Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

  "You're certain the pilot wasn't an Indian who happens to speak Chinese," the President prompted.

  "He's about as Indian as a fortune cookie," said the general.

  The Chief of Naval Ops: "We've put every hunter-killer team we can muster on intercept sweeps out of Oahu, off the Andreanofs, and in the Guatemala Basin. I don't see how the Sinos could mount such an operation without our detecting it. Frankly, I expect to find 'em sneaking some big troop subs north through the Middle America Trench. We'll be ready."

  "You'd better be," said the Secretary of Health. "That flu aerosol is already dispersed. By the twenty-eighth, there won't be an aspirin tab or a roll of toilet paper in Northern California."

  "Taking the worst case," said the Secretary of Defense.

  "Somehow they hit our beaches around the Oregon border. Do we nuke them or don't we?"

  Secretary of State: "I hope to God we can begin civilian evacuation today."

  "You talk as though the decision to nuke had already been reached."

  "No, sir, I think Health and Interior will agree with me that whatever the decision, we've got to pull our civilian population back east of the Coast Range in the next day or two while they're still able to walk-before that virus drops 'em in their tracks."

  "Meanwhile," said the general, "we pump flu vaccine into green Fourth Army troops and move our artillery in place around the bays."

  "And be ready to lift it again by chopper," nodded the Secretary of Defense. "This whole Sino operation could be a blind."

  The CNO: "The Latin-American scenario, Mr. Secretary?"

  Defense shrugged. "That or a massive resupply of Florida, which could swamp what's left of Second Army. If the Sinolnds have immunized an invasion force against their paranthrax, it could happen. We're not going to overlook anything."

  Defense was wrong. We had overlooked the possibility that an invasion force had been so thoroughly destroyed that even its own leaders had no way of knowing whether any of it survived.

  Major General Karel Lansky, at the far end of the conference table, sighed and put away his floppy discs. Until now he'd hoped the agenda would get as far as the new developments with First and Third Armies in Kazakhstan, Lansky's own bailiwick. It was too early for conclusions, but damned well time for an opinion: in western Sinkiang, rear echelons of the Chinese People's Army were beginning to panic.

  Nothing in satellite or RUS espionage reports suggested an Allied strangulation of supply routes to the CPA, yet the movements of troops and materiel in Sinkiang were in mounting chaos. One RUS brigade had already speared back into Semipalatinsk to find that Sino trucks and ACV's had run short of fuel. Rocket artillery, mortar rounds, fuel, food, everything that qualified as heavy cargo: the CPA was starving for it. The American Third Army had whiplashed under the Sino flank as far as Alma Ata, turning the Sino rear at Lake Balkhash. George Patton would have lanced on into Sinkiang. For once, our hesitation proved wise.

  Lansky did not trust the briefings he'd had as liaison with the RUS high command. The Russians ostensibly thought that some civil disturbance-perhaps a full-fledged revolution-was shaping up in western China, though no Chinese radio messages supported such an idea. But, said the Russians, if it had happened to the USSR in 1985 it could happen to anybody!

  Lansky gathered evidence and kept silent among the Russians; if his own suspicions were correct, he would be wise to hide them from his Russian friends. Lansky intuited that the CPA was as politically reliable as any military entity in existence. If an internal panic broke out in the rear echelons it was unlikely to have an ideological basis. But there were weapons, both chemical and biological, that could dismember the staunchest warrior cadre.

  Lansky knew that the RUS Central Committee had sworn they would unleash no biological warfare weapons without prior agreement among allies. He also knew that the Sinkiang anomaly had all the earmarks of madness, or of plague. Unless the RUS had broken its word by secret dispersal of some terrible weapon in Sinkiang or Tsinghai, Lansky had guessed awry.

  He had, and he hadn't. Though a Mikoyan attack bomber had provoked the beginning of the end with conventional smart-bombs against a Tsinghai laboratory, the RUS was for once innocent of intent. Ultimately the Chinese Plague was China's own dragon, come to breathe death on her people.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  June 18,'

  c/o Texas A & M

  Research Station Sonora TX

  My Dear Ted:

  By now you probably know we've stalemated paranthrax. It was a team effort and for a time, you were part of that team. I thought it might give you a lift to know you've been a giver of life and not a taker.

