Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

  "God a "mighty," Rogers breathed, before they slid past the ridge. "Cap'n, did you see that peccary?"

  A nod. "Glad I could see it from up here-only that was no peccary, Ely."

  "You ever see tusks like that on a cow?"

  Chartrand smiled and shook his head. "No, and I never saw a peccary the size of a Shetland pony. Gentlemen, you have just met an Aggie russian boar. Damn' if I know what it's doing out of the Aggie pens, but they were breeding some there. Working on a big low-aggression strain. I just hope that one's had his lobotomy, or whatever it takes."

  Quantrill felt a prickling along his arms. The beast had been clear on the display for only a moment; huge shoulders innocent of fat, sharply ridged back tapering to muscular haunches, tiny hooves. But more awesome than the upward-curving tusks that flanked the snout like ivory goalposts was the fact that the great animal stood on hind legs, ears pricked forward over the demonic visage. The boar leaned against the canyon wall as if deliberately trying to blend into shadow. Quantrill asked, "Are they smart?"

  "Beat you at checkers, I 'm told," Chartrand said, flicking toggles as he spoke. "I'm getting the substation beacon, Ted; time for you to get aft. We'll moor in ten minutes."

  Quantrill saw the distant gleam of window reflections on the horizon, tiny rectangular masses in a depression, trees that suggested a town. He scurried back to his station and buckled up. A delta crewman learned very soon that the big airships waddled and yawed as they lost headway. More than one veteran crewman had needed his barfbag.

  The Norway's automated snubber gear engaged minutes later as Quantrill, peering from a clear bubble, watched mooring struts scissor down and out. The prop shrouds gimbaled to produce lateral thrust and, with distinct thuds, the struts found their tapered sockets. The coloratura whisper of propellers died; faint whooshes of pneumatic interlocks; then Quantrill was unbuckling to help Bernie Grey at the cargo hatch. The Norway had brought her vital cargo to the Aggie station with her usual efficiency and quietude.

  Quantrill scampered down a strut, tasting the aroma of Edwards Plateau, confident of his movements in the airship that was now his ship. It seemed indestructible as a bridge pillar, and Quantrill had no slightest inkling that he would never lift in the Norway again.

  Chapter Forty

  David Chartrand was so preoccupied with his work that he did not monitor the special channel which updated other Air Defense Identification Zone limitations on civilian aircraft. The ADIZ display would have been his only hint that something big was breaking in the Mexican Gulf early Saturday.

  The Navy's ELF grid in Wisconsin had been hamstrung for hours after a nerve center sustained burrow-bombs emplaced by a suicidal Libyan squad infiltrating from Canada. Three naval ratings had perished, five more ratings and an officer had been wounded. It was therefore hit-or-miss for a coordinated defense against the Indian wave of saturation sorties.

  In a convoluted irony, the Indian attack aircraft had been developed from older craft furnished by the late USSR, which had copied earlier British STOL designs. Never intended to land on anything smaller than a carrier, the swing-wing jets were boosted from subs in the gulf. With luck they would be recovered by skyhook choppers or, failing that, would ditch at rendezvous points after their low-level passes at selected targets. The boosters permitted external fuel tanks and wavetop loitering while the squadrons formed south of the hundred-fathom line.

  Three squadrons of twelve attack craft then streaked north and west, saving afterburner fuel for the moment of slash-and-run. From Warner Robins in Georgia to the anchorage at Corpus Christi, the Sinolnd swingwings swept in with little warning to deliver their single ground-pounder nukes, deliberately chosen as 'dirty' bombs. Most of the targets were suspected induction centers-which explains why sleepy little San Marcos, a college town between Austin and San Antonio, rated such lethal attention.

  Because the flight paths of the attack aircraft were northwestward, US interceptors in Georgia and Florida were forced to chase, rather than intercept, the intruders. Air Defense Command interceptors from Alabama to Texas scrambled in time to engage the enemy. They saved Tuscaloosa, Lake Charles, and College Station among others, but they also found that the Indian STOLs had minicannon. They did not find Ranjit Khan in time to save San Marcos. What happened there was an act of randomness, or of God. Or of Puck. In any event, India did not greatly care for San Marcos or for the other sortie targets. What she cared very much about was the decoying of American air cover from Florida-and in that, she succeeded handsomely. The troop-carrying ACV's needed only an hour to cross the strait from Cuba, and neared Florida across a front longer than the Florida keys. We dared not nuke them; the wind was toward our defenders. But we reduced Cuban installations to slag the next day.

