Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Twenty-One

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

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

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

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

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

  Tiny Israel, still a nation surrounded by implacable foes except for moderate Turkey, felt an increasing squeeze as most AIR countries embargoed petroleum and high-grade ore to her shores. Under the circumstances, visitors thought it bizarre that Israel's internal transportation system would grow so dependent on air cushion vehicles that, even with the most effective ACV skirts, still used a third more fuel than wheeled vehicles and many times more than electric trains. Israel's Ministry of Transportation pointed out that an ACV did not require expensive roadbeds, and that her synthetic fuel industry was expanding on a crash basis. From Elat to Acre, Israel's noisy ACV transports levitated centimeters off the sand and left dust-tails in their wakes, until the night of Monday, 12 August 19%.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Twenty-Three

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

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

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