  You really should have said goodbye; it didn't take a Sherlock to trace you to the San Marcos induction center, and God knows you could pass for sixteen. I kept your note-as an object lesson in male inconsistency, I suppose. Surely you've had enough of uniforms by now! How many stripes on yours? Let me suppose it's one or two, and on that supposition I congratulate you. Better yet, write and tell me. I'm not naive enough to think you're still in San Marcos but optimist that I am, I dare hope this will reach you-wherever.

  I'm not in Sonora now, either. I can't tell you where. Let's just say I volunteered elsewhere. Incidentally, there's reason to hope that Louise and Sandra Grange are alive and well. Aggie Station resounded with rumors about some of the survivor groups, though they weren't the most law-abiding sects I might mention. But I digress. My current work is with something by the jawbreaking monicker of Staphylococcus rosacea, alias Keratophagic Staph, and we can thank God it's still confined to Asia. I'm assuming you've heard about it; it's in the news here. On the other hand: if you're anywhere in its vicinity, burn used hankies, keep your resistance up and your hands away from your eyes. It wouldn't hurt to use goggles. Need I insist that you take any antibiotics you're issued religiously! If I have a religion left, perhaps that's it. As long as all religions have their side effects, I may as well pray to Novobiocin as to anything else. Meanwhile, we of the priesthood are busily crafting new gods-the better to counter dat ol' debbil Staph. Wish us Godspeed-or should I say antibioticspeed? I saw a holo interview last night between the Sec. of Defense and Everyman's hotsy, Eve Simpson. Sorry to say she's getting downright chubby; no doubt you mourn that too, too-solid flesh more than I do. As I was saying, the gov't now admits that our transient camps in the San Joaquin Valley weren't just for agribiz. We expected the little invasion that wasn't there. Why tell you about it? Well, for all I know you're in some engineering battalion out there. So is my daughter, Cathy Palma, Jr., and it's just possible that you may run into each other. If so, tell her Mama says you don't have to salute!

  Must get some sleep. I have to keep my resistance up, too. Think of me now and then as I do of you and, if the spirit strikes, write. When all this is over, don't hesitate to use me for a reference, Ted. By then it may be all I'm good for.

  As ever, Catherine Palma

  Quantrill read the letter with an aching sadness that became anger on second reading. Damn Palma! Her letter needed ten days to reach him and ten seconds to breach his defenses. The last thing a gunsel needed was a reminder that there were still kind and loving people out there, taking terrible chances without rage or vengeance to prod them.

  He scanned the passage on survivor groups a third time, dredging up wry amusement to counter his ire. For damned sure they weren't law-abiding sects; according to Seth How-ell they were the chief reason why West Texas and much of New Mexico were justifying the label of Wild Country.

  Neither Howell nor Reardon had said so, but Quantrill felt sure his next assignment would be into wild country. Two of the new gunsels, Desmond Quinn and Maxim Pelletier, were sitting in on his cram sessions-but so was Sanger. Maybe Howell was right: to stop a bunch of crazies you'd have to ice them all or pinpoint the leaders first. Isolating leaders meant infiltration, and to minimax the operation it would be best to let gunsels, for once, do the prelim work usually reserved for the FB
I or other agencies.

  Of course that meant T Section's charter was thereby broadened. The Collier administration seemed reluctant to delegate death contracts to agencies which were themselves becoming Mormon in sympathy. T Section had no Mormons and no sympathies. It had one recent casualty whose Chicano background should have been good cover for an infiltrator in wild country. That cover had bought him a shallow grave on the banks of the Pecos River. Quantrill could not yet fully believe that some religious nut had bagged Rafael Sabado but, taking it at face value, he could endorse the notion of sending gunsels into the region in teams.

