Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

  "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 Sinolnds 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, Sinolnds would be cut off from the supplies they needed from the AIR 'neutrals'.

  Supply would depend on air cover, and Sinolnd 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 Nhau, 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 fi
fth, 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."