Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

  A week later-with all the delays from precincts where ballots were hand-counted, it was on Wednesday afternoon, 6 November,-President-elect Yale Collier delivered his victory speech. Cathy Palma listened morosely, though she had voted for the man. She was more concerned about QuantriU's defection; hadn't known of his delta pass until too late to stop him.

  And what could she have done to stop him? The captain of the delta Schwarz knew about Quantrill anyway; would hardly have denied him free passage. The Schwarz had been the first delta in a month scheduled to College Station via San

  Marcos. With either destination, Quantrill's intent seemed clear. Perversely, Palma hoped the kid would break a leg en route to enlist. He was diving headlong, she thought, into the meat grinder that had devoured his family, his friends, his future. To Palma it seemed a popular form of suicide.

  For the dozenth time, she-unfolded the page she'd crumpled after reading it. She had found it, in Quantrill's hasty scrawl, on his bunk atop a neatly folded yellow delta coverall. Palma's heart would have leapt if the yellow flight suit had been missing, for then she might have expected to see him again.

  Palma did not expect to see him again. "These should fit somebody," he'd written. "I can't wear a uniform that reminds me of friends. I don't think that's what uniforms are for. Someday we can argue about it. Good luck. Ted Quantrill."

  No, she thought, staring sightlessly at the page. They wouldn't argue; first because he was probably right.

  And second because he would very probably be dead in sixty days.

  PART II: GUNSELS

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The winter of 1996-7 was a relatively mild one, but a killer nonetheless. In Syracuse and Worcester, without natural gas, neighbors fought over ownership of trees they should have stacked as cord wood months before. In Roanoke and Knoxville, paranthrax crippled essential services until the cities, gasping in their own filth, welcomed December's refrigeration. The rat population leaped, and typhus was not far behind.

  On the central Siberian plateau millions died of simple starvation, with the removal of countless trainloads of Evenk beef and Yakut wheat to storage near the Black Sea. The aboriginal Evenk and Yakut people fared well enough on the land by returning to their old ways; but city-dwelling Russians in Mirnyy and Tura starved. The RUS needed rations for the armies that were moving south from Archangelsk to vast training areas in the southern Ukraine. Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria had declined the honor of hosting the Allied troops, and the RUS could not persuade where once the USSR had commanded.

  The RUS did not quarter American troops in the south out of kindness. They did it because advanced training of entire armies could be carried out more or less secretly there. And because thirty divisions of Americans wintering in the Urals would have died like thirty divisions of ants on an ice floe. North of the fiftieth parallel in a Russian winter, winter itself is the enemy.

  The Sinolnd movement to the west was slowed by the ferocity of Kazakhs, then stopped by the more ferocious ice storms. Only in warmer climes could a war against other men be prosecuted. Chad, for example, was dissuaded by her AIR neighbors from absorbing Libya. If Chad could only wait until the colossi fought to their mutual deaths, an Islamic crescent could become an Islamic world.

  Australians and New Zealanders completed their ANZUS exercises with American marines during a sweltering antipodal summer, making ready for a daring game of transoceanic hopscotch, while Canadian diplomats broached tender topics with Somalia for a bailout procedure, just in case. Canada's defensive game and her natural resources were burnishing her image as a major power. Somalia reflected on the Israeli/Turk agreement and its outcome, and then raised the ante. But at least she kept quiet.

  In Florida, surviving Sinolnd irregulars pushed past the Caloosahatchee River, bypassed the Miami ruins, sacked Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, and advanced on the Tampa Bay cities. Every Chris-Craft and dinghy in the American sports-fishing fleet was now armed: night-scoped AR-18's, heat-seeking SSM, or a self-correcting mortar-anything to interdict the supply hovercraft that hummed across from Cuba. There were still enough Harriers north of Orlando to make a Sinolnd air supply route plain suicide. The average Florida cracker was just as irregular as the invader, but he fought for his own turf and knew the inlets and hummocks better. The 'gators fed well. It was thought that Tampa might hold.