  He glanced at the Palma letter again, acutely aware that Control would have read it first. "Palma, you soft-hearted loser," he snarled, and tossed the letter into the carrel shredder. It wouldn't hurt, he thought, to let his mastoid critic transmit a scorn he did not feel.

  He checked the time: a half-hour before dark. Maybe Sanger would feel like a 'little jog', their own code phrase for twenty minutes of cross-country run and ten minutes of clean, piping-hot undiluted lust somewhere on the hillside below the big house. With Marbrye Sanger, he felt, you knew where you stood; knew that her needs were on honest display; could depend on a quid pro quo without emotional aftershocks.

  On one level Quantrill admitted his use of sexuality to salve a psychic wound. On another he assumed that Sanger was all surface, uncomplicated, beyond the need for friendship.

  His was an assumption that Control endorsed. Had Control found any evidence that Marbrye Sanger ached for dearer sharing with Quantrill, the pairing would have been dissolved by 'coincidence', and permanently. But Sanger was subtle, and regularly chose partners other than Quantrill-and was more vocal in her enjoyment of them. Control, for all its vigilance, did not ask whether Marbrye Sanger invested all her external encounters with the same inner valence.

  Sanger rejoiced at Quantrill's syncopated knock. She was not fool enough to show it; if anything, Sanger overestimated Control and her critic; preserved the cool grace that characterized her. She agreed to the little jog, careful to avoid primping, mindful of the video unit that might squat behind her mirror.

  Each time she was alone with Quantrill, Sanger sought new insights behind those troubled green eyes; touchstones into the character of a youth she must never claim as friend. She could provoke him into stories of his past, titillate him, ravish him, goad him to take her in the same way. But she knew that she must never befriend him.

  Sanger told herself that what she had was enough.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Liang Chen had taken more than enough. Accustomed from infancy to the security of his social unit, he *d been quite willing to leave his lakeside village unit in Hunan to join the biggest military unit on earth: The Chinese People's Army. Unit within unit, the huge CPA bureaucracy churned its human molecules into motorized infantry, armored, engineering, quartermaster units with all deliberate speed-i.e., slowly. Liang was quick to learn, stalwart under pressure, good with math; the right recipe for an antitank fire controller.

  Even when the RUS brought in the fast-scudding armored ACV's to change the rules on him, young Liang reacted quickly, bagged an even dozen. His new conversion tables accommodated the quick lateral capability of an ACV, permitted his battalion to survive the RUS onslaught where others failed, added a deferential note to his unit's phrase 'Xiao Liang'-young Liang. Now, for the first time, he wondered if he would live to be called 'Lao Liang', old Liang. Liang counted the remaining HEAT warheads, wondering when he would see more.

  It wasn't just the ferocity of the previous winter, though frostbite had scalloped Liang's ears. Nor the long desperate footsore march to meet the American Fifth Army which had been hurled against the southern face of the Kazakhstan front in the spring. Even the dwindling of supplies and the rumors of a hellish disease to the rear had not, in themselves, sapped the patriotic juices that once surged through Liang Chen. What drained him most was unitary breakdown.

  Liang was feeling the surface of a tumor in the military corpus of China. When the supply of antitank missiles was exhausted, Liang's unit melded with a mortar company. When the food ran out, the forty per cent of his company who could still fight managed to attach themselves to a retreating regimental supply group near Birlik, fighting off American air sorties with small arms fire and a few shoulder-fired SAM's.

  And when the first of the infected front-line officers began to don dark glasses to hide the signs of that infection, Liang shrugged it off. The CPA would take care of its own, he thought. But units could not prosper when unitary leaders spread horror.

  For it was the field-grade officers who first brought plague to the front, men whose duties required round-trips far back into Tsinghai and Sinkiang, men whose necessary contacts meant contact with what Allied medics had labeled Keratophagic Staph. The disease progressed in a human host, and spread to others, with ghastly dispatch.

