everybody's fat would sizzle in that fire.
Chapter Five
The train clung to its monorail and hummed an electric song as it fled in a lateral arc from Raleigh past Winston-Salem. The scoutmaster, Little, was too busy controlling sixteen of his charges to worry about the seventeenth. The Quantrill boy lazed alone by a window, one hand cupped to his ear, watching an unusual volume of traffic stream near their track that overhung the highway median strip. As always, most highway traffic was cargo; some old diesels, mostly short-haul electrics. But today a surprising number of private cars shared the freeway.
Bustling down the aisle, Purvis Little promised himself to confiscate the Quantrill radio, which defied Little's orders on a pack trip.
Ray Kenney flopped into the seat next to Ted, jabbed an obscene finger in Little's direction. "Old fart, he muttered; "took my translator. Said we were only looking for the dirty words."
Quietly, without stirring: "Weren't you?"
"If I'm gonna learn the language, I gotta know 'em all," Ray said, innocence spread across the pinched features.
Ted smiled at the tacit admission. What Ray lacked in muscle and coordination, he made up by honing his tongue. If words were muscle, Ray Kenney could outrun the monorail.
Ray leaned toward his friend, pretended to stare at the traffic, and whispered. "Got a fiver? Wayne's gonna buy some joints in Asheville. If you want in, I can fix it."
Ted considered the idea. A few tokes by the underaged on a weed in a sleeping bag was nothing new, a token rebellion to relieve chafing under Little's authority. But Wayne Atkinson, their only Eagle scout, seldom did favors without three hidden reasons for them. Atkinson probably had the joints already. "I'll pass, Ray. Thanks anyway."
"Scared?" Ray caught the cool glance from Ted Quantrill's mint-green eyes. The scar over Ted's nose and the sturdy limbs furthered the impression that Ted did not yield easily to fear. He might, however, yield to a claim of it. "Wayne isn't scared. He's cool, he never gets caught."
"But you do; you're not Little's pride and joy."
"If I had merit badges coming out of my ass like Wayne does," Ray began, and then jerked around.
There was no way to tell how many seconds Little had been standing behind them. Ray braced his knees against the seat ahead, thrust his hands between his thighs, slumped and stared at nothing.
"I'll take that radio, Quantrill," said the scoutmaster after waiting long enough to make Ray Kenney sweat. He took the radio, slipped it into his shirt pocket, pursed his zealot lips. "Was it reggae jazz, or polluting your mind with a porn station?"
Not sullen, but weary: "Just a newscast, Mr. Little."
"Oh, no doubt," said Little, suddenly favoring Ray Kenney with a we-know-better smirk. "How will we ever explain your sudden interest in current events, Quantrill?"
Little turned away expecting no answer. He was halfway to his seat when Ted replied, "No mystery, Mr. Little. My father's in the Reserve, flies patrol from Key West to Norfolk. And there's a big tanker gone off the Florida coast."
Little frowned. "Sunk, you say?"
"Just gone; disappeared." Ted's shrug implied, you tell me, you've got the radio.
"Get your gear together, boys," Little called. "Asheville is the next stop." Then he hurried to his seat, fumbled in his shirt pocket, and cupped one hand to his ear.
Ted Quantrill was wrong; a compelling mystery was unfolding in the Florida Strait sea lanes. The tanker Cambio Justo, under Panamanian registry, had last been reported off Long Key, lumbering north toward Hampton Roads with a quarter-million deadweight tons of Mexican crude oil in her guts. The Cambio Justo could hardly run aground in four-hundred-fathom straits. She could not just fly away, nor could she evade satellite surveillance while she thrummed over the surface of a calm sea. But she could always sink.
Two hours after the Cambio Justo vanished, a sinking was everybody's best guess, and as far as it went that guess was dead accurate. What no newsman had guessed yet was that she had not sunk very far.
Chapter Six
The interurban coach disgorged Little's brood in Cherokee. From there to Newfound Gap they invested an old diesel bus with their high spirits. At the Tennessee border they reached the old Appalachian Trail, streamed off the bus, watched the vehicle drone up a switchback and out of sight. The bright orange paint and the acrid stink of diesel exhaust bespoke a familiar world that, for a few of them, vanished with the bus as completely as had the Cambio Justo-and for the same reasons.
"Wait up," Ray Kenney puffed as the youths ambled down the trail under a canopy of oak, hemlock and pine. He pulled a light windbreaker from his pack, zipped it over slender limbs as Ted Quantrill sniffed the sweet tang of conifers in the mountain air.
"Move it, Kenney," a voice commanded from behind. Wayne Atkinson, the oldest of the boy's, enjoy ed a number of advantages in Little's troop. Wayne wouldn't have said just what they were; not couldn't, but wouldn't. His rearguard position was one of responsibility, which Wayne accepted because it also carried great authority. Below average height for his age, he was strongly built, fresh-faced, button-bright and sixteen. Wayne Atkinson gave the impression that he was younger, which enhanced his image to adults. The biggest members of the troop, Joey Cameron and Tom Schell, accepted Wayne's intellectual leadership without qualm and, because they could look down on the top of his head, without fear. Among themselves, the smaller boys called him 'Torquemada'.
Ray was already shrugging his backpack into place when the last of the others eased past on the narrow trail and Atkinson got within jostling distance. Lazily, self-assured: "If your ass is on the trail at sundown, I get to kick it." He followed this promise with a push and Ray, stumbling, trotted forward.
Atkinson reached toward Ted Quantrill with a glance, let his arm drop again, motioned Ted ahead. Ted moved off, trotting after Ray, leaving Atkinson to ponder the moment. Quantrill's part-time job at the swimming pool had toned his body, added some muscle, subtracted some humility. Sooner or later that kind of insolence could infect others, even little twits like Ray Kenney, unless stern measures were taken. Wayne considered the possibilities, pleased with his position, able to see the others ahead who could not see him. It would be necessary to enlist Joey and Tom, just to be sure; and they could provoke the Quantrill kid by using his little pal Kenney as bait. All this required isolation from Purvis Little, who would sooner accept the word of his Eagle scout than that of God Almighty. Wayne's roles at award ceremonies reflected glory on his scoutmaster, and God had never seen fit to do much of that.
To give Little his due, he took his duties seriously and imagined that he was wise. He called rest stops whenever Thad Young faltered. The spindly Thad, long on courage but sho
rt on wind, made every march a metaphor of the public education system: everyone proceeded at the pace of the slowest.
The summer sun had disappeared below Thunderhead Mountain, far to their west, before Little reached their campsite near a sparkling creek. The National Park Service still kept some areas pristine; no plumbing, no cabins. The more experienced youths erected their igloo tents quickly to escape the cutting edge of an evening breeze, then emerged again, grumbling, in aid of the fumble-fingered.
Tom Schell slapped good-naturedly at Ted's hand. "Take it easy with that stiffener rod," he said, helping guide it through a tube in the tent fabric. "It's carbon filament. Bust it and it's hell to repair."
"Thanks. It's brand-new; an advance birthday present," Ted replied, imitating Schell's deft handiwork.
The Schell hands were still for a moment. "If you have a birthday up here, I don't wanta know about it."
Ted thought about that. "Aw, birthday hazing is kind of fun."
"Not if Wayne's got it in for you. Look: you've got your friends and I have mine, Teddy. If you're smart, you won't talk about birthdays until we're back in Raleigh."
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