  Throughout the Northern Hemisphere and to a lesser degree in the Southern, background radiation was still dangerously high two months after the second-strike nuclear flurries of October. Among the most essential of US industries, suddenly, was the scatter of small processing plants for production of selective chelates.

  Years before, the Lawrence Berkeley Labs had created LICAM- C, the first chemical capable of selectively and safely removing plutonium ions from living tissue. By now, other chelates existed which had special affinities for iodine, cesium, strontium, calcium. Of course, a human body robbed of its stable iodine and calcium isotopes would not function for long. The murky suspension of Keylate that Americans swallowed contained not only the selective chelates, but coated particles of replacement elements which, like tiny timed-release caps, became available to the body only after chelates had removed newly-absorbed elements. There were side effects, but temporary nausea was better than cancer of the spleen.

  Americans listened to local media and took the recommended doses of Keylate. In the Ukraine, Keylate was in short supply. In San Bernardino, missile plant workers took it every four hours through November. In San Marcos Infantry Training School, Recruit Ted Quantrill took it once a day through December.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The big man in the dun uniform barked an order in Chinese, jerking the barrel of his assault rifle as if to goad his prisoner. Quantrill grasped the weapon, thrusting its barrel to the side as he swept one leg behind his captor's knee and wheeled. He fell atop the man, one elbow seeking the vulnerable soft flesh just beneath the sternum's bony mass; jerked his head back as his adversary spat in his face; found his throat hooked by the big man's calf, and was hurled backward.

  The dun-clad man swung his weapon toward Quantrill without rising, a grim smile across his camouflage-painted face. "Zap, Quantrill, you're dogmeat," he growled, then shouted at the circle of onlookers: "When are you ass-breaths gonna learn to follow through? You let go of a Sino's weapon once you snag it, and it's all over!" He waved Quantrill back to the encircling squad of recruits and came to his feet in a practiced backward roll, watching the recruit wipe spittle from his face. The instructor's half-sneer seemed fully permanent. This bunch of green-uniformed recruits, it implied, would always be green until the day they saw hand-to-hand combat; that is to say, the day they died.

  Sergeant Rafael Sabado could afford to sneer. Though garbed for the moment as a Sino, his own forest-green uniform was neatly sewn with small patches that meant more than some campaign ribbons. Airborne training at Benning; special combat school at Ord; languages at Monterey; unconventional warfare at Bliss. Now that most troop transportation was hamstrung and Fort Benning no longer existed, the Army was forced into one-station training with too few specialists. These poor raw recruits, thought Sabado, would be funneled straight from Texas to Russia. All but a very, very few.

  "Sergeant?" The lettering on the fatigues said it was Symons; the concern in the lank intelligent face said he wasn't being a smart-ass. "How can he hold onto a weapon when a bigger man is hauling him away by the neck?"

  Sabado paused, cocking his head, then smiled. "Leverage, Symons. He had it, but he let it go. Come back here, uh, Quantrill; we'll run through it."

  Quantrill, with surprisingly little reluctance for an anglo kid who couldn't be much over sixteen, moved onto the practice mats. The green eyes watched Sabado's moves with flickering interest. He nodded as Sabado showed him how to hook his arms over the weapon, seemed satisfied with the other instructions.

  "Now I want you to spit in my face," Sabado smiled.'I'd castrate you for that ordinarily,
but when we're on the mat, be my guest."

  The circle was suddenly silent, the recruits motionless. "Fair's fair, Quantrill," someone joked.

  "Fuck fairness," Sabado said; "Go ahead, recruit. I won't hurt you."

  The Quantrill youth smiled almost shyly, then spat without seeming to pause for spittle. Sabado's eyes flickered, but his head did not move a millimeter. Yet even that instant's involuntary blink hid the beginning of Quantrill's sidelong ducking roll that carried him to the edge of the mats.

  "Very good," Sabado purred. "You don't trust me in this uniform. But what's more important is that I didn't flinch from a little spit." He motioned the recruit back with the others, looked around him. "In personal combat you can't afford to care about little things. Flood, mud, shit or blood, it's all the same: flinch and you're dead."