  Liang Chen's devotion to battle kept him from early contact with the ravages of plague. Not until he heeded the call for retreat north of Alma Ata did Liang, gripping his perch on an ancient halftrack, see undeniable evidence that all units, on every level, were breaking down in panic. He saw a red-eyed captain submachinegunned by his own men who cowered more fearful of his corpse than he had been of their weapons. He saw others refuse to join new units, terrified that new unitary contact might chew their faces away. Finally he ripped a patch from a discarded battle jacket, affixed it to his own, and carried off his imposture as a corporal of a Political Solidarity detachment. No one cared much to fraternize with those zealots, and Liang could face down a major with his sham. Meanwhile he made his way back toward Sinkiang alone to find some unit worthy of membership.

  The farther he went eastward past Ining, the more desolation he found. Not death, but desolation. Units were becoming crowds of blind men, led to food and shelter by sighted men who might not be sighted for long.

  Liang knew intellectually how vast the world was. He knew in his guts that somewhere in it lay safety, and he knew positively that he was developing a cold. Or something. Liang turned north and set Mongolia as his goal. With no unit, no challenge by frightened guards as he pedaled his stolen bicycle toward Ara Tarn, Liang blew roadside dust from his nostrils, wiped a sleeve across his nose. Presently a command car hurtled past, going in his direction; probably, he thought, with the same goal. Liang cursed the dust of its passage, blinked, wiped his sleeve across his eyes.

  That night Liang Chen holed up far off the road where the bike would not tempt others. He had no food and he worried about that. His fever was worse and his eyes itched so that he found himself rubbing them; but this did not worry him much.

  What worried Liang more was the sight of his fingernails, late the next day, as he pedaled near exhaustion toward a deserted village. He allowed himself to coast, stared at his left thumbnail, saw its edge receding from the cuticle as though eaten by some subtle acid. Truly, it did not hurt much. Neither did his eyes. The damnable pounding headache and the blurred vision bothered him more.

  And then he passed the abandoned truck, saw for an instant the face of a soldier with scarlet eyes and runnels of pus down his cheeks; a face not of the dying, but of the damned. The truck had been deserted; he had glanced into a rearview mirror. Liang Chen sat down by the road and waited for the unending dark.

  Some of Minister Cha Tsuni's records went up with his lab; others were deliberately erased. We may never know whether Staphylococcus rosacea was a DNA-tailored bacillus, a spontaneous strain, or one induced by radiation. Like 5. aureus, S. rosacea thrived asymptomatically in the human nose, so human carriers spread the stuff with every exhalation. But also like other staph, 5. rosacea was not fastidious and could live in a wide range of temperatures, with or without oxygen. Thus the bug could live on airborne dust motes and wait to invade lungs, blood, organs. The best defense was solitude; 5. rosacea did not travel well without a host.

  Once entrenched in a host, the new bacillus released toxins that could lea
d to pneumonia, meningitis, huge suppurating carbuncles, and septicemia-all potentially lethal if untreated. But S. rosacea set itself apart from older staph varieties in two ways. It was highly resistant even to the potent, problematical vancomycin. And it had a horrifying affinity for keratinous tissue, especially the saline-washed transparent anterior covering of the eye. In plain language, while inflaming surrounding tissue it consumed the cornea, characteristically staining the victim's cheeks with a stain of yellow pus as it prospered and devoured.

  Typically a victim would breathe the bacilli, or airborne staph might invade an open wound. While the disease progressed into pneumonia or a toxin-filled bloodstream the victim became listless, often feverish. He would almost certainly place contaminated hands near his eyes, or walk through his own exhalations.

  Either way, the eyes had it. S. rosacea flourished in the salt tears, eating away the cornea and, to lesser effect, into the nails of fingers and toes. Treatment was at first a matter of administering exactly enough of a powerful antibiotic to quell the bug without generating serious side effects, e.g., renal failure, to kill the patient. This knife-edged balance required constant monitoring and considerable skill by trained medics and, given that edge, only thirty per cent of 5. rosacea victims died. But ninety per cent of the survivors would be sightless after the disease had run its full course.