  The invasion troops were led by Cubans, whose Kremlin connection had evaporated with the end of foreign aid. With the Cubans were well-trained Punjabis, Tamils, Gujaratis.

  And with every Indian came fifty Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Chileans anxious to avenge their ideological father, the martyred Fidel. The two thousand Indians were present chiefly to maintain the hardware. The hundred thousand latinos hungered for booty. They had not been told that paranthrax was already creeping down the Florida peninsula. Perhaps they would not have cared much.

  Ranjit Khan sortied past the Texas coast up the Guadalupe River with an early sun over his shoulder, jerking his eyes from horizon to viewscreen comparator. His electronic package was relatively unsophisticated but Ranjit's comparator found Gonzales, Texas, and after that it was a simple matter to cram fuel into the afterburners for his dash to San Marcos. The town was not very large. Ranjit needed only to arm his hundred-kiloton weapon, jettison it while crossing San Marcos at Mach 1.5, and delay his banked turn while the drogue chute deposited his ground-pounder. But when Ranjit flicked at the armament switch, the pig-humping thing popped out of the console! Ranjit swore, reached under the edge of the console; his crew chief was going to catch hell.

  Ranjit Khan felt several wires but could not see them. With the control stick between his knees he fumbled for the switch, saw it bobbing behind the hole in the console, leaned forward again and felt the aircraft respond as he nudged the stick.

  Cold sweat gushed from Ranjit's forehead as he hauled back on the stick and the steeple of some Christian mosque, or whatever they were called, flashed by. In his rearview he saw twinkling myriads of glass fragments burst from office buildings in his thunderous wake. He had bombed San Marcos-but only with his machwave, very much too low for a proper pass.

  Ranjit thought he could reinsert the Allah-accursed switch and arm his weapon, given a few minutes at loiter speed with his wings extended. He must relax, take his time, melt the ice in his guts and make a return pass. The Indian pilot throttled back and activated his wing hydraulics; began a long circle at fuel-hoarding speed. He was too intent on his console repair to notice the blip closing from behind on his sweep radar.

  Goliad, Texas, did not have an air force-and then again, it did. It had an absolutely gorgeous, positively ancient F-51, the Golid Chapter of the Confederate Air Force. The CAP was a joke crafted by experts, and parts of that joke tended to be hazardous. Hank Curran was his own mechanic, his own man, and he was sixty-nine years old. He had flown a Mustang in Korea almost half a century before, and later while other Texans invested in bigger tractors Hank was looking for a toy. A bubble-canopied, Allison-engined, six-gunned, four-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour toy. He found one with clipped tips and NASA scoops in Chino, California, in 1972 and by now he had replaced every piston and control cable. The scoops were replaced, wingtips added. Hank's paint job even had the black-and-white invasion stripes-but this was a different invasion.

  The day everyone called Dead Day had been a lively day in the hangar at Goliad. Hank Curran invested the time installing one air-cooled and thoroughly illegal fifty-calibre machine gun in the 'Slang's starboard wing. He had never really expected to use it, but other pilots in the CAF had swap
ped him the metal links and over a hundred rounds of hopefully-live ammo; actually, it was all API, the armor-piercing incendiary rounds that had once been inserted at intervals in an ammo belt. Ever since, Hank had slept with one ear open for that air raid klaxon. Goliad even had one of those, linked to Port Lavaca's.

  Early Saturday morning the klaxon made Hank spill his coffee. Nothing but sheer valiant CAF cupidity made him tear the screen door off as he ran for his Ford. He had the chocks away from the 'Slang's wheels and the engine oil temp up off the peg when Ranjit Khan's STOL thundered across the shoreline at Port Lavaca. Hank's canopy was sealing as he saw a hundred knots come up on his airspeed indicator, eleven minutes' worth of radar warning had been plenty for the Confederate Air Force.