  Into the murmur around him, Sabado inserted his calm Tex-Mex voice of command with a tone his recruits had come to dread. This was something Sabado liked, so it was sure as hell gonna hurt. "Choose a partner; don't choose a buddy. I see any asshole buddies, I get to make 'em my partners. Move," he said. Soon, twenty-five pairs of recruits stood toe-to-toe. It was a little exercise their mommies never taught them, Sabado said with relish, though his brother had taught him in a Houston slum. The pairs were to take turns. Every time a man flinched, he lost his turn. If any recruit lost his temper, he'd do laps with a full pack instead of eating chow.

  In a way, it was a very simple exercise requiring stainless steel discipline. All the recruits had to do was spit into each other's faces.

  Sabado halted the drill after two minutes, affecting not to see the bottled rage in the men; judging to a nicety when they had taken enough. "From now on, every day we run a two-minute spit drill," he said, pausing a beat before adding, "just like screwing a schoolteacher. You got to do it and do it, 'til you get it right." Sabado was good at his work; the laughter took the edge off their outrage and, with luck, some of these recruits would master one more small advantage.

  Sabado took them through a few two-on-ones, then some slow practice throws, and lazed watchfully while they continued at it in pairs. He watched the Quantrill kid surreptitiously. A lot of kids, given the order to spit like that, were so scared they could muster no spit at all. Quantrill had tried to sandbag him with that smile-and his side roll had been damned fast. All right then: unbelievably fast. Nobody could be faster than Rafael Sabado, but a very few were almost as fast. The problem was in taking time to hone that natural gift. Sabado knew what the recruits did not: in three weeks they would all be headed past the Canadian border. All but a very, very few.

  Chapter Fifty

  Two weeks later, Symons and Quantrill were en route to an hour of classroom drill on maintenance of the new Heckler & Koch machine carbine, walking in step as prescribed. Symons sought the source of an aerial whisper overhead, pointed at the drab, newly-camouflaged delta in the distance. "Don't you wish you were crewing one of those," he said, and got a shrug in answer. He persisted: "Rumor says you did, once."

  "Don't I wish," Quantrill agreed.

  "Jesus, three whole words," Symons grinned, his Dallas drawl bright and animated. "Better watch yourself, Quantrill; people will say we're in love."

  "Let "em. I 'm saving myself for a Chinese pederast," said Quantrill.

  Laughing: "Tell that to Sergeant Sabado, maybe he'll let up on you."

  "It's that obvious, is it?"

  "Rumor says the Mex must be into S-M, the way he loves his work. And he sure loves it with you, bubba."

  "Tell me something I don't know."

  Symons mulled that over. "Well, you don't know the squad's rooting for you. I mean, shit, you aren't giving your friends a chance, man. You could put in a complaint about the way he picks on you. We'd back you one hundred per cent."

  Quantrill had to look up to meet Symons's blue-eyed earnest gaze. Somehow he gave the impression that he was looking down. "You're kidding," was all he said.

  "Try us."

  "The Army's doing that," was the reply. "You notice that parade ground full of kids that came in last week? Still marching in civvies today? Well, guess whose fatigues they'll get when we get out battle gear, Symons. The Army's up against the wall, short on bodies, equipment, training. The more fiendish sonsofbitches they have like Sabado, the better they'll teach us. Anyhow, thanks but no thanks. Somebody told me once, 'Don't say it; it wouldn't help.' She was right."

  They paused under a jury-rigged awning, took off their rain cap covers, shook them in approved fashion. Fallout precautions were ritual now. "Well, I tried," Symons chuckled. "If you ever need a friend,-"

  "I should buy a dog," Quantrill finished for him, smiling.

  "Right. And there's always me."

  Another shared glance, a guarded offer of friendship met by a plea for apartheid. Quantrill found it hard to concentrate on field-stripping the H&K weapon during the next hour. Until now, he'd thought the special attentions of Sabado had been only in his imagination.

