Systemic Shock tq-1

by Dean Ing

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  "Now you're being testy, Eve," said Rudolf Berg, one of NBN's senior VP's. "Some might even say unpatriotic."

  Eve Simpson slid from the exercise machine, mopping her forehead as she glared from Berg to the beach far below. Wind currents from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles had not been kind in March. Eve missed her little outings, and somebody had to pay… "Brucie, get me a Drambuie."

  "Calories, Eve," he clucked.

  She would not look toward the mirror in the exercise room; she knew what it would tell her. Those extra few kilos were showing at her waist and chin. "A joint then," she raged. "A cup of hemlock, Bruce; something! Rudy here has Brigham-friggin' City on his brain!"

  "I'm only thinking of the network and your future, Eve," said Berg. "You can't really expect the President to drop everything and come here."

  "I'm becoming nothing more than an interviewer," she spat, then inhaled on the proffered filter-tip joint.

  Berg met her anger with aplomb, a grey little man with sequined ideas. Even Professor Kelsey praised Berg's sensitivity to the public pulse. "You're playing a vital role as sugar-tit, Eve. Don't knock it. You have more credibility now than you ever had."

  "I have more tit, you mean," she grumbled. “Is there no such thing as a low-calorie London broil?" She inhaled again; held it.

  "Eat less, chase your young men more." Berg scratched his nose to hide his expression. “I should imagine there are enough studly young priests in Brigham City to please you."

  "Salt Lake City's still hot," she accused, exhaling as if Berg himself had dropped the single nuke that exploded over North Temple Street.

  "They'll take you around it, as you very well know. And the Gulf of Kutch invasion is really hot, Eve. Media hot." His tone said that the wheedling phase was over. Her irises said that the marijuana was taking effect. "It's the biggest positive step in this war, and you can get an exclusive from Yale Collier himself — but it won't wait. You 'll have to be on that shuttle in an hour or we go with Lindermann. And the President, I'm told, was looking forward to a chat with you beforehand."

  Berg did know how to pull triggers. Eve despised the upstart Ynga Lindermann with her exotic accent and slender rump, whom NBN was surely grooming as a capital-P Personality. Berg knew, too, that Eve valued her tete-a-tetes with men of great power. She hoped that Berg would never guess how simply and directly that aura of power affected her sexually. Even spindly little Berg, when he was wheeling and dealing, made Evie itch.

  Of course the idea of virile, farm-raised young Mormon men gave her a different itch; less deeply psychic, much easier to scratch. Also, the Gulf of Kutch affair was more than just prime time. It was a world series-super bowl-Oscar night parlay, and an exclusive summary with Collier was worth a seventy share of the public's attention. "Get wardrobe and makeup alerted," Eve sighed; "and remember, you owe me for this one."

  Before she caught the hovership to the Lancaster shuttle, Eve managed a brief video call to her mentor, Kelsey. "You must evince genuine confidence in the church's infallibility," Kelsey counseled in his overblown academese that always made Eve feel like screaming. "Be deferential and dress demurely, and don't hold eye contact with him. The President knows you only as America's sweetheart; don't violate his expectations.

  "Drop a few terms about demographics and sub rosa media alliances — just enought to dispel any idea that your youth is equivalent to political naivete. Ah, you might drop my name once. Not twice. Don't argue with anything he says. If the President is convinced you are in thrall to his charisma in your personal private session, this relationship could have an incipient importance far beyond your career at NBN."

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

  Supply would depend on air cover, and SinoInd 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 Nühau, 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 destructi
on 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 gu
nsel 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.