  Hank figured the bogie would come in low. He himself went high, the Allison rejoicing. He also figured his chances of being shot down by our own interceptors were about fifty-fifty, give or take a bit. At the moment, Hank did not give a shit. He believed what the holo told him; did not fully appreciate that San Antonio had been flattened to her beltline. San Tone was the great cradle of US military aviation. Hank Curran would protect its grave.

  When the bogie wailed by him near Gonzales, its afterburners rocketing pink in the early light, Hank thought at first it was an old Marine Tomcat. Then he saw it bobble, stray low, dip, and correct in a beeline for San Marcos. No friendly pilot on earth would make a mach-plus pass over Gonzales at treetop level. And then Hank recognized the silhouette. He shoved the throttle to the firewall and hoped he could keep the rice-pickin' bastard in sight. He had no radar, no access to military scrambler circuits, and no hope of catching an aircraft of twice his speed.

  Unless the bogie slowed down.

  Hank had manually, dangerously, charged his fifty because he had no automatic equipment. He knew that if it fired, it might fire all over hell and half of Texas because he had not boresighted or adjusted the gun; and every round would be a tracer, telling the sumbitch he was on the 'wanted' list. But Hank knew how to slide the stick over, easing the pedals, to let his aerial gun platform walk its fiery dotted line of tracers to a target. The problem was, the goddam bogie purely disappeared west of San Marcos as its afterburners winked out. Then he saw a sunglint on wings, the STOL rising up almost to Hank's own altitude at breathtaking speed, and again came the glint. The bogie began a great loitering arc that just might bring it around in a circle. Hank thanked Heaven he was not showing a contrail, kept himself high in the sun, and wished his eyes were younger.

  Ranjit Khan's oval pattern took him two minutes, and by that time he knew he must pull the switch and its mount down, past the wiring bundle, to snap the miserable thing. He also knew that he would have to ground the switch body against the console or some other part of the STOL's airframe to complete the circuit. Unless the 'arm* signal was sent, he could not jettison his weapon either. So much for emergency refitting; Ranjit was not very keen on ditching at any speed whatever with the equivalent of a hundred thousand tons of explosive in the canister slung under his belly.

  The offending item came into sight with one final tug; Ranjit nosed his aircraft down, set a visual heading for San Marcos, snapped the switch to 'arm' position and reached to ground it against the console plate. One way or another, he was about to do his bit for Asian democracy. And still Ranjit did not check his radar display.

  The F-51 bored in from the southeast, her Allison singing like Valkyries, Hank Curran drymouthed as the enemy came within range. He would get only this one pass, and he had a slight advantage in altitude and a good angle on the bastard. Then the STOL's wings began to scimitar, its nose dropping as it gained speed, and Hank figured he'd been seen. He pressed the studs on his control stick, waiting that vital split-second to see where his tracers were stitching away before he maneuvered.

  The worst possible thing happened, Hank thought-incorrectly. The recoil hammered his airframe, crabbing the entire aircraft very slightly so that Hank's tracer burst was not only far ahead of the Indian STOL but above it, too. If he hadn't been seen before, he sure-God had announced himself now.

  Ranjit saw mach-three fireflies arc across ahead of him, knew instantly which quarter they had come from. He hit the afterburners, banked to the north,-and ran into Hank's last few rounds of API, lobbed in desperate seven-league trajectory after the fleeing jet.

  Ranjit's aircraft had only one battery, the backup unit having been removed for this mission in the interest of fuel economy. It only takes one fifty caliber slug to decant one battery, zizzing through the bottom of the device to leave two clean holes. A second slug toured the engine accessory pack, damaging the alternator. By the time Ranjit was fifteen thousand meters up, he had lost sight of San Marcos and all interest in it; found that he had no electrical power for instruments or switches. He still had pneumatics and manual systems, so he could still fire his nose cannon.

  The trouble was, there was nothing to shoot at and he could no longer be sure whether he had actually armed and dropped his nuclear bomb. He had seen no flash light the sky. His instruments certainly were not going to tell him. Ranjit raged and pounded against the arm of his ejection seat as he streaked over Kerrville on a westerly bearing. He armed his cannon, fired four rounds. Someone was going to regret this debacle. Ultimately, he thought, that someone might well be himself; but that was what paradise was for, to welcome warriors downed in holy battle. Ranjit Khan peered below in search of his own personal jehad.