  That afternoon during the current hour-a-day stint in the unfiltered outdoors, Quantrill decided otherwise. Calisthenics were no longer a trial in the brisk chill air, but as the recruits went through gradually quickening combat moves he was certain that Sabado stalked him and Symons, watching closely. The swagger of the small hips and big shoulders could not be hidden by Sabado's shapeless Sino fatigues as the instructor, his Toltec eyes glittering, chose first one victim, then another for disarming drills with a machine carbine.

  When Sabado had worked his deft lightnings on Fiero, a hundred-kilo hulk from Socorro with a linebacker's disposition, he held the H&K up in one hand while fishing in his pocket with the other. "A touch of realism," he began, and held up a magazine loaded with ammo, "to sweeten the pot. These are special loads with gel blank tips." To prove it, he slapped the magazine in place, handed the stubby weapon to Fiero. Donning polycarbonate goggles he said, "Set it for semi, Fiero, and see if you can bag me at point-blank range."

  The sullen Fiero peered uncertainly at the magazine, raised the carbine, aimed at the smiling face from five meters. Then he lowered its muzzle; licked his lips.

  Someone snickered.

  Fiero brought the H&K up and fired, a snap shot that caught Sabado on the cheek. The report was oddly muffled, almost like the pop of a plastic bag, and the gel did not even snap Sabado's head. Another round put a crimson blot on the brown-clad breast. Sabado held up one hand then, staring Fiero down as he advanced and took the murderous little German-developed piece. Fiero quickly moved off the practice mats, his glare a challenge to his peers.

  "Now then," Sabado breathed in his special murmur, "it's kickass time. Let's say I'm on night patrol and my image enhancer has a malf. But yours doesn't, you can see me just fine. And you'd like a nice shiny H&K for a souvenir. Anybody takes this off me gets a 'bye all next week-unless he takes a slug from this," he patted the weapon. A long silence greeted him. "Well? Would you rather have a ten-minute spit drill?"

  By now the spit drill was no more than a nasty joke; Sabado's flaunting of it was the real goad. The first man to step forward was little Tinker, the wiry black from Amarillo. Tinker donned the goggles while Fiero tied a very unmilitary, very Texan bandanna over Sabado's eyes.

  "You never looked so good, Sergeant," said a voice.

  "I never forget a voice, Symons," smiled Sabado blindly. "You're next." Laughter.

  As Tinker advanced on his sergeant the entire squad backed away, conscious that they were not wearing goggles, fearful that the gel blanks would sting. And blind or not, Sabado made a fearsome foe, especially with the padding sewn into that Sino uniform. Seldom had fifty recruits been so silent as Tinker stalked the big man, first from the rear, then reconsidering.

  Tinker made his move from Sabado's right, curling his own right forearm under the weapon as he tried a leg sweep against the back of the big man's knees.

  Sabado must have heard the movement of Tinker's clothing; he'd been standing erect but, crouching with h
is left foot forward, he bent his knees in readiness stance and almost maintained his balance. Still, Tinker levered the weapon half out of his opponent's grasp as they twisted and fell together. Sabado's reflexes were a damnable marvel. He went with the spin, his left upper arm slapping the mat to break his fall while his left hand still held the foregrip of the H&K.

  Tinker fell chest downward but hung onto the weapon, now with both hands, his knees flailing against Sabado's kidney pads as he wrenched at the prize. Then Sabado made his roll, coming astride the little recruit with both hands free to twist the H&K. The weapon's butt plate-it couldn't be called a stock-caught Tinker's elbow and in an instant Sabado had pressed the carbine's muzzle into the belly of the valiant little youth.

  There was no muffled report. "Thank you, Tinker," said the big man, removing the bandanna and helping the recruit to his feet. He raised his voice, waving Tinker away. "For you smaller guys: in real combat, never go to the mat with somebody twice your size if you can help it-unless you "re me. And you aren't. Symons! Front and center."