  The F-51 had been too long past redline on her tach, and Hank Curran gnawed the whiskers on his underlip as he tapped on the oil pressure gauge. A Mustang didn't deadstick worth a damn and he didn't want to do a gear-up in a plowed field. He decided to try the airstrip at Kyle. He might wind up in something worse than a field if anybody ever found out he'd been boring holes in the sky with tracer bullets like an old fool. But Hank had only been trying to protect his country, and just maybe that friggin' Hindu or Chinaman had cut and run for it because of him. He would never know whether his now-stuttering, vibrating old beauty had made any difference in anybody's life but his; he would like to think maybe it had.

  Maybe it had.

  Hank Curran ran out of runway and folded a wing within earshot of San Marcos, where five thousand inductees were in basic training. Ranjit Khan, with one eye on his chronograph, was estimating his remaining fuel and wondering whether he could get to Mexico. He was clearly not going to get another crack at San Marcos even if he could find it. He opted for Mexico; banked, then saw the buttercup-yellow gleam of a delta dirigible far ahead. It was motionless, moored near a group of long white buildings. It made the biggest, brightest target Ranjit Khan had ever seen.

  Chapter Forty-One

  ". like Vietnam all over again if the Cubans can hide in the Everglades," Bernie Grey puffed, steering the air-cushion pallet of supplies into the depot. Almost the first thing they had heard in greeting was news of the Florida invasion, only minutes old. A handful of maroon-coveralled Aggie personnel were on hand; most had flocked to the Caverns of Sonora, with most of the townsfolk.

  Quantrill slid the pallet onto the floor. "I'd rather they hid than have 'em take over. Uh-this the last load?"

  "Yup. Le's find some breakfast, ol' buddy." Their footfalls echoes through the depot building, Bernie glancing at his note 'corder. "Cap'n wants to get to Monahans by noon to pick up some-" Quantrill never learned what Monahans had to offer; the klaxon's hoot penetrated the building and, before they could spring to the exit, the Norway had already unlocked her struts. "Air raid," Bernie screamed, vaulting onto the cargo platform with an olympian leap. "Find a hideyhole, Ted!"

  Already the airship was underway, the inertial bounce of the struts carrying her too high for Quantrill to reach. His first reaction was anger that the cargomaster hadn't helped him get aboard. Then he saw Bernie's elaborated arm sweep, a warning to get away, and realized that a lighter-than-air craft was a much more vulnerable place than a ditch or culvert. To Quantrill, an air raid meant a nuclear blas
t. He saw two men galloping toward a concrete grain silo and chased after them. He was the only one in yellow flight togs; was to learn that the entire regular crew of the Norway had made it aboard. His backpack was still aboard, too.

  The great airship whispered southward where, Chartrand knew, the shallow canyon of Devil's River might suffice as a foxhole for a delta. A nuclear shock wave, catching the Norway moored, would utterly shred the great craft's filament-and-polymer body, but Chartrand imagined that either Sonora or the Aggie station was the target.

  "I want every man in shock harness," Chartrand said on the intercom. "We're probably going to scrape some of our hide off."

  The cargomaster: "Cap 'n, should you fire our little birds? Hate to have 'em going off under us if we hit-"

  "Sweet shit, here he comes!" Blythe Rogers, his display a split-screen with overlapping views, had obeyed the radar and was scanning the northeast quadrant for the blip. Unbidden, he threw the visual display onto Chartrand's monitor. Computer-enhanced visuals lent an unreal aspect to the monitor, the colors too sharp, too bright. And the arrowing enemy STOL growing too large as yellow lights burst from its nose. "The motherlover's gunning for us," Rogers shouted in amazement.

  They had been airborne for scarcely two minutes; the arroyo still distant. Chartrand hauled the huge vessel into a shallow climbing turn, felt the faint tremors as three explosive mini-cannon projectiles found their marks. A line of small explosions racketed across the packed earth of Edwards Plateau and then the Indian STOL had passed, wings extended, banking for another pass.